Year Zero (27 page)

José Laurel and most of his cohorts in the puppet government, such as Manuel Roxas and Benigno Aquino, were from the elite landowning families, whose power the Huks would have wished to overturn, even without a Japanese occupation. In the sense of serving under the Japanese and promoting an anti-American, pan-Asianist cause, these men were certainly collaborators. But like the collaboration of other Asian nationalists in former Western colonies, their motives were complex. Laurel was an impressive man, a graduate of Yale Law School, a senator, and an associate justice on the supreme court in Manila. Although a member of the colonial elite, he may genuinely have believed that the Japanese brand of militant “Asianism” was needed to wean Filipinos from their dependence on the United States. Similar claims have been made by European quislings, who thought that a new order run by Nazi Germany would restore some vim to their decadent societies. But they were betraying independent nations; Laurel, Sukarno, and others were operating under foreign rule or domination, before and after the Japanese landed.

Laurel remained a prime target for Filipino guerrillas. While playing a round of golf with Benigno Aquino at the Wack Wack Golf and Country Club in June 1943, he was shot in the back by two assailants, one of whom bore the name of “Little Joe.” Later that year, after he had recovered from his wounds, Laurel attended the Greater East Asian Conference in Tokyo, where Asian brotherhood and cooperation were pledged. The following year he agreed to declare war on the United States as the Japanese demanded.

Meanwhile, in October 1944, General MacArthur made good on his promise to the Filipinos that he would return. To heighten the drama of this event, he waded through the surf of Leyte, a scowling figure in aviator glasses. Indeed, he waded through the surf more than once to get the image just right for the newsreels. And he reenacted the same scene in Luzon. In his usual biblical manner, sure to appeal to the Catholic as well as the mystical side of Filipinos, he intoned: “People of the Philippines, I have returned. By the grace of the Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples . . . Rally to me . . . The guidance of divine God points the way.”

On their long and often bloody slog to Manila, American troops were actively helped by the Huks. The Filipino guerrillas drove out the Japanese from various parts of central Luzon, hoisted the Stars and Stripes along with the Philippine flag, and set up their own administration, expecting U.S. support for the independent Philippine socialist republic. This is not how it turned out, however. Despite some words of admiration for the fighting spirit of the Huks, MacArthur was persuaded to bring back the people he knew best, that is to say, the old landowning elite. Despite his vow to “run to earth every disloyal Filipino,” MacArthur made Manuel Roxas, a loyal member of Laurel's puppet government, a brigadier general in the U.S. Army.
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The Huks were ordered to give up their arms. When they refused, they were arrested. Some were jailed without formal charges. One of them was Luis Taruc, who shared his prison cell with several former collaborators of the Japanese. When fifty thousand peasants marched in protest to the Malacañang Palace in Manila, Taruc was released, but many of his troops remained in prison. What followed is murky. Arms were twisted, money changed hands. The Manila press came out with stories about Laurel and his colleagues having acted as impeccable patriots during the war, shielding the Filipinos as best they could from the horrors inflicted by Japanese. MacArthur called Roxas “one of the prime factors in the guerilla movement.” Filipinos were admonished to be above “petty jealousy” and “unnecessary misunderstanding,” for such things would only “impede progress.”
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As the first president of the Philippines after World War II, Manuel Roxas declared an amnesty for wartime collaborators. Thousands were released from jail. Luis Taruc took to the hills and the Huks became the Army to Liberate the People, forerunners of the Maoist New People's Army. And the old landowning families, firmly in charge of their possessions once more, continued to rule Philippine politics. This was still true in 1986, after “people power” had toppled Ferdinand Marcos, inspiring the world with the promise of Asian democracy. The People Power star was Corazon “Cory” Aquino, Benigno Aquino's daughter-in-law. Her vice president was “Doy” Laurel, José Laurel's son. As I write, the president is Benigno Aquino III, Cory's eldest son.

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TO RESTORE LEGITIMACY
to a ravaged country, it helps to have a symbolic figure to rally around. This can be a respected monarch, a resistance hero, even a foreign general who can plausibly pose as a savior. General Douglas MacArthur's style may have been a little too histrionic, even egomaniacal, for some tastes, but he played this role to perfection in both Japan and the Philippines. His use of the Japanese emperor as the symbol of continuity was calculated to complement his own performance as the temporary shogun. Heroism, including MacArthur's, is often a matter of theater, and in some cases a complete fiction. In North Korea, for example, “the Great Leader” Kim Il-sung was imposed by the Soviet Red Army as a great partisan hero who had single-handedly chased the Japanese from the Korean peninsula. In fact, he had spent most of the war in a Soviet army training camp near Khabarovsk.

When the figureheads of prewar regimes have lost credibility, and legitimacy is contested, you have the basis for civil war. This broke out in full force in Greece, and after a year of shadowboxing and skirmishes, it would soon cut loose in China too.

The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, known to Americans as the Gimo, and to the U.S. commander in wartime China, General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, as “Peanut Head,” was nominally in control of
China. But many parts of the country were clearly beyond his grasp. The Gimo presented himself, and was depicted in American wartime propaganda, as a great national leader, heroically battling the Japanese. But Mao Zedong, holed up with his guerrilla army in the northwest, promoted the idea—not entirely spurious—that Chiang had been passive at best, and a Japanese collaborator against the Communists at worst. The Communists claimed that
they
were the true resisters, and Mao the national hero. In fact, both sides often regarded the Japanese as a tedious sideshow which the U.S. would eventually take care of. The real enemies were at home. As two hostile Chinese armies squared up for the final battle, one heroic narrative was pitted against another.

The two leaders actually met, just after the war, at an extended meeting in the Nationalist wartime capital of Chungking (now spelled Chongqing). They couldn't really bear one another, but had a mutual respect for the other's toughness, like bosses of rival gangs. Mao toasted Chiang at the official banquet and wished him ten thousand years of prosperity. In an attempt to stave off an all-out civil war, polite talks were held about power-sharing, who would occupy which parts of the country, what kind of government might be shared, and so forth. No firm agreement was reached. Mao told his comrades that the statement of peaceful intentions (“democracy,” “one army,” Chiang's “leadership”) was “a mere scrap of paper.”
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But the U.S. ambassador to China, the mentally unstable Patrick J. Hurley, who disconcerted his Chinese hosts by treating them to whooping Choctaw Indian war cries, still had hopes that he, a man who knew next to nothing about China, would bring the two parties together. Any American who harbored doubts on this issue, including diplomats with far greater expertise, was, in Hurley's fevered imagination, a traitor and probably a communist.

The
New York Times
reporter had it right. In a report on October 6, he wrote, “To Westerners who wonder why there is so much haggling, it should be pointed out that troops are the decisive factor in Chinese politics.” Not only that, but arms were decisive too. Which is why Chiang
insisted on his sole right to disarm the Japanese, and why Mao chose to ignore this.

In the summer of 1945, Chiang's Nationalists had an army of about four million men spread all over southern and central China. But they were badly trained, ill disciplined, and often led by corrupt and incompetent officers. “Puppet armies,” set up by the Japanese in Manchukuo, northern China, and Nanking (Nanjing), the old Nationalist capital, numbered more than a million men. They were better equipped than the Nationalists and often superior fighters, and, rather than disarm them, Chiang preferred to absorb them into his own ranks. Then there was an assortment of provincial warlords whose loyalties were self-seeking and always fluid.

Chinese civilians dreaded the arrival of Nationalists in their villages and towns, for the troops tended to behave more like brigands than soldiers, looting property, robbing food, raping women, and shanghaiing peasants into the army. Puppet troops and warlord armies were not much better. The Communists, who had about a million soldiers and two million militiamen, could be ruthless masters too, but they at least understood the value of discipline. Their public relations were better; they realized that a war is partly won by propaganda. Being seen as a heroic people's army was one of their greatest assets.

Much of China was not just horribly damaged, but also corrupted by foreign occupation, warlord misrule, and many years of purges and counter-purges in a civil conflict that was often as brutal as the war with Japan. Donald Keene, the Japan scholar, was a young U.S. Navy officer stationed in Tsingtao (Qingdao), a port city on the Yellow Sea, known for its naval base, European architecture, and German-style beer breweries. The Japanese Imperial Navy was still in town when the U.S. Marines arrived, and Keene soon sensed “something fishy in the atmosphere,” a stink of skullduggery and corruption; “the charge of collaborationist is no less pervasive than the generally suspicious character of the city itself.”
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He found that Tsingtao was still run by Chinese who had been
appointed by the Japanese, generally louche characters who had done well out of foreign occupation. He found Japanese naval officers bragging of their wartime exploits, and Chinese being purged for collaboration by other Chinese whose records were just as blemished; they simply wanted to loot the suspects' properties. Tsingtao was a place of seedy carpetbaggers, gangsters, spies with shifting loyalties, and Japanese who still behaved like a master race. None of this was unique to Tsingtao. Keene heard reports from other parts of China about heavily armed Japanese troops being asked by Nationalists to help contain the Communists. These reports were entirely accurate. Some right-wing factions in Chiang's government actually wanted to start a war with the Communists immediately with active Japanese assistance. The cautious Gimo did not wish to go that far, but large numbers of Japanese troops were used to guard Chinese railroads and many other installations against possible Communist attacks.

There were reprisals against the Japanese here and there, but on the whole, both Nationalists and Communists concentrated on their domestic enemies, and the Nationalists needed Japanese help. Besides, the relationship between Chinese and Japanese was often too tangled for simple solutions.

One of the most grotesque scenes of the immediate postwar period took place in Nanking, where tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Chinese had been massacred and raped by Japanese troops on an extended rampage in 1937. The Rape of Nanking still stands as one of the worst atrocities of World War II. General Okamura Yasuji was not directly involved in the massacre, but he was responsible for equally horrendous war crimes. In 1938, troops under his command murdered countless civilians with chemical weapons. His scorched-earth policy in 1942, known by Chinese as the “Three Alls” (“kill all, burn all, loot all”), caused the deaths of more than two million people. All men between fifteen and sixty were targeted for killing on suspicion of being anti-Japanese. And the systematic kidnapping of young women, mostly from Korea, to serve as sex slaves in Japanese army brothels, also happened on Okamura's watch.

But when this same Okamura surrendered to General Ho Yin-chin in Nanking on September 9, 1945, General Ho bowed to the Japanese general and apologized for the indignity of this humiliating ceremony. Ho, who had been trained at the military academy in Tokyo under Okamura, called him “sensei,” teacher.
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And so, Okamura continued to occupy the Foreign Ministry building in Nanking as though nothing had changed. After he was finally indicted for war crimes by a court in Nanking three years later, the Generalissimo himself shielded him from further indignities and kept him on as a military adviser to the Nationalists. Okamura Yasuji died peacefully in his bed in 1966.

The key to the Chinese civil war really lay in Manchuria. The first to take this heartland of heavy industries and mines, set up and run by the Japanese, would be in an almost unassailable position. As we have seen, the Soviets got there first and stripped all the industrial and financial assets that could be transported to the Soviet Union. Their first encounters with the Chinese Communists were not always cordial. The ill-kempt Chinese soldiers were often treated with disdain by Soviet Red Army officers, and the lack of interpreters made communication almost impossible. Besides, Stalin, for the sake of Big Power stability, had decided for the time being to recognize the Generalissimo as the legitimate Chinese leader.

Still, more and more Chinese Communists from the Eighth Route Army were trickling into Manchuria, and in some areas, with the help of sympathetic Soviet commanders, took over the local administration. Since most Communist cadres had neither knowledge nor roots in a region that most Chinese regarded as the Wild North, home of nomads and savages, this was not an easy task. Apart from tense relations with the Soviets, and the sinister presence of roaming gangs of puppet troops, the Eighth Route Army also had to deal with an assortment of local underground guerrilla bands, some attached to the Soviets, some belonging to provincial warlords, and some affiliated with the Nationalist camp. Just as the Nationalists wanted Japanese and American help to fight the Communists, the Communists asked for Soviet assistance to suppress “anti-Soviet bandits.”
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