LONG before Japan’s Imperial troops occupied the Philippines, many Japanese civilians—donning innocent-looking merchants’ outfits—roamed the country’s coastal communities in the far far northwest facing Luzon Bay—by culture too trusting and had befriended many of those from the Land of the Rising Sun.
They enjoyed the blessings of the Commonwealth administration as they worked on their nearby farms that glistened with grains of gold in the harvest months that began in October or were fully carpeted by deep green native tobacco leaves or vegetables in the seething summer.
But that was before Japanese naval bombers made a treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941. It was Dec. 8 in the Philippines.
The attack prompted the United States to declare war against Japan. The war in the Pacific theater had begun. Germany and Italy, both allies of Japan, declared war against the United States and Britain, igniting the global war.
The war in Europe itself was triggered by the invasion of Poland by the Germans on Sept. 1, 1939. But the war was fundamentally a conflict between two ideologies: democracy and totalitarianism.
When Japan was included in the alliance of Germany and Italy, they were called the Axis Powers. By 1941, Japan, with an expanding population, was on its way to conquer other territories, two of which were Manchuria and Indochina.
This put the Philippines yet again on the war map after Emperor Hirohito’s Imperial Forces and Kamikaze fighters occupied the country for three years and put their foot down on civil liberties.
This rudely interrupted the 10-year preparatory period for the restoration of Philippine Independence, known as the Commonwealth. The country’s economy was pushed to meet the demands of the Japanese war efforts, its educational structure dismantled to enable the Filipinos to think along Tokyo’s track, and political life was shaped to the Japanese-sponsored Republic.
But the three years of Japanese occupation also saw the immediate birth of the resistance movement. In fact, even before the entry of the Japanese in Manila, guerrilla units had been formed for what was believed, wrongly, a short stay in the country of the enemy from the Land of the Rising Sun.
On Jan. 3, 1942, the commander-in-chief of the Japanese Army, only a day after enemy occupation of the capital warned Filipinos against “offering resistance or committing hostile acts against the Japanese forces in any manner.”
The guerrillas did three major functions: one, to ambush or otherwise kill enemy soldiers and civilians; two, to relay important intelligence reports to Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Australia, like size of army, troop movements, number of Japanese ships, disposition of troops, activities of the Japanese Military Administration headed by a Director General who was an Army officer, and other necessary intelligence information; and, three, to liquidate spies and Japanese sympathizers.
The United States had underestimated Japan. In January 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt opined, in a letter to Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, that Japan had no near-term purpose of moving against the United States.
In fact, the Americans had believed the Philippines, once acquired as a colony by the United States, would have strategic value and that no foreign power would dare stand up to it.
But the Pearl Harbor “surprise offensive” changed all that.
Japan was rising fast as a military power in the Pacific and defenses in the Philippines were not sufficient. Washington’s military anxieties heightened.
But when President Manuel L. Quezon, soon after the inauguration of the Commonwealth government, was able to prevail upon Gen. MacArthur to become Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, Washington’s apprehensions were somehow addressed. MacArthur wanted to establish a Filipino Army, strong enough to repel a foreign invasion.
Responding to MacArthur’s vision, the Commonwealth Assembly passed Commonwealth Act No. 1, the National Defense Act, which provided for a citizens’ army supported by bomber squadrons.
A total 108 Japanese bombers and 84 zero fighters were airborne on Dec. 8 from Japan’s Formosa-based 11th Imperial Air Fleet and speeding south toward Luzon, flying past the rolling hills of northern Philippines on a mission to bomb the US bomber base at Clark Field, some 100 kilometers north of Manila.
Zero pilot Saburo Sakai chopped up two B-17 bombers on the Clark runway then got in his sights an airborne American P-40 fighter for the first kill of World War II. Sakai later became the leading Japanese air ace.
On that same day, 17 planes hovered over Camp John Hay in Baguio and dropped bombs unexpectedly. Although most of the bombs fell on open spaces, some bombs directly hit the Post Headquarters building, the Quartermaster warehouse, the radio station, and the big concrete Officers Mess Hall (guest house).
Soon after the bombing, Japanese civilians voluntarily reported to Camp John Hay, requesting to be interned to escape reprisals from the native headhunters, who were even then being assembled and riled against the Japanese traitors. In all, 524 civilians reported to Camp John Hay.
The Japanese internees were later transferred to the custody of the Philippine officials.
On Dec. 22, the main Japanese attack was launched at dawn, when 43,000 troops of Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army waded ashore on coconut-dotted Lingayen Gulf, 295 kms south of Pinili. After only 11 days, the Japanese occupied Manila, and the band played the Japanese anthem “Kimigayo” as sunset guns boomed a snappy salute while the Japanese hoisted the Rising Sun.
On Jan. 9, the Japanese offensive began with artillery barrage that shook the northern end of the Bataan Peninsula. But the Japanese suffered 300 dead two days later when they charged against Filipino and American lines.
On the eastern side of the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on Dec. 8 declared, following a pledge to the United States a month earlier, war against Japan.
In Southeast Asia, the Japanese prepared carefully for war, especially the assault on the Philippines where many Japanese merchants had been deployed in the run-up to the Pearl Harbor bombing.
On Dec. 28, 1941, President Roosevelt assured the Filipinos of Washington’s help.
“I give to the people of the Philippines,” Roosevelt declared, “my solemn pledge that their freedom will be redeemed and their independence established and protected. The entire resources, in men and material, of the United States stand behind that pledge.”
Days before, Japanese landings were made in Batan island in the north of the country, Aparri and Pandan near Vigan, Legazpi in Albay as well as Davao and Jolo in the country’s far south.
They also made key landings in Lingayen in Pangasinan, in Mauban, Atimonan and Siain in Quezon province along Lamon Bay.
What aggravated the visibly nearly helpless Philippine position during the landings was the failing health of the Commonwealth leader, Manuel Quezon.
His worries over the sufferings of his countrymen had not helped any as he slid down to physical weakness.
On Dec. 24, 1941, MacArthur informed Quezon that he, his family and some of his officials were to leave for Corregidor, the tadpole-shaped island at the mouth of Manila Bay.
Quezon also called the last meeting of his official family and informed them of the decision to hole up in the island fortress.
Earlier that month, on Dec. 10, residents of the coastal towns of Ilocos Norte were stunned with the sudden appearance of Japanese Imperial troops at the start of their occupation of the shoreline municipalities.
On April 9, 1942, following one of the fiercest battles that scorched the slopes of Mount Samat overlooking Corregidor and the often placid Manila Bay, some 78,000 Filipino and American troops surrendered to the Japanese Imperial Forces, in the words of its commanding officer Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainright Jr., “to end the useless effusion of blood” on the peninsula.
The Battle of Bataan had ended. But it was, in the view of a soldier who fought there, the beginning of yet another battle— not to fight but to stay alive.
It was on the slopes of Mt. Samat that battle-scarred and exhausted American and Filipino soldiers surrendered to the Japanese, ending the organized resistance of the US Armed Forces in the Far East in the early months of the Pacific war.
Only 54,000 men survived the subsequent “Death March” of 112 kms on hot, dusty roads across the Bataan peninsula to San Fernando in Pampanga before the train ride to a piteously congested prison camp in the now lahar-devastated Central Luzon Plains town of Capas, Tarlac.
The town is about 10 kms northwest of the site of the Kamikaze—sometimes referred to as the Divine Wind—Airfield in Mabalacat, off the northeast perimeter fence of Clark Economic Zone.
But many, decades after the notorious Death March, waited in vain for justice.
Some have died without seeing the first letter of the term. One, who participated in the Death March, retired Col. Bartolome Gacad, wore on his death bed a T-shirt that read “Justice for the Filipino WW II veterans.”
It was a powerful reminder of a controversy that had resonated for six decades, after what military historians had described as one of the worst atrocities of World War II.
Each passing year, the veteran lines got thinner. But their search for justice was a continuing, if painful, drama.