Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  In contrast to such indulgence, the Americans endeavoured to disarm and demobilize the Huks, falsely portrayed as extreme Communists by the rival guerrillas of the USAFFE, who it should be recalled had not strained themselves to fight the Japanese. Hoping to obtain government pensions for veterans, the Huks naively provided the authorities with the names of their fighters. The lists led to arrests, or allowed landlords to blacklist or evict those listed. At Malolos in Bucalan, a USAFFE colonel named Adonias Maclang had 109 Huk fighters shot into a mass grave, in the presence of US Counter Intelligence Corps officers. The Americans rewarded Maclang by making him mayor of Malolos.6

  While the Huks were disarmed or murdered, the USAFFE guerrillas were converted into a paramilitary Military Police, their wages paid from the budget of the Philippines Constabulary and given 5,000 machine guns by the Americans. They became a strongarm force, whose main role was to reimpose the authority of the large landowners on the peasants whose campaign for social justice resumed where it had been interrupted by war. The main demand was a 60:40 split in the rice harvest in the peasants’ favour; a subsidiary demand was that they should not have to pay back rent covering three years of occupation to landlords who had fled to Manila the moment the Japanese appeared. Legal chicanery was employed to stop restive peasants from holding public meetings, which, when they happened, were broken up by Military Police in armoured cars armed with machine guns. An uprising might, just, have been averted had the political system functioned as a ventilator for pressures which many peasants likened to rice boiling over in a pan; but it was not to be.

  The de facto Japanese Shogun Douglas MacArthur intoned that ‘America buried imperialism here today’ when the Philippine Republic was proclaimed on 4 July 1946, but this regime was scarcely an advertisement for self-determination in the Asia-Pacific region. Manuel Roxas and his Liberal Party won the April 1946 national elections and quickly ratified the Bell Trade Act, which prohibited the manufacture or sale of any products that might compete with US goods and required the Philippines constitution to grant US citizens and corporations untrammelled access to Philippine markets and natural resources. It also pegged the Filipino peso to the US dollar. How this could be construed as anything other than colonialism stripped of administrative costs is a mystery. The new Supreme Court rushed ratification of this treaty to avoid scrutiny, while false charges of fraud were employed to disqualify six elected Congressmen from the Democratic Alliance. This was a new party whose candidates included the charismatic Huk military commander Luis Taruc. Permanent US air and naval basing rights further compromised the country’s sovereignty, with Roxas granting the US vast facilities at Clark Field and Subic Bay.7

  Needless to say, the Huks reverted to armed struggle, once all efforts to disband them had failed. Much of Central Luzon, which had voted heavily against Roxas, rapidly resembled an occupied country. Military Police in armoured cars dominated the main roads, while squads of them imposed their control on the barrios (shanty towns) strung along the side lanes while going on marauding ‘Huk Hunts’. This persuaded many former Huk supporters to go underground, with weapons they had retained or purchased from US servicemen. Younger people outraged by Roxas’s farce of democracy joined them, together with those who sought vengeance for police abuses. The leaders of the Democratic Alliance, the Huks and the Communist Party jointly offered to broker a truce between the Military Police and the growing number of peasants who were resorting to armed self-defence. Their initiative failed after one of them, Juan Feleo, disappeared in August 1946 while under Military Police escort; his decapitated body was later found floating in the Pampanga River. Months of police strongarm tactics in the barrios, involving innocent people tortured or kidnapped and killed, led the much abused peasants to a revival of the wartime resistance movement, initially an essentially defensive campaign against their police oppressors.

  The Roxas government responded with an iron fist, using artillery and dive bombers against barrios suspected of sheltering Huks. It deployed a police death squad named ‘Nenita’ under a commander called Napoleon Valeriano. The Nenitas had skull-and-crossbone insignia on their sleeves and on their banners, and lived down to their reputation as the ‘Skull Squadron’ by decapitating their prisoners. Detained Huk sympathizers were tortured with electric shocks and by a revival of the ‘water cure’ employed by the US Army when it suppressed the Filipino rebellion at the turn of the century. Suspects had water poured down their throats and their swollen stomachs were then jumped on by booted Nenitas. Many were then ‘shot while trying to escape’. None of this found its way into reports by the chief of the US military intelligence branch in the Philippines, which treated the Huks as part of a Communist conspiracy. In March 1946 he reported:

  [The leaders of the Huks] have made their boast that once their membership reached 500,000 their revolution will start. Meanwhile, in the provinces of Pampagna, Nueva Ecija, Tarlac, Bulacan, and Pangasinan, they are establishing or have established a reign of terror. So ironclad is their grip and so feared is their power that the peasants dare not oppose them in many localities. On liberation, their members were about 50,000; sources now report some 150,000 tribute-paying members . . . [The Huks] are now organised into trigger men, castor oil boys, and just big strong . . . ruffians to keep the more meek in line.8

  In fact, the Communist Party – whose members were to be found among unionized workers in Manila rather than in the countryside – said that ‘it does not believe in the use of force and violence or in conspiracy as its methods to achieve its programme’, which it sought to realize through constitutional means and the labour movement. The upper-class intellectuals and trade unionists who dominated the Party took a cooler view of things than simple peasants who were on the receiving end of government repression, and they did not alter this line until May 1948.

  The Man with a Mouth Organ

  Manuel Roxas died of a heart attack on 15 April 1948, while delivering a speech at Clark Air Force Base. Many Filipinos derived employment from the Americans, but 2,000 tenant farmers had been evicted to make way for the expansion of the base. It was so vast that Huk guerrillas commonly crossed the runways unhindered. Roxas’s successor was another Liberal, Elpidio Quirino, who ‘won’ the shamelessly fraudulent elections of 1949. Wits remarked that even the birds and trees had voted. Like Roxas, his principal activity was embezzling US aid, but Quirino also made a show of seeking to negotiate with the Huks. The talks collapsed when Luis Taruc learned of a police conspiracy to murder him and Quirino reverted to naked repression.

  US policy towards the Philippines was overshadowed by the loss of China to Communism, which concentrated minds and injected a sense of urgency lest the vast archipelago go the same way. However, the greatly increased funds made available once Congress accepted the policy of containment were not disbursed as indiscriminately to the Philippine government as they were in Europe, and as they had been to Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT. In the Philippines the US learned how to make aid grants dedicated to particular projects and contingent on the recipients delivering specific reforms.9

  In Septembr 1950 Edward Lansdale arrived in the Philippines. He was born in 1908, the son of an automobile industry executive. After dropping out from UCLA, he drifted into the advertising industry in San Francisco, acquiring such clients as the Wells Fargo bank and Levi Strauss, manufacturer of the eponymous jeans. He had an ear for the catchy phrase and an eye for the striking image. In December 1941 Lansdale sought to reactivate the college student reservist commission he had won at UCLA, but was deemed unfit for active service. His high-level connections won him a billet at the Washington DC headquarters of the OSS.

  He was put to work devising training courses. One exercise involved seeing how far a recruit would go in trying to knife a stranger, identified as a German agent, on the Manhattan subway. He also compiled detailed reports on foreign countries, based on the observations of travellers and academics. His involvement with the
Philippines began when he interviewed an ichthyologist with extensive knowledge of the types of poisonous fish invading US troops might encounter around the archipelago. Long before Lansdale was posted to Manila, he insisted that his brother, who had served there, teach him local songs that he could then play on his ever-handy harmonica. While it is not entirely clear where Lansdale served in the last years of the war, he spent ten months in the Philippines from late 1945 to the summer of 1946, dealing with the complex aftermath of the Pacific conflict and reporting on the Huks.10

  Lansdale persuaded his wife, with whom he was reunited while on leave, to bring their two sons to Manila, a city still in wartime ruins. Helen Lansdale detested life there and the two became estranged, with Lansdale striking up a close friendship with Pat Kelly, a vivacious Filipino journalist with whom he toured the remoter parts of the country. The quietly spoken Landsdale was also cultivating other relationships, whether with the oligarchs in the Malacañang Palace, or with raiding parties of Huk guerrillas across whose trails he loitered to strike up conversations in return for cigarettes. Even though at this stage the Americans were still invested with the aura of liberators, these acts of fraternization required strong nerves as well as an easy smile. Frustrated with army bureaucracy, Lansdale had himself transferred into the newly established US Air Force while retaining his job as an army press officer.

  On returning to the States, the Lansdales separated. Bored in a teaching job on a base in Denver, he was rescued by being reassigned to the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) in Washington, a covert organization created in 1948 at the urging of George Kennan to carry out psychological and paramilitary operations (a.k.a. dirty tricks). At first nominally independent, it was merged with the CIA in 1952. The OPC’s director was Frank Wisner, a New York lawyer who had served with the OSS in Romania. The new group flourished as the Cold War intensified, growing from 302 personnel to nearly 3,000 in 1952, and its budget from $4.7 million in 1949 to $82 million in 1952, running covert operations in over fifty countries.11

  After an initial period working on the Soviet desk, he persuaded his superiors that the Agency’s Far East division needed his services more. After all, he knew about poisonous fish. Soon he was running seminars in Washington for Filipino army officers who had completed training courses elsewhere in the US, his object being to improve the capabilities of an army whose indiscriminate violence was swelling the ranks of the Huk guerrillas. He eventually fastened on a visiting Filipino congressman who had fought the Japanese in the USAFFE, finishing the war as a captain. This was Ramon Magsaysay, a former bus company mechanic and a big man, full of nervous energy. He had grown up in a hut made of bamboo and cogon grass, spending his youth milking water buffaloes and working his family’s modest plot. The two men quickly realized that each could be very useful to the other, their common objective being the defeat of the Huk insurgency. Lansdale’s superiors organized a lunch to take a closer look at Magsaysay, before the decision was taken to send a delegation to President Quirino to tell him to appoint Magsaysay as his secretary of defence instead of his own candidate, a notorious wartime collaborator called Teofilo Sison. Quirino also appointed Lansdale as his adviser on intelligence.12

  Lansdale and his sidekick Lieutenant Charles ‘Bo’ Bohannan landed in Manila and took up residence in a two-storey bungalow on the city’s outskirts in an area reserved for Americans, ringed with barbed wire and guarded by Filipino troops. Lansdale was treated with extraordinary deference by everyone from the US Ambassador and the general commanding the US Military Advisory Group (MAG) to President Quirino, who once interrupted a cabinet meeting rather than keep Lansdale waiting.

  By this time 50,000 Filipino government troops and policemen were fighting around 15,000 Huk guerrillas, who operated amid a further million sympathizers. The centre of Huk activity was the mountainous areas of Central Luzon, known as Huklandia. There the Huks had their forest camps, linked to each other and the population of the village in the plains by a sophisticated courier system akin to the system developed by the CTs in Malaya, which made much use of girls. Lectures and communal songs were used to drill into recruits the ‘Fundamental Spirit’ guiding the movement and there was intensive training in weaponry and tactics. Women were not limited to support activities but were also recruited as combatants. Some of them married older male comrades in ceremonies where the newlyweds passed under an arch of guns, but did not for that reason cease to be fighters. In a very conservative Catholic country, people were fascinated by tales of Huk ‘Amazons’, some of whom insisted on putting on makeup before going into battle. It did the Huk cause no harm that some of their female commanders, such as Remedios Gomez (a.k.a. the Joan of Arc of the Philippines) and Celia Mariano were strikingly beautiful.13

  The main recruiting agent for the guerrillas was the brutality, corruption and ineptitude of a police force that daily heightened popular perception of gross social injustice. In the countryside it operated like a criminal gang, stealing at will, and in the cities even the traffic police regarded their job as a licence to extort bribes. In 1948 the US military commander in the Philippines reported to Chief of Staff Omar Bradley on a level of theft from his command that put even wartime Naples in the shade. Gasoline was stolen wholesale, trucks hijacked and goods thrown from moving trains to gangs of thieves. The leading black marketeers included the sons of the Mayor of Manila, the Chief of Police and the Secretary of Labour. When American investigators probed into a case of stolen army jeeps, the lead agent’s young daughter was shot dead by policemen under the orders of the Mayor of San Luis, who also killed a US officer outside a supply depot.14

  Lansdale and Magsaysay made improving the reputation of the security forces their first priority, with Magsaysay setting an example by being seen to live on his $500 a month ministerial salary, plus a smaller amount as chairman of Philippines Airlines. Magsaysay immediately took on the army’s hopelessly corrupt system of promotion, rewarding combat merit over seniority and connections. In 1951 the Americans suspended all aid until Quirino dismissed the armed forces Chief of Staff, General Mariano Castañeda, and the Chief of Constabulary, General Alberto Ramos. Brutalization of the civilian population was diminished by setting up a system whereby peasants could send telegrams to Magsaysay himself at a very cheap rate, their complaints followed up with inflexible rigour. He also increased soldiers’ pay so that they would no longer be obliged to steal in order to eat.15

  The relationship between Lansdale and Magsaysay deepened when, fearing Huk assassins, Magsaysay sent his wife and three children away and moved into Lansdale’s bungalow inside the ‘country club’, as Filipinos called the American quarter. The two men slept in separate single beds in the same room. The breakfast table became Magsaysay’s surrogate office, so that all defence department business was conducted in this bungalow. Lansdale held parallel informal meetings with Filipino soldiers, with the deliberate intention of having these casual conversations overheard by the Defence Secretary. Some thought that the ferociously ambitious Magsaysay was merely Lansdale’s creature – they called Lansdale ‘Frank’ and Bo Bohannan ‘Stein’ – and it was true that one of the Colonel’s talents was to make his own ideas seem like someone else’s, and another the capacity to seem invisible in any room where he was the dominant influence.16

  Their relationship was so close that Lansdale claimed the two men were brothers, with Lansdale playing his harmonica to lull ‘Monching’ to a sleep often troubled by phantoms. Magsaysay sometimes woke, grabbed his rifle and stuffed his pockets with cartridges after nightmares about a Huk raid in November 1950 on his home town of Barrio Aglao, in which the Huks had killed twenty-two people, many hacked to pieces with bolo knives, in retaliation for the government’s capture of virtually the entire Communist leadership in Manila. The relationship between the Filipino and the American was not always congenial and on one occasion, when they were travelling on a US internal flight, Lansdale knocked Magsaysay out for presuming
to use a speech written by a Filipino aide instead of the one prepared by Lansdale.

  Lansdale also believed in getting about to see conditions for himself, rather than relying on second- or third-hand reports or on experts who had never been to a Filipino barrio. He persuaded Magsaysay to undertake similar trips, sometimes even hitching lifts, with Lansdale in uniform and Magsaysay dressed like an American tourist. Magsaysay took note of everything from the tell-tale cardboard used by soldiers to resole worn-out boots to officers showing signs of debauchery, and cashiered those responsible. All units were also issued with cameras to photograph captured or killed Huks, which would be circulated to boost army morale.17

  The dynamic duo’s ultimate objective was to capitalize on Magsaysay’s success in the counter-insurgency war to propel him to the Filipino presidency. Building Magsaysay into a heroic figure came naturally to Lansdale from his background in advertising, and a reformist Magsaysay presidency, which emphasized justice, would secure long-term US strategic and commercial interests. That it represented gross interference in the internal affairs of an independent country was undeniable, but Lansdale argued that the coming to power of a representative of the ambitious new middle classes was better for the average Filipino than the survival of a corrupt oligarchy in hock to powerful landowners. Was it a crime to order a polling station burned when the ballot papers it contained were all fakes? Or to organize counter-gangs against the electoral thuggery of President Quirino’s brother Tony? Was it not fair enough to disseminate forged leaflets in which the Huk leadership enjoined sympathizers to boycott a presidential election? And so on. Lansdale was the consummate practitioner of the philosophy that the end justified the means.18