Behind Japanese Lines (41 page)

The saddest memories I retain from World War II are those related to our postwar treatment of Filipinos. Seldom in history have one people been so loyal to another or suffered so much for another as the Filipinos did for Americans. We had built no serious defenses in the Philippines when the war began, yet throughout the struggle the Filipinos shared our hardships, fought beside us, and risked their own and their families' lives for us. Those of us in the central plains of Luzon could not have survived at all without regular aid from local civilians. Many such civilians lost everything they had for trusting us too much. We owed them protection and defense, yet when the war was over we expected them to be grateful to us for having at length rescued them from further disasters of our making, disasters that had
already cost them perhaps a million dead from battle casualties, internecine slaughter, the bloody oppression of civilians, and the merciless scourges of disease and starvation. Yet, despite it all, most ordinary Filipinos were overjoyed when the American army returned.

What ought we have done? In my opinion, we should have made the Philippines a forty-ninth state. Contrary to most of what is written in books, contrary to everything “progressive” people are supposed to believe, I am convinced that in a free election most ordinary Filipinos would have voted to retain or strengthen their ties with America.
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Of course, this was not true of those prominent Filipinos who hoped to become the rulers of an independent nation. Sadly, it is also a fact that race and nationality consciousness are the foremost mass passions of our century, and that in every part of the world ambitious politicians have been able to inflame multitudes by clamoring for “freedom” and “independence.” Perhaps they would have done so in the Philippines too had we retained our control there. But at least we could have offered our wartime allies a choice.

After the war our government was remarkably stingy in its treatment of U.S. guerrillas. The War Claims Act provided that prisoners of war or civilians who had been held by an enemy government and not fed up to standards prescribed by the Geneva Convention should be paid $1 for every day spent in captivity, plus an extra $1.50 per day if they had been treated inhumanely or forced to perform unpaid labor in violation of the Geneva Convention. Al Hendrickson tried for ten years to persuade Congress to amend the act to include guerrillas, with the money to be taken out of Japanese war reparations. He got nowhere. Leon Beck battled in U.S. courts for twelve years to finally keep $992 which our government claimed had been wrongly paid to him as compensation for being a prisoner of war, because he had spent only thirteen days as a prisoner before escaping on the Death March, after which he had been a guerrilla for nearly three years. James P. Boyd, whose personal hegira resembled Beck's, was less successful. He was officially classified as a prisoner of the Japanese for only one day, April 9, 1942, after which he escaped, and so he was sent a check for one dollar—which he still cherished, uncashed, in 1984!
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Such treatment of American guerrillas was grotesque. That we never properly compensated many of those Filipinos who served with us, or the families of those who died doing so, was truly shameful. To be sure, obstacles in the way of justice were numerous and daunting, and some effort was made to cope with them. For instance, Bob Lapham went back to the islands early in 1947 as a consultant to the Guerrilla Affairs Section of the U.S. Army. He stayed about six
months, working with his own guerrilla officers and with American regular officers to reconstruct records and rosters that would be as complete and accurate as possible for Tarlac, Pangasinan, Nueva Ecija, and Nueva Vizcaya provinces. He tried to secure back pay and military status for deserving men and to insure that some assistance would be forthcoming to the families of those who had died fighting alongside ourselves against our common enemy. Sorting out the legitimate claims from the more numerous false ones was always difficult and often impossible. Bob said afterward that he believed something approaching justice had been done for most of his men,
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an estimate more optimistic than most. For me the whole business has always been intensely disheartening.

It has often been alleged that Filipinos came out of World War II demoralized. I have always found this hard to accept, since the vast majority of those whom I saw or dealt with were elated, jubilant at the return of American troops and the prospect of imminent victory. But save for the brief trip to Manila to be decorated, described above, I was always out in the hinterlands. The demoralization was said to have been much worse in cities, and especially in Manila. That it existed cannot be doubted, since it has been attested to by numerous American and Filipino writers of several ideological persuasions. They also agree that some of it was inevitable and some was not; and for that which was not, responsibility is divided between Americans and Filipinos themselves.

The descent commenced right at the beginning of the war. The U.S. Army threw open its storehouses in Manila to let Filipino civilians carry away what they could rather than allow it to fall to the invaders. Not satisfied, the recipients plundered Chinese shops and grocery stores for good measure. The police could do nothing since they were too busy elsewhere, they had had their firearms taken away a couple of days earlier, and too many people were involved anyway.
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The wholesale looting of Manila followed. This set the pattern for the future. Before long agriculture broke down, food shortages developed, prices of everything soared while wages remained low, and poor people starved to death in the streets while profiteers and collaborators lived grandly. Under such pressure gangsters and rascals of every stripe flourished. Some were spectacularly shameless. There were Filipino doctors who sold quinine and sulfa drugs at high prices while Filipino survivors of the Bataan Death March died from want of such medicines. Some rascality was bizarre. Graves were robbed to steal fancy clothes and to knock the gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. Some thievery was incredible in its boldness. One robber
lifted a Japanese officer's sword in a theater; another stole a machinegun off a Japanese truck parked in front of a restaurant.
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Japanese occupation forces soon contributed heavily to the economic and moral debacle. They elbowed their way into every Philippine industry of any consequence and manipulated the currency in ways that steadily drained the country of its raw materials and movable wealth.

To avoid starvation and to survive the counterpressures on them from the Japanese on one side and competing bands of guerrillas on the other, ordinary Filipinos were forced into the sort of moral compromises their political leaders faced when serving in the Japanese-sponsored “Philippine Republic.” Everybody stole from everybody else, both to live and to sell the loot to the Japanese. It soon seemed that any noteworthy transaction required an agent, a go-between, or some “sharpy” taking a cut.

Black marketeering flourished; “protection” was routinely sold to railway shippers; hijacking became commonplace; ticket scalping proliferated; ersatz foods multiplied; dogs and cats in various guises appeared on restaurant menus; local government broke down to such a degree that garbage and even unburied corpses lay in the streets of tropical cities for days on end; and shortages of everything were so bad that if one went to a hospital he had to bring his own bandages and medicines. At the war's end stevedores systematically looted American ships at temporary piers, and the streets of Manila teemed with hawkers of everything salable.
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Worst of all was the growth of eleventh hour “heroes” and of violence, especially in 1945. Many who had done nothing save pray that MacArthur would return soon now swaggered about carrying .45s. They talked loudly about what fearless guerrillas they had been, shouted orders at civilians, and confiscated food in the name of “military law.” They kidnapped and robbed or murdered the wealthy, or merely the unlucky, on the ground that the victims were “collaborators.”

During the war thoughtful Filipinos, viewing current destruction and what they knew was certain to come, and knowing that eventual reconstruction would be difficult, expressed the hope that when the war was over America would not forget Filipino bravery in the common struggle and would provide the aid the Philippines would need so sorely.
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Things hardly turned out thus. In 1945-46 hordes of American soldiers flooded into the Philippines, many of them interested primarily in un-Christian living. Filipinas flocked to them, and venereal disease rates soared. Though Bob Lapham thought the
American officers with whom he worked to investigate Filipino guerrilla war claims were generally conscientious, others have portrayed them as preoccupied primarily with playing golf or “investigating the anatomy of local women.”
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Perhaps worst of all, a swarm of “fast buck” types followed apace, taking advantage of wartime privations and general disorder.

Such irresponsible conduct indicated a fundamental inadequacy: in 1945-46 the U.S. government had no clear-cut Philippine policy. While Washington did follow through on the highest level of
general
policy, in that independence which had been promised to the Filipinos in 1934 was granted on schedule in 1946, when it came down to particular deeds the islands were treated with a mixture of muddle and neglect. In Manila, meanwhile, members of the new Philippine Congress, not to be outdone in either folly or venality, voted themselves back pay even though their national treasury was empty. In Washington years passed, senators and congressmen grew older, memories of the war receded, and interest waned in either Philippine claims or American obligations. With that strange perversity that seems to overcome us periodically, we adopted the policy that some Europeans have described wryly as “treating neutrals like friends, enemies like neutrals, and friends like enemies.” Filipinos could never understand why their idol, General MacArthur, went off to promote and preside over the recovery of Japan rather than the Philippines; why in the first year after the war their country received only about $3 million in UNRRA aid while Yugoslavia got $300 million;
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or why Americans seemed more solicitous about the condition of Nisei in the United States than that of ex-allies.

Small wonder that so many in the Philippine generation that has grown up since 1945 have become anti-American. They never experienced the warm comradeship of Americans and Filipinos in the war years. Their memories are, rather, of stolen war property, American and Filipino profiteers, endless squabbles over veterans' benefits, and those tawdry features of our civilization that so often impress foreigners more than American qualities of which we can justly be proud. Those Filipinos, old now, who do remember the war years have been saddened by these developments. I have received letters from some I knew and some I did not, and clippings from Philippine newspapers, referring to me as a “grateful American” and praising me in terms that are embarrassing, all because I have done such small things as keep in touch with some wartime Filipino associates or refer to Filipinos favorably in occasional letters to American magazines.
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How little we, as a people, appreciate the intangibles in human affairs; how heedlessly we threw away so much good will in the Philippines that could have been preserved merely by curbing a small number of swine among our own people and by treating more generously those who struggled and suffered with us. A remark attributed to the German chancellor Konrad Adenauer seems apropos here: “If God saw fit to limit human intelligence, it hardly seems fair that He did not also limit human stupidity.”

Few important things in life go smoothly; certainly few things in the army do. A week after I had received my DSC I said goodbye to all my friends and put in for air transportation home. At once I hit a snag. I was informed that everyone in my category (Project J, “Recovered Personnel”) had long since been flown out and that only seagoing transportation was now available. I protested that this policy was both absurd and unfair since I had remained in the service for additional months of my own volition. Was I now to be penalized for it?

I got nowhere with the middle-range military bureaucrats who deal routinely with such matters, so I asked to see Major Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, MacArthur's G-2. The next day I was leaning over a desk in his outer office writing something when a massive man came up alongside me and asked if I was Captain Hunt. Momentarily startled, I gazed upward at the giant who loomed over me and then downward as his huge hand engulfed mine. General Willoughby then asked how old I was. When I told him I was twenty-five, he said he had read some of my dispatches when he was in Australia and from them had envisioned me as a much older man. Then he asked me what he could do for me. I told him my troubles. He said he thought I should take an ocean liner; that three weeks or so of lounging in deck chairs with attentive nurses about struck him as an especially pleasant way to travel for someone who had been in a war zone for three years. I replied that I had not seen any of my family for more than six years and would like to get home as soon as possible. He shrugged at what clearly seemed to him my invincible irrationality. Then he wrote me an endorsement for air transportation, phrased so generously that it might have served as a commendation, and wished me well.

Two days later I boarded a C-54 at Nichols Field, where I had been at the outbreak of the war. My earthly possessions consisted of a couple of GI uniforms, some underwear, a few toilet articles, and my ornate 9mm. German Luger. Looking over my shoulder through the window of the plane, I watched the shores of the Philippines gradually disappear into the trackless sea. I had seen the whole war on one
of those islands, and by the grace of God I was still alive. It seemed improbable.

Now, long after, I seldom think about the war or my part in it, save for the recollection and study that were essential to write this book. Its composition has been, for me, an emotional experience. I undertook it with several hopes: to add a bit to the historical record of World War II; to apportion credit a little more equitably among Americans and Filipinos who struggled and endured so much together; and to pay a final tribute to the many Filipinos who did so much for me.