Behind Japanese Lines (28 page)

Finally, Laurel overrated the strength and abilities of the Japanese. Tokyo professed to be in the process of establishing an interdependent economic sphere in east Asia and the western Pacific, but such an enterprise could be held together only by a huge merchant fleet. By the end of 1944 the Allies had sunk over 80 percent of the prewar Japanese merchant marine. As their ships disappeared, Japanese troops in the Philippines had to get more and more of their food from the islands themselves. This ruined any chance that Laurel's regime might have had to become popular, since he was no more able to deal successfully with the consequent food shortages among Filipinos than he had been to prevent the Japanese from taxing Filipinos to support the Nipponese war effort. Nowhere in Japan's new empire were there enough capable technicians, managers, engineers, teachers, even propagandists, to meet the suddenly expanded needs.
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When this limitation was combined with the abominable behavior of so many Japanese troops, the popularity of Japan and any pro-Japanese regime inevitably plummeted.

One episode that illustrates several of these considerations was centered where I happened to be, in central Luzon. The Japanese developed a scheme to grow cotton in the Philippines, and created a Philippine Cotton Association to coordinate plans. When it came to the doing, however, necessary machinery, high yield seeds, and measures to control pests were all lacking. In addition, because of extensive fighting many fields had been burned and work animals killed.
Various guerrilla bands, including mine, then gave the whole scheme the coup de grace by appealing to the Filipinos not to cooperate.

Of those prominent Filipinos who collaborated with the Japanese, some seemed to do so with enthusiasm, others with reluctance. All soon discovered that it was easier to begin collaboration than to stop. At the end of the war American Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, the American Left, the Huks in the Philippines, and an assortment of American and Filipino political writers denounced all Filipinos who had collaborated with their conquerors and clamored to have them tried for treason. It was alleged that most wealthy Filipinos were fascists, or at least reactionaries; that since Quezon was now dead they could safely pretend that he had asked them to stay behind and defend their countrymen; that they had not, in fact, defended those countrymen but their own financial interest; that they had simultaneously fooled the Americans, the Japanese, and their own people. Now, in 1945, so many of them were claiming that they had always been patriots and resisters that it appeared that “even the Japs in Tokyo are now pro-American.”
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Recriminations about such questions have been endless because the wartime careers of many prominent Filipinos can only be called equivocal. That of José Laurel has already been considered. Laurel seemingly feared American judgment, since he fled to Formosa April 21, 1945, and then to Japan, where he was eventually arrested by the Americans and indicted for treason. He always maintained, however, that the Japanese had coerced him,
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and when he was flown back to the Philippines to face trial, crowds at the Manila airport cheered him when he got off the plane.
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He was to have been tried by a Philippine court but was, in fact, never brought to trial. In 1948 Roxas, by then president of the newly independent Philippine Republic, included Laurel in a general amnesty of all alleged collaborators save common criminals. The Filipino people must have approved the gesture, since they voted Laurel into the national Senate two years later and have since honored him along with other Philippine presidents.

Jorge Vargas, another prominent prewar Filipino politician, who was once Quezon's secretary, headed a provisional Philippine government set up by the Japanese in January 1942, and appeared to collaborate willingly with his masters as long as they seemed to be winning the war. He even wanted to campaign against Laurel to become the first president of the puppet “Philippine Republic,” and he once urged guerrilla leaders on Panay to surrender on the grounds that the Japanese fleet could always prevent the Americans from landing anything in the Philippines. One of the guerrillas sent him back four
Delicious apples, a variety that does not grow in Japan or in the Philippines!
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One of Vargas's motives seems to have been a desire to shake off American domination of the Philippines. He never opposed the conquerors on any critical issue, while Laurel, by contrast, successfully evaded Japanese pressure to raise a Philippine army to fight the Americans. Vargas eventually tied himself so closely to the Japanese that he could not break connections with them even when it became clear that they would lose the war.
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Even so, fate was kind to Vargas. He returned to the Philippines and in 1947 was indicted on 115 counts of collaboration with the enemy. His trial dragged on for months. It appeared that he would eventually be acquitted on procedural grounds when President Roxas and the Philippine Congress rendered his case moot by amnestying (January-February 1948) all who had not actually borne arms against the Allies or acted as spies or informers for the Japanese.
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One case of alleged collaboration that I happened to know something about personally was that of Manuel Roxas. It was obvious from the actions of General MacArthur at the end of the war that some sort of unrecorded understanding involving himself, President Quezon, Roxas, and probably several other highly placed Philippine political figures had been reached early in the war, most likely when Quezon was still on Corregidor. This was in no way unusual, for in other Southeast Asian lands prominent political figures are known to have made unwritten agreements that some of them would be pro-British, or pro-Dutch, or pro-French, and some pro-Japanese, in order to spare their people as much as possible during the war and to make sure that they had a few spokesmen who would be in the good graces of whichever side eventually won. It was understood that those who had chosen the winning side would forgive those who had thrown in their lot with the losers. In the case of Roxas, for two years he evaded damaging legal entanglement with the Japanese, usually on the plea that his health was poor. This was an excuse, to be sure, and there were rumors that Roxas raised his temperature and made his “illnesses” appear more convincing by putting a piece of garlic in his anus. Even if he did this, his ill health was probably not wholly faked, since he died a few years after the war when he was still a comparatively young man. Supposedly fearing execution, Roxas eventually capitulated to the Japanese and became president of the Senate in the “Philippine Republic.” There agreement about his actions and motives stops.

Writers whose sympathies are predominantly Left say Roxas was a slicker who cultivated MacArthur before the war and both Laurel
and the Japanese during it. They say he flattered them all and took them all in. They say that he pretended to have contacts with guerrillas, but that his only true loyalties were to himself and to the wealthy Filipino collaborators with whom he habitually associated.
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It should be added that Al Hendrickson, an observant man who was active with the Luzon guerrillas throughout the war and whose philosophical and political sympathies were not Left then or at any other time, was likewise convinced that Roxas was a shifty rascal and a consummate self-seeker. One of MacArthur's abler biographers sums up the anti-Roxas case by asserting that no guerrilla ever attested to any noteworthy anti-Japanese deed of Roxas.
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The last is untrue. I had several contacts with Roxas and know he did aid guerrillas. In fact, near the end of the war MacArthur told Roxas that to receive public approval he must secure a statement, signed by American guerrilla leaders, attesting to his pro-American sentiments and actions. I was one of those who signed it, and I did so gladly. Marking's guerrillas thought enough of Roxas that they offered to hide him in the mountains, and to supply and feed him. Their chronicler and co-leader adds that Roxas told her that he and Laurel kept in close contact, that they disagreed in public just enough so that the Japanese would take Laurel's advice rather than his own, that Laurel was a master at stalling, and that he (Roxas) regularly kept Laurel informed of much that the Japanese never told him. She added that she had no trouble believing him because she had played the same game with Vargas, Quezon's secretary, in February 1942 when she had been a broadcaster for station KZRH in Manila.
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When Quezon was preparing to leave Corregidor, he issued an executive order naming Roxas as his successor should he and Osmeña be killed. A few days later he added detailed instructions to Roxas about how to deal with every branch of the administration, including organizing, directing, and coordinating resistance to the Japanese.
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In July 1943 Quezon sent his personal physician, Dr. Emgidio Cruz, on a secret mission to the Philippines to see how things were going generally, and specifically to see Roxas. The two held daily conversations about which public figures had been forced to bow to the will of the Japanese, and to what degree, who were true collaborators and who were merely shamming, and who could be counted on to rally the people to anti-Japanese action when the time came for a final military and political showdown. Cruz made a lengthy report of his odyssey to General Willoughby, MacArthur's chief of intelligence, which Willoughby subsequently published in his book, along with much other evidence that Roxas was essentially
a mole in the Laurel regime who collected valuable information for USAFFE headquarters and gave much aid to guerrillas.
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At the end of the war, though MacArthur ordered the arrest of some other top Filipino leaders, he promoted Roxas to brigadier general and put him on inactive status. He explained that he knew Roxas was of good character, that he was innocent of collaboration, and that he had done much to aid guerrillas. Most of the Filipino people must have agreed, since they elected Roxas the first president of the independent Philippine Republic on April 23, 1946. Once in office, Roxas granted amnesty to all guerrillas who had fought against the Japanese during the war, and to the great bulk of those accused of collaboration with the Japanese. His enemies have always interpreted these actions as an endeavor to cover his own tracks, but there is a plausible alternative explanation. Just as the first Bourbon king of France, Henry IV, welcomed to his standard those of all political and religious persuasions in an effort to bind up the wounds of a long generation of savage civil wars (1559-98), and just as a later ruler of the same country, Napoleon Bonaparte, pursued a similar policy in an effort to weld France together again after the nation had been fragmented during the French Revolution, so any statesman of intelligence and good will would have tried to reunite the shattered Filipino people in the aftermath of World War II. In the case of amnestying guerrillas, moreover, a legal point needed settlement. Any Filipino who had taken arms in violation of the orders of the Japanese-sponsored “Philippine Republic” was, after all, formally a criminal since international law prescribes that citizens of an occupied country have a duty to cooperate with the occupying forces.

At the end of the war, mostly because of American pressure, 5,603 accusations of collaboration with the Japanese were legally filed. Only a few hundred of the accused were ever tried, only 156 convictions were secured, and only one of them was of a prominent person, Teofilo Sison, a prewar governor of Pangasinan province. All the other cases were dismissed or concluded with an amnesty.
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One of those put on trial was Claro M. Recto, a former member of the Philippine Senate and for a time foreign minister in the Laurel regime. Recto was a remarkably intelligent, far-sighted man. Long before the war he had perceived Japanese and Russian intentions in the Orient, had come to believe that domination of the smaller Asian peoples by other Asians would be worse than Western domination, and had urged that the Philippines must become strong militarily because the United States would never regard it as more than an expendable military outpost.
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During his trial Recto delivered an eloquent speech on his own behalf that summed up the general position of the collaborators. Those who, like himself, now stood accused, he said, had not fled to ease overseas where they could safely preach “defense of freedom” to their countrymen languishing under Japanese despotism. Only those who had stayed behind and tried to defend the lives and interests of the Filipino people could know what those people had faced, and how much temporizing and evasion they had been compelled to practice in order to live. No Americans were ever treated the way the Filipinos had been. No American cities were smashed either by barbarous conquerors or by the planes and bombs of “liberators.” The American countryside was not laid waste; no American civilians were insulted, tortured, or bayoneted by a cruel enemy. How many Americans, he asked, would have collaborated if the Japanese had followed up Pearl Harbor with landings in California? How would they now be regarded?

Whatever the war might cost the Philippine people, Recto said, was only incidental to Americans, for the American objective was
overall
victory; but no civilized Filipino public official could consider the matter with such objectivity. Philippine political leaders, even in the Laurel government, had turned a blind eye to much aid that had gone to guerrillas, had protested to Japanese authorities about atrocities against Filipinos, and had refused to raise an army to aid the Japanese even when pressed hard to do so. He added that the American government had known that it was pathetically unprepared to defend the Philippines, yet the Filipinos had remained loyal to America. And what of America's own “collaborators”? Washington had not merely excused Wainwright, Sharp, Cushing, Hilsman, Baker, and others who had surrendered to the enemy or had been compelled to make pro-Japanese statements, but had positively honored them on the ground that they had been victims of circumstances, casualties of American unpreparedness.
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Was not exactly the same true of those Filipino leaders now accused of collaboration?