I read this book. I typed some of the highlights I wanted to remember. Although this book is about WW2, my point is not about the war but my wishes to like to share the good and bad points of us Filipinos and the Philippines from the observation of a foreigner, which I think still exist up to the present. -- ninoChapter 1 The War Begins
Page 3
The bulk of the Philippine army was still virtually untrained, badly armed, and almost impossible to command since the men spoke something like seventy different dialects.
Page 5
Once ashore, I found nothing that seemed to have anything to do with imminent war. Downtown Manila seems a typical modern big city. Sunsets over Manila Bay and the Zambales Mountains on Bataan Peninsula were the most gaudily brilliant spectacles I had ever seen, like the canvases of an impressionistic painter gone berserk.
A second lieutenant with a heavy red beard startled me momentarily, but I was told that American soldiers thereabouts often grew such beards to impress Filipinos, who have little facial hair.
The jai alai building seemed particularly modern since it had air conditioning and gambling apparatus similar to parimutuel machines at U.S. racetracks. Equally memorable, if less happily so, was the pungent smell of native villages (barrios) without the facilities to dispose sewage.
Most striking of all were the women.
Now small, dainty Spanish-Filipina girls with incomparable complexions seemed inexpressibly beautiful.
Even the straggly-haired lavenderas ( washerwomen), sitting on their haunches and pounding their dirty clothes with large wooden paddles, would have looked at least moderately enticing if only their lips and teeth had not been stained a ghastly, almost neon, red from chewing betel nut.
Page 8
In an effort to save civilian lives and prevent the needless destruction of Manila. General MacArthur declare the metropolis an open city. In a response typical of their conduct throughout the war, the Japanese ignored the gesture and bombed the city freely. Soon its streets were filled with rubble of every sort, and the air hung heavy with the stench of countless human and animal corpses.
Chapter 2 The Struggle for Bataan
Page 14
Our immediate problem was not the enemy at all but the sheer density of the jungle. Gigantic trees towered up to two hundred feet in the air, grew close together, and were crested with luxuriant intertwining branches. Far below, dense masses of vines and bushes took up most of the space between the trees. The growth was so thick that on the ground it was never really daylight, and there were about six hours of the day that could even be called twilight. By the end of the afternoon one could avoid getting lost only by hanging onto the belt of the man in front of him.
Pages 16-17
I soon learned that Japanese infantry men were not merely savage and treacherous but also remarkably brave, tough, tenacious, and disciplined. Physically, maybe 80 percent of them could have come from a mold. They were about 5'2" and weighed about 125 pounds. Most were in their early twenties and had only elementary education. Perhaps a third came from farms. Most had been in uniform a couple of years, and all had passed through the world's harshest military training regime. Because of the brutality of their training and the thoroughness with which they had been indoctrinated to make any sacrifice for their emperor and their country, they were capable of incredible feats of endurance, not to speak of conduct that seemed insane to Occidentals. In desperate circumstances the Japanese would kill their wounded, even burn wounded men to death in buildings, to prevent the disabled from slowing the pace of military operations.
This grim approach to war did possess a certain macabre "efficiency," but it was also counterproductive. All the support services in the Japanese army, medical included, mere meager because Japanese troops were supposed to fight rather than engage in peripheral activities or go on sick call. This meant that many Nipponese soldiers threw away their lives in displays of brainless bravado, while many other sickened and died because they seldom received the medical treatment they needed and deserved. In our army, by contrast, for every man who was actually in combat there were as many as twelve others in training, maintenance, liaison, planning, special services or above all generating mountains of paper .
Page 17
Japanese infantrymen were armed with .25-caliber Arisaka bolt-action rifles and weighed about ten pounds with bayonets attached. Both commissioned officers and noncoms carried pistols modeled on the German Luger, and commissioned officers sported fancy samurai swords, which some of them delighted to use for beheading. It is possible that this particular penchant indicated a desire to humiliate the enemy since ordinary Japanese soldiers has a superstitious fear of having their own heads and bodied buried in separate places.
Page 19
The trees were so close together, and the brush and the vines so thick, that a tank wallowed as helplessly as a rhinoceros in quicksand.
Another of their unsettling tricks was to send snipers up tress where they tied themselves fast and covered themselves with camouflage. Then, as we advanced against their comrades on the ground and the sound of ground gunfire would hide their own, they would shoot us in the back. This happened to often that we took to spraying trees with bullets indiscriminately during each advance. Even when a sniper was hit, as happened occasionally, he would seldom move or cry out. We would become aware of his presence only if we happened to encounter drops of blood spattering the thick undergrowth.
In these grim surroundings one quickly learned iron self control or he did not live.
Page 25
Another such story was related to me by an old-timer. God, he said, had seen fti to create two kinds of mosquitoes for the Philippines: large daytime mosquitoes that caused dengue fever, and small nighttime mosquitoes that carried malaria. Unhappily he wasn't joking: I soon contracted both maladies.
Page 28
We tried eating carabao, the huge water buffalo Filipinos use as draft animals, though carabao meat is better suited for making saddles than for steak.
An animal I did try hard to kill was the iguana, a large lizard with a forked tongue and a hide like a crocodile. Though the iguana are ugly, repulsive creatures, their meat is sweet and tasty, much like the white meat of the chicken.
Page 29
Ed Dyess called in several of us sergeants, explained the situation to us, and asked us how the men would respond to such an agreement. We replied that they would accept it. Dyess later wrote in his book that he had never been more proud to be an American. No doubt that was the way it seemed to him; and I will say for us that we did understand the necessity of the action, but inwardly we were resentful. The pilots were officers and we were enlisted men. They had decent quarters while we slept in the outdoors on the ground amid mosquitoes so thick that by dawn our eyes were often swollen shut from their bites.Now, when we were all half starved, the officers were to get extra food as well.
Chapter 3 The Bataan Death March
Pages 33 - 34
The travail of some 75,000 - 80, 000 beaten, bewildered, sick, and hungry Americans and Filipinos who were bullied, badgered, taunted, stabbed, starved, and shot by their Japanese captors on a hellish march some eighty miles in stifling tropical heat has long since passed into history as one of the most spectacular and revolting atrocities of World War II. It was also one of the most important events of the Pacific war, for the shared sufferings of Americans and Filipinos strengthened the bond between the two peoples and heightened the animosity of both toward their brutal conquerors.
Nobody among either captors or captives attempted to keep records. Thousands of Filipinos and much smaller number of Americans managed to escape during the march, but nobody knows how many of them died alone in the mountains and jungle, or how many of the Filipinos made it hoe and quietly became civilians again. Thousands of both people died in O'Donnell and Cabanatuan prison camps after the war was over, but it is impossible to distinguish between those who expired from the belated effects of the Death March and those who perished from the cruel regimen in the camps themselves.
Page 37
Another time I was removed from the road and forced to help a Japanese company prepare a bivouac. Here one of the guards spoke to me in English. I asked him where he had learned the language. He said he had been trained in Yokohama to be a teacher in English. I then asked him which side he thought would win the war. He replied thoughtfully, without the customary Japanese menace or boasting, that he believed Japan would. He added that the training he had undergone in Japan was tougher than anything he had experienced so far in combat, so rough in fact that some of his fellow trainees has committed suicide rather than endure it. He said he hated the British, but about Americans he was silent. From this manner I guessed that he was opposed to the war and not sanguine about its ultimate outcome.
Page 39
All of us would have died had not the general disorganization that prevailed for three or four days enabled us to scrounge a little food in various ways. When the guards were few and otherwise occupied, we would sometimes dig up a few camotes ( Philippine sweet potatoes) in fields. Now and then a friendly Filipino would furtively hand or toss us something from along the roadside.
It is possible that an individual Japanese guard might have handed me a rice ball on an occasion or two, though I don't remember it.
Page 41
All along the road I had seen brave and compassionate Filipinos of both sexes and all ages risk their lives to slip food to prisoners. Surely some Filipinos would help me if only I could get away.
Page 43
I wanted to leave our adobe, but my companions did not. At length I arose and began to call out. Across the stream some Filipino farmers heard me, and one started toward us. He walked up onto a log that lay across the ditch, with his eyes turned downward. I asked him if there were Japanese around. Fortunately, he understood some English. He told me to stay down, and slipped into the underbrush. A few minutes later he returned and motioned for us to follow him.
Chapter 4 In and Out of the Fassoth Camps
Pages 44-45
As always throughout the war the Filipinos here treated us warmly and generously, at dire risk to themselves. Various of them brought us rice, water, and crude sugar several times a day. One boy begged me to let him hide me amid fishponds in Manila Bay, promising that he would make me well again and would keep me safe until the Americans returned in perhaps three months. Little did he or I realize that it would be three years.
Page 48
The new camp consisted of one large building about fifty by a hundred feet and several smaller ones, all made of entirely of bamboo and without nails. Filipinos are geniuses with bamboo. They make everything out of it: cooking utensils, drinking cups, woven baskets, animal snares, fish traps, scabbards for bolo knives, bridges - anything from tweezers to houses.
Nobody has seen rain until he has seen it in the Philippines. Many downpours would have been called cloudburst in the United States, yet they went on for hours, day after day.
Page 49
One incident during this era of semi-starvation. I will never forget. Vicente managed to get us a considerable quantity of navy beans, the sort universally reviled in World War I but now regarded as manna from heaven by those of us who had eaten little but rice for months. Mrs. Cataina Dimacal Fassoth, William's Filipina wife, who gave unselfishly of her time cooking and trying to care for us, prepared the feast. We lined up with our bamboo tableware in ardent anticipation. With my first bite I was astounded. Judging from the looks on the faces of the others, so were they. Filipinos like sugar ans prepare many of their foods with it. Mrs. Fassoth, knowing nothing about navy beans, had thrown a lot of sugar into the water when she boiled them. But we ate them.
Page 53
Filipinos had a lot of intriguing medical beliefs and practices. Their effects varied from bizarre to lethal. Henry Clay Conner, who like me owed his life to friendly Filipinos, relates that early in 1942 a Negrito tribesman once brewed an herb called dita and gave it to him for his malaria. In two days the chills and fever abated and Conner felt vastly better. When he tried to secure more dita on his own, however, he was warned by an educated Filipino, the brother of a doctor, that while dita did not harm Negritos, it often caused people less tough to end up deaf, dumb, blind, or dead.
Pages 53-54
In my case, one day a Filipino around the camp commiserated with me and told me that if I wished to recover I should drink the blood of a black dog. The thought was sickening, especially since blood was to be secured by cutting the dog's throat, but numerous Filipinos regarded it as a sure-fire universal remedy. I was so desperate to recover that I had become willing to try anything, so I agreed. When some of the repulsive stuff was actually brought to me in a coconut shell, I could down only one swallow. Nothing beneficial happened. Maybe my faith wasn't strong enough.
Page 55
Six other Americans indoors were caught in bed. Like me they survived by a fluke. The Japanese, finding them unarmed, spared their lives. Three Filipino and a baby were not so lucky. The invaders butchered the men with bayonets. When the baby began to cry, one of them seized it by the feet and struck off its head with one slash of a sword. Then the visitors set fire to the camp and burned it to the ground.
Page 57
Mac walking and I staggering, until we came to an inviting mountain stream full of suso. A suso is something like a freshwater oyster, a creature that lives in a shell stuck to a rock. We pried some off rocks in the stream, built a fire, put some water in a bamboo joint, and boiled them. When cooked, suso can be popped out of their shells with a sharp rap of the heel of one hand against the other, or by banging them against a rock. We ate our relish, but inadvisedly topped off our dinner with some green papayas, which promptly produced diarrhea.
Page 58
Mackenzie and I were awakened at dawn by the crowing of a rooster. This meant that there had to be some people around, so we headed in the general direction of the sound. Soon we came to a house occupied by an old Filipino man and a young girl. Once more, as was to be the case so many more times during the war, I was the beneficiary of the friendliness and generosity of ordinary Filipinos. Though these two had never seen us in their lives and could communicate with us only in sign language, they fed us rice and venison and then, for reasons unknown to us, probably far of the Japanese, quietly packed up and left. Long afterward I cannot help but wonder if we Americans would have taken comparable risks and shown equivalent kindness to Filipinos.
Page 59
After a time I came to a village inhabited by Baluga pygmies, a mountain people dressed chiefly in G-strings but whose men were armed with American rifles.
Though the Balugas were frightened momentarily at this apparition appearing suddenly in their midst, they soon recovered and fed me some camotes and green papaya soup. By now an ulcer had indeed developed in the wound on my foot, and had eaten a deep hole in it. The Balugas treated my malady by grinding a red rock into powder, pouring this into the wound, and then covering it with white paste produced by chewing some leaf. Then they took me to a trail that lead downward into the lowlands and left me.
That evening I came to a house nestled against a hillside where foothills disappeared into lowlands. Here I was greeted hospitably by two Filipino couples and offered a choice of food or cigarettes. Incredible though it must seem to a reader, my addiction to tobacco then was so great that I opted for cigarettes and smoked three or four of them. Later my host fed me anyway and let me take a bath, after which I felt refreshed and restored, save only for my throbbing foot.
Pages 59 - 60
By now it was in bad shape. The ulcer had eaten a hole an inch across right down to the bone. Little beads of decaying flesh honeycombed its sides and stank atrociously. In fact , as soon as I sat in the house the family dog picked up the smell and kept coming towards the foot, sniffing inquisitively. I kept driving him away. At length one of the Filipino women, who spoke English, noticed what was taking place and urge me to let the dog lick the wound clean. The mere thought disgusted me, but there were nothing to lose by trying. The dog eagerly worked its tongue into the festering cavity and began to lick away the rotting flesh. The pain was excruciating, so bad that I had to stand and hold my foot down to endure it; but when the dog had finished its loathsome task the foot felt better. I stayed there for week. The dog continued its treatments every day, and my foot began to heal. How easily civilization cause us to forget simple things, that from time immemorial animals have healed themselves by licking their wounds.
Chapter 5 Daily Life with Filipinos
Page 61
Receiving unorthodox medical treatment from a Philippine dog began a process that came close to making me a Filipino.
I was inherited by Mr. and Mrs. Louis Franco, who lived in the village of Tibuc-Tibuc near Gutad at the extreme western edge of Pampanga province.
The Francos did not know a word of English, but they treated me splendidly all the same.
Page 62
Sun, swimming, rest, and ample food gradually healed my foot and restored my health. In the process I turned brown as the Filipinos themselves. Save for my beard , which I could shave, and my Occidental nose, about which I could do nothing, a casual observer could hardly have distinguished me from a Filipino.
The Francos brought me what books they could. Most of them were elementary school text, but since they were all I had I read and reread them many times. From them I learned much about history, government, religion, and customs of the Philippines. With some amazement I discovered that more than seven thousand islands comprise the Philippines, that atleast eighty-seven dialects are spoken by their inhabitants, that Spanish was still the official language of the Islands, that Americans had made English compulsory for school children, and that Tagalog, a smooth, flowing tongue that is pleasurable both to speak and to hear, would probably replace both Western languages eventually.
Page 63
I also began in earnest to learn Pampangano, the dialect of the area.
Page 64
The favorite weapon of most Filipino men was the bolo, a long, curved knife carried in a bamboo scabbard and used for a variety of purposes.
Filipinos love to gamble, particularly on cockfights.
Page 66
Because few Filipinos had firearms before the war, carabao, deer, pigs and chickens were plentiful.
Page 67
Filipinos also esteemed large rats that lived in sugarcane fields, though I must add in their defense that they did not eat rats if the sort that infest garbage dumps. I don't know whether I ever ate "sugar rats" or not. Sometimes one was served stews and soups that were best consumed without asking a lot of questions.
Rice was the staple food of the Philippine diet. Because of its starch one could easily gain weight on it.
"Coffee" was made from rice and corn roasted together, then served with much sugar.
Cassava, the root of a common tropical plant, was cut, fried, and made into something like potato chips.
Small fish called bagong were often mashed and left to ferment, a process that turned them into a sharp-flavored, smelly seasoning.
Cattle intestines were carefully cleaned and much prized.
One's craving for sweets was satisfied most easily by chewing sugar cane, though the Filipinos did make a crude brown sugar by pouring boiled cane juice into coconut shells to harden.
Sometimes they make candy by boiling sugar and freshly gated coconut together.
Pages 67- 68
Most Filipino food was either boiled or roasted, and it run heavily on soup
Pages 68
Silverware was unheard of. Everything but soup was put on banana leaves spread on the floor and eaten with the fingers.
There were times, though when I drew the line. I never became reconciled to the delicacy called balot, a fertilized egg that had been buried in manure of some time, and I never developed a taste for the Philippine jerky after watching clouds of flies blow it while it was being dried in the sun.
But the worst was dog. The first time I ate it, I did not know what it was. When I was told, I promptly vomited my entire dinner. It was not that the flavor was repellent; it was just that I had always liked dogs and the thought of having eaten one gagged me.
The usual procedure was to tie the poor beast to a tree, starve it for several days, then stuff it with all it can eat and batter it to death with a club.
Pages 74-75
A religious service was held in the place almost as soon as we arrived. The sermon was given in Pampangano and then, with unfailing Philippine courtesy, repeated in English for my benefit.
Page 75
Now, near Porac, we met an old man. I told Jose Balekow, the Filipino who would soon become my bodyguard to ask if there were any Japanese in the vicinity. The two carried a long, animated conversation during which Jose was barefooted, shifted repeatedly from one foot to the other on the hot noonday sand. Eventually I lost patience and asked Jose what the old man had said. "Nothing," he replied. The truth of the matter was that there are so many dialects in the Philippines that understanding can easily vanish within twenty miles. Jose had no idea what the old man had said, but was ashamed to admit it.
Page 76
In the tropics people must pace themselves when working to avoid exhaustion. Filipinos did this in a delightful fashion, by having a guitar player set a tempo.
After the rainy season the rice fields dried, the grain ripened, and the farmers harvested it with sharp hand sickles.
Evenings women put rice grains into hallowed logs and pounded them methodically until the husks came off. The sound is as rhythmic as that of railroad men alternating hammer blows when driving spikes.
The rice was laid on broad, hand-woven, nearly flat, circular discs and tossed into the air. The wind blew away the husks, and the rice grains, being heavier fell back onto the discs.
Eventually the rice was packed into sacks on large bamboo baskets. The whole procedure was accompanied by much guitar playing and light-hearted talk. Thus the Filipinos make rice harvesting one of the lesser fine arts. Alas! they were never able to make it an exact science. No matter how much hand picking went on along the way, harvested rice always contained a few tiny rocks.
One soon learned to eat rice cautiously; the alternative was jangled nerves and chipped teeth.
Page 78
The faithful Filipino sometimes went to incredible lengths to protect me. It would be hard to imagine a more heartening demonstration of loyalty that that displayed by Mr. Dolfin L. Dizon, the village leader of Matatalaib, a suburb of San Jose, east of Tarlac City, in Tarlac Province.
Mr. Dizon assembled all the people of his barrio, finger printed in their own blood, ordered them to swear never to reveal my presence among them. He told them they were to die , if necessary, rather than provide any information about me to the Japanese.
Jose soon grew restless for other reason aswell, the main one being that he longed to go back north to his family and fellow Igorot tribesmen.
Chapter 6 Early Guerrillas of Luzon
Page 111
The enemy might have been forgettable, but the booze was not. There were many different liquids one could drink in the Philippines. They ranged from puzzling to lethal. In some places trucks and cars an on coconut alcohol. This was drinkable if it passed through copper tuning; but there were instances of men drinking it after it had run through galvanized pipe, in which cases the thirsty topers went blind.
Pages 111-112
Another common drink was tuba, which was made from palm buds. I drank some of it on occasion and found it not too bad. What our local Filipinos had, though, was two different kinds of wine: basi, made from sugarcane, and miding, concocted from some portion of the nipa palm. The former destroyed one's stomach, the latter one's mind. We drank both and suffered fearsome hangover next morning.
Page 115
In fact, training them at all was difficult since most were civilians who knew nothing of military regularity. Consequently, they relinquished some kinds of training, hated others, and tended to ignore what they disliked.
Pages 115 - 116
What most of them enjoyed most was competitive drill and repeatedly cleaning their weapons. They especially delighted in contest to see who could most rapidly take apart and then correctly assemble weapons when blindfolded.
Page 117
Blackburn was right about most Filipino guerrillas, though. They got bored easily unless there was some action.
Page 123
it simply work better to pick a Filipino subordinate whom you trusted, tell him general what you wanted done, and then leave him alone.
Page 124
While a few Japanese knew occasional Filipino dialect, most of them knew none, whereas Minang had an excellent command of English and knew several Filipino dialects as well. Soon her guards were asking her why her audiences seemed to laugh at unexpected times during her speeches, which were given in Panpangano. It never seemed to occur to them that she would dare to sabotage them verbally. On the contrary, some of her captors were quite taken with her. One high ranking Japanese officer even offered to take her with him when his countrymen conquered Australia.
Chapter 7 Hukbalahaps and Constabulary
Page 127
Our Operations in Central Luzon were complicated immensely by the presence of a rival and bitterly hostile guerrilla organization, the Hukbalahap.
Generations before the war Spanish entrepreneurs had gained control of much of the good farmland in the Philippines and turned it into great estates for the commercial production of various commodities, notably sugar.
Gradually, and particularly in the twentieth century, many Filipinos had also become large landowners.
Actual work on the estates was done by sharecroppers and hired laborers.Like similar people at other times and places, they scratched out a bare living for themselves, and slowly fell hopelessly into debt to their increasingly wealthy landlords.
Because of this long-standing condition there was much peasant unrest in the Philippines on the eve of the war. It was most intense in Central Luzon, particularly in the Pampanga province.
(Notes at the Back)
Most of the debts of peasants were incurred not to improve their lands and to increase their income but to finance weddings, funerals, and fiestas, and to bet on cockfights. Spence, For Every Tear a Victory, p. 230
Chapter 8 Guerrilla Life
Page 141
Meanwhile the villagers who hid us went about their customary activities as their ancestors had dowe for generations.
The women squatted on the banks of streams and beat the dirt out of the family clothing with wooden paddles, in the process often chewing betel nut or indulging in the strange practice of smoking cigarettes with the lighted ends inside their mouths.
Now and then they would take a break and undertake a collective assault on the head lice that are commonplace in the Philippines. They would sit in line, one behind the other like a row of monkeys, and each would pick the lice and nits from the head of the woman in front of her. I never did figure out how the last one inline was accommodated. It seems to me that a circle would have been a more logical configuration.
During the rainy season sudden fierce downpours were common, but nobody seemed to mind, or even notice it much.
The men, usually barefooted, dressed in shorts and, armed with bolos in wooden scabbards attached to their belts, went about their business as usual.Women would pack whatever they had to sell and walk off to market quite as readily during a cloudburst as on a sunny day.
Funerals are frequent, rain or shine, and were always joyous occasions; never sad. Wine and
sweet foods would be shared, as at a party. When the deceased was being taken to his final resting place, his cortege was always preceded by a brass band if anyone could find or assemble one.
Page 155
With the heartening bravery I witnessed so many times in the Philippines, the villagers, even with our common enemy in their midst, tried to deliver food to us, in the dark, in our new location.
Page 157
We Americans are notoriously poor judges of the psychology of other people and maladroit in our dealings with them. In the 1940s the Japanese were incomparably worse. Had they treated the Filipinos with kindness and generosity from the first day of the war, many of the latter would have accepted their fate, and many who remained loyal to America initially would have gradually gone over to the conquerors as months of of Japanese occupation stretched into years.
Japanese field commanders usually acted harshly in an effort to scare civilians into cooperation.
Japanese military administration, by contrast ,gradually began to urge leniency in an effort to win the sympathy of civilians.
The latter might have worked had it been instituted in December 1941, but by 1943 there had been far too many crimes committed by Japanese against Filipinos for such policy to have a chance of success.
Page 158
It is impossible to conceive a more effective tool against Filipinos, whose primary allegiance has always been to their families rather than the nation or state.
Page 160
Most Filipinos are mild, peaceful people, but if aroused or enraged they can become vindictive and capable of frightful cruelties.
Chapter 9 The Flight of the Filipinos
Page 168
The Filipinos were simply caught between Americans and Japan from 1941 to 1945.
The whole position of the Filipinos in the modern world has long been ambiguous.
By geography and skin color they belong to the Orient: by religion and by four centuries of history and social experience, they belong to the Western world.
The latter does not indicate merely a desire to appear "white," as some Caucasians have assumed.
The Philippines never had a well-developed indigenous civilization like those of China, India and Japan.
Thus, when the islands were conquered by Spain in the sixteenth century the victors did not have to displace a deeply rooted alien culture; they had only to impose their own.
Pages 168 -169
Spanish civilization and religion colored the Philippines heavily for more than three centuries, and was then succeeded by American civilization for forty years preceding World War II.
In 1940 Filipinos were brown-skinned Asians, but their recent ancestors had spoken Spanish, the educated among them now spoke English rather than Tagalog, and their government was modeled on that of America.
They were not typical Orients but half-westernized east Asians who occupied a major outpost of the half-Christian, half-secular Occident.
Page 169
Another factor that contributed to the Philippine identity problem was the special character of American imperialism.
The Filipinos were the only Asian colonial people who refused to capitulate to the Japanese without a fight; the only ones who remained loyal to and friendly with their former rulers; the only ones who called eventful Allied victory " Liberation? rather then "reoccupation."
Page 171
The Japanese had no particular animosity toward Filipinos when the war began. They had attacked the Philippines because American bases were there.
But they always underestimated the desire of the Filipinos for freedom, and they were incredibly inept psychologists.
When they stressed the common oriental heritage of Japanese an Filipinos and went out of their way to humiliate white people, this might have cut some ice with Filipinos who remembered " white only" golf clubs, "Christian" schools from which Filipinos were barred, and other subtler forms of American condescension.
But the same "fellow Orientals" then killed them, tortured them, raped their women, stole their food, slapped their faces in public, and required them to bow to Japanese privates.
Nothing made ordinary Filipinos so pro-American as the Japanese occupation.
Page 172
An important element in Filipino psychology is than when one accepts unsolicited favors or gifts from another he thereby incurs an obligation.
Because Americans had done so much to promote democracy, public health, and education in the Philippines, Filipinos felt that they were obligated to help the United States resist the Japanese - who had, of course invaded their homeland too.
But then the Filipinos also assumed that their loyalty would be reciprocated; and they could never understand why the United States was lax at its military preparations before 1941, made its major war time effort in Europe rather than in the Pacific, and did not compel the Japanese to pay war reparations to the Philippines afterward.
Page 174
The Filipinos were trapped, first of all, between the Japanese-sponsored Vargas or Laurel government in their homeland and the Quezon-Osmena government-in-exile in the United States, each backed by a foreign army and each demanding their total allegiance.
If they cooperated with the guerrillas, the Japanese killed them.
If they worked with the Japanese, the guerrillas killed them.
Pages 174 - 175
If the supported the Huks, they incurred the displeasure of all non-communist guerrillas.
If they helped us USAFFE irregulars against the Huks, there lives were at once in danger from the communists.
Page 175
An all-too-typical illustration of this melancholy state of affairs once took place in Tayabas province.
Guerrillas entered a town, assembled all the people in the village church, read off the names of those deemed pro-Japanese, and shot them.
The Japanese soon heard of what had happened, assembled the survivors, and shot all those they considered pro-American.
Page 176
Historically, the usual response of the Philippine ruling elite to conquest has been to come to terms with the invader in order to retain their own influence and to spare the islands and their peoples.
So it has been with the Spaniards before 1898 and with the Americans afterward.
In 1941 most Filipinos did not regard the Japanese as a friendly people, or trust them, but they did regard them with respect.
The traditional Filipino elite doubtless would have responded to Japanese conquest and occupation as their forefathers had done to Spaniards and Americans if only Japanese propaganda had been less crude and unconvincing, and Japanese conduct less beastly.
Page 3
The bulk of the Philippine army was still virtually untrained, badly armed, and almost impossible to command since the men spoke something like seventy different dialects.
Page 5
Once ashore, I found nothing that seemed to have anything to do with imminent war. Downtown Manila seems a typical modern big city. Sunsets over Manila Bay and the Zambales Mountains on Bataan Peninsula were the most gaudily brilliant spectacles I had ever seen, like the canvases of an impressionistic painter gone berserk.
A second lieutenant with a heavy red beard startled me momentarily, but I was told that American soldiers thereabouts often grew such beards to impress Filipinos, who have little facial hair.
The jai alai building seemed particularly modern since it had air conditioning and gambling apparatus similar to parimutuel machines at U.S. racetracks. Equally memorable, if less happily so, was the pungent smell of native villages (barrios) without the facilities to dispose sewage.
Most striking of all were the women.
Now small, dainty Spanish-Filipina girls with incomparable complexions seemed inexpressibly beautiful.
Even the straggly-haired lavenderas ( washerwomen), sitting on their haunches and pounding their dirty clothes with large wooden paddles, would have looked at least moderately enticing if only their lips and teeth had not been stained a ghastly, almost neon, red from chewing betel nut.
Page 8
In an effort to save civilian lives and prevent the needless destruction of Manila. General MacArthur declare the metropolis an open city. In a response typical of their conduct throughout the war, the Japanese ignored the gesture and bombed the city freely. Soon its streets were filled with rubble of every sort, and the air hung heavy with the stench of countless human and animal corpses.
Chapter 2 The Struggle for Bataan
Page 14
Our immediate problem was not the enemy at all but the sheer density of the jungle. Gigantic trees towered up to two hundred feet in the air, grew close together, and were crested with luxuriant intertwining branches. Far below, dense masses of vines and bushes took up most of the space between the trees. The growth was so thick that on the ground it was never really daylight, and there were about six hours of the day that could even be called twilight. By the end of the afternoon one could avoid getting lost only by hanging onto the belt of the man in front of him.
Pages 16-17
I soon learned that Japanese infantry men were not merely savage and treacherous but also remarkably brave, tough, tenacious, and disciplined. Physically, maybe 80 percent of them could have come from a mold. They were about 5'2" and weighed about 125 pounds. Most were in their early twenties and had only elementary education. Perhaps a third came from farms. Most had been in uniform a couple of years, and all had passed through the world's harshest military training regime. Because of the brutality of their training and the thoroughness with which they had been indoctrinated to make any sacrifice for their emperor and their country, they were capable of incredible feats of endurance, not to speak of conduct that seemed insane to Occidentals. In desperate circumstances the Japanese would kill their wounded, even burn wounded men to death in buildings, to prevent the disabled from slowing the pace of military operations.
This grim approach to war did possess a certain macabre "efficiency," but it was also counterproductive. All the support services in the Japanese army, medical included, mere meager because Japanese troops were supposed to fight rather than engage in peripheral activities or go on sick call. This meant that many Nipponese soldiers threw away their lives in displays of brainless bravado, while many other sickened and died because they seldom received the medical treatment they needed and deserved. In our army, by contrast, for every man who was actually in combat there were as many as twelve others in training, maintenance, liaison, planning, special services or above all generating mountains of paper .
Page 17
Japanese infantrymen were armed with .25-caliber Arisaka bolt-action rifles and weighed about ten pounds with bayonets attached. Both commissioned officers and noncoms carried pistols modeled on the German Luger, and commissioned officers sported fancy samurai swords, which some of them delighted to use for beheading. It is possible that this particular penchant indicated a desire to humiliate the enemy since ordinary Japanese soldiers has a superstitious fear of having their own heads and bodied buried in separate places.
Page 19
The trees were so close together, and the brush and the vines so thick, that a tank wallowed as helplessly as a rhinoceros in quicksand.
Another of their unsettling tricks was to send snipers up tress where they tied themselves fast and covered themselves with camouflage. Then, as we advanced against their comrades on the ground and the sound of ground gunfire would hide their own, they would shoot us in the back. This happened to often that we took to spraying trees with bullets indiscriminately during each advance. Even when a sniper was hit, as happened occasionally, he would seldom move or cry out. We would become aware of his presence only if we happened to encounter drops of blood spattering the thick undergrowth.
In these grim surroundings one quickly learned iron self control or he did not live.
Page 25
Another such story was related to me by an old-timer. God, he said, had seen fti to create two kinds of mosquitoes for the Philippines: large daytime mosquitoes that caused dengue fever, and small nighttime mosquitoes that carried malaria. Unhappily he wasn't joking: I soon contracted both maladies.
Page 28
We tried eating carabao, the huge water buffalo Filipinos use as draft animals, though carabao meat is better suited for making saddles than for steak.
An animal I did try hard to kill was the iguana, a large lizard with a forked tongue and a hide like a crocodile. Though the iguana are ugly, repulsive creatures, their meat is sweet and tasty, much like the white meat of the chicken.
Page 29
Ed Dyess called in several of us sergeants, explained the situation to us, and asked us how the men would respond to such an agreement. We replied that they would accept it. Dyess later wrote in his book that he had never been more proud to be an American. No doubt that was the way it seemed to him; and I will say for us that we did understand the necessity of the action, but inwardly we were resentful. The pilots were officers and we were enlisted men. They had decent quarters while we slept in the outdoors on the ground amid mosquitoes so thick that by dawn our eyes were often swollen shut from their bites.Now, when we were all half starved, the officers were to get extra food as well.
Chapter 3 The Bataan Death March
Pages 33 - 34
The travail of some 75,000 - 80, 000 beaten, bewildered, sick, and hungry Americans and Filipinos who were bullied, badgered, taunted, stabbed, starved, and shot by their Japanese captors on a hellish march some eighty miles in stifling tropical heat has long since passed into history as one of the most spectacular and revolting atrocities of World War II. It was also one of the most important events of the Pacific war, for the shared sufferings of Americans and Filipinos strengthened the bond between the two peoples and heightened the animosity of both toward their brutal conquerors.
Nobody among either captors or captives attempted to keep records. Thousands of Filipinos and much smaller number of Americans managed to escape during the march, but nobody knows how many of them died alone in the mountains and jungle, or how many of the Filipinos made it hoe and quietly became civilians again. Thousands of both people died in O'Donnell and Cabanatuan prison camps after the war was over, but it is impossible to distinguish between those who expired from the belated effects of the Death March and those who perished from the cruel regimen in the camps themselves.
Page 37
Another time I was removed from the road and forced to help a Japanese company prepare a bivouac. Here one of the guards spoke to me in English. I asked him where he had learned the language. He said he had been trained in Yokohama to be a teacher in English. I then asked him which side he thought would win the war. He replied thoughtfully, without the customary Japanese menace or boasting, that he believed Japan would. He added that the training he had undergone in Japan was tougher than anything he had experienced so far in combat, so rough in fact that some of his fellow trainees has committed suicide rather than endure it. He said he hated the British, but about Americans he was silent. From this manner I guessed that he was opposed to the war and not sanguine about its ultimate outcome.
Page 39
All of us would have died had not the general disorganization that prevailed for three or four days enabled us to scrounge a little food in various ways. When the guards were few and otherwise occupied, we would sometimes dig up a few camotes ( Philippine sweet potatoes) in fields. Now and then a friendly Filipino would furtively hand or toss us something from along the roadside.
It is possible that an individual Japanese guard might have handed me a rice ball on an occasion or two, though I don't remember it.
Page 41
All along the road I had seen brave and compassionate Filipinos of both sexes and all ages risk their lives to slip food to prisoners. Surely some Filipinos would help me if only I could get away.
Page 43
I wanted to leave our adobe, but my companions did not. At length I arose and began to call out. Across the stream some Filipino farmers heard me, and one started toward us. He walked up onto a log that lay across the ditch, with his eyes turned downward. I asked him if there were Japanese around. Fortunately, he understood some English. He told me to stay down, and slipped into the underbrush. A few minutes later he returned and motioned for us to follow him.
Chapter 4 In and Out of the Fassoth Camps
Pages 44-45
As always throughout the war the Filipinos here treated us warmly and generously, at dire risk to themselves. Various of them brought us rice, water, and crude sugar several times a day. One boy begged me to let him hide me amid fishponds in Manila Bay, promising that he would make me well again and would keep me safe until the Americans returned in perhaps three months. Little did he or I realize that it would be three years.
Page 48
The new camp consisted of one large building about fifty by a hundred feet and several smaller ones, all made of entirely of bamboo and without nails. Filipinos are geniuses with bamboo. They make everything out of it: cooking utensils, drinking cups, woven baskets, animal snares, fish traps, scabbards for bolo knives, bridges - anything from tweezers to houses.
Nobody has seen rain until he has seen it in the Philippines. Many downpours would have been called cloudburst in the United States, yet they went on for hours, day after day.
Page 49
One incident during this era of semi-starvation. I will never forget. Vicente managed to get us a considerable quantity of navy beans, the sort universally reviled in World War I but now regarded as manna from heaven by those of us who had eaten little but rice for months. Mrs. Cataina Dimacal Fassoth, William's Filipina wife, who gave unselfishly of her time cooking and trying to care for us, prepared the feast. We lined up with our bamboo tableware in ardent anticipation. With my first bite I was astounded. Judging from the looks on the faces of the others, so were they. Filipinos like sugar ans prepare many of their foods with it. Mrs. Fassoth, knowing nothing about navy beans, had thrown a lot of sugar into the water when she boiled them. But we ate them.
Page 53
Filipinos had a lot of intriguing medical beliefs and practices. Their effects varied from bizarre to lethal. Henry Clay Conner, who like me owed his life to friendly Filipinos, relates that early in 1942 a Negrito tribesman once brewed an herb called dita and gave it to him for his malaria. In two days the chills and fever abated and Conner felt vastly better. When he tried to secure more dita on his own, however, he was warned by an educated Filipino, the brother of a doctor, that while dita did not harm Negritos, it often caused people less tough to end up deaf, dumb, blind, or dead.
Pages 53-54
In my case, one day a Filipino around the camp commiserated with me and told me that if I wished to recover I should drink the blood of a black dog. The thought was sickening, especially since blood was to be secured by cutting the dog's throat, but numerous Filipinos regarded it as a sure-fire universal remedy. I was so desperate to recover that I had become willing to try anything, so I agreed. When some of the repulsive stuff was actually brought to me in a coconut shell, I could down only one swallow. Nothing beneficial happened. Maybe my faith wasn't strong enough.
Page 55
Six other Americans indoors were caught in bed. Like me they survived by a fluke. The Japanese, finding them unarmed, spared their lives. Three Filipino and a baby were not so lucky. The invaders butchered the men with bayonets. When the baby began to cry, one of them seized it by the feet and struck off its head with one slash of a sword. Then the visitors set fire to the camp and burned it to the ground.
Page 57
Mac walking and I staggering, until we came to an inviting mountain stream full of suso. A suso is something like a freshwater oyster, a creature that lives in a shell stuck to a rock. We pried some off rocks in the stream, built a fire, put some water in a bamboo joint, and boiled them. When cooked, suso can be popped out of their shells with a sharp rap of the heel of one hand against the other, or by banging them against a rock. We ate our relish, but inadvisedly topped off our dinner with some green papayas, which promptly produced diarrhea.
Page 58
Mackenzie and I were awakened at dawn by the crowing of a rooster. This meant that there had to be some people around, so we headed in the general direction of the sound. Soon we came to a house occupied by an old Filipino man and a young girl. Once more, as was to be the case so many more times during the war, I was the beneficiary of the friendliness and generosity of ordinary Filipinos. Though these two had never seen us in their lives and could communicate with us only in sign language, they fed us rice and venison and then, for reasons unknown to us, probably far of the Japanese, quietly packed up and left. Long afterward I cannot help but wonder if we Americans would have taken comparable risks and shown equivalent kindness to Filipinos.
Page 59
After a time I came to a village inhabited by Baluga pygmies, a mountain people dressed chiefly in G-strings but whose men were armed with American rifles.
Though the Balugas were frightened momentarily at this apparition appearing suddenly in their midst, they soon recovered and fed me some camotes and green papaya soup. By now an ulcer had indeed developed in the wound on my foot, and had eaten a deep hole in it. The Balugas treated my malady by grinding a red rock into powder, pouring this into the wound, and then covering it with white paste produced by chewing some leaf. Then they took me to a trail that lead downward into the lowlands and left me.
That evening I came to a house nestled against a hillside where foothills disappeared into lowlands. Here I was greeted hospitably by two Filipino couples and offered a choice of food or cigarettes. Incredible though it must seem to a reader, my addiction to tobacco then was so great that I opted for cigarettes and smoked three or four of them. Later my host fed me anyway and let me take a bath, after which I felt refreshed and restored, save only for my throbbing foot.
Pages 59 - 60
By now it was in bad shape. The ulcer had eaten a hole an inch across right down to the bone. Little beads of decaying flesh honeycombed its sides and stank atrociously. In fact , as soon as I sat in the house the family dog picked up the smell and kept coming towards the foot, sniffing inquisitively. I kept driving him away. At length one of the Filipino women, who spoke English, noticed what was taking place and urge me to let the dog lick the wound clean. The mere thought disgusted me, but there were nothing to lose by trying. The dog eagerly worked its tongue into the festering cavity and began to lick away the rotting flesh. The pain was excruciating, so bad that I had to stand and hold my foot down to endure it; but when the dog had finished its loathsome task the foot felt better. I stayed there for week. The dog continued its treatments every day, and my foot began to heal. How easily civilization cause us to forget simple things, that from time immemorial animals have healed themselves by licking their wounds.
Chapter 5 Daily Life with Filipinos
Page 61
Receiving unorthodox medical treatment from a Philippine dog began a process that came close to making me a Filipino.
I was inherited by Mr. and Mrs. Louis Franco, who lived in the village of Tibuc-Tibuc near Gutad at the extreme western edge of Pampanga province.
The Francos did not know a word of English, but they treated me splendidly all the same.
Page 62
Sun, swimming, rest, and ample food gradually healed my foot and restored my health. In the process I turned brown as the Filipinos themselves. Save for my beard , which I could shave, and my Occidental nose, about which I could do nothing, a casual observer could hardly have distinguished me from a Filipino.
The Francos brought me what books they could. Most of them were elementary school text, but since they were all I had I read and reread them many times. From them I learned much about history, government, religion, and customs of the Philippines. With some amazement I discovered that more than seven thousand islands comprise the Philippines, that atleast eighty-seven dialects are spoken by their inhabitants, that Spanish was still the official language of the Islands, that Americans had made English compulsory for school children, and that Tagalog, a smooth, flowing tongue that is pleasurable both to speak and to hear, would probably replace both Western languages eventually.
Page 63
I also began in earnest to learn Pampangano, the dialect of the area.
Page 64
The favorite weapon of most Filipino men was the bolo, a long, curved knife carried in a bamboo scabbard and used for a variety of purposes.
Filipinos love to gamble, particularly on cockfights.
Page 66
Because few Filipinos had firearms before the war, carabao, deer, pigs and chickens were plentiful.
Page 67
Filipinos also esteemed large rats that lived in sugarcane fields, though I must add in their defense that they did not eat rats if the sort that infest garbage dumps. I don't know whether I ever ate "sugar rats" or not. Sometimes one was served stews and soups that were best consumed without asking a lot of questions.
Rice was the staple food of the Philippine diet. Because of its starch one could easily gain weight on it.
"Coffee" was made from rice and corn roasted together, then served with much sugar.
Cassava, the root of a common tropical plant, was cut, fried, and made into something like potato chips.
Small fish called bagong were often mashed and left to ferment, a process that turned them into a sharp-flavored, smelly seasoning.
Cattle intestines were carefully cleaned and much prized.
One's craving for sweets was satisfied most easily by chewing sugar cane, though the Filipinos did make a crude brown sugar by pouring boiled cane juice into coconut shells to harden.
Sometimes they make candy by boiling sugar and freshly gated coconut together.
Pages 67- 68
Most Filipino food was either boiled or roasted, and it run heavily on soup
Pages 68
Silverware was unheard of. Everything but soup was put on banana leaves spread on the floor and eaten with the fingers.
There were times, though when I drew the line. I never became reconciled to the delicacy called balot, a fertilized egg that had been buried in manure of some time, and I never developed a taste for the Philippine jerky after watching clouds of flies blow it while it was being dried in the sun.
But the worst was dog. The first time I ate it, I did not know what it was. When I was told, I promptly vomited my entire dinner. It was not that the flavor was repellent; it was just that I had always liked dogs and the thought of having eaten one gagged me.
The usual procedure was to tie the poor beast to a tree, starve it for several days, then stuff it with all it can eat and batter it to death with a club.
Pages 74-75
A religious service was held in the place almost as soon as we arrived. The sermon was given in Pampangano and then, with unfailing Philippine courtesy, repeated in English for my benefit.
Page 75
Now, near Porac, we met an old man. I told Jose Balekow, the Filipino who would soon become my bodyguard to ask if there were any Japanese in the vicinity. The two carried a long, animated conversation during which Jose was barefooted, shifted repeatedly from one foot to the other on the hot noonday sand. Eventually I lost patience and asked Jose what the old man had said. "Nothing," he replied. The truth of the matter was that there are so many dialects in the Philippines that understanding can easily vanish within twenty miles. Jose had no idea what the old man had said, but was ashamed to admit it.
Page 76
In the tropics people must pace themselves when working to avoid exhaustion. Filipinos did this in a delightful fashion, by having a guitar player set a tempo.
After the rainy season the rice fields dried, the grain ripened, and the farmers harvested it with sharp hand sickles.
Evenings women put rice grains into hallowed logs and pounded them methodically until the husks came off. The sound is as rhythmic as that of railroad men alternating hammer blows when driving spikes.
The rice was laid on broad, hand-woven, nearly flat, circular discs and tossed into the air. The wind blew away the husks, and the rice grains, being heavier fell back onto the discs.
Eventually the rice was packed into sacks on large bamboo baskets. The whole procedure was accompanied by much guitar playing and light-hearted talk. Thus the Filipinos make rice harvesting one of the lesser fine arts. Alas! they were never able to make it an exact science. No matter how much hand picking went on along the way, harvested rice always contained a few tiny rocks.
One soon learned to eat rice cautiously; the alternative was jangled nerves and chipped teeth.
Page 78
The faithful Filipino sometimes went to incredible lengths to protect me. It would be hard to imagine a more heartening demonstration of loyalty that that displayed by Mr. Dolfin L. Dizon, the village leader of Matatalaib, a suburb of San Jose, east of Tarlac City, in Tarlac Province.
Mr. Dizon assembled all the people of his barrio, finger printed in their own blood, ordered them to swear never to reveal my presence among them. He told them they were to die , if necessary, rather than provide any information about me to the Japanese.
Jose soon grew restless for other reason aswell, the main one being that he longed to go back north to his family and fellow Igorot tribesmen.
Chapter 6 Early Guerrillas of Luzon
Page 111
The enemy might have been forgettable, but the booze was not. There were many different liquids one could drink in the Philippines. They ranged from puzzling to lethal. In some places trucks and cars an on coconut alcohol. This was drinkable if it passed through copper tuning; but there were instances of men drinking it after it had run through galvanized pipe, in which cases the thirsty topers went blind.
Pages 111-112
Another common drink was tuba, which was made from palm buds. I drank some of it on occasion and found it not too bad. What our local Filipinos had, though, was two different kinds of wine: basi, made from sugarcane, and miding, concocted from some portion of the nipa palm. The former destroyed one's stomach, the latter one's mind. We drank both and suffered fearsome hangover next morning.
Page 115
In fact, training them at all was difficult since most were civilians who knew nothing of military regularity. Consequently, they relinquished some kinds of training, hated others, and tended to ignore what they disliked.
Pages 115 - 116
What most of them enjoyed most was competitive drill and repeatedly cleaning their weapons. They especially delighted in contest to see who could most rapidly take apart and then correctly assemble weapons when blindfolded.
Page 117
Blackburn was right about most Filipino guerrillas, though. They got bored easily unless there was some action.
Page 123
it simply work better to pick a Filipino subordinate whom you trusted, tell him general what you wanted done, and then leave him alone.
Page 124
While a few Japanese knew occasional Filipino dialect, most of them knew none, whereas Minang had an excellent command of English and knew several Filipino dialects as well. Soon her guards were asking her why her audiences seemed to laugh at unexpected times during her speeches, which were given in Panpangano. It never seemed to occur to them that she would dare to sabotage them verbally. On the contrary, some of her captors were quite taken with her. One high ranking Japanese officer even offered to take her with him when his countrymen conquered Australia.
Chapter 7 Hukbalahaps and Constabulary
Page 127
Our Operations in Central Luzon were complicated immensely by the presence of a rival and bitterly hostile guerrilla organization, the Hukbalahap.
Generations before the war Spanish entrepreneurs had gained control of much of the good farmland in the Philippines and turned it into great estates for the commercial production of various commodities, notably sugar.
Gradually, and particularly in the twentieth century, many Filipinos had also become large landowners.
Actual work on the estates was done by sharecroppers and hired laborers.Like similar people at other times and places, they scratched out a bare living for themselves, and slowly fell hopelessly into debt to their increasingly wealthy landlords.
Because of this long-standing condition there was much peasant unrest in the Philippines on the eve of the war. It was most intense in Central Luzon, particularly in the Pampanga province.
(Notes at the Back)
Most of the debts of peasants were incurred not to improve their lands and to increase their income but to finance weddings, funerals, and fiestas, and to bet on cockfights. Spence, For Every Tear a Victory, p. 230
Chapter 8 Guerrilla Life
Page 141
Meanwhile the villagers who hid us went about their customary activities as their ancestors had dowe for generations.
The women squatted on the banks of streams and beat the dirt out of the family clothing with wooden paddles, in the process often chewing betel nut or indulging in the strange practice of smoking cigarettes with the lighted ends inside their mouths.
Now and then they would take a break and undertake a collective assault on the head lice that are commonplace in the Philippines. They would sit in line, one behind the other like a row of monkeys, and each would pick the lice and nits from the head of the woman in front of her. I never did figure out how the last one inline was accommodated. It seems to me that a circle would have been a more logical configuration.
During the rainy season sudden fierce downpours were common, but nobody seemed to mind, or even notice it much.
The men, usually barefooted, dressed in shorts and, armed with bolos in wooden scabbards attached to their belts, went about their business as usual.Women would pack whatever they had to sell and walk off to market quite as readily during a cloudburst as on a sunny day.
Funerals are frequent, rain or shine, and were always joyous occasions; never sad. Wine and
sweet foods would be shared, as at a party. When the deceased was being taken to his final resting place, his cortege was always preceded by a brass band if anyone could find or assemble one.
Page 155
With the heartening bravery I witnessed so many times in the Philippines, the villagers, even with our common enemy in their midst, tried to deliver food to us, in the dark, in our new location.
Page 157
We Americans are notoriously poor judges of the psychology of other people and maladroit in our dealings with them. In the 1940s the Japanese were incomparably worse. Had they treated the Filipinos with kindness and generosity from the first day of the war, many of the latter would have accepted their fate, and many who remained loyal to America initially would have gradually gone over to the conquerors as months of of Japanese occupation stretched into years.
Japanese field commanders usually acted harshly in an effort to scare civilians into cooperation.
Japanese military administration, by contrast ,gradually began to urge leniency in an effort to win the sympathy of civilians.
The latter might have worked had it been instituted in December 1941, but by 1943 there had been far too many crimes committed by Japanese against Filipinos for such policy to have a chance of success.
Page 158
It is impossible to conceive a more effective tool against Filipinos, whose primary allegiance has always been to their families rather than the nation or state.
Page 160
Most Filipinos are mild, peaceful people, but if aroused or enraged they can become vindictive and capable of frightful cruelties.
Chapter 9 The Flight of the Filipinos
Page 168
The Filipinos were simply caught between Americans and Japan from 1941 to 1945.
The whole position of the Filipinos in the modern world has long been ambiguous.
By geography and skin color they belong to the Orient: by religion and by four centuries of history and social experience, they belong to the Western world.
The latter does not indicate merely a desire to appear "white," as some Caucasians have assumed.
The Philippines never had a well-developed indigenous civilization like those of China, India and Japan.
Thus, when the islands were conquered by Spain in the sixteenth century the victors did not have to displace a deeply rooted alien culture; they had only to impose their own.
Pages 168 -169
Spanish civilization and religion colored the Philippines heavily for more than three centuries, and was then succeeded by American civilization for forty years preceding World War II.
In 1940 Filipinos were brown-skinned Asians, but their recent ancestors had spoken Spanish, the educated among them now spoke English rather than Tagalog, and their government was modeled on that of America.
They were not typical Orients but half-westernized east Asians who occupied a major outpost of the half-Christian, half-secular Occident.
Page 169
Another factor that contributed to the Philippine identity problem was the special character of American imperialism.
The Filipinos were the only Asian colonial people who refused to capitulate to the Japanese without a fight; the only ones who remained loyal to and friendly with their former rulers; the only ones who called eventful Allied victory " Liberation? rather then "reoccupation."
Page 171
The Japanese had no particular animosity toward Filipinos when the war began. They had attacked the Philippines because American bases were there.
But they always underestimated the desire of the Filipinos for freedom, and they were incredibly inept psychologists.
When they stressed the common oriental heritage of Japanese an Filipinos and went out of their way to humiliate white people, this might have cut some ice with Filipinos who remembered " white only" golf clubs, "Christian" schools from which Filipinos were barred, and other subtler forms of American condescension.
But the same "fellow Orientals" then killed them, tortured them, raped their women, stole their food, slapped their faces in public, and required them to bow to Japanese privates.
Nothing made ordinary Filipinos so pro-American as the Japanese occupation.
Page 172
An important element in Filipino psychology is than when one accepts unsolicited favors or gifts from another he thereby incurs an obligation.
Because Americans had done so much to promote democracy, public health, and education in the Philippines, Filipinos felt that they were obligated to help the United States resist the Japanese - who had, of course invaded their homeland too.
But then the Filipinos also assumed that their loyalty would be reciprocated; and they could never understand why the United States was lax at its military preparations before 1941, made its major war time effort in Europe rather than in the Pacific, and did not compel the Japanese to pay war reparations to the Philippines afterward.
Page 174
The Filipinos were trapped, first of all, between the Japanese-sponsored Vargas or Laurel government in their homeland and the Quezon-Osmena government-in-exile in the United States, each backed by a foreign army and each demanding their total allegiance.
If they cooperated with the guerrillas, the Japanese killed them.
If they worked with the Japanese, the guerrillas killed them.
Pages 174 - 175
If the supported the Huks, they incurred the displeasure of all non-communist guerrillas.
If they helped us USAFFE irregulars against the Huks, there lives were at once in danger from the communists.
Page 175
An all-too-typical illustration of this melancholy state of affairs once took place in Tayabas province.
Guerrillas entered a town, assembled all the people in the village church, read off the names of those deemed pro-Japanese, and shot them.
The Japanese soon heard of what had happened, assembled the survivors, and shot all those they considered pro-American.
Page 176
Historically, the usual response of the Philippine ruling elite to conquest has been to come to terms with the invader in order to retain their own influence and to spare the islands and their peoples.
So it has been with the Spaniards before 1898 and with the Americans afterward.
In 1941 most Filipinos did not regard the Japanese as a friendly people, or trust them, but they did regard them with respect.
The traditional Filipino elite doubtless would have responded to Japanese conquest and occupation as their forefathers had done to Spaniards and Americans if only Japanese propaganda had been less crude and unconvincing, and Japanese conduct less beastly.
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