Fighting on all Fronts (59 page)

Women such as Sakdalista Salud Algabre had played an active role in earlier resistance movements. The Huk, however, were reportedly the
first significant political or resistance organisation to actively recruit them. Jesus Lava, a post-war general secretary of the PKP, estimated that females made up around 10 percent of the guerrillas. In a deeply conservative country—because of the Catholic tradition and the central role of the family in rural life—the participation of women as commanders and comrades in arms, rather than simply as sisters and wives, provoked passionate debate about the role and status of women in Filipino society. It also created conflict within the Huk and the PKP, whose ranks harboured the prejudices of the time.
⁶⁵
Nevertheless, rebel practice seems far more enlightened than the “civilised” Japanese or US occupiers. Taruc paid particular tribute to two commanders—Remidios Gomez, a former beauty queen and AMT organiser who took the name Liwayway (Dawn), and a former KPMP organiser who took the name Guerrero (Warrior):

Liwayway…[prior to a battle] would comb her hair, apply lipstick, manicure and polish her nails. “Why shouldn’t I?” she said. “One of the things I am fighting for is the right to be myself”… Guerrero…[was] fond of wearing a man’s clothes. She became adept at handling an automatic rifle, and would command on the firing line. She was one of the organisers of Apalit Squadron 104, which became one of our best. Guerrero was also a good speaker and an effective rallier of the people’s support.
⁶⁶

By September 1942 the number of Huk squadrons had grown from five to 35. Gradually, the amateur fighters, who had been trained primarily in labour solidarity, learned through military engagements to become efficient soldiers. The Japanese mounted a show of force against the rebels at this time. But the atrocities and terror tactics of the invaders only drove more locals into Huk ranks. By the end of the year the guerrillas had 5,000 active supporters. US military analyst Lawrence Greenberg later wrote:

In January 1943, Huk attacks resumed against Police Constabulary garrisons and Japanese supply depots. As their tactical successes grew and the people saw them as more effective fighters, Huk strength grew again—doubling to 10,000 by March 1943. As their strength and popularity mounted, the Huks activated additional squadrons and helped form an all-Chinese force.
⁶⁷

In addition to the Huks’ main presence in central Luzon and the widespread, but less effective USAFFE (United States Armed Forces in the Far East), there were highly effective fighters in the southern islands
of Mindanao and Sulu. Despite their superior resources, a hint of weakness on the side of the US and their protégés in the USAFFE emerges from popular anecdotage. When US forces on Corregidor gave up the fight, General Wainwright ordered all USAFFE fighters to surrender. Their commander, Wenceslao Vinzons, angrily refused. The order was ridiculous, he argued, because local guerrilla fighters had, up to that point, beaten the Japanese. In the following period Huk fighters travelled to the Bataan peninsula to stock up on weapons and munitions dumped by the Americans. Similar procurement exercises occurred in other provinces.
⁶⁸

Huk guerrillas were seen as heroes. They killed some 25,000 Japanese, Philippine Constabulary (which worked hand in glove with the Japanese High Command from very early on) and spies. They fought on multiple fronts: against the Japanese, the constabulary, the Ganaps and against potentially thousands of other pro-Japanese collaborators who not only gave up guerrillas to be tortured and murdered, but who sometimes participated in such activities. “There is a point”, wrote Taruc, “…where ‘turn the other cheek’ means to have your head knocked off. Rather than have liberty in our country destroyed, we would destroy the destroyers.” In such circumstances mistakes were bound to be made. “Innumerable cases of execution of Filipinos, deemed to have had some kind of rapport with any Japanese, were perpetrated to such an extent that many Filipinos feared the guerrillas more than the Japanese”, wrote the historian Teodoro Agoncillo.
⁶⁹
Yet the guiding principles were clear. Two documents drafted with the assistance of the Chinese guerrillas, “The Fundamental Spirit of the Hukbalahap” and “The Iron Discipline of the Hukbalahap”, set protocols for interactions both within the movement and between the guerrillas and the people:

Everyone shares the same fortune and endures the same hardship… Insults, coercion or deception are forbidden… Neither officers nor soldiers can have any individual privileges… A revolutionary army should not only love and protect the people, but it should represent the people… It should struggle for the benefit of the people. It should regard the people’s benefit as its own benefit in all things it does.
⁷⁰

A severe defeat in March 1943 at the hands of 5,000 Japanese troops resulted in demoralisation and some strategic rethinking. One result was greater emphasis on broad civilian resistance in the villages and towns. Barrio United Defence Corps (BUDC) were originally developed in 1942 to help supply and provide intelligence to the guerrillas
and, importantly, to govern in rebel territory. “After centuries of [appointed administrators] the people were given the opportunity to rule themselves”, wrote Taruc.
⁷¹
Barrio councils set up schools, carried out anti-Japanese propaganda and administered local non-military justice. Ultimately, self-governing areas under the democratic control of the inhabitants were considered facts on the ground that would shape national politics and lay the basis for independent Philippines at the end of the war. “From the experiences and the pioneering of the BUDC it was only a short step to the establishment of local people’s governments, which we began to build in the last stage of the war. The people’s horizons had been immeasurably expanded”.
⁷²
This was problematic. BUDCs were conceived as cross-class alliances, which would display to those who were not peasants “that the resistance movement was not ‘a class organisation’.”

The Hukbalahap was as much a political as a military organisation. “Mass schools” were set up to train organisers who could forge links between various resistance organisations and propagate the ideas of democracy and national independence in order to broaden the base of the rebellion and prepare for victory. Similar study groups were established in the guerrilla units.

The guerrillas regrouped after the March defeat and by the end of the year were better positioned. In Huk strongholds “both the landlords and the Japanese grew reluctant to attempt to seize any of the rice harvest. Freed from the heavy rice payments to their landlords, many of the peasants recalled 1942-1947 as the period in which food was most abundant”.
⁷³
They also fought in southern Luzon, particularly Laguna province. Huk growth alarmed the US. USAFFE detachments in Nueva Ecija province fought against the rebels from as early as 1942—sometimes in concert with the Philippine Constabulary and even the Japanese. Captain Alejo Santos, commander of the Bulacan Military Area, in 1943 described the Huk as the enemy.
⁷⁴
In 1944 General MacArthur, the commanding officer of the US military’s Pacific operations, ordered US-controlled guerrilla units to take them on.
⁷⁵
The broader momentum of the war and USAFFE disorder seem to have made this a distraction rather than a disaster. The US was pushing back into South East Asia and the Japanese were redeploying troops from Luzon. Guerrillas across the archipelago were on the offensive.

Just before the US regular forces landed on the islands in late 1944, the PKP started spreading a leaflet with the slogans “Long live America, defender of democracy! Destroy the puppetry! Establish people’s
democratic governments everywhere!” PKP leaders Casto Alejandrino, Juan Feleo and Jesus Lava were elected provisional governors in the liberated provinces of Pampanga, Nueva Ecija and Laguna in early 1945 as BUDCs gave way to local government in town after town. However, the party would soon find that the leaflet’s first exaltation was misplaced. The US Army took control of the archipelago and was little interested in defending the democratic advances made in its absence.

Before the Japanese invasion a small coalition of groups had campaigned against Japanese aggression and atrocities, and against the Axis: these included the League for the Defence of Democracy, the Friends of China and the PKP. These groups organised demonstrations and boycotts of Japanese goods, along with fundraising for China. After Japan invaded they formed the core of the United Front, which sought to bring together all resistance organisations, regardless of political differences, and coordinate the struggle against the occupying army. Other elements operating underground included the organisation Free Philippines with its movable radio broadcasting anti-Japanese and pro-US propaganda, as well as Filipino programmes.

US Army intelligence sought to “decipher the complicated relations” between the PKP and other elements but didn’t achieve much clarity. It did register the fact that Huk leaders “preferred legitimate political activity to violence”.
⁷⁶
With a large Communist Party in the field and a broader front embracing the non-communist left and other progressive sectors, we might think that the key initiatives came from those structures. According to Kerkvliet, however, connections with these political currents were weak. “The PKP did not…control the peasant movement in central Luzon during the 1930s and 1940s, the Hukbalahap, or the Huk rebellion itself”, he wrote.
⁷⁷
Untangling the alliances is difficult. The PKP didn’t want to go it alone and focused on keeping the United Front together. According to Saulo, the party kept a low profile so as not to alienate the non-communist sections of the resistance movement.
⁷⁸
Jesus Lava, along with William Pomeroy, a communist who fought in the US Army and the post-war Huk resistance (see below), maintained, “All leaders of significance in the rebellion were party members”.
⁷⁹

An ex-member of the 1970s party, Francisco Nemenzo, convincingly explained away the contradictions between Kerkvliet’s and Lava and Pomeroy’s accounts. The Socialist Party, and the unified PKP, he argued:

derived its strength from the fact that it was integrated in the indigenous revolutionary tradition, but its chief weakness lay in the failure to transcend that tradition, to set the movement on a genuine Marxist footing. In the course of armed struggle, the PKP nurtured a millenarian-populist outlook because that was the easiest way to rally the peasants.
⁸⁰

The error wasn’t simply due to the mitigating circumstances of war, but rooted, Nemenzo argued, in the modus operandi of the SP, which built the largest mass organisation (the AMT) but was hostile to theoretical work. The organisation adapted itself to and even encouraged the prevailing superstitions and prejudices of the peasantry. Part confirmation of this can be found in Taruc’s testimony that in the party “all of us… were free to follow our own methods and our own ideas”.
⁸¹
Of Abad Santos he also wrote: “He knew people better than he knew economics, so there was more psychology than theory in his approach to the movement. He had an immense bag of tricks…which he used to prod the peasants into action”.
⁸²
Taruc was a talented protégé, but even after three years in the group—during which time he had risen to the post of national secretary—he clearly found it difficult to communicate in secular socialist language. Of party organising in 1938, he related:

At demonstrations I got up and spoke to the people… I had not read Marx, or anything about Marxism, so I used quotations from the Bible to defend my arguments. Strip from the ideas and preachings of Christ the cloak of mysticism placed over them by the Church, and you really have many of the ideas of socialism. “We cannot sit back and wait for God to feed the mouths of our hungry children”, I said. “We must realise that God is within ourselves, and that when we act to provide for our own welfare and to stop injustice we are doing the work of God”.
⁸³

The approach was born of Taruc’s limitations and far removed from that of a theoretically adept agitator. There seems more to the low political level of the PKP than the Socialist Party simply diluting the unified party, however; the socialists numbered just 300 members at the time of the merger. The communists had their own theoretical shortcomings.
⁸⁴
Jose Lava, an elder brother of Jesus and also for a time PKP general secretary, admitted that, in the early 1930s at least, the party’s organisational and propaganda drive in central Luzon was “guided more by determination and enthusiasm rather than solid Marxist knowledge”.
⁸⁵
The 1938 unity convention had passed a resolution on educational work, which proposed weekly classes:

The convention places before the whole party the problem of the education, selection and promotion of the leading personnel in all the party organisations. Great attention should be placed upon the Marxist-Leninist training of the leaders of basic organisations of the party, as well as the training of party members who are carrying on work inside the mass organisations.
⁸⁶

Yet there were obvious limitations to carrying out such an undertaking. First, the PKP had only 196 members several months before the merger.
⁸⁷
James Allen, a CPUSA envoy offering significant guidance to the party during this period, estimated that the core of the organisation numbered “some 40 or 50 comrades”—a minuscule number. Second, the organisation was still developing and was devoid of both the history and the theorists of the European workers’ movement. And the Filipino working class was relatively tiny and fragmented; by 1940 still almost half of the labour force was employed in domestic and personal service.
⁸⁸
That was not the most conducive environment for the development of organic intellectuals. Third, while the PKP grew rapidly in the lead-up to the merger, its base was shifting from Manila and the working class to the countryside, where the land question rather than the labour question was often central and the fundamental principles of Marxism were less relevant. Urban party membership further declined with the advent of war because worker members were instructed to leave and give support to the guerrilla struggle; the membership of the party was almost totally recast by an influx of peasants.
⁸⁹
Fourth, the tension between leading the mass work, keeping together a variety of anti-Japanese fronts and working through revolutionary theory would have been substantial. Finally, the Japanese occupation again pushed the communists underground.