The Philippine Story by David Bernstein

Author:David Bernstein [Bernstein, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Wars & Conflicts (Other), United States, 20th Century, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9781789122886
Google: XlGHDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 12968701
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Co.
Published: 1947-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

VIII—THE WAR YEARS

EVERYBODY KNOWS how was came to the Islands: how the Japanese, a few hours after Pearl Harbor, bombed many targets in the Philippines; how they landed at several points in the archipelago; how they pushed the American and Filipino troops back by dint of superior numbers and equipment; how Manila, declared an open city, was first raided and then occupied; and how the American and Filipino forces fell back to Bataan and held out through long months of ceaseless fighting, of short rations and few weapons, of hope turned to fatalism and finally to despair.

Bataan and Corregidor are now enshrined in the military history of both the United States and the Philippines.

But the lasting import of the battle was political. It lay in the fact that, for every American fighting man on the peninsula, there were at least four Filipino fighting men. It lay in the fact that the heroism of these Filipino soldiers matched, man for man, the heroism of the Americans. It lay in the fact that the Filipinos were not impressed soldiery, not mercenaries, not servants, but upright and self-respecting individuals who were making a conscious choice when they proved that they were willing to die in resisting the enemy.

American heroism on Bataan was, after all, no matter for wonder—except for the universal wonder at any mortars willingness to risk his life in any cause. The war with Japan, after all, was an old-fashioned war, in the minds of most who fought it. Japan had, without provocation, violated American soil, in Hawaii and the Philippines. The violation had to be punished, not only because of the nation’s sense of honor, but because otherwise there would be no guarantee that it would not happen again. Unlike the war against Germany, in which was involved the American contempt for the idea of fascism, this was a war by one nation against another nation which had transgressed.

For the Filipinos it was not so simple. True, the Japanese had violated Philippine soil. But they had done so while the American flag still flew over that soil, while American sovereignty was supreme. And the Japanese insisted they bore no grudge against the Filipinos; indeed, they were almost apologetic for the inconvenience caused to the Filipinos.

Such propaganda seemed ridiculous to the white man of the West; it was not so ridiculous to the Oriental.

The Japanese spoke of Asia for the Asiatics. They spoke of all the Occidental stupidities and cupidities in the Far East, of British arrogance and American crassness. They aroused the suffocating memories of humiliations which every Oriental had experienced if he had come in contact with the white man. They talked of Anglo-American imperialism, of Dutch and French greed. They pointed to the fact that Japan herself was an Asiatic nation, that by her ethnic origins and by her traditions she deserved the support of her fellow-Asiatics. They pointed to her military successes—her early victory over Tsarist Russia in 1905, her successful challenge to the Western world in

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