Behind Japanese Lines (26 page)

The famous aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who toured the Pacific during the war, came away convinced that American treatment of enemy prisoners and suspected spies was not much better than that of the Japanese, even though we professed to be fighting for civilization. Of course, it is generally wise in war to treat prisoners kindly since this gives enemy soldiers an incentive to surrender and save their lives. Moreover, once they are prisoners skilled interrogators can usually get useful information from them. But the Japanese were always exceptional: they simply did not play by rules of any kind. When an occasional one was captured, he could never be trusted, just as we guerrillas could not trust or take chances with real or suspected Japanese agents. Colonel Lindbergh, flying around in an airplane and penning memoirs afterward, simply never had to deal with the sickening quandaries that cropped up so often in the relentless ground war. Trying to distinguish “moral” from “immoral” conduct during struggles to the death with remorseless enemies has always seemed fruitless to me.

The lot of small nations and peoples caught up in the struggles of great powers is never enviable. One has only to think of the Poles, trapped for a thousand years between Germans and Russians, and with Turks on their southern flank for five hundred of those years; or of Balkan peasants of many nationalities enmeshed for centuries in the wars between the Turks and the Holy Roman Empire. The Filipinos were similarly caught between America and Japan from 1941 to 1945.

The whole position of the Filipinos in the modern world has long been ambiguous. By geography and skin color they belong to the Orient: by religion and by four centuries of history and social experience, they belong to the Western world. The latter does not indicate merely a desire to appear “white,” as some Caucasians have assumed. The Philippines never had a well-developed indigenous civilization like those of ancient China, India, and Japan. Thus, when the islands were conquered by Spain in the sixteenth century the victors did not have to displace a deeply rooted alien culture; they had only to impose their own. Spanish civilization and religion colored the Philippines heavily for more than three centuries, and was then succeeded by American civilization for forty years preceding World War II. In 1940 Filipinos were brown-skinned Asians, but their recent ancestors had spoken Spanish, the educated among them now spoke English rather than Tagalog, and their government was modelled on that of America. They were not typical Orientals but half-westernized east Asians who occupied a major outpost of the half-Christian, half-secular Occident.

Another factor that contributed to the Philippine identity problem was the special character of American imperialism. Americans positively encouraged the growth of Philippine nationalism, whereas the Dutch in Indonesia and the French in Indochina tried to discourage the growth of native nationalist sentiment, while the British in India and Burma were neutral toward it at best. As a consequence, movements to collaborate with the Japanese during the war were far stronger in Dutch, French, and British colonies than in the Philippines. The Filipinos were the only Asian colonial people who refused to capitulate to the Japanese without a fight; the only ones who remained loyal to and friendly with their former rulers; the only ones who called the eventual Allied victory “liberation” rather than “reoccupation.” It was this loyalty that made possible the long stand on Bataan, and that led millions of Filipinos to risk their lives afterward either as guerrillas or to aid guerrillas who would fight the Japanese enemy.

There is no doubt that the character, personality, and deeds of Douglas MacArthur had contributed significantly to the pro-Americanism of most Filipinos, since they idolized the famous general. Sentimental attachment to America and principled admiration for democracy among the educated were also important. Most basic, despite all sorts of errors and injustices, American rule in the Philippines had been more enlightened than that of other imperial powers in eastern Asia. After the war of 1898 and the subsequent “pacification” of the Philippines had passed, there were no more massacres and no more pillage, and no unfairness toward Filipinos in courts. As the years passed, there were successive American concessions that pointed toward eventual Philippine self-government.

The Filipinos were grateful. An eloquent testimonial to the latter, and to the devotion of some of them to democracy, was penned by Tomas Confesor, a prewar governor of Iloilo who refused all Japanese offers to collaborate, took to the hills, organized a Free Philippines movement on Panay, and headed it during the Japanese occupation. He addressed himself thus to a Filipino collaborator:

There is a total war in which the issues between the warring parties are less concerned with territorial questions but more with forms of government, ways of life, and those that affect even the very thoughts, feelings and sentiments of every man. In other words, the question at stake with respect to the Philippines is not whether Japan or the United States should possess it but more fundamentally it is: what system of government would stand here and what ways of life, system of social organization and code of morals should govern our existence. . . .

You may not agree with me but the truth is that the present war is a blessing in disguise to our people and that the burden it imposes and the hardships it has brought upon us are a test of our character to determine the sincerity of our convictions and the integrity of our souls. In other words, this war has placed us in the crucible to assay the metal in our beings. For as a people, we have been living during the last forty years under a regime of justice and liberty regulated only by universally accepted principles of constitutional governments. We have come to enjoy personal privileges and civil liberties without much struggle, without undergoing any pain to attain them. They were practically a gift from a generous and magnanimous people—the people of the United States of America. Now that Japan is attempting to destroy those liberties, should we not exert every effort to defend them? Should we not be willing to suffer for their defense? If our people are undergoing hardships now, we are doing it gladly, it is because we are willing to pay the price for those constitutional liberties and privileges. You cannot become wealthy by honest means without sweating heavily. You know very well that the principles of democracy and democratic institutions were brought to life through bloodshed and fire. If we sincerely believe in those principles and institutions, as we who are resisting Japan do, we should contribute to the utmost of our capacity to the cost of its maintenance to save them from destruction and annihilation and such contribution should be in terms of painful sacrifices, the same currency that other peoples paid for those principles.
¹

The Japanese had no particular animosity toward Filipinos when the war began. They had attacked the Philippines only because American bases were there. But they always underestimated the desire of the Filipinos for freedom, and they were incredibly inept psychologists. When they stressed the common oriental heritage of Japanese and Filipinos and went out of their way to humiliate white people, this might have cut some ice with Filipinos who remembered “white only” golf clubs, “Christian” schools from which Filipinos were barred, and other subtler forms of American condescension. But the same “fellow Orientals” then killed them, tortured them, raped their women, stole their food, slapped their faces in public, and required them to bow to Japanese privates. For Japanese propaganda to extol the spartan life and decry American materialism was not impressive when Filipinos in any sizable town could see Japanese officers and civilian officials commandeer the country clubs and yacht clubs, move into the finest homes and hotels, and drive around in Cadillacs and Packards. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would have seemed more attractive to Filipinos if its inventors had not closed Philippine schools and businesses, shut off public utilities, halted transport, banned theaters and then radios, stripped the country
of so much food that Filipinos starved, tried to make everyone learn Japanese, and manipulated the currency in ways that amounted to ill-disguised plunder. Nothing made ordinary Filipinos so pro-American as the Japanese occupation.
²

Filipino loyalty to the United States brought complications in its train that have not worked themselves out yet forty years after World War II. An important element in Filipino psychology is that when one accepts unsolicited favors or gifts from another he thereby incurs an obligation. Because Americans had done so much to promote democracy, public health, and education in the Philippines, Filipinos felt that they were obligated to help the United States resist the Japanese—who had, of course, invaded
their
homeland too. But then the Filipinos also assumed that their loyalty would be reciprocated; and they could never understand why the United States was lax in its military preparations before 1941, made its major wartime effort in Europe rather than in the Pacific, and did not compel the Japanese to pay war reparations to the Philippines afterward.
³

Many thorny questions faced Filipinos in World War II. Was
any
kind of collaboration with the Japanese dishonorable at best, treasonous at worst? If not, how much or what kind
was
allowable? Did it make any difference if the collaborator was highly placed, or if he was coerced by the conquerors? coerced how much, and in what ways? Should distinctions be made between the avowed intentions of collaborators and their visible deeds? If so, who should make them? Above all, what should be done about it all when the war was over?

Before the French Revolution (1789-99), in most western countries treason was easily recognized: it was personal disloyalty to a ruler to whom one owed loyalty or homage. In the two centuries since then matters have grown more complex. The French Revolution did more than any other event in modern history to promote the idea that the interests of the “nation” or “people” should take precedence over all other values, though it is often exceedingly difficult to know just what those interests truly are. In totalitarian states anytime, and in democratic states as well in wartime, it does not even require specific acts for one to be regarded as a traitor; mere words, even attitudes or states of mind, suffice, at least for authorities and zealots. Mere lack of enthusiasm for an official ideology is regarded as something close to treason in totalitarian states like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Often it is extremely difficult for a conscientious person to know where his primary loyalty
should
lie in the modern world: to his nation state, to its leaders-of-the-moment, to the nation itself though perhaps not to its present form of government, to his religious beliefs,
to his family? If he is in the armed forces, to his military superiors? It is much easier to ask such questions than to answer them.

The questions are not hypothetical, either. One of the many reasons France fell so swiftly to the Wehrmacht in 1940 was that while many high-ranking French soldiers and politicians, of whom Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval are perhaps the best examples, hated Germany, they also hated their own Third Republic and wanted to see it destroyed. In Yugoslavia, a land of many nationalities, most of whom dislike most of the others, Draja Mikhailovich, the leader of the Chetnik guerrillas, accepted British and American aid and at times used it to fight the German and Italian conquerors of his country, but what he wanted most of all was to insure that when the war was over Yugoslavia should not be communist, so he fought the partisan guerrillas of the communist Tito more enthusiastically than he did the fascist states, and many times he did not fight the latter at all since to do so would bring terrible reprisals down onto the Yugoslav people. Marshal Tito's Partisans also took Allied aid. They fought the Germans and Italians too, but with little concern for what happened to civilians of any sort. Their main objective was to communize the country, so they ambushed Chetniks and tried to destroy their credibility with the Allies. How could an ordinary citizen of Yugoslavia know where his duty lay in such circumstances, especially when one or both guerrilla groups had leaders or espoused policies inimical to the interests of people of his own nationality or religion? Or consider one individual citizen of that state, Milovan Djilas, who survived World War II and wrote much afterward. His father was shot by an Albanian nationalist, one of his brothers was killed by a Montenegrin militiaman serving under the Italians, another was tortured and killed by a Serb policeman working with the German Gestapo, and a pregnant sister was murdered by the Chetniks. To whom, or to what, should Djilas have been loyal? The whole question of whether one is morally obligated to obey military and political superiors when their orders are perceived to be either immoral or apt to lead the nation to ruin, was especially acute in Nazi Germany in World War II and led directly to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (1946). Their utility and wisdom have been debated ever since.

It might be objected that questions of this sort worry only intellectuals and thus were irrelevant to my concerns as a leader of Filipino guerrillas, nearly all of whom were simple, untutored people. Not so. Uneducated people are not necessarily stupid or incapable of understanding abstractions; nor are they less concerned than the
educated to act honorably. Most Filipinos regarded their president, Manuel Quezon, as a national hero. He spent most of the war, until his death, in the United States, from where he exhorted his countrymen to remain loyal to America. Meantime other prominent Filipino politicians collaborated with the Japanese and, at least in public, urged their countrymen to do likewise. Still others tried to steer a middle course. Ordinary Filipinos, like most Asians, thought that in a crisis loyalty to one's own people should supersede loyalty to a particular political philosophy. In the world of deeds ordinary Filipino civilians were in a truly hopeless position, even worse than that of Europeans caught in the maelstrom of Nazis, Soviet communists, British, Americans, and their own divided resistance groups. The Filipinos were trapped, first of all, between the Japanese-sponsored Vargas or Laurel government in their homeland and the Quezon-Osmeña government-in-exile in the United States, each backed by a foreign army and each demanding their total allegiance. If they cooperated with the guerrillas, the Japanese killed them. If they worked with the Japanese, the guerrillas killed them. If they supported the Huks, they incurred the displeasure of all non-communist guerrillas. If they helped us USAFFE irregulars against the Huks, their lives were at once in danger from the communists. Much of the time from 1942 to 1945 large sections of Luzon resembled the State of Nature as envisioned by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes: a grim locale where there existed a perpetual war of all against all, and where life was, in consequence, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”