By Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan

 

Part 21: An old order gives way to reshaping regional geopolitics

The journey through the annals of human barbarism is a somber testament to the darker side of history. These lessons serve as stark reminders of the devastating consequences when fear, intolerance, hate and power coalesce, leading to the systematic dehumanization of others and the breakdown of law and order perpetuated by those who govern the people.

          The ancient Roman gladiatorial games, the Spanish inquisition, African slave trade, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge regime, the Rwandan and Bosnian genocide, the reign of the ISIS, and of late the extermination of the Palestinians by Israel, are classic examples of historical savagery.

Philippine experiences

          Closer to home, the Americans have been able to cover up massacres in Balangiga and Bud Dajo.

During the Philippine-American War, following a successful surprise attack by Filipino villagers on a U.S. garrison in Balangiga in 1901, Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith ordered his troops to turn the island of Samar into a “howling wilderness” killing anyone over the age of 10 who was capable of bearing arms.

Estimated civilian casualties ranged up to 5,000 civilians.

In May 1902, Smith faced a court-martial for his orders, being tried not for murder or other war crimes, but for “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline”. The court-martial found Smith guilty and sentenced him only “to be admonished by the reviewing authority.”

To ease the subsequent public outcry in America, Secretary of War Elihu Root recommended that Smith be retired. President Roosevelt accepted this recommendation, and ordered Smith’s retirement from the Army, with no additional punishment.

Gruesome redux

Five years past and about almost a decade since the Americans assumed control over the islands following the Spanish-American War, the occupation remained a deeply contested issue at the US mainland

A feature in New Lines Magazine narrates that sometime in October 1907, the African-American sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who is also the first black bestowed with  a PhD from Harvard University, received a black-and-white photograph taken the year previous.

“I think that picture is the most illuminating thing I have ever seen,” Du Bois wrote. “I want especially to have it framed and put upon the walls of my recitation room, to impress upon my students, what wars and especially ‘Wars of Conquest’ really mean.”

News Lines continued: At first glance, the sepia-toned photograph shows merely a grim battlefield with soldiers wearing slouch hats, standing and sitting around what appears to be a ditch bridged by a heavy tree trunk. The ground is littered with debris, while a collapsed hut is visible on the right. In the background, rising smoke half obscures the outline of the jungle.

But a closer look shows something much darker.

A photograph taken on the morning of March 8, 1906, on the eastern crest of Bud Dajo (John R. White Papers, Knight Library, University of Oregon) documents American soldiers using human cadavers as trophies of war, unmindful that at the center lays a half-naked woman with her equally dead infant.

Halfway out of the ditch, the unmistakable form of a woman’s body, head thrown back as if in agony, can be made out. Her right breast is exposed, and a swaddled infant is lying by her side, the small head resting in her lap. Both are clearly dead. Arms and legs and faces emerge from the shapeless piles in the foreground of the image. Yet it still takes a few moments for the viewer to realize that the trench is overflowing with dead bodies and that the “debris” is in fact corpses scattered like rag dolls over the ground among the soldiers.

Taken on the morning of March 8, 1906, the image shows the aftermath of a U.S. military assault on the eastern trail of Bud Dajo, an extinct volcano on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines.

The soldiers are American, of the 6th and 19th Infantry, and the dead are Moros, a Muslim ethnic group locally known as Tausug. It was the third day of fighting, and the last Moro stronghold, on the edge of the crater, had only just been captured.

Three days previously, 750 men and officers under the command of Colonel Joseph Wilson Duncan, assaulted the volcanic crater of Bud (Mount) Dajo at least 1,000 villagers, killing 99% of civilians including the elderly, women and children according to forensic reports, with only six Moro surviving, compared to American casualties ranging from fifteen killed and seventy wounded.^[1]

Although the engagement was a victory for the American forces, it was also an unmitigated public-relations disaster reverberating all the way to the US mainland.

Duncan, who led the 1906 massacre, was later promoted to the rank of Brigadier General in the U.S. Army. His final active-duty assignment was commanding officer of Fort Sam Houston in Texas, where he died of natural causes on May 14, 1912

In a scathing, satirical condemnation titled Comments on the Moro Massacre, Mark Twain, famous author aka Samuel Clemens  of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and also a fierce anti-imperialist, wrote that Major General Leonard Wood trapped and slaughtered Muslim civilians  in Sulu, Philippines, utilizing withering irony to contrast official military heroism with what he saw as unmitigated butchery.

1. Denouncing the “Battle” as a Lopsided Massacre

Twain fiercely rejected the U.S. government’s framing of the event as a “brilliant feat of arms”. He pointed out the extreme disparity in firepower and positioning:

• The Setup: Heavily armed American soldiers and native auxiliaries fired downward from the rim of a 50-foot-deep volcanic crater.
  • The Trap: Moro men, women, and children were caught at the bottom “like rats in a trap”.
  • The Outcome: The U.S. military suffered only 15 fatalities, while abolishing the enemy utterly, leaving almost no survivors. Twain scoffed at General Wood’s reports of a “desperate hand-to-hand fight,” noting that if the Moros were truly able to fight desperately, they would have killed more than 15 soldiers before every single man, woman, and child perished.

2. Condemning the Slaughter of Women and Children

Twain was deeply horrified by the complete extermination of families. He mocked the military’s inability or refusal to distinguish combatants from innocents: “We see the small hands clinging in supplication to the mother… how is it that our soldiers could not tell the breasts of a woman from the rudimentary paps of a man… that they couldn’t tell a toddling little child from a black six-footer?”

3. Satirizing “Christian” Imperialism

Twain referred to the American troops as “Christian butchers” and “uniformed assassins”. He turned President Theodore Roosevelt’s congratulatory telegram to General Wood upside down, sarcastically labeling the event “incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.” He dismissed the action would not have been honorable even if “Christian America… had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets.”

4. Exposing the Subversion of American Values

Twain used historical metrics to show how American warfare had degraded. He noted that in the American Civil War or at the Battle of Waterloo, armies left the vast majority of the enemy alive. At Bud Dajo, the U.S. army exhibited a “taste” for total annihilation. He lamented that the nation had “debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world” by conquering a people who simply wanted their land and liberty.

          After his Philippine tenure, Wood returned home to the army’s Eastern Department. and then became chief of staff. Regarded by many as the political heir of President Theodore Roosevelt, he even became an active candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920. but lost to Warren G. Harding.

The following year, President Harding appointed him to the Wood-Forbes Mission to the Philippines, and eventually governor-general of the Philippines, a post he held until forced to resign by a terminal illness in 1927.

          You can call this American justice.

The surrender of Bataan

If there is anything the United States can be credited for throughout history, it is finding shameless face-saving for its incompetent commanders.

On April 9, 1942, Major General Edward P. King Jr. surrendered Bataan, against General Douglas MacArthur’s orders, his 78,000 troops (66,000 Filipinos and 12,000 Americans), the largest contingent of U.S. soldiers ever to surrender in history,

General Douglas MacArthur did not authorize King to surrender Bataan to the Japanese.

In fact, it was executed in direct violation of explicit standing orders from both MacArthur and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had forbidden any capitulation.

Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright, who took over MacArthur’s immediate command in the Philippines, echoed these instructions and expressly forbade King from surrendering.

Let’s give this some context. In General King’s judgment, the 78,000 Filipino and American troops under his command on the Bataan Peninsula were completely cut off, severely malnourished, and ravaged by diseases like malaria and dysentery.

What was obvious was his lack of courage to face danger, difficulty, pain, or opposition defined his failure of character where overwhelming fear prevents an individual from fulfilling a duty or taking necessary risks.

Thus, in my honest opinion, his taking full personal responsibility for the decision not to fight but to surrender, was stinking horse pucky.

His justification that further resistance would only result in a pointless, wholesale slaughter of his defenseless, starving men, the American major general actually hastened their obliteration.

That is actually where atrocity started not with the Japanese but King’s  – not only did he decide so without informing General Wainwright, allegedly to shield his superior from blame, but his intelligence personnel was in the dark about the context of attrition that the week’s battle had also weighed on the Japanese side;

• Fresh but Fragile Reinforcements: Tokyo sent fresh forces (such as the 4th Division and the 65th Independent Engineer Regiment) to bolster Homma’s 14th Army after his earlier attempts to breach the lines stalled on January 1942.
• The Toll of Disease: Within weeks of fighting through the dense, malaria-ridden jungles of the Bataan Peninsula, tropical illnesses like malaria, beriberi, and dysentery swept through the Japanese ranks just as aggressively as they did the Allied lines.
• The “2,000 Remaining” Estimate: Historical logs and postwar analyses note that out of undetermined number (5,000 to 20,500) General Masaharu Homma sent to blitzkrieg Bataan, the rapid spread of illness meant that by the time Bataan fell on April 9, 1942, only a tiny fraction—roughly 2,000 Japanese soldiers—were still healthy enough to remain standing and fully fit for active combat.

Homma and his staff were overwhelmed by almost thrice as many captives as his reports had estimated, creating an enormous logistical nightmare – the movement and transport of over 60,000 starved, sick, debilitated and wounded prisoners and over 38,000 equally weakened civilian noncombatants who had been caught up in the battle.

Edward’s King’s cowardice and atrophic refusal to lead troops under his command, was all of a sudden, a responsibility dumped into the laps of Homma who estimated a month of grueling encounter, but was himself perplexed that his forces took Bataan in just a week of engagement.

The Japanese general could not keep them in Bataan which was a peninsula, a terminal territory on the opposite side of the supply lines on the east. Camp O’Donnel in Capas, Tarlac was the only option. It was alongside what the military designated as Highway 3 trekking from Northern Luzon all the way to Manila, east of which was then the food basket of Luzon.

He wanted to move the prisoners and refugees by boat to Manila but active military threat existed because Allied troops were still potent across Manila Bay at Corregidor Island. Land transport was also unavailable and would only arrive in time for the capitulation of Corregidor, a month after.

The surrender of Corregidor

• The Surrender: General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered Corregidor on May 6, 1942, yielding approximately 11,000 to 12,000 American and Filipino troops.
• The Transfer: Unlike Bataan’s defenders, the Corregidor captives were largely spared a brutal, on-foot death march because the Japanese this time transported them by boat from the island fortress to the Manila waterfront a facility. In Manila, they were detained at Bilibid Prison before being packed into sweltering train cars to be shipped to Camp Pangatian in Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija that was also alongside Highway 3.
• Transfer Casualties: Only hundreds of Corregidor surrenderers still died during their transfer and subsequent imprisonment mostly due to extreme malnutrition and rampant disease, aggravated by lack of food, water, and medical care while held on freighters and in Bilibid before the train ride.

As someone who has made exhaustive studies of the plight of Filipino World War II veterans in connection with the lobby of our Embassy in Washington DC, I consider the blame of the infamous Death March more on Edward King than that of Masaharu Homma.

This is not to absolve Homma of any culpability, but the numbers speak for themselves: 78,000 surrenderers against 2,000 surviving attackers, now to serve as security enforcers. That is a 39:1 ratio over a distance of 105 kilometers.

Look at this from the fact that this was occurring within just three and a half months of Homma’s landing in Lingayen Gulf on December 24, 1941, and his anticipation is onto battle and not logistics for movement of prisoners-of-war and administration of concentration camps.

In interviews of hundreds of actual Death March survivors, I have arranged and facilitated for authors I also accompanied, foremost of whom were Hampton Sides of The Ghost Soldiers, and Stanley Karnow of In Our Image, there was a narrow possibility of an Allied victory against the Japanese assault on Bataan.

Besides, actual testimonies were overwhelming that the Filipinos were willing to fight to their deaths, in fact most of them escaped before General King’s capitulation and continued engaging the enemy as guerrillas, who by 1944 had controlled most of the Philippines.

Just by looking at this photo, one can only conclude the improbability of delivering 78,000 surrenderers 66 miles away in one piece. Factor the condition they were in and the lack of logistics to move, feed and attend to their medical needs, the task becomes an impossibility.

Upon learning of the capitulation, MacArthur was deeply shocked and demanded an explanation from General Wainwright.

In newspaper articles after the war, delusional General King wrote of the humiliation and anguish he had suffered because General Homma of “insulted him by declining to accept the surrender personally, making him wait  and sending a subordinate, Colonel Motoo Nagayama to officially dictate the terms of surrender inside a treaty tent in Lamao, Bataan.

The sonuvabitch was more concerned about his personal esteem and was totally oblivious of the disaster he had caused.

King and his men endured three-and-a-half years of severe mistreatment, starvation, and captivity across the Philippines, Formosa (now Taiwan), and Manchuria, constantly fearing that his unilateral decision to surrender would result in legal repercussions back in the United States. This sounded like guilt, to me.

But what would occur later, however, was totally appalling.

When he was liberated at the end of the war in 1945, he was treated as a hero upon his release. His insubordination and his own “war crime” was set aside to serve American propaganda.

His choice was widely recognized by an overwhelming consensus among US military authorities as a “display of immense moral courage”

That he “saved” thousands of immediate lives. That his action was necessary to prevent the needless slaughter of his starving troops, concealing he created the precondition  where almost half of those troops subsequently perished in the Bataan Death March.

Against his worst fears, he was not court-martialed, but he did not receive any further promotions. He retired from the U.S. Army in 1946, earning decorations including the Distinguished Service Medal, living  out his post-military life in Georgia, dying on August 31, 1958, and buried in Flat Rock, North Carolina

Cover-up king

We have established so far, the American’s penchant at denying the truth, rewarding perpetrators and afterwards using what they have covered up as propaganda to serve their vested interests.

But what the United States has relatively remained covered up are Japanese war crimes predominantly in mainland China where estimates reach that 30 million Chinese perished.

Japanese forces committed widespread atrocities in China during World War II, including mass killings, sexual violence, forced labor, and destruction of cities, with the Rape of Nanking being the most infamous example.

It was only last May, however,  that social media became replete with accounts of Unit 731, a clandestine research facility operated by the Imperial Japanese Army from 1936 to 1945 in Harbin, Manchukuo (now Northeast China) and other locations in China and Southeast Asia.

The primary goal of Unit 731 was to advance Japan’s biological warfare capabilities and gain a strategic military advantage, circumventing the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting chemical and biological weapons. The unit operated under strict secrecy, and after the war, many perpetrators were granted immunity in exchange for their research data, resulting in minimal accountability.

Unit 731 conducted inhumane experiments on prisoners, euphemistically called “logs,” including Chinese civilians, Russians, Koreans, and others, often including children and pregnant women.

The experiments included:

• Vivisection without anesthesia to study disease progression and organ function.
• Infection with deadly pathogens such as plague, cholera, anthrax, and syphilis to test biological weapons like dropping disease-carrying fleas on Chinese populations, which resulted in thousands of civilian deaths.
• Exposure to chemical agents, explosives, and extreme conditions, including hypothermia and high-pressure chambers.
• Amputation and organ harvesting for research purposes.

These experiments directly caused the deaths of an estimated 14,000 people within the facility, while biological weapons developed by Unit 731 led to 200,000–500,000 deaths in Chinese cities and villages through deliberate contamination of water, food, and crops.

Unit 731 remains a stark example of ethical violations in science and medicine, highlighting the dangers of conducting research without moral oversight. Its legacy continues to inform modern bioethics, human rights law, and the study of dual-use technologies

The occupying United States government undertook the selective cover-up of Unit 731, granting political immunity to military personnel who had engaged in human experimentation and crimes against humanity predominantly in mainland China.

The pardon of these Japanese war criminals, among whom were Unit 73’s commanding officers General Shiro Ishii and and General Masaji Kitano was overseen by US General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.

In exchange for the data gathered from their human experiments—which the U.S. deemed invaluable for advancing its own biological warfare programs—these researchers were shielded from prosecution at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Many later went on to have prominent careers in medicine and academia in post-war Japan.

Again, due to the cover-up by the United States, the atrocities of Unit 731 were largely omitted from early post-war history. Today, it remains widely recognized as one of the darkest chapters of World War II and a severe violation of international law, equivalent to the medical atrocities committed by Nazi doctors.

Conclusion

As we see the United States surrogates its regional hegemony in the Asia-Pacific today, resulting in the rebirth of Japanese militarism, these pictures from the past will continue to haunt us. Unmistakably unsettling, they provide crucial insight into the darker aspects of human nature and underline the importance of humanity’s quest for respect for human life, tolerance for others, and justice for all.

But it is important to remember that our history, while marred by instances of cruelty, is also marked by resilience, empathy, and the continuous struggle for justice. It behooves us to learn from the past, recognizing our capacity for both cruelty and compassion, and strive for a future that upholds the principles of justice, empathy, and respect for all.

Only by acknowledging the depths of human cruelty can we fully appreciate the value of human rights and the continuous necessity to safeguard them.

A multipolar world offers a clear choice – a reboot to barbarism or “a community with a shared future for humanity”

China now provides for a vision and core concepts in foreign policy and global strategy advocating for peaceful development, an equitable global governance system, and multilateral cooperation over zero-sum geopolitical conflicts.

A great leap forward from forever wars to forever peace…and as the Benjamin Franklin published in 1754 –  “Join or die!”

   

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