ABSTRACT
- Title of Dissertation:
- WAR AND RESISTANCE: THE PHILIPPINES, 1942-1944
James Kelly Morningstar, Doctor of History, 2018
Dissertation directed by: Professor Jon T. Sumida, History Department
What happened in the Philippine Islands between the surrender of Allied
- forces in May 1942 and MacArthur’s return in October 1944?
- Existing
historiography is fragmentary and incomplete. Memoirs suffer from limited points of view and personal biases. No academic study has examined the Filipino resistance with a critical and interdisciplinary approach. No comprehensive narrative has yet captured the fighting by 260,000 guerrillas in 277 units across the archipelago. This dissertation begins with the political, economic, social and cultural history of Philippine guerrilla warfare. The diverse Islands connected only through kinship networks. The Americans reluctantly held the Islands against rising Japanese imperial interests and Filipino desires for independence and social justice. World War II revealed the inadequacy of MacArthur’s plans to defend the Islands. The General tepidly prepared for guerrilla operations while Filipinos spontaneously rose in armed resistance. After his departure, the chaotic mix of guerrilla groups were left on their own to battle the Japanese and each other. While guerrilla leaders vied for local power, several obtained radios to contact MacArthur and his headquarters sent submarine-delivered agents with supplies and radios that tie these groups into a united framework. MacArthur’s promise to return kept the resistance alive and dependent on the United States. The repercussions for social revolution would be fatal but the Filipinos’ shared sacrifice revitalized national consciousness and created a sense of deserved nationhood. The guerrillas played a key role in enabling MacArthur’s return. Their legacy shaped Philippine national identity and the political contest between exiled officials, collaborationists, and the members of resistance. The research presented in this dissertation crosses military, cultural, social, political, economic and diplomatic fields. It gives voice to the Filipino, Japanese, and American actors and shows how their actions and stories are not only interrelated but interdependent. In this way it hopes to reach several audiences at once. For the military student, this case study reveals the multiple and particular roots of guerrilla warfare. For others, it reveals the fundamental role of military action in important social and cultural developments. Finally, and most essentially, it tells a fascinating story that has been long ignored.
War and Resistance: The Philippines 1942-1944
by
James Kelly Morningstar
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2018
Advisory Committee: Professor Jon T. Sumida Professor Holly Brewer Professor Colleen Woods Professor David Freund Professor Meredith Klaykamp
© Copyright by
James Kelly Morningstar
2018
Forward
What happened in the Philippine Islands between the surrender of the Allied forces in May 1942 and MacArthur’s return in October 1944? During the two-and-a-half years between the worst defeat in the history of the United States Army and the greatest single loss of soldiers in the Japanese Army’s history, at least 260,000 guerrillas in 277 units resisted the Japanese across the archipelago but the existing historiography about their struggle is fragmentary and incomplete. 1 Works by former political figures, noncombatants and guerrilla leaders offer points of view constrained by the limits of personal experiences and biases. No historian has yet provided a comprehensive examination of the Philippine resistance with the interdisciplinary approach the subject demands. The result has produced a glaring gap in history.
The seventy-eight volume official history of the United States Army in World
War II includes four books addressing the Philippines. The Fall of the Philippines (1953) concluded with Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright’s surrender on 6 May 1942 which it labeled “The End of Resistance.”2 The author, Louis Morton, left a misleading impression when he wrote: “…by 9 June all forces in the Philippines, with the exception of certain small detachments in isolated areas, had surrendered… The six-month-long
1 See Robert Lapham and Bernard Norling, Lapham’s Raiders: Guerrillas in the Philippines 1942-1945
(Lexington, Kentucky: The University of Kentucky Press: 1996), 225. Lapham argues that many of this Filipino numbers were “spurious” claims while 100,000 true guerrillas were rejected.
2 Louis Morton, The War in the Pacific: The Fall Of The Philippines (United States Army in World War
II), (Washington, D. C.: Center Of Military History United States Army 1993), Chapter XXXII, especially
583.
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struggle for control of the Philippine Archipelago was over.”3 Following a volume describing the Allied advance towards the Islands, the series resumed with MacArthur’s reappearance on 20 October 1944 in Leyte: The Return to the Philippines (1954). This book contained only a brief acknowledgement of guerrilla operations preceding the American invasion.4 What happened in the Philippines between those events apparently did not merit mention.
These U.S. Army histories are a singular but by no means isolated example of the conspicuous absence of the Philippine resistance from the historiography of World War II. Tens of thousands of pages in the hundred books recently recommended by the West Point history department contain only two references to the guerrillas: Robert B.
Aspery’s two-volume, 1,391-page, War in the Shadows: the Guerilla in History devotes
fifteen pages to their story while Ronald H. Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan contributes two of 561 pages to these guerrillas.5 Even more
recent seminal works such as Edward J. Drea’s Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1853-1945 and John Costello’s The Pacific War 1941-1945 make little or no mention the
Philippine guerrillas.
Academic studies on this subject are few and narrow. Notably, Bernard Norling, former professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, wrote of the American guerrillas in Northern Luzon up to 1943. Matthew Andres published a 144-page study of
3 Ibid., 582. 4 Hamlin Cannon, Leyte: The Return to the Philippines, (Washington D.C.: The Center of Military History), 1. 5 See David Asprey, War in the Shadows: the Guerilla in History. 2 Vols. (New York: Doubleday and
Co., 1975), 513-528, and Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan
(New York: Free Press, 1985), 467-468
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the Filipino guerrillas in Luzon.6 U.S. Army Major Peter T. Sinclair II wrote a Command and General Staff College masters thesis, “Men of Destiny: The American and Filipino Guerrillas During the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines,” that became a short book of the same name. Unfortunately, these works are too limited in time, space, and subject to provide comprehensive understanding of the events in the Islands.
Histories of irregular warfare prove no better on this subject. A prominent U.S.
Army study on irregular warfare by Kalev Sepp identified forty-eight insurgencies in the twentieth century including three in the Philippines: the fight against the Americans in 1899-1902; the Hukbalahap Rebellion in 1946-1954; and, the New People’s Army and Moro Liberations Front revolts that began in 1970.7 David Galula’s Counterinsurgency
Warfare: Theory and Practice (1964), Francois Sully’s Age of the Guerrilla (1968), and
Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea (1970) focused on Vietnam and the Cold War.8 They led a new wave of interest in guerrilla warfare but one with limited perspective as reflected by U.S. Army counterinsurgency doctrine: “the modern era of insurgencies and internal wars began after World War II” as “national and transnational revolutionary movements.”9 These works thus both ignore the Philippine resistance in World War II and frame all guerrilla warfare within the constructs of Maoist revolutionary war theory.10 Accordingly, all guerrilla warfare is seen as part of phased revolutionary war
6 Matthew Andres, Pinoys at War (Chicago: Andres Historical Solutions, LLC., 20 January 2013). 7 Kalev I. Sepp, “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, May-June 2005, 8-9.
8 One author of current US Army counterinsurgency doctrine, John Nagl, noted that of all its source material, “perhaps none was as important as David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and
Practice.” United States Department of the Army, U.S. Army Field Manual FM 3-34, Counterinsurgency
Field Manual, (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2007), 7
9 United States Department of the Army, U.S. Army Field Manual FM 3-34, Counterinsurgency Field
Manual, (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2007), xix.
10 Galula opened his book with a quote from Mao Tse-Tung and throughout equated insurgency and guerrilla warfare with Mao’s concept of protracted revolutionary war. Galula, xi, 1-3.
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aimed at social change and culminating in the creation of conventional forces to conduct decisive military operations. The Philippine resistance did not fit this model.
More recent works like Max Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002) and Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (2013) mention the World War II Philippine
guerrillas only as a minor part of the larger conventional war. Ian Beckett’s Modern
Insurgencies and Counter-insurgencies: Guerrillas and Their Opponents Since 1750
(2001) includes only a one-sentence on the Philippine resistance against Japan.11 Robert
W. Barnett’s Asymmetrical Warfare (2003), Anthony James Joes’ Resisting Rebellion
(2004), Thomas X. Hammes’ The Sling and the Stone (2006), David Kilcullen’s
Counterinsurgency (2010), and Emile Simpson’s War from the Ground Up (2013) do not
mention them at all.
Any search for evidence to fill this blank space in historiography faces daunting challenges. The memoirs of isolated guerrilla leaders and other actors tend to be myopic, cryptic and prone to exaggeration.12 Rumors and Japanese propaganda distorted their perceptions.13 The traces of their experiences captured in the documents and records collected by MacArthur’s headquarters lacked context and were further compromised by
11 See Ian. F.W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-insurgencies: Guerrillas and Their
Opponents Since 1750, (New York: Routledge, 2001), 56. 12 For example, as the U.S. forces made their way across Luzon and Leyte, Fertig entered into his diary, “My own opinion is that the land fighting, at no time, has been as serious as communiqués would make you believe.” Wendell Fertig, Fertig Diary, October 27 1944, Wendell W. Fertig Papers, Diary, 1943-1945, Message Traffic intelligence Summaries Later Conference, Box 1 of 2, The United States Army Heritage and Education Center Archives, Ridgeway Hall, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania
13 See Russell W. Volckmann, We Remained: Three Years Behind Enemy Lines in the Philippines (New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1954), 105-105. Sometimes the unfulfilled rumors of impending Allied invasion were worse on popular morale than any Japanese propaganda.
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requirements for military secrecy. 14 Censorship regulations forbade soldiers from reporting locations of operations, escapes from enemy custody, Japanese propaganda, mistreatment of POWs, and even malarial control efforts.15 Commanders barred the publication of any photographs that could reveal the effects of operations, disparage U.S. and Allied forces, or “be distorted by the enemy and used as propaganda.”16
Language barriers present additional difficulties: I do not speak Japanese or many of the languages spoken in the Philippines. Fortunately, the pertinent Philippine sources are available in English. Unfortunately, the 102-volume Japanese War History known as the Senshi Sōsho is just now being translated.17 The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR), with associated organizations such as the Corts Foundation and the Australia-Japan Research Project, has only recently translated the first volume of the vital work. Even so, enough postwar U.S. military intelligence translations of Japanese documents and interrogations – and Japanese academic works published in English – is available to gain the degree of knowledge of the Japanese perspective this effort requires.
14 AIB deputy Colonel Allison Ind got “an exclusive channel” for the AIB to be kept secret even from the guerrilla leaders. See “Radio Communications–Philippines,” Ind to Merle-Smith, 14 January 1943, in “Papers of Courtney Whitney,” MacArthur Archives, Norfolk, Virginia, Box No. 63, Records Group 16. 15 See Appendix 6, USAFFE Regulations No. 1-25, “Censorship Regulations Regulating Private Correspondence,” 8 December 1943. Charles A. Willoughby Papers, Intelligence Series: Operations of Military Civilian Censorship, Box 9 of 13, The United States Army Heritage and Education Center Archives, Ridgeway Hall, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania 16 See Appendix 4, USAFFE Regulation N0. 1-25, “Processing and Censoring of Film,” 16 November 1943, Charles A. Willoughby Papers, Intelligence Series: Operations of Military Civilian Censorship, Box 9 of 13, The United States Army Heritage and Education Center Archives, Ridgeway Hall, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania
17 The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR) and associated organizations such as the Corts Foundation and the Australia-Japan Research Project have made available in English the first volume regarding the Dutch East Indies.
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The particular influences operating upon archives present barriers of their own.18
Two of the three major collections of Philippine guerrillas records are U.S. government controlled: the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and the United States Army Heritage and Education Center Archives in Ridgway Hall in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The third is the MacArthur Memorial Archives in Norfolk, Virginia. While the archivists I have worked at these locations with have been unfailingly professional and helpful, the government does not always make materials available. Alfred W. McCoy noted how for 35 years the U.S. government withheld as classified vital records relating to Ferdinand Marcos’ war service.19 During the research for this work, the U.S. Army withdrew from public access all records of former Philippine guerrillas Russell Volckmann, Donald Blackburn and Wendell Fertig related to their drafting of U.S. Army Special Forces doctrine.20 Additionally, these archives draw almost exclusively from, or through, U.S. military sources. Filipino voices are largely absent.
Postwar politics raised even more barriers. In 1945, Ferdinand Marcos petitioned the U.S. Army for recognition as the wartime leader of the Ang Mga Maharlika guerrilla group in Luzon.21 He claimed to have formed this unit on 1 December 1942, and later expanded it to 131 officers and over 8,000 men.22 Marcos asserted that he had led these men in constant battle against the Japanese and later even claimed the title of ‘most
18 Diana Taylor explained: “What makes an object archival is the process whereby it is selected, classified, and presented for analysis.” Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003), 19. 19 Uldarico S. Baclagon, Filipino Heroes of World War II published in WE Forum, 3-21 November 1982, and Jose F. Ariate, Jr, and Miguel Paolo P. Reyes, “File No. 60: Debunking the Marcos War Myth,” The
Philippine Star, 5 July 2016.
20 I discovered this at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and the U.S Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, N.C. in the spring of 2015. 21 See Marcos’ petition online at UP Third World Studies Center site at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3IczjzkKCDkV2FqMDlOemZyNVk/view 22 Jeff Gerth and Joel Brinkley, “Marco’s Wartime Role Discredited in U.S. Files,” The New York Times, 23 January 1986, A1.
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decorated Filipino veteran’ with thirty-two medals for heroism, two from the United States Army.23 Into the 1980s, Filipino writers were still “discovering” documents revealing his “super exploits” during the war.24 As Jeff Gerth of the New York Times reported, Marcos’ guerrilla history was “central to his political appeal.”25
The intricate politics of the Marcos regime complicated the historiography of the resistance. Philippine President Manuel Quezon once noted: “Under our Constitution what is paramount is ‘not individuals’; it is the good of the State, not the good of the individual which must prevail.”26 The good of the state often became entangled with the interests of the person in power. As Ellen Schrecker noted, this turned “dissent into disloyalty.”27 History that contradicted Marcos’ legend could be seen as treasonous.
The evidentiary record actually offers some support for Marcos’ claims. On 31
March 1945, MacArthur’s General Headquarters identified Colonel Ferdinand E. Marcos, “ex-Manila lawyer” and an intelligence First Lieutenant on Bataan, as the commander of 13 staff officers and 8,200 troops of the “ANG MANGA MAHARLIKA (The Noble Ones)” guerrillas.28 The report added however, “Many of the personnel belonging to the MAHARLIKA seem to belong to [American guerrilla leader Russell] VOLCKMANN’s organization.”29 As Marcos inflated his record in the decades after the war, anyone purporting to tell the history of the resistance was expected to support his story. In 1982,
23 Ibid.. 24 Baclagon, Filipino Heroes and Ariate and Reyes, 25 Gerth and Brinkley. 26 Harold M. Vinacke, “Post-War Government and Politics of the Philippines,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 9 No. 4, November 1947, 717.
27 Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1998), xxiii. See also Colleen Woods, 53.
28
General Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Area, Military Intelligence Section, General Staff, “Guerrilla
Resistance Movements in the Philippine,” 31 March 1945, 22, 45. Box 255, RG 407, Philippines Archive Collection, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 29 Ibid., 45.
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even the truly heroic Jesus Villamor included in his memoirs distinct recollections of Marcos as an unparalleled warrior on Bataan, a fearless guerrilla leader, and a source of vital intelligence from Luzon and Manila.30
Despite this pressure to conform, some other Luzon guerrilla leaders challenged
Marcos’ memories. Robert Lapham wrote, “It seems to me that the critics have the stronger case, that much of Marcos’s wartime heroism was imaginary or at least exaggerated; nevertheless, the whole question has been grievously muddled by postwar American and Philippines politics.”31 Finally, in 1985, historian Alfred W. McCoy discovered documents confirming long-held suspicions that Marcos’ claims were “distorted, exaggerated, fraudulent, contradictory and absurd.”32
By then the influence of the Cold War and Marcos’s politics had discolored the history of the resistance. One example was the obscuration of the wartime history of the Socialists, Communists and Sakdal party members. These movements coalesced first into an anti-Japanese United Front and then as the Hukbalahap guerrilla movement. When the prewar Filipino elites returned to power, the Hukbalahaps became a threat to the “good of the state” and Cold War order. As Colleen Woods explained, “by branding dissent as subversion, Filipino and American anti-communists contended that the state was not required to allow those deemed as communists the freedoms a liberal state promised its citizens.”33 The state’s subsequent victory in its ten-year conflict with the Huks threw a shadow over the substantial role the social revolutionaries had played in the resistance
30 Jesus Villamor, They Never Surrendered: A True Story of Resistance in World War II (Quezon City,
Philippines: Vera-Reyes, Inc., 1982), 48, 183, and 261.
31 Robert Lapham and Bernard Norling, Lapham’s Raiders: Guerrillas in the Philippines 1942-1945
(Lexington, Kentucky: The University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 122. 32 Gerth andBrinkley. 33 Colleen Woods, “Colonial Elites in a Postcolonial State: Violence and the Problem of Political Legitimacy, 1944-48,” 53.
