Behind Japanese Lines (29 page)

Recto then cited such political figures as Sukarno in Indonesia, Ba Maw in Burma, and Scavenius in Denmark, all of whom had collaborated with Japanese or German occupation forces but had been taken back into the good graces of the democratic nations as if nothing had happened. He concluded by insisting that in any case the spirit of democracy and self-government which infused the American constitution required that Filipinos, not Americans, should try their own accused collaborators.

It has always seemed to me that Recto's position is unassailable.
War imposes hard necessities. Just as we guerrillas could not tolerate Japanese agents in our midst and survive, so the Filipino people as a whole could not have survived had not many of them cooperated at least passively with their conquerors. We Americans are in many ways the spoiled children of history. Though the Northern occupation of the Old Confederacy, 1864-76, was bitterly resented by Southerners, we have never had to endure the experience of being overrun and occupied by cruel foreign enemies and to make the compromises that necessarily follow such an experience. It was all very well for Franklin Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, and others ten thousand miles away to talk bravely and to denigrate Filipino officials who had to struggle and live with enemies who gradually killed hundreds of thousands of their countrymen. So-called collaborators had little choice. On May 7, 1942, the Japanese executed Philippine Chief Justice José Abad Santos for refusing to serve under them. After that few Filipino leaders declined to take office. Once they were in office, their conquerors did not scruple to take the sons of some of them and send them to Japan to insure the good behavior of their fathers.
²⁸
What good purpose would have been served had all of them emulated Abad Santos? They would have been killed and replaced either by
real
pro-Japanese like Benigno Ramos, Benigno Aquino (father of the Philippine opposition leader assassinated in 1983), Pio Duran, and General Ricarte, or by amoral self-seekers. Would ordinary Filipinos have been better off then? Or would the United States, for that matter? Prudence is often the better part of valor. Heroism is not only fighting and dying. Death ends man's problems: staying alive increases them. Those who stayed behind and tried to make the best of a terrible situation served their people quite as much as did Quezon and Osmeña in far off Washington.

Perhaps the best indication of how tepid and unwilling so many collaborators were is that the Japanese never fully trusted them, and with good reason. Thousands of lower level “collaborators” were merely people who happened to hold some public office at the time of the Japanese conquest and had to keep their jobs to support their families. Few were seriously touched by Japanese indoctrination. Whether their true motives were a noble desire to serve their people or mere fear of reprisals, some aided the guerillas when they could; some sabotaged their conquerors in small ways when they thought it safe; most simply waited and hoped for better days. President Sergio Osmeña understood this, as he indicated in a speech made from Leyte a few days after the American landing there on November 23, 1944. He took note of the compromises that had been made under pressure,
and promised to deal with accusations of collaboration justly and with dignity, on an individual basis.
²⁹

We Americans should be lenient in judging the Filipinos for other reasons too. Fundamentally, what was the correct policy for a Philippine government to follow in the war when its people had been promised independence by a colonial power that had brought war down upon them, then proved too weak to protect them, and might never return? Yet those victimized people had suffered and died alongside our own soldiers, and their civilians had risked the lives of themselves and their families to help Americans on innumerable occasions afterward. That many sat on the fence waiting to see who would win the war is true: it is also likely that Quezon, Osmeña, and Romulo would have done the same had they stayed in the Philippines instead of going to the United States. But what does this prove? We welcomed those Filipinos who accepted American hegemony after 1898. No stigma of “collaboration” was ever attached to them or to the Japanese who passively accepted American victory and domination after 1945. After the American Revolution most of the Tories were eventually absorbed into the new United States of America, as were the rebellious Confederates after the Civil War.

Finally we need to think of what the situation in the Philippines would have been like in 1945 had not some politicians tried to cushion the impact of the Japanese occupation on the Filipino people. Philippine politics would have been polarized between pro-Japanese Filipinos backed by the Japanese army, and the Huks and their sympathizers. Extremists on both sides wanted this. Had they gotten their wish and had the United States pushed the collaborationist issue hard in 1945-46, it is quite possible that the Huks would have ridden to power and the Philippines would have become another Soviet republic.
³⁰

The whole issue of collaboration, which seemed so explosive and fraught with menace near the end of the war, evaporated rapidly afterward. President Roosevelt died in the spring of 1945. Those American politicians most interested in Philippine affairs, men like Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Senators Millard Tydings and Paul McNutt, were either in disagreement or distracted by other problems. The new president, Harry Truman, was less avid to pursue collaborators than Roosevelt had been. By 1946, too, it was growing evident that the menace of the future would be Soviet Russia. This at once made the Huks, with their cries for vengeance against “the elite traitors of Manila,” less attractive, and made it seem more important to check communist global expansion than to pursue old feuds from
World War II. Thus, the whole issue faded away, and those who had dominated the Philippine Commonwealth before 1942 soon dominated the Philippine Republic that was established in 1946.

As noted earlier, one of the by-products of guerrilla life was that I became aquainted with several Filipino politicians who were either well known in the 1940s or rose to prominence after World War II. One of the latter, whom I happened to meet in 1944, was Ferdinand Marcos, later to become a famous and embattled president of the Philippines. One day he showed up at my headquarters barefooted and unarmed, accompanied by a Filipino writer, F.M. Verano, who sometimes assumed the alias “Lieutenant Winters” and acted as a liaison man between Manuel Roxas and my organization. Marcos was then a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer who already had an interesting past. Years before the war a political adversary of his father had once put a dummy in a coffin and draped it with a sign indicating that it ought to be Marcos's father. Outraged at the insult, the son hired the family chauffeur to shoot the offender. At the last moment the chauffeur could not go through with the act, so young Marcos grabbed a rifle and shot his father's foe himself. He was then tried for murder and convicted, but the case was appealed to a higher court. While it was still pending, young Marcos was admitted to the bar. A second trial was ordered, and in it he defended himself so skillfully that he was acquitted.

Shortly before the Philippine presidential election of 1965 a “campaign biography” of Marcos appeared in which it was claimed that Marcos had performed with exceptional valor during the defense of Bataan, that he was nearly tortured to death by the Japanese in Fort Santiago, that after his release he devoted months to an unsuccessful effort to band together all the guerrillas on all the Philippine islands, that he formed his own northern Luzon guerrilla band, the Maharlika (Free Men or Noble Ones), that late in the war he helped Volckmann clear all the bandit irregulars out of north Luzon, and that he played a key role in the reestablishment of civil government on Luzon in May 1945. For these heroic deeds Marcos came out of the war the most decorated man in Philippine history.
³¹

For a long time I assumed offhand that most of this was true, maybe all of it. The principal reason was that I had little occasion to think about Marcos at all. To me, he would have been no more than one more barefoot Filipino had not Verano told me that he had once killed a foe of his father. Then, incongruously, twenty years later this man had become president of the Philippines. In fact, when the latter event took place I had to do some research to assure myself that the
new ruler of the islands was the same Marcos I had once met during the war.

When Marcos eventually became the center of furious controversies at home and abroad, books and articles began to appear claiming that his wartime heroism had been grossly exaggerated and that many, perhaps most, of his medals had been manufactured after the war to commemorate exploits that had never taken place.
³²
This evolution came to a climax shortly before the Philippine election of February 7, 1986, when many accounts appeared alleging that most of Marcos's war record was fraudulent. The stories were based on hundreds of pages of documents found in the U.S. National Archives by an American scholar, Dr. Alfred McCoy.
³³

I was drawn into this whole controversy because two of the documents bore my signature. They called for the arrest of all unauthorized guerrilla organizers in Pangasinan, and one of them mentioned Marcos specifically. Within a few days newspaper and television journalists descended on me from all points of the compass. I was interviewed repeatedly and my responses circulated broadly. It soon became evident that, for whatever reason, perhaps mere unaccustomed excitement, I had not chosen my words with sufficient care. I was widely quoted as having said that Marcos had never led any guerrilla organization of significance, and that I had either arrested him or had ordered his arrest for unauthorized solicitation of funds and for efforts to recruit guerrillas.

The best I can do now, after the event, is try to sort out the truths from the half-truths, and both from the falsities. At the risk of boring readers I must emphasize that the events in question took place more than forty years ago, that they did not then seem to be of much importance, and that it was a time of great stress and tumult. Consequently, my memory of the precise details is inexact. I do not recall that either Verano or Manuel Roxas, both of whom I knew fairly well, ever said anything to me about Marcos being a guerrilla. I know he did not command an
armed
guerrilla organization in
Pangasinan province
, but it is possible that he did organize guerrillas elsewhere. I do not recall ever ordering his arrest, and I believe the document purporting to show this is a forgery.
³⁴
Of course, it is conceivable that some of my subordinates might have arrested him for a brief time without telling me about it, or that I might have been so informed but forgot about it merely because I attached little importance to it and had other matters on my mind.
³⁵
To repeat yet again: in 1944 Ferdinand Marcos was not a famous man, and we had had so much trouble
with so many would-be guerrillas that one more of the species was not likely to linger in my memory.

To be sure, General Willoughby attests that Marcos did command his own guerrilla unit and that it numbered over 8,000 men, 3,800 of whom were supposedly in Pangasinan.
³⁶
Perhaps so, but it was and is always difficult to say with any precision how many people there are in any irregular outfit or resistance movement. If one counts only those who are actively engaged on a full-time basis, the number is almost always small. If one counts those who normally follow some civilian pursuit but regularly provide aid, information, and support, the number is considerably larger. If one counts all those who are basically sympathetic and who occasionally perform some service useful to the movement, the number is much larger. With “paper guerrillas” estimates are the merest guesses; and my own surmise (not unimpeachable knowledge) is that most of Marcos's followers were “paper guerrillas,” particularly in Pangasinan.
³⁷
In 1944-45 a “paper guerrilla” was a person who possessed a piece of paper identifying him as a member of a guerrilla organization, even though he did not have a gun. Some such people really wanted to be guerrillas. Others were former collaborators with the Japanese who wanted to cover their tracks. Others were fence-sitters who now judged that the Allies were going to win the war. Still others were out for personal gain of some kind. It did take some courage to become even a “paper guerrilla,” and a bit more to organize a unit of such people, since anyone whose name was on such a list was likely to get short shrift if he was ever captured by the Japanese, though in 1944-45 this was a steadily diminishing risk. Whatever their intentions, and whatever the risks involved, “paper guerrillas” did little good and much harm. Sometimes they collected intelligence of some value, but this was vastly overbalanced by their interference with the recruiting efforts of genuine guerrillas, and by the disrepute they, as conspicuous johnny-come-latelys, brought down on the heads of genuine guerrillas whom they outnumbered by at least two to one near the war's end.

Wherever the truth lies between the claims of Marcos's admirers and adversaries, I tried to reestablish contact with him in 1982 when he paid a visit to the United States. I wrote him a letter reminding him of the circumstances under which he and I first met. He did not reply. In January 1986, Bob Lapham visited the Philippines. In the course of his stay he had a ninety-minute conversation with President Marcos. He told me afterward that Marcos had inquired about me.
³⁸
Interestingly, prior to his meeting with Marcos in the Malacanang
Palace, Bob was told by a close associate of Marcos that “bad blood” existed between Marcos and myself. No such feeling ever existed on my part; if it did (or does) on Marcos's side, the only reason I can imagine is that perhaps back in 1944 one of my men really did arrest the future president of the Philippines.