Americans remember the Liberation of the Philippines beginning with MacArthur’s return in October, 1944. Yet in the two-and-a-half years after the fall of Bataan, Filipino insurgents waged a bloody guerrilla war against the Japanese occupation army. Indeed, Tokyo’s determination to hold the islands in the face of local resistance ultimately played a role in the downfall of the empire. (Image source: WikiMedia Commons)“Guerrillas endured pervasive exhaustion, disease, and malnourishment. They engaged in irregular warfare, espionage, prison raids and sabotage.”
By James Kelly Morningstar
WHAT IF I told you that one of the most important campaigns of World War II – the Philippine Resistance — has been ignored?
Even the official U.S. Army history pronounced the “struggle for control” of the islands ended with the surrender of Corregidor in May 1942 and was not renewed until MacArthur returned in October 1944.[1]
Yet in that time Filipino guerrillas waged a war that denied Japan its strategic goals, altered U.S. grand strategy and helped transform America’s greatest military defeat into Japan’s greatest military disaster. Their fight also laid the foundation for a free and independent nation vital to the post-war order.
In my new book War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942-1945, I show how the interactions between the Japanese, Filipinos and Americans produced these historic outcomes.
Japanese soldiers guard American and Filipino POWs after the fall of Bataan, 1942. (Image source: WikiMedia Commons)Spurred by Germany’s success in Europe, the Japanese rushed their initial attack on the Philippines under the assumption that cooperation with native elites coupled with the military domination of the general population would pacify the country.[2] But as Tokyo’s planned 50-day campaign to subdue the islands turned into a 153-day slog, Japan’s troops encountered groups of determined guerrillas. Indeed, attempts to bully Filipinos by beatings, starvation and torture only motivated whole families to join the resistance.[3]
Japan’s efforts to have its army ‘live off the land’ and to expropriate Philippine resources further hurt the local economy and increased hardships.[4] The price of rice in Manila during the period rose two thousand percent.[5] Black markets thrived. People starved. Many women were forced into prostitution to support their families while many more were outright abducted by Japanese soldiers to serve as “comfort women.”[6]
Not surprisingly, Japanese propaganda directed at Filipinos that emphasized Asian brotherhood failed to gain traction in population centers. Similarly, military action in remote areas failed to crush guerrillas. When Tokyo decided to make the Philippines the decisive battleground of the Pacific war in mid-1944, the guerrillas remained positioned to play a major role in that fight.
The war between Japan and the U.S. caught the Philippines in transition to national independence and riven by social and political divisions. Many Filipinos agreed to collaborate with the Japanese, often under instructions from the exiled government, in hopes of securing independence or protecting the people. Meanwhile, hundreds of others, like Wenceslao Q. Vinzons, Marcos V. “Marking” Augustin and Macario Peralta took up arms and organized resistance.
In time, up to 1.3 million Filipinos may have supported more than 1,000 guerrilla units. The U.S. Army would recognize 260,715 guerrilla in 277 units.[7] An estimated 33,000 guerrillas lost their lives.[8]
Filipino guerrillas. (Image source: WikiMedia Commons)Guerrillas units independently chose whether or not to invite refugee U.S. soldiers into their movements. Many Filipinos, separated by pre-war rivalries, agreed to unite behind Americans who were likely to attract General Douglas MacArthur’s support; others, like Peralta, chose to sideline Americans to safeguard their independence.[9]
Through clashes with rival factions, guerrilla leaders consolidated local power and created new basis for post-war government. Meanwhile, MacArthur’s promised return freed the guerrillas from having to defeat the Japanese occupation forces; they only had to prepare for the return of American conventional military forces.
MacArthur had taken tentative steps to organize guerrilla resistance by sending officers like Lieutenant Colonel John Horan to marshal insurgents on Luzon and ordering commanders on other islands to prepare their own irregular campaigns. His removal to Australia combined with Japanese threats against the 12,000 U.S. and 66,000 Filipino POWs undermined this effort.
Still Americans like Robert Lapham, Edwin Ramsey, Russell Volckmann and Wendell Fertig refused to surrender or escaped prison camps and became key guerrilla leaders in their own rights.
U.S. troops in the Philippines, 1945. (Image source: WikiMedia Commons)After sporadic radio traffic alerted MacArthur of the rise of Philippine guerrillas, he established the Allied Intelligence Bureau and the Philippines Regional Section to validate the resistance and develop it under his command.
In January 1943 the U.S. military inserted a team of Filipino soldiers under Major Jesus Villamor into Negros to coordinate the resistance. This was the first of 43 submarine missions that delivered supplies and agents over the next two years.
MacArthur tailored this support so as to develop reliable guerrilla groups and prevent any one leader from challenging his authority. He also isolated and checked groups deemed unreliable, like the “People’s Army to Fight the Japanese,” also known as the Hukbalaháp or Huks, which sought a Communist revolution in the Philippines and opposed the return of the exiled government.[10]
A propaganda poster celebrating the Filipino resistance. (Image source: WikiMedia Commons)The Philippine resistance is a heroic tale of overcoming oppression and immense environmental challenges. Guerrillas endured pervasive exhaustion, disease, and malnourishment. They engaged in irregular warfare, espionage, prison raids and sabotage. They supported warfare on land, air, sea and undersea. Women played a large and dynamic role in the struggle, often as frontline fighters.
The scale of the resistance helped MacArthur convince President Roosevelt to approve his return to the Islands.[11]
Guerrillas would capture Japanese plans, conduct pre-invasion operations, guide invasion forces, and even serve as regular army combat units. With their support, MacArthur destroyed an army of 381,550 troops and nearly all of Japan’s remaining combat aircraft and naval vessels.[12] He also captured 115,755 Japanese prisoners – more than twice the number who surrendered on all other fronts during the entire war.[13]
Because of the guerrillas MacArthur got to return to the Philippines and Japan got the decisive battle it sought – just not with the outcome they desired.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: James Kelly Morningstar is the author of War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942-1945. A retired U.S. Army armor officer and decorated combat veteran with degrees from West Point and Kansas State University, he holds a master’s degree from Georgetown University, and a PhD from the University of Maryland. He currently teaches military history at Georgetown. He is the author of Patton’s War: A Radical Theory of War.
[1] Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines, The War In the Pacific (United States Army in World War II) (Washington, D.C.: The U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1989), 582.
[2] Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder, Colorado: WestviewPress, 1996), 204.
[3] See Alfred McCoy’s study of Filipino kinship networks. Alfred W. McCoy, “‘An Anarchy of Families’: The Historiography of State and Family in the Philippines,” An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines, ed. Alfred W. McCoy (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), 1, 10.
[4] Gene Z. Hanrahan, Japanese Operations Against Guerrilla Forces (Chevy Chase, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University, Operations Research Office, 1954), 5.
[5] Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food. (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012), 243.
[6] Wallace Edwards, Comfort Women: A History of Japanese Forced Prostitution During the Second World War (North Charleston, South Carolina; Absolute Crime Books, 2013), 77-78.
[7] Larry S. Schmidt, American Involvement in the Filipino Resistance Movement on Mindanao During the Japanese Occupation, Master of Military Arts and Science Thesis, US Army Command and General Staff College, 5.
[8] This number comes from the Hunters’ guerrilla leader Colonel Eleuterio ‘Terry’ Adevoso who became head of the Philippine Veterans Legion after the war. A.V.H. Hartendorp, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, Vol. II. (Manila: Bookmark, 1967), 610.
[9] Russell W. Volckmann, We Remained: Three Years Behind the Enemy Lines in the Philippines (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1954), 5.
[10] Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1977), 12.
[11] Most early American guerrilla leaders fell to disease and exhaustion and were replaced by a second wave of leaders who had spent the first year of the war sidelined by illness. Robert Lapham and Bernard Norling, Lapham’s Raiders: Guerrillas in the Philippines, 1942-1945. (Lexington, Kentucky: The University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 43.
[12] 255,795 of 381,550 were killed or died — nearly twenty percent of all Japanese soldiers who died during the war. Robert Ross Smith, Triumph in the Philippines (The United States Army in World War II: The War in the Pacific) (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1933), 694,
[13] A total of 1,140,429 Japanese military personnel died in combat between 1937 and 1945; 485,000 against U.S. forces. John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 218.
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