by Max Boot
Lansdale followed their example by getting his “staff of home-sick Americans to change their habits of estimating an enemy’s order-of-battle and combat intentions and, instead, to take a hard look at the country where we were. An estimate of the war-ravaged socio-economic conditions in the Philippines, soon to be an independent nation relying on itself, was sorely needed. So we worked on the task, giving the results not only to Washington but also to Malacanan [Palace] where they were of use to the Philippine President and his Cabinet.”13 By the beginning of 1947, Lansdale and his staff had compiled twenty-seven major studies that offered the most thorough survey of conditions in the Philippines during that period. A typical study, completed in June 1946, began by noting, “The situation is far worse than what was envisioned in 1941.” The Philippines faced war damage estimated at $700 million to $800 million, with nearly 80 percent of schools and 60 percent of power plants having to be rebuilt. The citizenry also confronted rampant “lawlessness” and a skyrocketing cost of living, making “many necessities of life . . . nearly impossible to obtain, except through the black market.” “On the other hand,” the survey noted, “the situation is far more encouraging than it was right after the liberation in the Spring of 1945.” “Money and supplies” had poured in from the United States to help alleviate “the first, or disaster, phase of rehabilitation.” The health situation had improved, the ports were again functioning, “transportation is nearly normal again,” and “public water-works are in good shape.”14 Following this summary came page after page of in-depth information, illustrated by striking photographs.
Although the details were unique to the Philippines, roughly similar conclusions could have been reached about many other places in post-1945 Asia, including China, Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, Korea, Thailand, and Indochina—all of which, like the Philippines, would be convulsed by insurgencies that arose out of the chaotic, impoverished, and unsettled postwar conditions. Lansdale recognized the danger before most of his contemporaries. His reports were not focused on tracking enemies, the traditional mission of military intelligence. Rather, he was tracking societal conditions to ensure that new enemies did not arise out of the rubble of old wars.
JAPAN, WHICH in the historian John Dower’s phrase “embraced defeat,” was one of the few Asian nations that did not experience an armed uprising after the end of the war, but U.S. forces stationed there still faced a daunting array of difficulties. Lansdale was to get a firsthand glimpse of the challenges of rehabilitating America’s former adversary in 1946. That summer the military government of the Ryukyus, a chain of islands stretching south from the Japanese mainland toward Taiwan, was to pass from the U.S. Navy to the U.S. Army. Okinawa, the biggest of the Ryukyus, was well known to American soldiers as the scene of one of their bloodiest battles of World War II. The other Ryukyus, some of them little more than tiny unpopulated atolls jutting out of the blue-green waters of the East China Sea, were terra incognita to most Americans—or, for that matter, most Japanese. In the spring of 1946, Major Lansdale was dispatched, at his own initiative, to learn more about the thirty-two islands located north of Okinawa, with an estimated population of 190,000.
While his formal mission was simply to gather information, Lansdale was, in fact, part of a larger endeavor on the part of the American armed forces, which were then engaged in one of the most successful examples of nation building on record by converting the Japanese from foes to friends. That process was just beginning when Lansdale set out for the Ryukyus. Assigned to accompany him was an agent from the Army Counterintelligence Corps, James Clark, an Army photographer, Technician Fifth Grade David Greene (addressed as “corporal” or “tech corporal”), and a Nisei interpreter, Technician Fourth Grade Matsue Yagawa (addressed as “sergeant”). No other transportation being available, they had to travel on leaky wooden Japanese boats, first the Koei-maru and then the Taekuku-maru, which were normally used to haul rice and other goods between the islands.
They set off from Okinawa at the end of April 1946 aboard the eighty-foot-long Koei-maru, which Lansdale described as “a sort of overgrown rowboat and a very ratty, dirty and ancient one.” Lansdale had to share the “tiny” captain’s cabin with two other Americans. In addition to the Americans, the boat carried Japanese crew members, a Japanese government official, a Japanese sugar dealer, and the “silver-toothed” Japanese captain and shipowner, who, Lansdale was amused to note, “laughs at everything. If the ship were sinking, he’d probably stand on deck and laugh until the tears came.” Lansdale did not speak a word of Japanese, but still had “quite a conversation” with his Japanese shipmates “using our phrase books.”
As they chugged along, the whole boat shaking from the vibrations of the diesel engine, Lansdale sat early one morning on the “deck” (“boards over the hold with canvas cover”), wearing nothing but shorts, smoking a cigarette (most likely a Chesterfield, his favorite brand), enjoying the “pleasantly warm” weather, and looking out over the endless ocean. Lansdale “started wondering how strange it was to be in a little Jap island boat that the U.S. had been trying to sink not long ago—and going up to look at islands which few people have even heard of.” (His casual use of “Jap” shows that the contemptuous wartime argot had not entirely vanished with the coming of peace.) Along the way, Lansdale saw such natural wonders as an active volcano on the island of Suwanosejima, which had “ruddy flames and plumes of smoke” and “spit up white hot chunks of magma from time to time as we approached it across the strait.” But his primary interest was in the natives, not nature, and he found plenty to fascinate him in these remote and isolated societies. Hanging “onto a bulkhead with one hand” while “writing with the other,” he would produce an extensive report on food availability, public health, government, education, social organizations, and other aspects of the islands. It was not just subjects of military concern that caught his attention and led him to put pen to paper. On Suwanosejima, he was entranced by the locals who “danced and sang for us the other night—old ladies first, beating hard drums and a dry nasal song, then the younger women with kids strapped on their backs—the kids looking wide-eyed at the Americans as their mothers jogged in a circle.”
Lansdale’s observations were part of a long history of American fascination with the islands of the Pacific stretching at least as far back as Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Herman Melville’s first book, which was based on his experiences as a deserter from a whaling ship in the Marquesas Islands. Interest in the region only increased with Commodore Matthew Perry’s “opening” of Japan in 1853–55, the clipper trade with China, and the fin de siècle acquisition of Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island, followed four decades later by the island-hopping campaign in World War II. A naval lieutenant just a year older than Lansdale was even then writing a collection of short stories that would come to define Pacific island culture for most Americans. James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific would be published in 1947 and, after rocketing to the top of the best-seller list, would win the Pulitzer Prize and become the basis for the popular musical South Pacific. Lansdale’s experiences could have made a fitting sequel—“A Tale of the North Pacific.”
In a journal he kept, Lansdale recounted how his party made landfall at the town of Naze, capital of the island of Amami Oshima, on May 2, 1946. He observed “dark masses of high hills on each side, above was alive with stars, and nearby in the waters, were rowboats and sampans with fishermen using copper-colored flares to attract the fish.” The boat’s engine was shut off, and they “glided along silently over the batches of copper reflections.” Nearly all of the Ryukyus had been bombed or strafed regularly by American warplanes between March and August 1945. These attacks destroyed a third of the fishing fleet and roughly half of all standing structures. “The business section of Naze was wiped out,” one of Lansdale’s reports noted, and farmers were unable to work their fields “because of the frequency of the air raids.” Although fishermen were going ou
t once again and farmers were planting sweet potatoes, Lansdale noted, “the islands are existing on a bare subsistence level.” The inhabitants were reduced to eating grass soup.
The crisis, as in many other places in Europe and Asia, was compounded by the kind of corruption that the director Carol Reed and screenwriter Graham Greene would memorably depict in the 1949 film noir classic The Third Man, set in a seedy and decrepit Vienna. In a village on Amami Oshima, Lansdale discovered the local version of the black marketeer Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles in the movie. His name was Kinoje Degushi, and his position was subgovernor (or mayor). Misusing his authority, he had stolen substantial supplies of rice and sold them on the black market. Lansdale did not bother to notify his headquarters and ask for instructions. He took matters into his own hands by confiscating all of the rice and redistributing it to the residents. Then he convened the people in the schoolhouse, which he converted to a makeshift courthouse, to sit in judgment on their subgovernor.
With Kinoje sitting forlornly beside him, Lansdale, speaking through his Japanese American translator, Matsue Yagawa, delivered an indictment of the subgovernor, saying he wasn’t doing his job, because he was letting the people go hungry. As Lansdale was speaking, Matsue whispered to him that Kinoje was trying to inch open the drawer of the school desk in front of him to grab a gun. The army counterintelligence agent and photographer were getting nervous; they asked for, and received, Lansdale’s permission to prepare their rowboat for a hasty departure. Lansdale, who had a .45-caliber automatic pistol in a shoulder holster, told Matsue to tell the subgovernor, “I know he’s got a gun in there and I’m waiting for him to get it . . . and take a shot at me so I can kill him right in front of the people.” Upon hearing this, Kinoje jumped up to show that he had no gun and surrendered on the spot.
Lansdale and his small team marched their prisoner down to the boat to transport him to jail, one of the few buildings that remained standing in Naze. As they were leaving, Matsue asked Lansdale how fast he was on the draw. Lansdale had to admit that he’d never taken his pistol out of its shoulder holster. On examining the gun, he discovered it was lodged so tightly in the new holster that he couldn’t even “tug it loose.” “Oh Geez,” Matsue said nervously. “I thought you were lightning fast. I was getting ready to duck and everything but you’d just have been creamed on the spot.” Lansdale was no gunfighter, but he was a master of psychology and had just tricked the subgovernor into submission.
While they were sailing back to Naze with their prisoner, Lansdale and his men passed a small copse of Japanese fishing boats. The fishermen had already heard of how Lansdale had arrested the corrupt official, and they were yelling thanks. In Naze, local people came up to express their gratitude and to offer gifts. The mayor gave him a scroll, and the local prostitute, “the one bad girl for all these islands,” gave him “a little handkerchief with dirty pictures on it, all nicely folded up.”
Lansdale, naturally, found the trip to be “exciting.” He exulted, with the typical pride of the Western imperialist or nation builder, “In some places, I was the first white man people had seen—in most places, the second white man.” “And,” he added excitedly, “coming in on a Jap boat, I learned more about the islands than anyone previously. . . . I’m the only officer above the grade of 2nd Lt. or Ensign who ever rode a rice boat in these waters.” While on the move, he wrote, “I’m really having the time of my life—except I seem to stink of moldy rice by now.”
Helping the people of these exotic, faraway islands while advancing the interests of his own country was a heady tonic for a thirty-eight-year-old former advertising man who only five years before might easily have imagined that he would spend the rest of his life peddling consumer products—Levi’s jeans and Wells Fargo bank accounts and Swiss Colony wines—while living in the comfort of Northern California. His initial success in the Ryukyus confirmed Lansdale’s conviction that, by getting involved in their internal affairs, he could help the people of Asia as they confronted the challenges of the postwar world. “Look where I am,” he thought. And look at what I can do.15
BACK AMID the wartime damage and tropical beauty of the Philippines, Lansdale continued his efforts to learn as much as possible about the archipelago. “I have always felt that if you are going to report on something,” Lansdale later said, “don’t take the word of other people, go out and eyeball it and see and then talk to people. You get a far different feeling for the problem and the situation.”16 He made it a point to get out of Manila as often as possible to explore the countryside. Usually he went on Sundays, a day of rest for many of his fellow soldiers but not for him. In a journal he kept intermittently, he described a typical Sunday—October 27, 1946—which illustrated not only how widely he traveled but also how many friends he had accumulated in such a short time.
“I was glad to get away from Manila,” Lansdale wrote, which he did by borrowing a jeep to pick up his friend Engracio Fabre, recently appointed commissioner of immigration by President Roxas. Together they “drove over to a house in the Santa Cruz district just off Rizal [Boulevard]” to pick up Congressman Fortunato Suarez from the city of Lucena. “When Suarez came out finally in a rumpled white pongee suit, complete with shirt and tie, his packages piled on top of all Fabre’s packages, we then set off again and picked up a Congressman from Samar at a nearby house.” Their next destination was yet another congressman’s house, where they were surprised to find a political meeting in progress at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday. “So I sat,” Lansdale wrote a few days later, “and looked wise while speeches in Tagalog sputtered all around me.” After an hour of this, “we all shook hands and swore eternal friendship and the four of us who went in then went out and drove to . . . breakfast at the Selecta, which consisted of thick doughy hotcakes and coffee.”
By 11 a.m., Lansdale and his three friends were on the highway heading south toward Quezon Province, a narrow isthmus wedged between the Sierra Madre mountains to the north and the Sibuyan Sea to the south. The drive in the topless vehicle was bumpy and uncomfortable. Soon it started to rain. “In seconds we were working through mud and a passing truck threw a big gob of it into my face,” Lansdale wrote. “Suarez, dozing in his white pongee in the rear seat, let out a wild yell and I turned and saw that he was covered with mud. He and the others then started laughing at the fun of getting splattered with mud, so I just kept on going. We entered the coconut country and my good humor came back, with the sight of green trees again.” By 1 p.m., with the rain still falling hard, they stopped for lunch “at a fairly clean looking panciteria,” where they sat in their “muddy and soggy clothes and ate a sourish pancit soup and rice and a strong-tasting fish and washed it down with coffee.” When they got on the road again, “the rain suddenly turned into a regular S.E. monsoon, with sheets of water blowing in horizontally. I strapped my raincoat tightly about my wrists, but even then the rain blew up my left sleeve where my arm was raised to the steering wheel and I was soon sopping wet inside my rain-proof.”
Finally they reached the town of Lucena, the capital of Quezon Province nestled precariously on the edge of Tayabas Bay, where, Lansdale wrote, he “delivered Suarez to his wife, who gave me a glass of tepid beer which I drank while my clothes kept a steady drip-drip on the living room floor.” Then on to Fabre’s hometown of Sariaya, “where I discussed the local copra situation with [Rufino] Rodriguez, the local big-shot planter, then I met the governor and was invited to a banquet.” At Fabre’s house, “suddenly the strain of the . . . week and the long drive hit me, so I went in and lay down on his parents’ bed, on a straw mat, and ‘took a nap.’ Fabre tried to wake me later to attend the governor’s banquet, but without luck. I slept right on through until 5 the next morning, when I woke up, had a cup of coffee and drove the 150 km. back to Manila for a conference with the general at 9 a.m.”17
LANSDALE DID not spend all his time hobnobbing with influential politicos. He was just as eager to meet the Negritos, Stone Age hunter-gatherers l
iving on Luzon and other islands across Southeast Asia. Existing apart from other Filipinos, the Negritos had little interest in the quarrels between the Japanese and the Allies or later the Communists and the government, but with their knowledge of the rain forests of central Luzon they could be invaluable scouts and intelligence collectors for whichever side won them over. They occupied a cultural and geographical niche somewhat similar to that of the Montagnards, the hill tribes of Vietnam, which the French were then employing against the Vietminh and which the Americans would later employ against the Vietcong.
In October 1945, shortly after his arrival in the Philippines, Lansdale set off to find out what had happened to a Japanese armored column near Clark Field. Some Negritos, only three to four feet tall and clad in loincloths, showed up at his camp. Lansdale cooked them dinner while trying to figure out how to communicate with them since the only word of English they knew was “okay.” They didn’t even speak Tagalog, only their own tribal dialect. “This problem was finally solved by each of us drawing pictures in the sand and acting out parts,” Lansdale recalled. In this way he figured out that the Americans had done something to the daughter of the tribal chief and specifically something to her belly. At first Lansdale assumed she had been abducted and raped by GIs. But “after three or four hours of talk,” he finally figured out that the chief’s daughter had been hit accidentally by an American artillery barrage meant to stop a Japanese armored column from escaping into the Zambales Mountains. “With that,” Lansdale concluded, “I took off my GI watch that I had and I strapped it on the wrist of the tribal president as an expression of an American’s sympathy about his daughter. He seemed pleased. I showed him how to wind the watch and how to listen to it. He didn’t know how to tell time but I showed him.”18
