by Max Boot
What he found was that central Luzon, a low-lying, agricultural region of rice paddies and sugar fields interspersed with barrios (villages) stretching 125 miles north of Manila Bay to Lingayen Gulf and bounded by the Zambales Mountains to the west and the Sierra Madre to the east, was increasingly dominated by the Huks. This area, home to more than a million people, even came to be known as Huklandia.
“Central Luzon is still a place where fear starts as the sun sets each day,” Lansdale wrote on March 19, 1947.
Farmers hurry home out of the rice paddies and cane fields. Buses stop for the night in the nearest town and the highways become empty, except for occasional pairs of armored cars hurrying along on patrol. In the larger towns, police sling their carbines and rifles on their shoulders and hurry into the center of town, usually opposite the marketplace, where they stand nervously under a street lamp in a group and peer into the shadows and stop every passing vehicle. Home folks finish their suppers and then hurry to close the doors of wooden homes or put the door panels in the nipa shacks . . . and make sure the lights are set for all night long.
Yet Lansdale kept going through the threatening darkness: “It’s strange to roam around at night and see lights in all the houses and to realize that people are sleeping next to the flickering candle, coconut oil or carbide lamps, hoping the light will keep evil-doers away from their bedsides.”29
In entering these Huk-dominated areas, Lansdale was armed with little more than his smile and his harmonica; his pistol would not have protected him from an ambush. Usually his personality was disarming enough. “You don’t kill a guy laughing at you, being nice to you,” he later said.30
An example of how he operated came in a trip to Huklandia in 1947. “I stopped in one town on the Pampagna River one hot noon to get a coke at a little sari-sari [convenience] store,” he recounted. “The town had supplied a lot of men to the Huks, so most of the men were either dead by now or hiding out with the Huks in the swamps or hills. As I drank the hot coke, a group of local people gathered around and stared at me, more sullenly than most do.” He was “taking a bitch puppy from a family in Pampagna to relatives in Tarlac”—almost certainly to Pat and her family—so he got the puppy out of the jeep and gave him the last of his coke. “I winked at some small boys watching me as I did this,” Lansdale wrote, “and they smiled shyly. I smiled back, and then all those standing around suddenly smiled.” The ice broken, Lansdale “wound up sharing lunch with a family, sitting on the split bamboo floor of their nipa house.” Although he didn’t say so, odds were that Pat was along to act as translator and guide.31
Lansdale benefited, of course, from being in a land in which Yanquis were generally looked upon with affection. Yet even though most Filipinos were pro-American, life-threatening dangers abounded for an outsider. On Sunday, June 8, 1947, a “beautiful morning,” Lansdale was inspired to paint his “yearly landscape.” He stuck his “water colors, cold beer, sandwiches, camera, and .45 pistol in the jeep, put on a sport shirt and walking shorts, and drove”—along with Pat—“about 10 miles north of Manila to Novaliches dam.” Since it was “sizzling hot,” he and Pat popped open cans of beer as soon as they stopped. They were just taking their first sips when behind them they heard someone say “ps-s-s-st Joe.” “So I turned around for a look,” Lansdale wrote. “There, 10 feet behind me was a Filipino with a big handkerchief across his face and with an M-1 [carbine] raised to his shoulders on a dead bead with my head.”
“Hey, take it easy,” Lansdale told him, while starting to reach for the .45 pistol beside his seat. He thought better of it when he realized the bandit wasn’t alone. There were five men altogether, all armed. So he and Pat obeyed their instructions to exit the jeep with their hands raised. As four of the bandits began unloading the jeep, “the one with the M-1 kept inching up closer behind me,” Lansdale wrote. “I sensed that he was extremely nervous and probably out on his first holdup.” He remembered that a U.S. Army lieutenant had been murdered in this area the previous year under similar circumstances, and he “started to get scared.”
The bandits were speaking Tagalog, which Pat no doubt translated for Ed. “The nervous guy with the M-1 behind me said something about killing the kano (me) and then searching the body,” Ed wrote. “You are in bad trouble now, just doing this to me,” he replied. “Don’t get into really bad, serious trouble doing anything more.”
The bandits took Lansdale’s new Rolex watch and his wallet along with Pat’s Semca wristwatch and handbag and all of their other possessions. Then they blindfolded Ed and, leaving Pat behind, made him climb into the jeep before taking off cross-country. Just as Lansdale was wondering what was going to happen next, the jeep stopped. He was afraid that he was going to be killed on the spot. To prevent that from happening, he recounted, “I asked them for one of my cans of beer. They opened one and gave it to me, so I told them they might as well drink up my beer.” This calmed the bandits, and it was to become a standard Lansdale ploy when meeting hostile men. (Many years later he explained that you need to give potential killers “something else to think of fast, and I would ask them if they needed cigarettes or need some food or did anyone want a drink.”)32 Taking advantage of the change in mood, Lansdale “told them it was a lousy trick to make me walk so far back on a hot day and to give me another open can of beer for the walk.” Lansdale finally decided to risk taking off his blindfold and climb out of the jeep. The young, nervous bandit with the M-1 was still talking about killing him, but an older bandit took charge and escorted Ed down “a muddy trail next to a rice paddy.”
Lansdale walked five miles back to the dam to reunite with Pat and to call Filipino and American MPs. The only way we can be sure that Pat was present during the robbery, given the care that Ed took to excise any mention of her from his letters home, was the police report that he filed. Paragraph four read, “At the time of the robbery, I was accompanied by Mrs. P. Y. Kelly, who was also robbed of her possessions.”33
THIS ARMED robbery hardly dissuaded Lansdale from trying to get close to the Huks. He went to great lengths to track down their leader, Luis Taruc. One of the few genuine peasants in the Huks’ leadership, Taruc had gone to an American-run school and, like Johnny Orendain, had formed an emotional attachment to American history. “I cherish Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, especially Lincoln,” Taruc later told an interviewer.34 But Taruc had been influenced by an American soldier in a very different way than Orendain had been. As a boy, he had met an American sergeant who was a dedicated Communist and set him on the path, after brief labor as a tailor, to becoming a Communist himself. During World War II, Taruc led Huk guerrillas against the Japanese occupiers. In 1946, he won a seat in the Philippines Congress as a candidate of the Democratic Alliance, a leftist political party. But President Manuel Roxas accused him and other Huks of being terrorists and refused to seat them. Denied a chance to influence his country’s future via the political process, Taruc and the other Huks took to the hills in late 1946 to resume guerrilla warfare. Not yet thirty years old, Taruc was appointed the Huks’ military supremo.
He and his comrades found a receptive audience among subsistence farmers who had long-standing grievances against a landowning elite that kept them in a state of semifeudal peonage. Many ordinary Huks wanted reform, not a revolution, but they were led by Marxist ideologues who enforced a strict discipline on their ranks. Those who were suspected of disobeying commands were subject to summary “liquidation” as “traitors.” The Huks had little if any direct contact with Chinese or Soviet organizers, so instead they studied the American reporter Edgar Snow’s 1937 book Red Star over China, about Mao Zedong’s movement, for pointers on how to conduct a revolution.35 Just like their Chinese and Vietnamese counterparts, the Huks sent cadres into the barrios to hold covert political rallies and to gather intelligence, food, and recruits. Meanwhile, armed guerrillas in mobile columns ambushed military units and terrorized government officials and their supporters.
Lansdal
e thought he might be able to meet Taruc if he visited the home of his sister in a small town in central Luzon. He knew that Taruc’s sister was pregnant and losing her teeth, so he brought along some calcium tablets and a message that he “would sure love to talk to her brother if he ever sneaked into town.” He found her house dark, but the door was partially open, so he stuck his head inside and asked, “Anybody home?” The answer came when he felt gun barrels poking into his ribs. Taruc’s bodyguards were in the house, and they were convinced Lansdale was a spy. The first thing he could think to say was, “Don’t shoot, look at the floor. . . . If you’re going to shoot me, do it outside. . . . Don’t get the floor bloody and the women have to scrub up after you.”
Talking fast, Lansdale argued that he was too valuable to kill. He pointed out that the Huks risked sending couriers through military checkpoints to Manila to give their press releases to news agencies so that they could be published in the United States and eventually read by President Truman. Lansdale suggested that talking to him was a much simpler way to get the president’s ear because, he claimed rather presumptuously (and prematurely), his reports were read by Truman himself. So he whipped out a pad of paper and asked them, “What do you want to tell the president of the United States?”
The Huks obligingly proceeded to air their grievances. Once they were done, their anger spent, they told him that Taruc’s sister was in the bedroom. Lansdale went in to introduce himself and give her the pills. He learned that Taruc had gone out of the back window just as he had come in the front door.36 Lansdale never did succeed in meeting the elusive rebel leader, but he did manage to walk away from another close call thanks to his quick thinking.
IN ADDITION to meeting the Huks for himself, Lansdale was interested in studying how the American-trained Philippine army fought them. On Saturday, March 29, 1947, he set out for central Luzon to see “where men were killing men in dubious battle.” A battle was being waged on Mount Arayat, a “lonely mountain that rises with volcanic abruptness from the central plain where no mountain should be.” It was being used as a Huk base, and now it was under attack by the Military Police Command of the Philippine army. Lansdale had been invited to “come up and see the fun” by Major Napoleon “Poling” Valeriano, like Pat Kelly an invaluable interpreter of local politics and culture who was to become one of his closest associates in both the Philippines and Vietnam.
Valeriano was a 1937 graduate of the Philippine Military Academy (modeled on West Point), the U.S. Cavalry School at Fort Riley, Kansas, and the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was also a survivor of the Bataan Death March who had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp to join guerrilla resistance against the Japanese.37 Since the start of the Huk Rebellion, he had developed a reputation as one of the most able and ruthless officers in the entire Philippine army. He was in charge of the Nenita unit, a “hunter killer” team whose purpose, he explained, was “to seek out and destroy top leaders of the Huk” and “by disciplined, ruthless action to strike terror into the guerrillas and their supporters.”38 It had been nicknamed the “skull squadron” by rebels who accused Valeriano’s men of taking Huks’ heads as trophies. Although friends with Poling, Lansdale did not share his lust for battle. “I have broken bread and shared cans of beer with folks on both sides of this squabble,” Lansdale said, “and I couldn’t square with myself if I had to sit and listen to the orders being issued to kill people I knew.”
Instead of joining the army troops as they advanced up Mount Arayat, Lansdale went down a carabao (water buffalo) track by himself (or accompanied only by Pat Kelly) and made camp that night in “a flat place with a five foot tree growing in it.” He strung his mosquito net from tree to jeep, ate his rations, and watched as “the base slope of Mount Arayat lighted up with flashes.” “I slept most of the night,” Lansdale wrote, “except for the heavier firing when I awoke long enough for a cigarette and to wonder if there were any Huks on the mountain and what a bad spot they were finding themselves in.”39
As these comments suggest, Lansdale was sympathetic to the ordinary Huks and skeptical of the heavy-handed tactics being employed against them by the Philippine army—similar to those being employed by the French and later the Americans in Vietnam. “Most of the Huks . . . believe in the rightness of what they’re doing, even though some of the leaders are on the communist side of politics,” he wrote. “And there is a bad situation, needing reform, which still exists in central Luzon. Agrarian reforms still seem to exist only on paper and I suppose armed complaint is a natural enough thing after the guerrilla heritage of most of these folks.”40
As for the Military Police Command, the force on the front lines against the Huks, he thought it was “so riddled with politics it can only make weak passes at the Hukbalahaps who are in open rebellion in Luzon. And, the Philippine Army itself is involved in one scandal after another as its officers sell off the U.S. surplus they are supposed to be guarding for the Republic.”41 Both sides were guilty, he believed, of deplorable excesses: “Cruelty and a lust for murder are commonplace. Philippine Army MPs take but few prisoners. They merely shoot their newly captured Huks, often in the back of the head. It is hard to prove sedition, the true crime, against these folks, so why waste time with legal proceedings? On the other hand, MPs live but a few agonized moments after the Huks capture them. Both MPs and Huks have told me they learned to kill during the Jap occupation.”42
Lansdale realized that the blunderbuss approach of the security forces was creating more enemies than it was eliminating—exactly the same problem the U.S. armed forces would later face in Vietnam. The problem was that as a lowly army major he did not yet have the power to force his Filipino counterparts to adopt a different approach.
THE YEAR 1947 would bring significant changes in Ed Lansdale’s professional and personal life. In August his family—Helen Lansdale and their two boys, Ted, age eight, and Pete, age six—arrived from California to live with him in a military housing compound in Manila. Relations between Ed and Helen were predictably tense after a two-year separation, and they did not improve upon Helen’s arrival.
Manila undoubtedly had made real strides since the dark days of the immediate postwar period. Lansdale wrote in early 1948 that a U.S. military officer from 1945 would have gotten lost in “the city of today”: “He would be mostly amazed at the six-lane divided concrete boulevard which they’ve made out of the bumpy Espana Street,” and he “would see few Army vehicles, hear less shooting,” and he would “go to new night clubs” like the Riviera, Town House, and El Cairo.43 But there were still many lingering signs of the war, including the ubiquity of pontoon bridges and Quonset huts, which were intended to be temporary but remained in place years after Japan’s surrender. There were also reminders of the ongoing rebel war, including a growing population of rural residents who, driven out of their homes by mounting violence between the Huks and the army, had become squatters in Manila.
Helen Lansdale, newly arrived from the San Francisco Bay Area, was disgusted by the privations posed by her new surroundings. She wanted to keep everything “beautiful” and “immaculate,”44 said a friend of hers, and that was impossible to achieve in the tropics. “She was a nice person,” Ed’s associate, Rufus Phillips, said many years later, “but I think not suited for living abroad under fairly chaotic circumstances. . . . She liked an ordered existence.”45 To make matters worse, Helen fretted about Ed’s safety while he was off on expeditions to Huklandia. She became upset when he came home from a trip with bullet holes in his vehicle, so he stopped telling her about his adventures.46 But she was reminded of the danger they lived in when, as Ed recalled, “the Philippine army would escort us from parties with armor, light tanks, scout cars, and heavy weapons.”47
Ed’s Filipino friends would joke upon meeting Helen, “What! Ed’s wife? Why, he never told anyone he was married.” “Since Helen and the boys arrived,” Ed wrote, “I have discovered that that is the Number One hu
mor line in Manila.”48 This jest was, of course, not very funny to a wife who must have increasingly suspected that her husband was cheating on her, for his relationship with Pat was an open secret around town. Peter C. Richards, a British-born Reuters correspondent who was a good friend of Lansdale’s, recalled that he and his wife socialized with both Pat and Ed and Helen and Ed: “We got along well with him and his wife as a couple, and we got on well with him and Pat as a couple. And you might say almost simultaneously. I don’t know how that worked, but it worked all right. That was their problem, not ours.”49
WHILE COPING with a new domestic situation, which forced him to juggle a wife and mistress in a scenario ripped from a French bedroom farce, Edward Lansdale also had to get used to new professional responsibilities. In 1947, he switched from the Army to the newly established U.S. Air Force, which he believed would offer “more elbow room for fresh ideas,”50 even if he had no intention of learning to fly. “I wanted a share of the thinking that would help guide my country in the troubled days I saw looming,” he later wrote, and he figured that “in an air age” the Air Force “would assume the mantle” of intellectual leadership from the Army.51 At the same time that Lansdale was switching services, he was also changing jobs—much against his will. But his desires did not carry much weight when balanced against those of the most powerful American in all of Asia.
By then a five-star general, Douglas MacArthur was Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan and Commander of Army Forces in the Pacific. He was focused primarily on the rebuilding of Japan, which he directed from a walnut-paneled office on the sixth floor of the Dai Ichi Insurance Building in Tokyo, across from the Imperial Palace, yet he remained keenly interested in the Philippines. He would have Philippine newspapers flown to him every day, and he would mark up, with visible annoyance, all the anti-American comments he read. Lansdale, reading the same newspapers in Manila, summed it up: “As far as the Manila press was concerned, the ‘big white brothers’ are just so many s.o.b.’s.” The newspapers now were full of criticism that, as Lansdale noted, “GI drivers were racing through the streets killing off pedestrians or bumping into jitneys (which were probably built out of stolen Army jeeps).” Another sore point was the location of U.S. military bases—“The Filipinos want military bases in the Philippines, but not near anybody and certainly not near Manila.”52 GIs did not help their own cause with wanton displays of racism against “Flips,” as they often called the locals.
