Early in the war their contacts with Australia had been feeble and infrequent. After Hollandia they increased, until nearly four thousand radio messages were being logged every month. No sparrow fell there but MacArthur knew of it; his files held everything from the transcripts of executive sessions in Malacarian to the guest lists of the Manila Hotel. His submarines brought the guerrillas equipment, technicians, transmitters, and commando teams, and he personally interviewed each partisan who escaped into his lines. Some of their leaders were Americans who had been left behind in the chaos of defeat, or had escaped from the concentration camps at Bilibid, Cabanatuan, Los Baños, and Santo Tomás University. Most were Filipinos, however, and their accomplishments matched those of the French Maquis. Their skills grew with their audacity; they posed as dockworkers, as red-capped Moro servants, or, carrying chicken and dried fish from village to village, as traders. The Japanese kempei-tai, the enemy’s secret police, put prices on their heads, flung those they caught into the sixteenth-century dungeon of Manila’s Fort Santiago, and publicly beheaded them. Fugitives brought MacArthur accounts of these atrocities. He vowed retribution, and Filipino coast watchers, picking up the signal, passed the word inland on the bamboo telegraph. The resistance grew and grew. Eventually it contested enemy control of three out of every four provinces, and while this may be misleading—the Nipponese held the population centers—the strategic information the partisans sent southward was priceless. Their eagerness to provide it was an index of their enthusiasm for the U.S. cause, and their devotion was translated into loyalty to two men: MacArthur and Quezon. When Quezon died of tuberculosis at Saranac, New York, the day after the General returned from his Hawaii conference with Roosevelt, MacArthur became their sole idol. He was, quite simply, the symbol of their hopes for a better postwar world. American GIs ridiculed him. Filipinos didn’t. Carlos Romulo wrote: “To me he represents America.”5
Collaborators were more complex because their motives varied. Some were frightened of the Japanese, some preferred Oriental rulers to Occidentals, some thought they could best serve their countrymen by cooperating with their conquerors, and some were outright opportunists hankering for personal gain. Probably most were a blend of all these. Like the guerrillas, they had begun to surface while MacArthur was still on Corregidor. In the last week of January 1942, Masaharu Homma had appointed a commission of Philippine politicians headed by Jorge Vargas, who had been Quezon’s secretary, to help him run the country. Their first act was to cable Roosevelt, demanding an end to all American resistance in the archipelago. Afterward they would testify that Quezon had told them that MacArthur had said they could share power with the victors provided that they never excoriated America or swore fealty to Hirohito. The General denied it, and the point is irrelevant, since in the end they did something worse. In September 1943 the commission was superseded by an “Independent Philippine Republic” headed by José Laurel, a former associate justice of the commonwealth’s Supreme Court and the only Filipino to hold an honorary degree from Tokyo Imperial University. The following year the pro-Japanese Laurel regime declared war on the United States and Great Britain. Some five thousand Filipinos signed up in the Makapili, a right-wing organization sponsored by the Nipponese; they were issued rifles and trained to fight GIs on the beaches if the Americans returned.6
Many of these recruits were domestic servants from Manila whose upperclass employers had encouraged them to enlist. Laurel’s puppet government attracted few middle-class joiners; even less was it a movement dedicated to agrarian reform, like the Huks. To the dismay of MacArthur and Quezon, it was led by the capital’s prewar oligarchic elite—the General’s friends and Quezon’s colleagues. Traditionally, politics in the archipelago had been an aristocratic pursuit, and of the successful candidates for seats in the commonwealth’s legislature in 1941, one-third of those elected to the House and three-fourths of those elected to the Senate served in Laurel’s administration. These were the men, most of them absentee landlords, independently wealthy sportsmen, and prosperous businessmen, who belonged to Rotary and lunched at the capital’s elegant old Casino Espanol. They lived in the huge mansions in the exclusive Santa Mesa district, where each home had its own swimming pool, water system, formal gardens, heavily armed private policemen, high stone walls, moat, gigantic teak-and-brass doors, and Spanish window grilles. They played tennis every noon and polo on weekends. They attended elaborate parties with their handsome, well-coiffed wives, who were accustomed to paying several hundred pesos for a gown which they would wear once or twice and then discard. As patricians they had always lived well and saw no reason to change their life-styles now. The Japanese assured them that they needn’t, provided they signed here, and.here, and here.7
MacArthur was outraged. He felt personally betrayed. “When our military forces have landed in Luzon, “ he announced, “it shall be my firm purpose to run to earth every disloyal Filipino who has debased his country’s cause so as to impede the services of [American] officers or men. . . . Such actions construe direct aid to the enemy in his war against the United States of America and the Philippine Commonwealth.” In Washington Roosevelt told reporters: “Those who have collaborated with the enemy must be removed from authority and influence,” and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, whose jurisdiction included the archipelago, demanded prosecution of the “timid, craven, opportunistic helots who basely collaborated with the cruel enemy who sought to enslave their people.”8
When the guerrillas heard these explicit statements over their clandestine radios, they were elated; the returning Americans, they believed, would punish all members of the puppet regime. Yet their elected leaders, Quezon and Osmeña, were anything but vindictive. They, too, belonged to the Manila elite. They had grown up with Vargas, Laurel, and the others, had gone to school with them, were their compadres, and were related to them by blood and marriage. On Corregidor, Romulo recalls, “Quezon gave me hell for denouncing Filipinos who were collaborating. He said, ‘They have no choice.’ “ In an anguished letter to MacArthur the Philippine president wrote from his Saranac deathbed that his old friends were not quislings or traitors but “virtually prisoners of the enemy.” His former secretary of justice, he said, had been offered his “liberty on condition that he would agree to make a campaign of pro-Japanese propaganda . . . . He refused and they shot him.” No wonder the others had agreed to collaborate, Quezon reasoned; they were “victims of the adverse fortunes of war, and I am sure they had no choice.” Osmeña, succeeding to the leadership of the government-in-exile, took a similar line: “The motives which caused the retention of the office and the conduct while in office, rather than the sole fact of its opposition, ought to be the criterion upon which such persons are judged.”9
That was a dull statement. Osmeña was, in fact, a dull man, and his personality, or lack of it, was crucial, for in the end this vital issue turned on the relationships between individuals. During his youth his taciturnity had won him the nickname “Sphinx.” In a nation of orators, he put people to sleep; his associates remember him as “unassuming,” “unassertive,” and “lackluster”—everything, in short, that Quezon was not. Indeed, he owed his office to Nacionalista Partido ticket-balancing: to the very politicians now kowtowing to the Japanese. If the Huks had their way, and the wealth were redistributed, upperclass Filipinos like Osmeña would be eliminated from public life. Moreover, MacArthur didn’t like him. He was too pallid, had been critical of the General’s Philippine defense plans in the 1930s, and had voted against military spending on the eve of war. Worst of all, he had become a protégé of Harold Ickes, the curmudgeon of Roosevelt’s cabinet, whose authority in the Philippines MacArthur had never recognized. “Ickes,” he later said scornfully, “seemed to think of the islands as another one of his national parks.” The more bloodthirsty the secretary’s statements on collaboration became, the more the General reexamined his own position. Afterward he wrote that Ickes “informed me that he had been advised as to w
ho had been loyal and who had been disloyal to the United States during the period of Japanese occupation, and that he was going to try the disloyal people for treason.” MacArthur replied that “no prima facie case of treason” existed against a man “simply because he accepted duties under the Japanese-established government.”10
At this point Courtney Whitney joined his headquarters. This ultraconservative Manila corporation lawyer, a World War I aviator, had been in the United States when war broke out. Back in uniform as a lieutenant colonel, he was first stationed in Washington. In the spring of 1943 Sutherland suggested to MacArthur that Whitney might be useful in Brisbane. The General sent for him, and when he arrived he was given responsibility for Philippine civil affairs. From the standpoint of the guerrillas he was a disastrous choice. Undiplomatic and belligerent, he was condescending toward all Filipinos except those who, like himself, had substantial investments in the islands. Professional soldiers tend to be conservative anyway, and by the time MacArthur was ready to land on Leyte, Whitney had converted most of the staff to reactionaryism. At his urging the General barred OSS agents from the Southwest Pacific, because Whitney suspected that they would aid left-wing guerrillas, and rejected Robert Sherwood’s liberal propaganda leaflets. It cannot be said that Whitney was giving orders to the islands’ partisans. Their own leaders did that. But he did see to it that those who advocated sweeping social and economic reforms in the Philippines were discouraged. Later, in Japan, where Americans owned no stock and the General had time to devise his own civil policies, MacArthur would execute a spectacular about-face. In the early 1940s, however, he was busy with the war. In addition, the newcomer exploited his vanity. “Whitney was a consummate flatterer,” another former aide recalls. “He poured it on and the General ate it up.”11
In Manila the shifting political kaleidoscope had the undivided attention of Manuel Roxas y Acuna, the most fascinating and enigmatic Filipino of his generation. Now in his early fifties, the slight, sulky, melodramatic Roxas had long been a key member of the Philippine establishment, a regent of the University of the Philippines, and the owner of three publications, one of them a tabloid, the Manila Daily News. Most of his energies, however, had been devoted to public life. As Speaker of the House, as minister of finance, and, after the November 1941 elections, as senator-elect, he had been a powerful advocate of Philippine independence. He also held a brigadier general’s commission in the United States Army. Quezon, whose protégé he was, trusted him implicitly and wanted him, not Osmeña, to be the next president of the Philippines. He had asked Roxas to accompany them in exile. The brigadier declined. Whether or not he stayed on MacArthur’s instructions is unclear. The General later said so, but contemporary documents are confusing. Quezon wrote of him: “He replied that he would do whatever I ordered but that his own thought was that it was his duty to remain in the islands. He seemed to feel that in his own particular case, as a soldier, to leave the country would be tantamount to desertion, and notwithstanding that he recognized as well as I did that we were lost in a military sense—because to continue hoping for reinforcements was vain and the days of Bataan and Corregidor were numbered—he insisted on remaining.”12
On Quezon’s instructions, the brigadier had sunk some of the commonwealth’s bullion reserves in the waters off Corregidor. Then Quezon signed Emergency Order No. 3 on March 5, 1942, designating Roxas as his successor should he and Osmeña be killed during their flight to Australia. In Saranac, toward the end, Quezon spoke constantly of him and told Doña Aurora how much he missed him. “But oh,” he wrote in his posthumously published memoirs, “how proud I am of him! I almost envy him, for he has the occasion to do just what I wanted to do myself—to tell the Japanese that we want nothing from them. If Roxas has been murdered he is the greatest loss that the Filipino people have suffered in this war. He can’t be replaced, and I don’t know how long [before] the race will produce another Manuel Roxas.”13
Roxas hadn’t been murdered, and whatever he was telling the Japanese, it wasn’t rude. To be sure, he had gone through a bad time after his capture. Imprisoned in a POW camp at Bukidnon, on Mindanao, he was questioned for fifteen weeks and threatened with death. Then, on August 18, 1942, Vargas told Japanese newspapermen that he and Benigno Aquino, another collaborator, had persuaded Homma to release Roxas on the ground that he would be “a valuable man. ‘ The Japanese were so convinced of this that the brigadier, not Judge Laurel, became their first choice to head the puppet government. He pleaded ill health; he had, he said, suffered a coronary. At that point the record becomes blurred. Guerrillas contacted him in 1943 and offered to help him escape. He declined; he either thought the plan unsafe or was feeling friendlier toward the enemy; it is impossible to tell. He began to appear in Malacañan Palace, signing documents. That fall the U.S. submarine Thresher landed Dr. Emigidio Cruz, Quezon’s physician and an army major, in the Philippines. His mission was to assess the strength of the Philippine underground. Roxas received him at 893 Lepanto Street and didn’t turn him in. Nevertheless, he still wouldn’t leave for the United States. According to Dr. Cruz’s report, “Roxas said that he appreciated the high regard President Quezon had for him, but declined to go to Washington, at that time, because he had very important work to do; he was the only one in a position to advise the underground and to stop them from manifesting their intense hatred of the Japanese.”14
The next year he was approached again. Before he could respond, someone tipped off the Japanese. Everyone else in the plot was beheaded, but he was freed, either because he had been the source of the tip, because Laurel interceded, or because he promised to collaborate. Subsequently he held several high positions under Vargas and Laurel, winding up as minister without portfolio in the collaboration cabinet. In his study of the Philippines between 1942 and 1944, Hernando J. Abaya concluded that Roxas became “puppet Laurel’s closest adviser and colleague.” It is a moot point. Undoubtedly the pressure on him was enormous, and those who have not been so tested should be slow to judge him. Nevertheless, there is no question that the Japanese exploited his prestige with his public consent. As early as October 14, 1943, he had helped to draft the puppet government’s constitution, had affixed his signature to it, and had then posed for Japanese photographers with the other signers. Later, as head of the Economic Planning Board and the Biba, the rice-purchase pool, he served as the food czar of the regime.
As MacArthur’s armies approached the archipelago, it was evident that a great deal hung on the fate of this one man. After the war, when the Philippines became an independent republic, the two obvious candidates for the presidency would be Osmeña and Roxas. Nor did it stop there; if so powerful a collaborator were exonerated, the cases against the others would collapse, and many of the embittered guerrillas, particularly the thirty thousand Huks, would return to their arms caches in the jungle. Osmeña, weak and impotent, dependent upon U.S. quartermasters for his very rations, could do nothing for his people until the end of the war. Everything depended on MacArthur. Manuel Roxas had been his friend for twenty years. But the General wasn’t discussing the future of the Philippines with anyone except Whitney, who, with his substantial investments there, should have disqualified himself on this of all issues. Whenever Roxas’s name came up in other conversations, MacArthur changed the subject.15
On the map Leyte resembles a molar tooth, with its roots pointing downward. To the south lies Mindanao, as big as Ireland; to the north, Luzon, nearly as large as England. Lesser islands, swarming between these two giants, are so formed that Leyte Gulf, the chief anchorage in the central islands, is approachable through only two major entrances, Surigao Strait to the southwest and San Bernardino Strait to the northwest. These tropical waters were about to become the scene of the greatest naval battle in history, for the Japanese were now desperate. If they were unable to prevent MacArthur from retaking the Philippine archipelago, they knew they would no longer have access to the Indies’ oil, the lifeblood of their generals and
admirals.16
They believed they could do it. Imperial Japanese headquarters in Tokyo had drawn up a do-or-die plan encoded “Sho-Go,” or “Operation Victory. “ Everything would be thrown into an attempt to prevent the General from establishing a foothold in the islands. After the war Admiral Soemu Toyoda explained why: “If the worst should happen there was a chance that we would lose the entire fleet; but I felt the chance had to be taken. . . . Should we lose in the Philippine operations, even though the fleet should be left, the shipping lane to the south would be completely cut off so that the fleet, if it should come back to Japanese waters, could not obtain its fuel supply. If it should remain in southern waters, it could not receive supplies of ammunition and arms. There would be no sense in saving the fleet at the expense of the loss of the Philippines.” Lieutenant General Shuichi Miyazaki, chief operations officer in Tokyo, told postwar interrogators that “viewed from the standpoint of political and operational strategy, holding the Philippines was the one essential. . . . The loss of the Philippines would greatly affect civilian morale in Japan. The islands were essential for the enemy advance on Japan.”17
Toyoda, Miyazaki, and Field Marshal Count Hisaichi Terauchi, commander in chief of Japanese forces in the Southwest Pacific, assumed that Mindanao would be MacArthur’s next objective, but they had strengthened their garrisons throughout the archipelago. Assessing their morale at that point is difficult. The enlisted men believed what they were told, and they were told that their rising sun still dominated the Pacific sky, that the Allies would eventually surrender. Some of their commanders were discouraged by MacArthur’s unbroken string of victories over the past two years, but officers at the highest levels were hopeful, even euphoric. When word reached them that a seven-hundred-ship, hundred-mile-long American armada was steaming toward Surigao Strait between Dinagat and Homonhon islands, they brimmed with confidence. Lieutenant General Sosaku Suzuki, commander of the Thirty-fifth Army in the Visayan Islands, the central Philippines, told his staff: “We don’t even need all the reinforcements they are sending us.” His only worry, he said, was that the American leader might attempt to surrender just the troops participating in this operation: “We must demand the capitulation of MacArthur’s entire forces, those in New Guinea and other places as well as the troops on Leyte.” In Tokyo, Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso, assured by his army and navy leaders that the General was in an even greater fix than he had been in on Corregidor, went on the radio to tell the country the good news. Leyte, he said, would be the greatest Japanese triumph since the Battle of Tennozan in 1582.18
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