World War II in the Philippines

What may not have been anticipated either by the American allies, was the ferocity and intensity of the Filipino response to the invasion. All through the war years, from the realization of defeat as superior forces overran the country, to the final battle for liberation, the Filipinos waged a guerrilla war against the interloper with the incapacity to come to a truce.

The guerrilla movement took root in every region, in every province of the Philippines, uniting people over differences of language, religion, culture, custom, and tradition. It was truly national in form and substance.

The guerrilla movement had the strategic effect of tying down in the islands scores of Japanese infantry divisions that otherwise would have been used to invade other territory. How the Filipino resistance movement helped win World War II for the Allies has not been fully measured, but doubtless it was crucial to the Allied cause. It may have been decisive to ultimate victory.

How decisive it was for the Filipino mind has not been fully measured either, for the guerrilla fighter became a permanent fixture on the Philippine scene. World War II came to an end, but the guerrilla war in the Philippines has raged to the present, although the fighters may now be fighting for or against certain causes the nature of which might confuse many Filipinos.

The fact remains that the resistance against the Japanese during World War II united the Filipino people as no other factor would. It was the common cause that homogenized the nation as José Rizal could only dream of when he organized the Liga Filipina in 1892. No other cause brought the fragmented archipelago together as the resentment against the interloper did. Mountain dweller and city-bred, society scion and slum bum, Muslim and Christian, from Batanes to Sulu, they presented a united Filipino front, although they may have operated separately and independently of each other.

This was the legacy of the holocaust. It created a new sense of Filipinohood.

As to the second condition cited earlier, by its brutality and rapacity, by the bankruptcy of its values as an occupation force, by the subhuman conduct of its occupying troops, the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II subjected the indigenous people to a moral degradation from which they hardly ever recovered.

Seventy-five years ago, Japan officially surrendered aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. The 23-minute ceremony ended the Pacific war, which had started on December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was bombed. It also ended nearly four bitter years of Japanese occupation in the Philippines—a war that shattered the Pearl of the Orient and killed approximately one million civilians. But today not many people know of the tremendous sacrifices of the Filipinos during World War II.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the Filipinos on December 28, 1941At the same time, the Arcadia Conference was taking place in Washington, DC. Winston Churchill had crossed the Atlantic to ensure that the United States would fulfill the terms of Rainbow Plan 5, the Allied War Plan developed during the American British Dutch Australian (ABDA) conversations from January to April 1941, based on a Europe First Policy—prioritizing American military resources to win the war against Hitler before that against Japan.

The US Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), created on July 26, 1941, consisted of about 100,000 Filipinos and 20,000 American soldiers. Their main task was to perform a delaying action on the mouth of Manila Bay. Not a month had passed after the Japanese invasion of the Philippines on December 8, before these troops were placed on half rations. Despite promises by their commanding general, Douglas MacArthur, that thousands of troops and hundreds of planes were being dispatched, no help ever came.