Volume 3, Issue No. 11
OPINION/COMMENTARY
/ News That Fears None, Views That Favor Nobody /
. . . . . A community service of The Filipino Web Channel (TheFilipinoWebChannel@gmail. com) and the Philippine Village Voice (PhilVoiceNews@gmail.com) for the information and understanding of Filipinos and the diverse communities in North America . . . . . .
Our latest as of Monday, November 8, 2021
~ Unsung, neglected, and duped, the hardy Filipinos had suffered the pain and agony of soldiery, yet in a moment of historic triumph, they found misery rather than honor. That's the worst indignity ever inflicted on them. Somebody had stolen the thunder and in its wake, made political capital to the utter disbelief of those who really fought hard and won. A son of a hero, Seattle-based media colleague Conrado "Sluggo" Rigor Jr., writes about his father and his comrades who helped turn the tide in the war against Japanese invaders in World War II. We yield this space to him to commemorate November 11, which is Veterans Day in the United States, and Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom, Canada, and other Commonwealth countries. - Editor
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A SON'S STORY
The Unsung Filipino Heroes of World War II
By CONRADO (SLUGGO) RIGOR, JR.
Guest Writer
Fate whispered to the warrior:
“You cannot withstand the storm…”
The warrior whispered back:
“I am the storm.”
- Author unknown
My father’s contemporaries tell me he was an authentic war hero---with emphasis on the word ‘authentic.’ Of course, this makes the family genuinely and silently proud.
A war history buff, I often wonder why there are lesser stories told about victories featuring Filipino soldiers during the last world war. Were they not key players who belonged to the triumphant Allied Forces of World War II in the Pacific?
Except for the overplayed MacArthur U-turn to the archipelago, military historians seem to focus more on defeats and infamy like Bataan, Corregidor, and the Death March. We commemorate these woeful events of subjugation every year but rarely remember those where the Filipino soldier had dutifully helped defeat the enemy.
(Related story about General Douglas MacArthur: https://filwebchannelmagazine.blogspot.com/2021/05/macarthurs-kept-woman-was-young.html)
In one crucial and bloody military operation in the final months of World War II, my father had led three all-Filipino battalions of the 121st Infantry, USAFIP-NL. Reinforced by gritty bolomen from the Mountain Province, they assaulted Bessang Pass in the rugged mountains of North Luzon.
It was Dad’s unit that broke through a formidable enemy defense line entrenched within the mountainous terrain of the Cordilleras. That hard-fought battle that lasted several months led to the surrender of the feared Tiger of Malaya, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, and other high-ranking Japanese Imperial Army and Naval flag officers who had regrouped in the Philippines from nearby Asian cities.
They had hoped that with the fabled Tiger in command, they could create a formidable stand. Among them was a ranking Admiral, the Vice-Chief of Staff of the Japanese Imperial Navy, who had helped maneuver the submarine attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
My father, “Daddy” to us his nine children and to our mother Erlinda, was not much of a talker. He was the silent, self-effacing-to-a-fault type. In close circles of friends, he was known as an upright, ram-rod-honest soldier-scholar, a poet, writer, and an ROTC reservist from the University of the Philippines. Close friends and associates called him “CB” or Condring.
In his writings, he had paid homage to poets E.E. Cummings and Jose Garcia Villa when he studied philosophy and letters as a government scholar at the Columbia U in New York following his wartime service. He took up courses there with the then General Dwight (Ike) Eisenhower. After a three-year stint in the U.S., he returned to the Philippines to help establish the English Department of what is now a national institution, the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) in Loakan, Baguio.
Throughout his forty-six abbreviated years on this planet, he rarely spoke about his wartime exploits. But his comrades-in-arms had recognized his dedication to the cause of the veterans when he was unanimously chosen to be the first secretary general of what is now the Veterans Federation of the Philippines (VFP), an organization that he had helped to organize so that there would be advocacy and substance to the peacetime campaigns of the forgotten Filipino soldier.
His comrades-in-arms (who became distinguished personages) like Fred Ruiz Castro, Macario Peralta, Carmelo Z. Barbero, Albert Fenix Sr., Pilar Normandy, Ernesto Rodriguez Jr., Francisco Bautista, Roberto Reyes, Eulogio Balao, Simeon Valdez, Cris De Vera, Jose Crisol, Nicanor Jimenez, Jose Banzon, Arnulfo Banez, Amador Daguio, Pio Escobar…to name a few… Dad’s peers who would frequent the quarters where the family lived at various military camps. They would recount what he and his comrades had accomplished that fateful day in June of 1944 when the rising morning sun was hidden by the clouds in the rugged ridges of Bessang Pass.
What Dad had dubbed in his post-war writings as “The Battle of the Clouds” is said to have marked the official end of hostilities in the Philippines after General Yamashita and his staff were escorted down the foot trails of the Cordilleras. From there the legendary Japanese general was taken to Manila for his celebrated military trial in Los Banos, Laguna and eventual execution as a war criminal.
Dad, in his journal writings, pointed to the battle in Bessang Pass as an “engagement of redemption,” coming full circle after “the shame and ignominy that was Bataan.” His colorful lines about the battle at Bessang would later be used rather extensively by a popular Senator who campaigned for the highest office of the land in 1966.
A wordsmith at heart, Dad had unwittingly laid out through his after-battle reports and writings a clear path for the ambitious politician to tread. The ex-military turned politician and his apple-polishers created in the process the impression that the dreaded General Yamashita had personally surrendered to him.
The truth is that he was safely tucked away as staffer in an obscure military personnel office. He had supposedly feigned sickness 85 kilometers away from the bloody battle. Asked by one of Dad’s officers why he was not in the frontlines that day, the then Major, who was in bed at Camp Spencer’s dispensary, replied wryly, “I am not in the mood for heroics.”
Barely twenty-three years later, after stints as congressman of Ilocos Norte and later as a senator, this political figure would create a controversy because of a film story and campaign line, “For every tear, a victory,” lines so utterly familiar to what Dad had written about the triumph at Bessang Pass.
Shortly after Dad suddenly died in May of 1960 at the age of 46 due to asthma complications (and because of incompetence of medical staffers at the V. Luna Medical Center in Quezon City), his writings, files, records and journals vanished. According to my mother, she had turned them over to some of Dad’s comrades-in-arms to be used in recording the USAPIP-NL’s role in World War II.
As if the trauma of Dad’s passing was not enough to his still-in-shock family, a devastating storm and flood two weeks after he was laid to rest nearly washed away the new home that he had lovingly built in Little Baguio, San Juan. Wet, torn and muddied, all of his library books, records, journals and files were damaged beyond repair. Whatever remained in his library about “The Battle of the Clouds” were lost forever.
Only in the writings, recollections and testimonies of those who had fought with him would remain. Only the tamper-free World War II files of the United States military would now reflect the names and the recorded roles of Filipino fighting men in the benighted peninsula of Bataan, the rock-like defense that was Corregidor, the infamy of the Death March and then the shining valor, redemption and gallantry that was Bessang Pass.
But many still wonder to this day if envy and prejudice that lurked in the hearts of those who had recorded and revisited historic military episodes would diminish the glory of the Filipino soldiers and guerillas who fought a war that was hardly theirs.
The book written by a communications officer and dear friend of Dad, Ernesto Rodriguez Jr. (founder and first president of the College Editors’ Guild (CEG), a prestigious organization of young Filipino academics) entitled “The Bad Guerillas of Northern Luzon,” is considered by historians as a factual and priceless chronicle of the complicated military campaign in that region during the war’s final months.
The book recounts the day-to-day pursuit of Yamashita’s retreating army by Filipino soldiers who were under the telegraphic command of Col. Russel Volkmann of the United States Armed Forces in the Philippines-North Luzon (USAFIP-NL). The desperate Japanese Imperial Army (with combatant-prisoner that were kidnapped Korean men) had ravaged Manila and areas of Central and Northern Luzon as they hurriedly retreated northward.
In a rare storytelling episode on our way to Dolores, Abra one summer vacation in the early 50s, when we were still in grade school, Dad parked the car on a roadside along the national highway and pointed to the mountain ranges in the distance where he had fought side-by-side with brave Filipino soldiers and guerilla bolomen as they pursued well-entrenched Japanese forces on Bessang Pass up in the rugged Cordilleras, only 20 miles away from historic Tirad Pass that featured young General Gregorio del Pilar.
Dad had affirmed that many of those who were fighting against his 3rd Battalion, 121st Inf., USAFIP-North Luzon, were young Koreans not more than 16 years old. Frightened, hungry and sick, the Korean boys were prisoners of war (POWs) who were forced by Yamashita to wear ill-fitting combat uniforms and to fight the advancing Filipinos. Many of them ran from their battle trenches to surrender to Dad’s men. #
Epilogue
About two decades after Dad was buried at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani in Fort Bonifacio, I met several of his old comrades-in-arms who had fought side-by-side with him in Bessang Pass. Each one had expressed dismay over an epic battle that could have been the most profound glory hour of the Filipino soldier in WW II if it were ever made public.
The surrender of the highest-ranking, most feared Japanese Imperial Army General to a gritty battalion of Filipino military officers supported only by a band of barefoot and spunky Ilocano Bolomen from the provinces of Abra, Ilocos Sur and the Mountain Province was all but forgotten. Why? Because the American officers behind the battle lines—far away in La Union----upon learning of the breakthrough against Yamasita’s almost-impregnable defense lines by the USAPI-NL’s 121st Bn. were in disbelief.
They ordered the Filipino detachment at Bessang Pass “not to announce anything until further orders.” Two days later, only after the Americans had arrived in Bessang Pass, that the announcement of Yamashita’s surrender was bannered to the whole world.
Even today, Dad’s aging comrades can only shake their heads in silent anger. One outspoken Filipino officer commented: “Well…the ‘I Shall Return’ PR blitzkrieg and full-bore propaganda campaign had to have a glorious spin to it and Bessang Pass was a sure fit.”
(The other surprising spin to the historic surrender of the Tiger of Malaya was that he reportedly refused to emerge from his cave in Bessang unless there were American officers to receive him---for fear that the Filipinos would kill him right there. This was pure rubbish, Dad and his comrades would declare. For his war crimes, Yamashita was summarily executed by the Americans in Los Banos anyway.)
And so, countless Filipino warriors remain unheralded, forgotten and buried under the WWII radar screen of valor and sacrifice. So like that haunting song of patriotic servitude, Dad and his gallant comrades “…will never die, they’ll just fade away…” Burning in the hearts of warriors who fought for freedom and who revere truth is a conviction that redemption always comes in the end game. #
_________
Conrado (Sluggo) Rigor, Jr., editor and publisher of FilAm Bulletin in Seattle, WA, is an organizer-advocate for aging Filipino WWII veterans, their widows and orphans. He had served as adviser-supporter to the Filipino War Veterans of Washington (FWVW) now headed by 96-year-old Commander Greg Garcia, a retired civil engineer from Batac, Ilocos Norte who had participated in the Bessang Pass campaign as a communications engineer for 15th Inf., USAFIP-North Luzon. (Copyright 2021. All Rights Reserved).
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