The Philippine Online Chronicles

For a generation that lived through 40 years of relative peace --- while being weaned on Spam and Hollywood --- that would later be known as the Commonwealth Era --- the 1941-1945 Asia Pacific war was, in many ways, life-changing for most. Ask your parents or grandparents about the war and you are likely to hear stories of death and destruction; as well as acts of bravery and heroism (real or imagined); of lost or missing family members, friends and neighbors; or how the more resourceful ones were able to survive the war by hiding out in the mountains, subsisting mostly on bananas and root crops.

Stories and personal recollections of wartime experiences abound in these islands. With the last great war only a few generations past, you’d be hard put to find a family that doesn’t have at least one living member who has stories of life during the war years. And like traditional folk stories, most, if not all, are handed down as anecdotes or as family legends to succeeding generations by those who went through and survived those four terrible years of brutal occupation by the Imperial Japanese Army.

While the country itself was no stranger to war, having been under the rule of the conquistadors for four centuries, the war that was brought upon by Japan’s dream of colonial rule over Asia was of such magnitude that no one, not even the veterans of the war against the Spaniards, and later, the Americans, were prepared for the tsunami of events that was to befall upon them.

Except for an anecdote or two, I have never heard of any personal stories about the war either from my mom or my late dad. No personal tales of wartime heroism or battle stories (I doubt if anyone in my family had even joined the military, much less the guerillas) made it to the family archives, but there were plenty of tales circulated on both sides of my family which provided me a glimpse of what life was like during the Japanese occupation.

At a tender age of two, mom was still too young to remember the day World War 2 came crashing down on her hometown of Albay, in the Bicol province. She did, however, recall being gathered up and thrown into a clothes-filled blanket by my grandmother, who, upon learning of the approaching bayonet-wielding invaders, fled with her brothers to seek refuge in the nearby hills where my maternal great grandmother owned a tract of land.

My grandfather, though, wasn’t able to go with them; he was advised instead to hide in the mountains in the more remote part of the province, along with some members of the town’s Chinese community. Word had it then that the Japanese soldiers were targeting the local Chinese whom they suspected of financially supporting the anti-Japanese movement in China. How true that claim was, I will never know. But such claim of selective atrocity by the Japanese Imperial Army towards certain ethnic group has its basis.  An example would be the Sook Ching Massacre in Singapore where --- depending on whose side (Japanese historians or Singapore’s Chinese community) you believe --- thousands of Chinese males who were perceived as anti-Japanese, were hauled off by the Kempetai to the different parts of the island and systematically executed.

The townsfolk, according to the story, were initially surprised at the swiftness and efficiency of the military operation, as the soldiers seemed to know where and who to look for. As it turned out, a number of the town’s Japanese residents who were thought to be ordinary traders and vendors before the war, were in fact spies working for the Japanese Army. The first to be rounded up for execution, as the story goes, were the town toughies that used to bully the “hapless” Japanese, who later turned out to be ranking officers in the Imperial Army.

Mom’s cousins, meanwhile, weren’t able to join my grandfather and the other Chinese townsfolk in the boondocks; instead, they were hurriedly taken to one of the small islands that dot the province, where a family friend owned a property, and waited out the duration of the war living off the land and bounty from the sea --- which explains why mother’s cousins were all such good swimmers and can fish and dive with the best fishermen.

It was different on my dad’s side. As was the practice of some Filipino-Chinese (the term Tsinoy had yet to be coined) families before the war, my native-born father was shipped off to China at the tender age of nine by my grandfather. He spent the war years toiling the rice fields in the Fujian province, until he was shipped back to the land of his birth in the early fifties. He was then already in his late teens.

But as unremarkable his experiences were during the war, life in wartime China was still hard. The threat of hunger from food shortages was always present, and there was constant danger from the Japanese Army, whose reputation for brutality, such as what happened during the Rape of Nanking, preceded it.

Some of the “wartime” (as the old-timers not-so-fondly call those days) stories that I’ve heard as a young kid came not from our numerous blood relatives, but from  my parent’s friends and old uncles who have since passed on to the afterlife.

One such story was from a family friend in the old neighborhood. I was told how he, as a young man studying in the city, trekked all the way from war-torn Manila to Bicol… on foot. Not an easy feat (no pun intended), considering that the province is more than 600 kilometers away from the capital city.

The trains had stopped running at the time after an aerial bombardment destroyed a portion of the railroad track somewhere in Bicol, so the obvious choice then was to walk… either that, or stay in the city and risk death.

Fleeing the constant bombardment and the encroaching Japanese army, he and a couple of friends slowly made their way to the southernmost province of Luzon by following the railroad track, stopping to rest at every town they passed, and making sure to avoid the marauding soldiers along the way.

It took them almost six days to reach the end of the track in the city of Legaspi, and from there, the travel-weary refugees made another 80 or so kilometer trip to the town of Matnog in Sorsogon, where they chartered a boat to take them to the island of Samar where our friend was able to reunite with his parents.

Among those caught in the war between the US and Imperial Japan were a number of American missionaries and their families based in Legaspi City. There was no immediate panic after Pearl Harbor, as most civilians still did not fully understand the danger and the fact that the Pacific Fleet was largely immobilized. Many decided to stay put and hoped for the best. It was only after the Japanese landed north of Manila and started a rapid push towards the south did the missionaries begin to realize they would soon be captured by the Japanese. By that time they had little or no time to make preparations to evacuate.

At a great risk, many Bicolano members of the congregation hid them up the mountains where they lived, ate and waited out the war with the others for a couple of months. It was only after the Japanese authorities gave an ultimatum to the civilians to give up the Americans did the missionaries, fearing for the lives and safety of the civilians who tried to help them, surrendered to the Japanese.

Many had lost hope to ever see them alive again as they were taken to an interment camp in the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. But as fate would have it, they all survived and returned to the province after the war to continue their missionary work.

It’s a given that war always brings out the worst in man, but it also brings out the best in many, as some of the stories showed the grit and determination of the Filipinos to survive amidst the carnage. In spite of what the movies try to tell us, war is never glamorous, nor exciting, as many of the survivors will tell us. There is no glory in war, whether to the victor or (especally) to the vanquished. Death and destruction are the only things certain, and as Leo Tolstoy, in his novel “War and Peace,” wrote: "War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war."

Photo: “Street fighting 2” from ww2.incolor.com, Some Rights Reserved

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Forty-something and single, the author has long detached himself from the corporate world where, for nearly twenty years, he used to work as a sales and marketing executive for a well-known clothing manufacturer. Since 2002, he's been doing free-lance consultative work in the same capacity during his corporate years. Writing, on the other hand, was a hobby he indulged in five years ago when, out of boredom, he started writing down his thoughts in a blog, which continues to this day.