Moyar Mark. A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq
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90 e Huk Rebellion
from moneylenders. Other tenant benets, such as free unhusked rice at har-
vest time to feed to their chickens, came to an end. Frequently absent from his
lands, Manolo hired overseers to keep watch over the tenants and declined to
sponsor baptisms or weddings or even give gis on those occasions. Yet he ex-
pected the tenants to do everything for him that they had done for his father.
Peasants who had loved Manuel Tinio had only contempt for his son.1
e Tinio family story resembles that of countless other principalia fami-
lies during the rst decades of the twentieth century. Once the troops of
Arthur MacArthur and Adna Chaee had extinguished the insurrection, the
rural elites dried from their estates to Manila and other cities, attracted by the
modernization and urban prosperity stimulated by American rule. e United
States plugged the Philippine countryside into the world economy, which en-
abled the principalia to sell rice and sugar from their estates on the world
markets, providing cash for the purchase of imported goods. It became com-
monplace for landlords to give control of family estates to prot-maximizing
overseers who cut the peasants’ benets and raised rental rates, and for peas-
ants to resent their landlords for abdicating their traditional responsibilities.2
In some regions of Luzon, tenant farmers responded to the changes by
hiding crops from the overseers, who tended to be less knowledgeable than the
landlords. Others supported organizations that called for the landlords to re-
peal rent hikes and resume their former paternalistic activities. e tiny Phil-
ippine Communist Party—which was formed in the 1920s as the Comintern
was creating Communist Parties across Asia—and a small number of other
le-wing radicals took up arms against the landlords and the government.
Hoping to capitalize on the breakdown of the traditional peasant-landlord re-
lationship, the radicals sought to take the place of the landlords as authority
gures.
All resistance activities came to an abrupt halt with the Japanese invasion
of the Philippines in December 1941. Having neutralized American air and
naval forces with surprise air attacks, the Japanese sent ashore huge numbers
of amphibious forces, compelling the Philippine and American forces of Gen-
eral Douglas MacArthur to fall back to the fortresses of Bataan and Corregi-
dor. Besieged by the Japanese, the American and Philippine forces held on for
several months but eventually were defeated by lack of food and overwhelm-
ing Japanese force. As the end approached for the defenders at Corregidor,
President Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to go to Australia, which MacArthur
did, albeit burdened with the knowledge that most of the American and Phil-
e Huk Rebellion 91
ippine soldiers had to be le behind. Philippine president Manuel Quezon
likewise ed the country, stopping in Australia before moving to the United
States to set up a government-in-exile. e 70,000 Americans and Filipinos
captured in Bataan were force-marched for six days with no food or water in
100-degree heat as Japanese soldiers beat or shot those who had trouble keep-
ing up. Fieen thousand perished on the “Bataan Death March.”
American ocers who had evaded the Japanese took to the hills and re-
cruited Filipinos into guerrilla units called the U.S. Armed Forces Far East
(USAFFE). e Philippine Communist Party set up a separate guerrilla orga-
nization called Hukbo ng Bayan Laban so Hapon, abbreviated to Hukbalahap
or Huk, meaning “anti-Japanese army,” which, like the USAFFE, claimed to
be ghting simply for liberation from the Japanese aggressors. e Huks’ pub-
lic professions of nationalism masked their real intentions, which included
promoting international revolution. Luis Taruc, the top Communist military
commander, was an anomaly, for he possessed real nationalist sentiments
and was also a religious man, heresies that the party tolerated only because
of his exceptional leadership gis.3 In 1942 the Huks repeatedly rebued calls
by American ocers to put themselves under the complete command of the
USAFFE, leading the USAFFE command to declare that all guerrillas not in its
employ were enemies of the United States.
e Japanese at rst raped and pillaged on a large scale, but then settled
down and got Filipinos to do much of the raping and pillaging for them. As
the war progressed, oppression by Filipino units oen weighed more heavily
on the people than Japanese oppression did. Murder, rape, and other vile acts
by Philippine collaborators and Japanese troops drove many peasants to join
the Huks, as did a series of early Huk military successes. In 1942, Huk strength
rose from less than 300 to 3,000, and by September 1944 it had reached at
least 10,000. At “Stalin University” in the Sierra Madre mountains, Huk o-
cers received training from seasoned Huk leaders and veterans of the Chinese
Red Army. Most of the guerrillas did not receive formal instruction, learning
guerrilla tactics instead on the job and from experienced comrades. eir at-
tacks on the Japanese were small in scale and duration because of their limited
ammunition and the ability of the Japanese to bring reinforcements quickly.
Generally, they directed more violence at Filipinos who collaborated with the
Japanese than at the Japanese themselves, killing 20,000 Filipinos during the
war as opposed to 5,000 Japanese.4
Huk forces established shadow governments in central Luzon, their prin-
92 e Huk Rebellion
cipal base of operations, an area forty miles wide and over 100 miles long be-
tween the Zambales mountain range and the Central Cordillera. In 1943 the
Huks started encroaching on territory that had been the sole domain of the
USAFFE guerrillas, on several occasions exchanging re with USAFFE forces.
A few Huk units provided interpreters or guides to Douglas MacArthur’s 8th
Army aer its entry into the Philippines in October 1944, but cooperation was
the exception rather than the rule. American ocers recognized that the Huks
were dangerous radicals, feigning friendship as a temporary expedient until
they were ready to expel the Americans from the Philippines. Major Robert
Lapham of the Central Luzon USAFFE wrote in January 1945 that the Huk-
balahap was a “subversive” and “radical” organization, guilty of “carnage, re-
venge, banditry and highjacking” that was “never equalled in any page of his-
tory of the Philippines.”5
With the coming of peace and victory over Japan, MacArthur ordered
that the Huks be disbanded. Some Huk guerrillas were disarmed at gunpoint
aer refusing initial requests to turn in their weapons, and a number were
imprisoned for subversion, kidnapping, or murder. Unlike Philippine veterans
of the USAFFE, who received back pay and veterans benets and who were
welcomed into the Philippine Military Police Corps, most Huks received no
benets and were barred from governmental service.
Sergio Osmena assumed the presidency of the restored Philippine nation,
having replaced Manuel Quezon aer the latter’s death at Saranac Lake, New
York, two months before MacArthur’s return to the Philippines. An inept and
uncharismatic leader, Osmena was in every respect the opposite of what was
needed in this precarious hour. Much of Manila and the other large popula-
tion centers had been reduced to rubble during the last months of the ght-
ing, and critical government departments such as sanitation and law enforce-
ment were in chaos, with few personnel remaining and few buildings intact.
Osmena failed to step forward with energy or urgency to reassemble the gov-
ernmental structure. Although the United States sent millions of tons of food
and hundreds of millions of dollars, it entrusted the distribution of the aid to
Osmena’s regime in the spirit of promoting self-government, which allowed
corrupt and ineectual ocials to pocket or waste vast sums.
Wary of Communist subversion, Osmena appointed known anti-
Communists to head the local governments and security forces in central
Luzon. Aside from their opposition to Communism, however, the only other
noteworthy characteristic of many of these appointees was an aptitude for
e Huk Rebellion 93
crime. Soldiers and policemen plundered the barrios without restraint. Even
worse was the behavior of the civilian guards hired by landlords at war’s end
to help secure property and enforce rent increases. In response, Huk veterans
banded together and used whatever weapons they could nd to attack govern-
ment forces and the private security forces.6
During the spring of 1946 the government sent additional forces with ar-
mored cars to wage war in central Luzon. e Huks continued to ght back
while also preparing for the national elections, which were held in April, just
before the Philippines received full independence from the United States. e
leaders of the Philippine Communist Party created a new political organization
called the Democratic Alliance, which purported to be a party of the moderate
le. e Democratic Alliance recruited huge numbers of non-Communists,
most of whom did not know that Communists held all of the top leadership
positions in the Democratic Alliance or that the Communists intended to use
the organization to overthrow the government by 1952.7
In the national elections Luis Taruc and ve other Democratic Alliance
members from central Luzon were elected to the Congress. But Manuel Roxas,
the newly elected president, and congressmen from his Liberal Party voided
the election of these six because Democratic Alliance thugs had intimidated
and terrorized voters in central Luzon. Roxas, a charismatic man who enrap-
tured audiences with speeches promising heaven on earth, tried to appease the
Huks by compelling landlords to let tenants keep 70 percent of their crops, but
the Huks responded with impossible demands, such as the disbandment of the
national armed forces. So Roxas renewed the attacks on the Huks, and some
of his men apparently murdered the Democratic Alliance leader Juan Feleo in
August. Both acts convinced much of the Huk leadership that violence prom-
ised better results than political action.
For the next two years, provincial Communist Party organizations and
Communist front organizations like the Democratic Alliance and National
Peasants’ Union led a guerrilla war against the government and the landlords
in central Luzon. Much of the national Communist Party leadership did not
at rst embrace violence, preferring to focus on trade unions and other legal
political means of obtaining power, but top party ocials like Luis Taruc and
Casto Alejandrino were active in directing Huk military activities early on.
Organized in typical Communist fashion, the Huks had a mixture of full-time
ghters, part-time ghters, service supporters, and civilian sympathizers. Peas-
ants oen provided the Huks with information on government and landlord
94 e Huk Rebellion
forces. Aer counting government trucks and armored cars as they passed and
noting the types of troops, peasant scouts sent the information by runner to
the nearest Huk eld command. e Huks also had numerous agents among
government ocials and in the Philippine Police Constabulary, who warned
them of government operations in advance.8
In response to the rise in insurgent violence, Roxas declared that the gov-
ernment would use an “iron st” to destroy the insurgents within sixty days.
e iron-st campaign lasted two years and never achieved this objective.
e rst problem was a shortage of troops. In 1946 the government had only
37,000 men in its security forces, scattered across the entire archipelago, of
whom 25,000 were in the regular armed forces. Arrayed against them were
10,000 well-led, experienced Huk regulars and many more Huk irregulars.
e government’s repression might nevertheless have undermined the insur-
gency had it been undertaken by talented and persistent leaders who dely
eliminated insurgents and convinced the citizenry that the insurgents were
going to lose. Without such leadership, it merely antagonized the population.
Primary responsibility for ghting the insurgents belonged at rst to the
Philippine Military Police Corps, later renamed the Philippine Constabulary.
Aer this organization unked the test of battle, the Philippine army entered
the fray, bringing with it artillery, tanks, armored cars, and aircra, but the
army did scarcely better. Many of the most successful leaders from the prewar
constabulary and army had been killed ghting the Japanese or had died in
Japanese prisons, and aer the war new ocers were chosen hastily, based
on personal connections or their services to the ruling party, not ability or
track record. Roxas, soaring rhetoric notwithstanding, did little to ameliorate
the problem aer assuming the presidency.9 Most constabulary and military
leaders lacked the initiative, dedication, and tactical judgment required for
fruitful military action. ey kept their forces inside their posts for much of
the day and all of the night. It was commonplace for units to avoid forays
into the countryside entirely, other than an occasional brief excursion during
which they red o their ries at nothing in particular and then submitted
reports that they had inicted heavy casualties on the Huks. Government o-
cers who were more motivated to hurt the Huks oen did not know where the
guerrillas were and thus ailed blindly while the insurgents jabbed at them
from all sides.10
e inability to hit back at the guerrillas naturally made the counterinsur-
gents angry, and some leaders allowed their troops to give vent to this anger
e Huk Rebellion 95
by ravaging villages suspected of abetting the Huks. Constabulary and army
ocers permitted troops to steal food, burn houses, make dubious arrests, and
commit violent crimes against civilians, all of which stoked the people’s desire
to support the insurgency. e landlords’ civilian guards committed the same
oenses. And the Philippine court system did not protect peasants but instead
protected the interests of government ocials and the wealthy.11
Across central Luzon, peasants joined or assisted the insurgents primarily
to avenge victimized relatives or to avoid becoming victims themselves. e
Pampangans, the dominant ethnic group in central Luzon, were culturally in-
clined to resist oppression ercely by organizing themselves under unusually
strong leaders, which does much to explain why the insurgency ourished
there and failed to sprout in other areas of the Philippines despite the Huks’
repeated dispatching of armed proselytizers.12 e Huks, who deterred their
own people from committing abuses by making mistreatment of innocent
civilians a capital oense, came across as protectors of law and order against
the unruly government and landlord forces.
e Huks’ burgeoning military strength and their battleeld successes also
helped them win over the people of central Luzon. William J. Pomeroy, an
American Communist who spent several years in the Huk ranks, remarked,
“e people are always impressed by the arms, not out of fear but out of a feel-
ing of strength. We get up before the people then, backed up by our arms, and
give them the message of the struggle. It is never dicult aer that.”13
Factors other than government and landlord mistreatment and Huk mili-
tary strength had little bearing on the peasants’ political orientation. In pro-
paganda, the Huks vowed to give sharecroppers ownership of the land they
tilled, which might have seemed very appealing in a country where 90 percent
of farmers did not own any land, yet interviews with Huk veterans indicate
that land reform did not rank among their principal sources of motivation for
joining. In practice, Huk agrarian policies were oen limited in scope, aimed
mainly at compelling landlords to restore interest-free loans and raise the per-
centage of crops kept by tenants to what it had been in the past—a return to
wealth lost, not a grab for wealth never held.14 During a 1970 interview, former
Philippine Communist Party general secretary Jesus Lava recalled that “it was
the party that propagandized the slogan ‘Land for the Landless.’ at didn’t
come from an outcry by the peasants. Few peasants then—or even today—
were willing to ght with guns for land. Most really only wanted larger shares
of the harvests.”15
96 e Huk Rebellion
Of even less importance to the peasants was Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Whereas the Communist leaders were highly educated intellectuals from
cities, where the wealthy citizens drove cars and kept their food in refrigera-
tors, most of the Huks were recruited from barrios, where the typical peasant
possessed at best an elementary school education and occupied a thatched-
roof bamboo hut with no running water or electricity. At rst, the peasants
failed to grasp Communist ideology simply because of a lack of education, and
they failed to grasp it even aer serving for several years in the Huks because
the party misled the ghters into believing that land redistribution was an
ultimate objective, not what it really was—an intermediate step that was to be
followed by abolition of private ownership. One of the dedicated Communists
among the Huks explained: “Since the peasants do not understand the benets
of collective ownership you have to cater to their backward thinking.”16
In April 1948, Roxas died of a heart attack during a visit to Clark Air Base
on Luzon. e presidency was transferred to Vice President Elpidio Quirino,
a man who owed his high position in the Liberal Party to his lack of collabo-
ration with the Japanese during the war, rather than to any abilities of his
own. Under his administration, corruption surged. Observers disagreed over
whether Quirino himself was especially corrupt, but his failure to rein in the
venal individuals around him was undisputed. As a result of the siphoning of
public funds, the Philippine economy stalled. e Americans, who were pour-
ing in aid to help the Philippine government ght Communism, beseeched
Quirino to halt the pilfering, but to no eect. Secretary of State Dean Acheson
spoke wistfully of replacing Quirino but restrained himself with the thought
that American involvement in Quirino’s removal would become known pub-
licly and damage the standing of the United States across Asia.17
In the 1949 presidential race between Quirino and the Nationalist Party’s
José Laurel, Quirino supporters used cash payments and intimidation to ob-
tain votes. ey registered children, dead people, owers, and birds as voters
and lled ballot boxes with votes for Quirino. Laurel’s supporters also com-
mitted acts of fraud, but apparently of a lesser magnitude, for Quirino nished
with more votes and retained the presidency. e electoral misdeeds, widely
publicized by the Huks and the press, made Huk supporters out of people who
were becoming disenchanted with the two largest national parties.
e fraud in the 1949 election also convinced the Philippine Communist
Party to abandon its remaining hopes for gaining power through elections
and to concentrate exclusively on military action. Huk military attacks of late
e Huk Rebellion 97
had been crowned with victories, driving terried government ocials from
the provinces to Manila. e Huk forces were approaching an armed strength
of 15,000 men. In January 1950, the party resolved to accelerate the armed
struggle in order to topple Quirino’s government by 1952.18
From March to May 1950, the Huks raided towns in central Luzon, killing
government forces, stealing weapons, and raising the hammer and sickle over
town squares. e government responded with predictable feebleness. An
American military adviser warned that the Huks were on the verge of taking
complete control of sections of central Luzon. In August, 500 Huks launched
two attacks on army bases, inicting debilitating and embarrassing losses on
government forces. During one of these attacks, the Huks killed the patients
in the base hospital, raped the nurses prior to killing them, and released forty-
seven prisoners from the provincial jail. As a result of these victories, the party
leadership moved up the target date for achieving decisive victory to 1951.19
It was during this time of despair that a new leader arrived to pull the
drowning Philippine government out of the water. Ramon Magsaysay was
born in 1907 in a hut made of bamboo and cogon grass, the Philippine equiva-
lent of Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin. His father taught carpentry until he was
red for unking the school superintendent’s son, aer which he opened a
small store that sold retail items in very small quantities to impoverished
peasants. A strict disciplinarian, the elder Magsaysay required his children to
work long hours during the day and stay home aer dark, and he beat them
for misbehaving. rough his hard work and that of his eight children, the
father eventually collected enough money to open a blacksmith shop. Ramon
chopped down trees and made charcoal, which he took to the forge, where he
pumped the bellows while his father hammered away on the anvil.
Ramon Magsaysay also spent much of his youth milking water bualoes
and working his family’s modest plot of farmland. By doing a peasant’s work
and talking with peasants, he became much more knowledgeable about the
peasantry than most members of the middle class to which his family was
ascending, not to mention the urban elites. He sympathized with the peasants
then, and also years later, when he had the power to translate sentiments into
governmental action.20
Magsaysay attended college in Manila, then went to work at a bus company
as a mechanic. With talent and hard work he became a manager, making him a
full-edged member of the expanding Philippine middle class, which included
quite a few young idealists intent on making political and economic reforms
98 e Huk Rebellion
that the upper class had been unwilling to make. When the Japanese invaded
the Philippines in December 1941, he joined a Philippine infantry division,
and aer the fall of Manila he signed on to a USAFFE unit to ght as a guer-
rilla. He so impressed the Americans that in February 1945, MacArthur made
him military governor of Zambales province.
In 1946, Ramon Magsaysay won election to the Philippine House of Rep-
resentatives as a member of Roxas’s Liberal Party. He served ably on the House
Committee on National Defense and became its chair in 1949. While on a trip
to the United States in April 1950, Magsaysay met Edward Lansdale of the
Oce of Policy Coordination, a covert action outt that was later merged into
the CIA. Lansdale, who had operated in the Philippines as a military intelli-
gence ocer aer World War II, had recently been sketching plans for saving
the Philippines from Communism. His superiors found his ideas incisive and
were considering sending him to Manila. At their rst meeting, Magsaysay
and Lansdale discovered similarities in thought and commitment. e next
day, Lansdale informed American military and civilian ocials that Magsay-
say could help rescue the Philippines, and he presented the dashing Philippine
congressman to them in person. e Oce of Policy Coordination and the
State Department, which by this point were thoroughly disgusted with Qui-
rino, concluded that Magsaysay ought to be propelled to a position of greater
prominence in the Philippine government. ey decided, in addition, to send
Lansdale to the Philippines with a few sidekicks and a large bank account to
assist Magsaysay and the Philippine government in general.21
George Chester of the Oce of Policy Coordination and Livingston Mer-
chant, deputy assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern aairs, ew to the
Philippines to join forces with the head of the American advisory group, Major
General Leland Hobbs, and the American ambassador, Myron Cowen. Con-
verging on Quirino like a herd of salesmen, they urged him to appoint Mag-
saysay secretary of national defense. e appointment, they made clear, would
lead to further U.S. aid, something that Quirino knew would be dicult to
obtain aer his failure to meet repeated American demands for reform. Some
of the Philippine Liberal Party senators, alarmed by the government’s inability
to check the Huks’ advances, also pushed hard to get Magsaysay appointed.
Quirino was reluctant to make the appointment, for he viewed Magsaysay as a
potential political rival. On the other hand, Magsaysay might fail, and Quirino
could not, in any event, aord to forfeit the American aid. He did not hesitate
long before agreeing to grant the American request. When he extended the
e Huk Rebellion 99
job oer, Quirino asked Magsaysay what he would need to destroy the Huks.
Magsaysay replied, “An absolutely free hand.” Quirino assented.22
Magsaysay became secretary of national defense in September 1950. Fear-
ing that Huk assassins would target his home, he sent his family to Bataan and
moved in with Lansdale, who had just arrived under the cover of intelligence
adviser to the Philippine government. Having no experience as a national ex-
ecutive, Magsaysay was receptive to Lansdale’s oers of advice and quickly
came to rely on him. During the rst months, Magsaysay conducted much of
his ocial business in Lansdale’s bungalow, where Lansdale could feed him
ideas as Philippine ocials led in and out. At night, Magsaysay tossed out
thoughts and Lansdale sorted and critiqued and added to them. Lansdale
steered Magsaysay’s thinking so subtly that Magsaysay was convinced that he
had created and developed the ideas all by himself, which ensured that he
would act on them.23 While Magsaysay possessed in abundance most of the
characteristics of a strong counterinsurgency leader, much of the exibility,
the good judgment, and especially the creativity that he exhibited early on
sprang from the mind of Edward Lansdale.
Although Lansdale was a man of ideas, he was not the sort who clings to
libraries or oces. He did not trust the written reports of U.S. government
ocials or the articles and books by American scholars who were considered
experts on the Philippines. “Maybe we should be more cautious in our lis-
tening to ‘experts’ and pay more heed to how they have come to know that
of which they speak,” Lansdale once said. “When was the ‘expert’ last invited
to be a guest in an ‘average’ Filipino household to share a meal? When did he
last spend a night with Filipinos in the provinces? . . . Does he honestly know
whereof he speaks? Or, does he merely know Manila, the largest city, and a
coterie of acquaintances?”24
To see the truth for himself, Lansdale traveled frequently into the country-
side, at considerable risk to his person and in disregard of ocial U.S. regula-
tions prohibiting Americans from venturing beyond a few safe zones. When
people complained about his violations of those rules, he persuaded General
Hobbs to grant him a special exemption. Although Lansdale had to rely on
an interpreter to converse, he invariably succeeded in charming the local Fili-
pinos he encountered, including some Huks. Lansdale “could make a friend
of everybody except Satan,” remarked one of the Americans who worked with
him.25 By talking with people and observing the situation in the countryside
rsthand, Lansdale concluded that the crux of the problem was the govern-