THE PHILIPPINES, 1942-1944 James Kelly Morningstar, Doctor of History
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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. ii 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 iii 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, x i, 1-3. iv 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.