by Max Boot
Lansdale was soon to learn this for himself. Just as millions of American servicemen were at long last preparing to return home, he was shipping out in September 1945 for the first time on a long-term overseas assignment. Thanks to “the caprice of Army clerks who shuttled millions of Americans in uniform around the world at seeming random,”36 as he later put it, he was headed to Asia, where he would encounter not the old enemy, Japanese imperialism, but the new one—Communist expansionism—and his duties would expand far beyond those of a regular intelligence officer. His success at finding a niche within the OSS and the Army’s Military Intelligence Service during World War II ensured that he would not have to return at war’s end to what now appeared to have been a humdrum life as a San Francisco advertising man. He was eager for adventures to come on the far side of the Pacific in the places that he could only have imagined while visiting the Golden Gate International Exhibition on Treasure Island five years before, in what by now must have seemed like a long-vanished age.
PART TWO
COLONEL LANDSLIDE
(1945–1954)
Colonel Lansdale and Defense Minister Ramon Magsaysay, October 1952, on one of their inspection trips to the Philippine countryside. (MSFRIC)
4
The Time of His Life
Filipinos and I fell in love with each other.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
NATION building—the wrenching process of bringing disparate people together under a new government—is as old as civilization. The very first nation builders were the ancient kings of Mesopotamia and Egypt, who five thousand years ago constructed the first civilizations. Every great conqueror, from Alexander to Napoleon, was in some form a nation builder. The two great victors of World War II—the Soviet Union and the United States—were no different. Each attempted to spread its own form of government and political ideology, different as they were, to new nations being born across Asia and Africa from the debris of old colonial empires.
This was both a heady and a nerve-racking time, with American proconsuls installed in Tokyo and Berlin, and American emissaries fanning out around the world to refashion nations on democratic lines. Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, was to title his memoirs Present at the Creation. Many others who were active in those years felt the same way. “We have, and we know we have, the abundant means to bring our boldest dreams to pass—to create for ourselves whatever world we have the courage to desire,” said Archibald MacLeish, the poet and Librarian of Congress.1
Anything seemed possible at the dawn of the postwar world.
EDWARD LANSDALE’S introduction to the excitement and frustrations of nation building came in the fall of 1945 when he arrived in the Philippines. His first glimpse of the land where he would make his reputation came near midnight on October 9, 1945, only two months after the nuclear bombs had finally stilled the war engines of the Japanese Empire. An electrical storm was raging, and he was exhausted after a sixteen-day voyage from San Francisco along with four thousand other soldiers aboard the USS Uruguay. During the crossing, the titanic transport ship had hit the tail end of a typhoon and everyone aboard thought they were going to sink. They were, in fact, lucky to make it to land.2
The land in which they were arriving was both alien and strangely familiar—the United States refracted through a funhouse mirror. The Philippines was a largely Catholic country where English was the language of government, the upper crust went by nicknames like Babe and Pinksy, Rotary and Shriners and Lions clubs were a well-established part of the social firmament, and Tin Pan Alley tunes were as popular as they were in New York. A young American officer who had arrived in Manila just a few months before Lansdale remarked in wonder, “Why the girls here paint their lips, their finger nails and even their toe nails, just as in the States.”
The Philippines was not, of course, just the same as the United States. As Stanley Karnow was to point out in his book In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, the vast majority of the ordinary people were far less touched by American influences than were the elites. In rural areas, most farmers lived under a quasi-feudal regime, laboring on the estates of a small number of wealthy landowners whose property holdings descended from the days of Spanish rule. Even the more Americanized upper class was bound by extended kinship ties that were alien to the more individualistic Americans and that underlay a pervasive culture of corruption. But superficially, at least, there was much that would have made a newcomer like Lansdale feel at home.3
The transformation of the Philippines into a faraway simulacrum of the United States had begun nearly half a century earlier. While the United States had declared war on Spain in 1898 as a result of American outrage over Spanish abuses in Cuba, the peace treaty that ended the conflict also gave the United States, almost as a lagniappe, sovereignty over another former Spanish colony, the Philippines. The young insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy led violent resistance to American rule in a savage conflict with some similarities to the future war in Vietnam—including the domestic opposition that both wars aroused. The Anti-Imperialist League united worthies such as Mark Twain, Grover Cleveland, and Andrew Carnegie, who were horrified to read that American troops were torturing Filipinos (including the use of the “water cure,” a technique learned from the Spanish, and later called waterboarding) and killing even noncombatants.
Yet while the United States was to lose in Vietnam, it won in the Philippines. An important difference was that North Vietnam was adjacent to the People’s Republic of China, which provided copious weapons and training to the Vietminh and later the Vietcong, whereas the Philippine insurrectos, fighting on islands whose approaches were dominated by the U.S. Navy, had no real outside support. The insurrectos also lacked leaders of the caliber of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap; Aguinaldo made no attempt to win over the bulk of the population by pushing for social and land reforms, as the Vietcong would later do, because such revolutionary steps would have alienated his upper-class supporters.
By the time the conflict had mostly ended, in 1902, the United States had lost 4,234 dead and 2,818 wounded. Some 200,000 Filipino civilians died as a result of disease and mistreatment from both sides. Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell, a future Army chief of staff, extinguished the last resistance on Luzon by herding more than 300,000 civilians into “zones of protection,” similar to the “concentration camps” that British forces were constructing at virtually the same time to defeat a Boer uprising in South Africa, in order to cut them off from the guerrillas. As in South Africa, many in the Philippines died because of the lack of proper medical care and nutrition in these makeshift holding pens.
It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that American forces simply terrorized Filipinos into acquiescence. While U.S. troops relentlessly pursued guerrillas, the first civilian governor, William Howard Taft, who arrived in 1900, set up schools and hospitals, imported idealistic young American teachers known as Thomasites (they arrived on the transport ship Thomas), improved public sanitation, wiped out infectious diseases, built roads, and took other steps to win over the population. Lansdale would later cite the efforts of the Thomasites and other well-intentioned Americans as the ideal of the “True American” that the United States needed to inculcate into its representatives abroad to win the Cold War: “a person of integrity, with the courage of his convictions, with competence in some technical field, with devotion to getting things done, and with Christian affection for his fellow man.” (“Admittedly,” he added, in a self-aware postscript, “this is an ideal which human weaknesses make it difficult to achieve.”)4
U.S. rule was paternalistic and racist (Taft referred to Filipinos as “our little brown brothers” and ordinary soldiers called them “googoos” or “niggers”), but it was also in important respects more liberal than contemporary European colonial regimes. Washington did not allow American companies to set up agricultural concerns to exploit local labor and land such as the vast rubber plantations owned by the French in
Indochina, the Dutch in the East Indies, and the British in Malaya. There was no need to exploit the Philippines when the American homeland was so abundantly provided with natural resources of its own. The Filipinos elected a national legislature in 1907, and by the 1920s they had taken over most administrative and military posts. In 1935, President Roosevelt created the Philippine Commonwealth, which enjoyed autonomy in its domestic affairs, while promising complete independence in 1946.
Filipino-American ties were tested and ultimately strengthened by the Japanese attack that began within hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. While some Filipinos cooperated with the Japanese occupiers, few became enthusiastic adherents of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Filipinos resented the fact that they had to bow to their new conquerors or else suffer “a slap in the face, a kick in the ass, or a blow from a gun butt.”5 By war’s end some two hundred thousand Filipinos had joined guerrilla bands to resist Japanese rule in cooperation with scattered survivors from the defeated American forces. They were inspired, these Filipinos, by the injunction of Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon y Molina, who told his people before evacuating Corregidor, “Keep your faith in America, whatever happens.”6
General Douglas MacArthur kept his own faith in the Philippines even after being evacuated to Australia in 1942. One of the most brilliant and obdurate, vainglorious and controversial figures in modern military history, he was the son of General Arthur MacArthur, who commanded U.S. troops in putting down the “Philippine Insurrection,” and he himself had spent a substantial portion of his life in the Philippines. Although known to American soldiers (including his often exasperated aide, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower) for his aloof, autocratic, and self-dramatizing ways, MacArthur endeared himself to Filipinos by treating them as equals at a time when racism was still pervasive among Americans in the archipelago. Determined to make good on his pledge to “return,” MacArthur insisted over the objections of his Navy counterparts that U.S. forces had to liberate the Philippines on their island-hopping campaign toward the Japanese mainland. And on October 20, 1944, MacArthur did wade through the surf to a beach on the island of Leyte to proclaim, “People of the Philippines I have returned. . . . Rally to me!”
Nearly three months later, on January 9, 1945, U.S. troops landed at Lingayen Gulf on northern Luzon in order to drive to Manila, 110 miles to the south. The Japanese army commander in the Philippines, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, wanted to abandon Manila, a flat, sprawling city of seven hundred thousand people, because he did not believe it could be successfully defended; he preferred to harass the American invaders from bases in Luzon’s jungle-covered mountains. But Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, the commander of a naval defense force, had other ideas. With twenty thousand soldiers and sailors under his command, he was determined to defend Manila to the last man. He forced U.S. troops to fight for Manila block by block in vicious street fighting accompanied by artillery duels that razed much of the city between February 3 and March 3. After just a week of fighting, one resident of Manila reported that the “view down San Andres [Street] was like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Strewn with bloated corpses, wrecked cars, dead animals, piles of rubble, twisted metal roofing, and urban debris, we could not get oriented because there was not a single landmark we recognized.”7
An estimated one million Filipinos perished during the Japanese occupation. Of that total fully 10 percent—one hundred thousand—died in the ruins of Manila when the hour of liberation was at hand. An American general who toured the city on March 3 found that it had all but “ceased to exist.” For days afterward, noted the historian D. Clayton James, “the horrible stench of thousands of unburied corpses pervaded the downtown area.” But then, “like the miraculous appearance of green shoots on the charred earth of a forest recently ravaged by fire, signs of life and activity began to reappear” as Filipinos emerged from “hiding in blasted buildings and homes.”8 Even though American artillery fire had played a significant role in Manila’s destruction—arguably a greater role than Japanese vindictiveness—few Filipinos blamed their liberators and most were grateful for American help in rebuilding. Filipinos and Americans immediately began working together to deliver food, stop the spread of contagious diseases, reopen schools, restart the water supply, and do everything else needed to bring a devastated metropolis back to life. By March 13, 1945, the lights were coming back on across Manila.
EDWARD LANSDALE landed in the Philippines just seven months after the conclusion of the Battle of Manila and only three months after the last Japanese units on Luzon had surrendered. He saw the war’s impact even before setting foot ashore. In Manila harbor, Lansdale counted thirty sunken ships: “There were sterns pointing straight up to the sky out of the water, hulls side up looking like elephants submerged and taking baths, just sticks of masts above the water, and some twisted and buckled rusty plates like reddish warts above the water where ships had been blown apart.”
Lansdale made the trip to a U.S. Army camp outside Manila aboard a crowded troop train. He and the other soldiers were packed like cattle into cars that were normally used to transport sugarcane. As the train chugged along at 15 mph, someone “started ‘moo-ing’ like a lonely cow and the moo-ing was taken up all along the line.” From the “trainload of moos,” Lansdale could see that the “strikingly beautiful” countryside had not been affected by war to the same extent as the harbor. He saw “palm huts on stilts with vivid green banana fronds making a border for a blue, blue sky marbled with towering fluffs of cumulus clouds, and before this background of sky and hut and fronds was spread a rice paddy intersticed with small raised dikes and the green rice sprouts making a staccato vertical pattern broken by big old water buffalo plodding along, with a copper skinned old man, all bent, straw big brimmed coolie hat on his head, following after.”
When the train reached Manila, such bucolic scenes were replaced by further reminders of the legacy of conflict. “Stone walls along the roads were gouged and holed,” Lansdale wrote, “tall apartment houses and hotels and public buildings—the ones that earned Manila the name ‘Pearl of the Orient’ showed gaping holes, sagging concrete floors open to view, and with rusty iron girders all twisted and bent and dangling out of crumbled concrete twenty stories up like dried worms baked in the sun while still wriggling.”
Lansdale and the other troops finally settled into a camp located fifty-five miles outside Manila, near a major air base, Clark Field. There were still many unexploded shells scattered around. “Ordnance teams are blowing them up constantly and I’m writing now [to] the accompaniment of boom-boom-boom,” Lansdale wrote on October 12, 1945. Also loitering about were some Japanese holdouts who either had not heard of their nation’s surrender or who refused to believe it. Lansdale saw fourteen Japanese soldiers—“a very bedraggled group of forgotten men”9—come in from the hills just outside his camp and surrender rather than starve in the jungle.
Most American soldiers in the Philippines were eager to depart now that the war was over. “Everything is confusion and indifference here now,” Lansdale noted, “the correct attitude being: the war is over now, so let’s go home.”10 Lansdale possessed a very different outlook. Before he had shipped out from the United States, Ed had a brief conversation with his brother Ben, an engineer in uniform, who had visited the Philippines during the war to study the impact of proximity fuses in artillery shells.
Ben remembered Ed asking him “what musical tunes were popular among the Filipino troops and when I didn’t know, he played a few tunes on his pocket-size harmonica and asked me if I had heard any of those.” Ben said he hadn’t paid attention to what Filipinos were singing because “that wasn’t part of my military duties.” He wondered why Ed cared.
Lansdale replied that he “wasn’t going there to shoot at people or to try to make them change their minds by force, but rather to understand them and to help guide them into a type of democracy that would live and have meaning to the people. And on
e way to understand and to communicate with the people is by knowing their songs, something they hold dear to their hearts.”11
If we are to credit Ben’s recollection of this conversation, Ed Lansdale was from the start of his sojourn in Asia intensely interested in the people he would meet and how he could help them to build a better nation.
MAJOR LANSDALE was initially assigned as chief of the relatively small intelligence division (G-2) for Army Forces Western Pacific. (Under the Napoleonic staff system adopted by the U.S. armed forces, the personnel staff is designated G-1, intelligence is G-2, operations G-3, logistics G-4, and so on.) In this position he performed myriad jobs. He helped to coordinate security for the 1946 inauguration of Manuel Roxas y Acuña, a close associate of the late Manuel Quezon, as the last president of the American-dominated Commonwealth of the Philippines and the first president of the independent Republic of the Philippines. He helped to train an intelligence division for the new Philippine army. He resolved some “300-odd cases of internees of doubtful nationality,” such as Chinese slave laborers imported into the Philippines by the Japanese. In the latter case, one of his friends, Major O. J. Magee, wrote, “He found the root of the trouble quickly, pulled, kicked and pounded his way through obstacles of inertia, high politics, pomposity and ignorance, and soon had an honest system operating smoothly.”12
All the while, Lansdale was struggling to understand the country in which he now found himself living—something that remarkably few soldiers of any nationality bother to do when deployed abroad. The rare exceptions tend to be celebrated ones. They include the French field marshal Hubert Lyautey in Indochina and Morocco, the British commanders Robert Clive and Frederick Roberts in India, and T. E. Lawrence in Arabia. Only a few contemporary Americans such as Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines and Japan would have made the list; in years past, the most noted American military students of foreign societies had been Indian fighters such as George Crook and Christopher “Kit” Carson. While their fellow officers preferred unintellectual pastimes such as polo or hunting, drinking or card playing, these renegades undertook the difficult and sometimes dangerous work of acquainting themselves with alien cultures and in the process often became alienated from their own societies.
