From In Our Image: The United States and the Philippines. For the documentary, Stanley Karnow conducted three interviews with Claude A. Buss. This is an edited transcript of extended portions of the interviews. The site says the interviews for the documentary were conducted . In his interview, Buss mentions “I feel at the end of the year the Philippines is a lot better off than it was a year ago,” referring to the new administration of Corazon C. Aquino; so the interview has been dated to 1987.
From: First Interview with Claude A. Buss
This period from 1935 until 1945, the United States was to be represented by a high commissioner. And the government of the Philippines would be operated by its own elected officers. At that time, the name of President Quezon and, of course, Vice President Osmeña… were synonymous with the government of the Philippines in those days. My job was to be executive assistant to the high commissioner. And my particular job was relations with the Philippine government and with the Philippine people. We had a very small staff…
Our high commissioner then was Francis Sayre, who was the son-in-law of President Wilson. He had been identified with the Philippine affairs and with the state department for many years. And he was assisted by his legal advisor and then by an economic advisor. Anybody that was familiar with the United States and the Philippines at all in those days will remember the name of Evan Hester because he had been out here for a long, long time. And then we had a military attaché, an army officer, a naval attaché and an air attaché. But all in all, I doubt if there were as many as 60 people on our whole staff in the Philippines. And so when I came out here, it took a long time to get next to my own job, what I was supposed to do.
And those months, I arrived as I told you on the 14th of January of 1941. And in those months, we had to tackle such questions as this. Is there any way that we can prevent the resources of the Philippines falling into the hands of Japan? And feeding what we’ve perceived to be the Japanese conquest and what they call their greater East Asia, co-prosperity sphere. And then another question was, is there any way that we can bring the resources of the Philippines to the United States and use them for possible war effort? For example, lots of ships were laden with sugar and we didn’t really need sugar that much. But we needed chrome very badly.
And I recall one of the most ticklish jobs I had early on was to ask President Quezon if he would bring influence on his own people to unload ships that were already full of sugar. And then just simply fill them with chrome and send them back to the United States. And I must say one of the most enjoyable parts of the job so far as I was concerned was to watch how President Quezon operated. He responded to human situations. The guy that was supposed to ask him to unload this sugar. Sugar is pretty precious in the Philippines. We weren’t sure how he would take it at all. And when Quezon was asked what he unloaded the ship or give orders to unload the ship, he just grinned and he says, “Will I be glad to tell Don Vicente Madrigal” –who owned the ship– “By God, he’s got to do something for good public service for a change!” and so the order went out and that’s the way things were done.
…One of the most difficult parts of any job in the High Commissioner was to maintain the sovereignty of the United States. And at the same time catered to the sensibilities of the Filipinos. It was one of these cases where they were free but they were not free. And President Quezon was a person who was a very practical man and very conscious of what he felt were the prerogatives of his own office.
And this very often led to difficulties between our High Commissioner who had his responsibilities as the American representative and President Quezon who had his responsibilities as the President of the Philippines. And the consequence was that I was caught in the middle. And quite early in the game I warmed up to President Quezon as an individual. I liked his way of doing things, his ability to dispense with formality when the occasion called for it. And his ability to make a quick decision and to act on it. Very much a person of impulse. One time in commenting on the differences between himself and his Vice President, Osmeña, he was explaining his own character. He said, “When I meet, watch my eyebrows dance.” And he would say something and you could see those eyebrows dance up and down.
He said, “I can explode. I can’t hold it very long. I don’t keep any records.” He said, “I don’t know what I said, what I did, five minutes ago.” “Now,” he says, “contrast that with the scholar in office who’s my Vice President. He can tell you everything that happens. And he’s so close in holding his decisions that he won’t let his heart know what his own head thinks.” He says, “this is just the difference in the way that we work.” Well, I responded to him very warmly and that’s the only way to put it. And I suppose that we discussed more problems over games of bridge than in regular office hours. And more days than I like to think about then, which I love to think about now. Around four o’clock, he would call and he’d always say, “Doc,” he always called me “Doc.” I, of course, called him “Mr. President.” He would call and he’d say, “well, would you like a game of bridge?” And of course we did.
And our partners were his own personal friends, usually his medical doctor that he kept around him. And we’d always have a break. And during those breaks, we would discuss the problems of what’s going to happen to the Philippines after independence, particularly the economic relations between the United States and the Philippines. And always wondering whether the war was going to come and whether it was going to engulf the Philippines. And if you would go through those early days of, let’s say April of 1941. And the date that stands out in my mind, I think was the 27th of May. We were one day ahead out here of what it was in Washington. But this was the day that President Roosevelt gave an unlimited emergency speech. And I shall never forget the words. We were sitting around the High Commissioner’s office. And the short wave came out. And President Roosevelt said that, “it used to be don’t fire until you see the whites of your eyes. But nowadays, if you don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes, you will never know what hit you.”
…President Quezon was a very complex person and to try to make any generality which would cover the Quezon of 24 hours a day would be misleading because he could change as fast as the Manila weather. And toward the United States, this was equally true. There were times when he felt that we were doing things which were not right in his view. And he would say very much what he thought about the United States. And on other times, he would be unstinted in his praise of what … the United States had done for the Philippines.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it quoted that he wished that we had been harsher in our treatment because it would have made his fight for independence much more credible because what he wanted, he didn’t have to fight for. If he could establish its reasonableness, the United States conceded it to him. Sometimes those whom he looked upon as his most bitter American enemies, he considered as his staunchest American friends. Let me illustrate by two anecdotes. Both of these are as he told them to me and some other persons might have different interpretations. I once asked him which of our officials that he admired and respected the most. And without a moment’s hesitation, he said General Leonard Wood and Henry Stimson… And everyone knew the fights that he had had with General Wood.
And yet he felt that General Wood stood for American principles and he had to stand for the Philippine side. He said, “When we fought,” as he put it one day, he said, “it was a hell of a fight.” He said, “It sent General Wood to his grave and sent me to a sanatorium,” In Monrovia (that was in Southern California where he entered the sanatorium to recuperate in his health). And the other incident that he recalled was, he said that, “Governor-General Stimson and I used to make the air blue with our curses. But not after one o’clock, because at one o’clock it was lunchtime. And we’d take the time for lunch and then after lunch we would continue whatever it was that we would argue about.” But no matter how bitter the argument, the thing that impressed me was that he felt he was doing his duty and I’m sure that our representative felt the same way. He never got along too well with our high commissioner, Mr. Sayre.
Mr. Sayre was a man of very deep principles. Very much a constitutional lawyer who believed in doing things exactly according to the book. And I suppose what you would call a strict constructionist. And President Quezon simply didn’t operate that way. And then when you had a situation where you had war coming and the one person being very careful to operate within his authority as prescribed by American laws, and the other feeling that he was maybe above the law and the Philippines and could do what he felt was necessary, the limits that each man saw in their areas of operation often made for very difficult situations. President Quezon was not very quick to accept the American proposition that war was on the way and would engulf the Philippines.
I’m inclined to think that maybe the hope was the father of the thought. None of us knew too much about President Quezon’s Japanese connections. We knew that they existed. And we were particularly curious about relationships in Davao and the southern province of the Philippines. And the fact that it might be that even if war came, the Philippines might be able to escape. I believe that that kind of thought lingered in President Quezon’s mind much longer than it lingered in the minds of American authorities…
I think a turning point came in perhaps mid-July. And again, what went on in the Philippines must be interpreted in terms of general events and the rest of Asia. And there was a time when you remember Tojo took over the Prime Ministership as well as the war ministry which he had occupied before. And I think this had a tremendous influence on President Quezon’s thinking. And it certainly had a tremendous influence on his expressed attitudes toward the United States. See, I use this “expressed attitudes” as being slightly different from what he really felt inside himself. His own attitudes had ranged all the way between what are perhaps his two best known quotes.
The one quote was on a Loyalty Day in the Philippines. When there was a demonstration that some people had arranged and had asked President Quezon if he wouldn’t express his loyalty: not his own personal loyalty, but the attitudes, of the Filipinos toward the Americans if war would be on our side and the rest of it, and the orator of the day was President Quezon and he gave perhaps one of the most thrilling speeches that he ever gave in his life. And the line that always stays in my mind was near the close of his speech when he said, “And when that starry flag of the United States comes down over the Philippines we will find wrapped deep in its furls the heart of every Filipino.” Now, I might not have had it exactly, but in his most romantic motion he was a tremendous romanticist about the United States.
This is the way he expressed himself and then his other quote which is well known is that “I would sooner have a government which is run like hell by Filipinos than one which is run like heaven by the Americans.” And so you can just take it in between those two extremes on any given day you would find that that’s the way that President Quezon expressed himself…
Let me tell you one other thing that always gave me a deep insight into President Quezon. If he had two American heroes I would say that they were President Wilson and President Roosevelt. President Wilson naturally with the Jones Act and all those things that Wilson was associated with…The Jones Act was the act of the American Congress in 1916 which said that the Philippines would have independent government whenever… a stable government was established therein. And President Quezon always had a warm feeling in his heart toward President Wilson because he associated President Wilson with that promise of his own long cherished dream which was independence for the Philippines…
And with President Roosevelt, Roosevelt was always very friendly toward President Quezon. There were letters that Quezon and Roosevelt exchanged. And whenever Quezon would get a personal letter from Roosevelt, he would call me over and hand it over to him and he’d say, here, read this. And sometimes if he would read in the papers or if he had a hunch that there was something happening in the High Commissioner’s office which he thought of as anti-Quezon. This was his way of saying, well, you boys over there in the High Commissioner’s office might think that you’re stymieing me. But look, I’ve got the President of the United States behind me. And there was always this feeling that he was personally very friendly with Roosevelt. And he just had a very warm spot in his heart for President Roosevelt…
The relations between General MacArthur and Mr. Sayer, I’ll have to leave to the respective memoirs of the two men they’ve both written and they can tell you how they felt about one another. And it’s very clear that the relations between General MacArthur and President Quezon had an element of strain about them.
…July 26, 1941, was a crucial day in the history of U.S. Philippine relations. That was the day that it was announced that we were going to freeze the assets of the Japanese, that we were going to control all the exports of the Japanese in the Philippines. And that was the day that it was announced that the United States Armed Forces of the Far East would be created. The Philippines scouts taken into American service. And then General MacArthur was recalled into active American service and he became Lieutenant General permanent rank of the U.S. Army, U.S. Usofi, as we call it. And from that time on, General MacArthur was entirely a different person. I mean, he was the commander in chief of the American forces and he acted as the American commander in chief.
…Before July 26, General MacArthur was always much more philosophical in his thought. And concerned with problems of democracy is a political system. And the future of democracy, the future of Christianity and Asian and much more generalities than any specific thing about the future of Japan and Asia, the future of the United States and Asia. And he allowed himself, if you will, the luxury of academic thinking. And no matter how much he thought in academic terms after July 26, he was the exponent of his own responsibility. I mean, there were no ifs ands or … buts about it. He was the commander of the American forces, which were in combat against aggression and and it was his duty to command those forces…
I hate to be so sure about this, but I really think that he felt after July 26 that war was inevitable… And he was very aware of our inadequacies in manpower and equipment in the event that war should come. I don’t think that he underestimated the power of the Japanese. And I couldn’t say that for all of our officials who felt that Japan was far less strong than Japan turned out to be. A good many of us were under the illusion that the Japanese had been mired down in China, weren’t even able to conquer China what in the world would they ever do in the event that they would get into a war against Britain and the United States.
And a good many of us took consolation in the feeling that the Japanese would never go farther than they had gone to challenge the United States. I don’t believe that General MacArthur shared those feelings at all. I think that he had a very deep respect for the power of Japan. At one time when some tanks were offloaded down at one of the piers in Manila and just for the show of the thing perhaps for media purposes. I went down from the High Commissioner’s office and were represented at General MacArthur’s office and when these tanks were offloaded there were the usual pictures and the feeling of confidence that now we got some tanks. And I can remember General MacArthur saying, “If these can only keep on coming until next April,” that would have been until April of 1942, “I would be a lot more confident than I am right now.” See the few that came he realized wonderful token but not going to be equal to what someday we would certainly need.
…I was so busy in preparing for a war assuming that war was going to come that if it comes was not part of our thinking. Our thinking was what are you going to do?…
And then we did some things which never came to any definitive conclusion –suppose you evacuate where you’re going to go to. Well immediately Baguio is a wonderful place to go and so they all said let’s evacuate to Baguio. Well then it came look how long is it going to be until those roads will be clogged and you won’t get through and then somebody said how about Pagsanjan and those are the falls outside of Manila that’s a nice place to go. And it very soon became clear that there isn’t going to be any evacuation them –in time of a war the whole area of the Philippines is going to be a war theater and you better begin to think in terms of how are you going to take care of yourself wherever you are. And I must say for President Quezon, on his behalf it took him some time to see what we in the High Commissioner’s office had been thinking about were doing until he accepted, yes this is a reasonable thing to do. And then he plunged into all these things heart and soul ordered his own cabinet officers to back up these preparing for war plans. And you get back to the civil emergency emergency emergency administration. We had new officials of every kind coming out and he’d say make office space available for these people and and there’s no way that President Quezon and his staff could have been more cooperative than they were… say from September until Pearl Harbor Day…
…And by that mid-summer of 1941, July of 1941, when these precautions took on a serious nature, living in Manila was fine… the only time that the officials felt like spoil sports were when you tried to direct the conversation around to “look things like this are likely to be very serious.” And we found some sympathetic souls that would sit down and try to plan with us. And it took a long time before we were able to win both Mr. Sayre and President Quezon to a feeling that whatever personal differences they had, those differences had to be submerged in the interest of a common effort in what might be approaching hostilities. There were a lot of Americans who were aware of differences of opinion between the two offices and help like everything and trying to smooth over the lingering differences between those two units…
On the eve of the war, I’m talking about two weeks before the war. Things moved very quickly, and there were not severe differences between Filipinos and ourselves.
The closer we got toward the war, the closer we became in our operations. President Quezon got awfully excited at one time. He was afraid we were going to declare martial law, and he wouldn’t be in on it. He called me over and was very excited, and he said, “I want you to know that if you people declare martial law, and I’m not at the head of that martial law,” he says, “I will just embarrass you by calling out every mayor and governor in the place. There’s no way of running this Philippines without me.” It was a mistake that had really caused him to have this serious feeling. The commander of the British forces in Singapore and the Dutch in Indonesia had been invited to come and meet with General MacArthur. And Quezon was miffed that he hadn’t been included in.
He said, “What are you people doing? Are you planning war operations without me?” And once it was cleared up, that there was no intention of carrying on without him, we were very much more careful to be sure he was clued in on everything from there on. But… that was the exception. That wasn’t the rule at all. And the closer we got to war, the closer the cooperation, the things that we needed, they made available. And spiritually, the Filipinos, I never met a single one that I felt was pro-Japanese as being opposed to pro-American. And no matter how many complaints any Filipino might have had against the Americans, I never met any that felt that they were looking forward to being liberated from the United States to be better treated by Japan. I didn’t find any pro-Japanism on the part of these Filipinos at all.
And those Japanese that they found, those Japanese that found collaborators later, I think that was after the event. I don’t think that there were Quislings among the Philippine population at all… I would like to say that categorically. The closer that we came to the war, the closer the cooperation between the Filipinos and the Americans. A little bit later, I heard a British colleague say the great difference between the American success in the Philippines and the British difficulties in Burma was the attitude of the local people. There were too many knives stuck in British backs, said my friend in Burma, where the knives were stuck in the Japanese backs in the Philippines.
And then later when we were comparing notes with Indonesia and some people were saying how the radio network and the submarine landings were so successful in the Philippines, not one bit of success was registered in Indonesia. And I use this only to substantiate my feeling that the closer the hostilities became, the closer the cooperation, and whether there was guerilla activity or collaborationist activity, I think was the result of necessity and opportunity and not the result of a choice on the part of the Filipino at all…
…I would say I had the feeling after the first of December that we were really in for it. It was my duty in the High Commissioner’s Office to send in the weekly reports.
…But on the night of the first, we knew that the Japanese fleet was somewhere where we didn’t know where it was. We knew that extraordinary precautions had been taken in Thailand and Hong Kong and Indonesia. We knew that a third order to evacuate all American nationals had taken place from China on the first of December. And it didn’t take very much imagination to know that trouble might very welcome. And we were also well aware of the negotiations in Washington that took place between the 20th of November.
Remember the Karusu Nomura conversations with Secretary Hall sometimes and with President Roosevelt sometimes. And we realized that the worldwide situation between the United States and Japan, between the United States and Germany was very tense. The morning of …December 8 in Manila, that was December 7 Pearl Harbor Day. I was awakened very early in the morning by a telephone call from General Sutherland who was General MacArthur’s number two. And told me to come down to the office immediately to inform the High Commissioner that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. And I went down to the office as quickly as I could get there. And I don’t think I was there before Japanese planes were overhead.
I’ve never gone into the exact timing between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the bombing of Manila. But I know before we were able to get our wits together about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese planes were overhead. They bombed immediately almost as if it were four corners of the checkerboard. And Camp Nichols [Murphy], which is I think Camp Aguinaldo today, was in flames. And Cavite was in flames. And the other corners were in flames. And the Japanese planes were so low that we could see the pilots. We could see pilots just waving out at almost like a cartoon where they were waving out to the people below. And there were people in our office that were sure that these were German pilots. So we still had such a good many of us still had such a low opinion of Japanese capabilities. We didn’t believe that they were Japanese planes.
But the realities very quickly came into focus. And we realized that this was honest to God, war. And we didn’t know how they would come into Manila. We knew very well that Japanese troops could not come into Manila. But there was the evidence of the planes, the casualties. Right away, we sent small boats over to Cavite to bring in naval casualties from the 16th naval district. And we heard these reports of some of our submarines had been sunk and that what ships were able to get out had left. And for all intents and purposes, Manila itself became a deserted city. The troops went to Bataan or to Corregidor or wherever they were stationed. And the job of those who were left of us, of those of us who were left in Manila was to take care of our own casualties and then begin to thinking in terms of taking care of our Americans and taking care of the Filipinos.
When the Japanese came in, I was over in the Philippine General Hospital, a good friend of mine. But that was later, that was when the Japanese came in. And this morning, the first thing that we were asked to do, we still had telegraph. This is the morning of the bombing. Eighth December, I want to come back to this morning of eight December of 1941. And then our job, we were asked by Washington to get on the air immediately and inform them what had happened. The communications were chaotic and I suppose military communications took over all existing facilities and all that Washington wanted out of us was some kind of a message that could be put on the air as soon as possible, which would tell the American people of the psychology of those of us who were left here in Manila. And I can’t remember exactly, I remember making that message kind of a wake up America, come along and help her, God knows what went into it.
But what we tried to do was to make a short message as dramatic as we possibly could and to say that, okay, we’re under attack and that’s that. And the message went back and then we had to get our what’s together, what do you do, how do you get your own office organized, what kind of context you set up with the Philippine government, what do you do with the American community, what do you do with the Filipinos and with the American community. The first thing I did was to organize what we called an American coordinating committee and we took some of what we felt were the most respected citizens of Manila, there was a Judge DeWitt here. Everybody liked him and well known a kind of a patriarch and I asked him to come down and tell me a dozen Filip Americans who knew what was going on and just forum what we called American coordinating committee and okay you see the problem now help us in what you think we ought to do. And then with the Filipinos I immediately went to Quezon and we got the same kind of a committee working with the Filipinos and Quezon took over and organized this Civilian Emergency Administration as he called it and what we could do to think in terms of operating in Manila.
…And a good many of them headed for the High Commissioner’s Office, that’s that big park in front of the present Embassy. And we couldn’t, we couldn’t make up our minds whether it was better to inaugurate some kind of a security system coming in or whether to open the gates and say, look, there’s no place in this city that’s safer than any other place. And so far as your government is concerned, it’s here, here is this park, you’re welcome to come in here if you want. But we have no way of knowing whether the Japanese will strike again, where they will strike next or anything else. And then among other things, we had to intern the Japanese. Those procedures were all wired to our military people by our military authority. But our legal people were instructed to see to it that whatever the rules of warfare were, and frankly none of us knew anything about what rules of warfare were in a situation like this. But we did make as many plans as we could to intern the Japanese as quickly as we possibly could.
And we honestly did it for a dual purpose. The first one was to make sure that they weren’t going to be the object of a mob attacks. And the second one, if there were any fifth columnists or anything like that, the matter of protecting for ourselves. And so very early in the game, I don’t know how many days it took us, we rounded up and interned the Japanese. And I think that that was important to note, because later we were interned by them, and they had the experience of first having been interned by us. And we were fantastically optimistic. We really felt that, gosh, this is just a matter of help will coming, that it’s just a matter of over the horizon. There will be an American float teller, it will be there. And all these things would be straightened out. And it was only those that we felt were the most pessimistic among us, who had the realism to say that it might be a long time to you folks get out of here. Most everyone felt that this is a short term thing, and if we just manage to survive, that will be all that’s to it.
And through the weeks between December 8th and January 2, when the Japanese really came in, it was almost living hand-to-mouth. The only reality was that the Japanese were landing at other places in the Philippines. We knew that they were landing at other places in the Philippines. We knew there would be a pincer’s movement, which would sooner or later close in on Manila. And the problem came, when do you say to the Filipino people, yes, Manila is going to fall? Before we get to the actual service to get those aircraft in the air? …
As the military developments occurred, it was very obvious to Americans on the spot that we were not going to be able to hold up against the Japanese.
I would say that for the first two weeks, whatever propaganda there was, Manila Tribune and Manila Bulletin, those papers were going. And the thrust of our propaganda had to be keep your chin up. And there were things help is on the way. And shortwave would come in from the United States, which would say be brave and help will be here. And for maybe two weeks, I think that we kind of lived on the hope that help would be coming here. But it didn’t take more than two weeks to be convinced that it just simply wasn’t going to happen that way. And then when these Japanese troops spilled their contingents out on the various points in the Japanese territory. And we heard bravery stories from Bataan and from Corregidor, where our troops were holed in. And then we heard many bravery stories of our pilots against their pilots.
…But the whole thrust of our propaganda was hang on that help is coming. And then there was even this famous broadcast of President Roosevelt, where the Filipinos heard him say, or at least they thought they heard him say, that we would pay you for every chicken that’s lost. And this featured later in claims. But at any rate, this was it. But after a while, I would say December 20th, something like that. When we read the Japanese troops that landed, then we had to begin the plan realistically. First of all, for American internment. I mean, if we are going to lose, then what’s going to happen to the American community? What’s going to happen for the release of the Japanese who are now interned? And how are we going to say to the Philippine people?
We Americans will come back. That’s the best that you could say. But it may be that Manila will be conquered by an enemy. And if it is, what are you going to do? Are you going to say shoot on sight? Are you going to say keep out of sight? And our thoughts had to be geared toward how are we going to prepare Filipino people? For what might be an honest agonist defeat? And we first brought out a release in one of the daily papers that said, in the unhappy event that Manila should be occupied, we caution you not to indulge in any foolhardy acts of what looks like bravery. Don’t take a shot at anybody. And the best thing to do is to keep off the street. And Jill was just as, oh, the first thing was, how can you do this to us, you know? And you mean, have you lost your nerve or you really lost your confidence?
I mean, that’s the kind of criticism it came in.
…Okay, on December 22, orders came from Washington that the military forces should make Manila an open city and that Mr. Sayre should get out of Manila. The reason being that the United States did not want any formal surrender, any transfer of power from any American to the Japanese. So there couldn’t be any legal law of succession occupation. And consequently, Mr. Sayre left and I was in charge of the High Commissioner’s Office. And I had no written instructions deliberately so and I was simply told to do the best I can and that was all. And Mr. Vargas, he’s a name that I think we Americans should know better. We always called him “George,” Jorge Vargas.
And he was the number two to President Quezon. And whenever Mr. Quezon was too ill to take care of anything or we had requests that required follow-up action, he was the one that had to do it. And later, he worked under the Japanese and was thought of as being a collaborator. But between the time that President Quezon left, Mr. Sayre left… And we were left in Manila just to do the very best we could. And from December 22 to January 2, it was just simply playing it by ear and I haven’t got any idea…
And by this time, there had been many bombings in Manila. There were fires all over the place. And then there were conflicting councils among the Americans in Manila. We didn’t know if we were to drive our cars out, destroy our cars and try to …stop the advance of Japanese coming in from North and South. Or whether we should just say, okay, this is it. And the Japanese take over the city and from here on, it will be up the Japanese to take care of Americans and Filipinos both. We had some particular problems in the High Commissioner’s office. We wanted to make sure that we were not deserting the Filipinos. And when it was known that General MacArthur had gone, that Mr. Sayre had gone, though easy thing for everybody to do was to say the Americans had run out on us.
And therefore it was absolutely up to those of us remain here to keep as high a profile as we possibly could. We didn’t have any TV in those days, but that meant that any instructions which could be given by radio. Just to let them know that there were still Americans around, I think that that was our number one thing. And then the port area was bombed. And this port area is where all the ships cargoes were unloaded, where lots of consumers goods were being stored. And I went to the radio and said, fires have destroyed a lot of these goods at the port area. But all of you get out and help yourselves. Anything that you can take, it’s a lot better for you to have it than for the Japanese to have. And it was kind of like a madhouse…
The Japanese civilians who came with the army were, so far as they dealt with me, very educated people. And very well aware of their obligations as members of the international community…
…I left the Philippines for a Japan and had a short experience with the Philippines in the United States. The lands were being made for rehabilitation. And also, Quezon was alive still and very ill. And I wanted to go see him and I did and I had several contacts with him in the United States after I got back. And his illness was certainly terminal. And it was very poignant talking with him and seeing his great desire to return to the Philippines. But I had the feeling that I had less of a contribution to make to the Philippines and I had to war effort other places in Asia.
And I stayed in the High Commissioner’s office until March of 1944….
From: Second Interview with Claude A. Buss, Part 1
The situation in the Philippines was not comparable to the situation in Norway, for example, where there had been negotiations with the Japanese before the actual landings. And most of the Filipino government personnel that were left in Manila had been just as cooperative with the Americans as they could be. Three o’clock in the morning before the Japanese entered, I talked to my counterpart in the Philippine government, a guy named George Vargas, who was the secretary to Quezon. And his last words to me were, “Is there anything that either one of us ought to do before the Japanese come in? In order to hinder their progress, make things tough for them.” And no, I said the only thing that you’re just going to have to do is use your heads and don’t do anything that’s going to bring retribution on the people of Manila. And you’ve got to remember it was a very hectic situation. The city was in flames and people were scared and you knew very well that the American protection had gone and that people were going to be thrown on their own resources to take care of themselves. And I think that it must have been all three or four days anyway, before these government officials emerged and announced that they had taken positions under Japanese control situation. And a lot of the people that stayed in Manila, sympathized with them, there was nothing they could do. They had no jobs, no paycheck coming in from the United States anymore. No relatives in the hills that they could go to, and the result was that when the Filipinos were divided into collaborators and guerrillas, everybody that could go to the hills or had relatives in the countryside called himself a guerrilla. And those that had nowhere to go had no alternative, just had simply had to live by their wits under the Japanese. And I sympathized like anything with these people who were their protectors gone, which we Americans were, simply had to live and no love of the Japanese, no hatred of the Americans who simply had a real situation where you had to take care of yourself. Many more Filipinos were in the position of collaborators than were in the position of guerrillas. And when the war ended, those people were worried as the very [inaudible], they did not know if the Americans were going to punish them, criticize them, or where the Americans would sympathize with them. And consequently, they were very eager when we came back to tell us their own side of the story and elicit sympathy where they could. And the result was that a lot of the Americans did take a very sympathetic attitude toward them. I, for one, I couldn’t really see that I could blame a man like Recto or a man like Roxas, Roxas is the most noted example, as you know, Roxas was a Colonel in the American Army and was one of those who had to choose whether he was going to leave with Quezon, Quezon wanted him to go. And Roxas had said that no, he would prefer to stay behind. He was a man with great deal of ability.
And he said that he would be able to do more for his people if he stayed in Manila than if he left. And of course, his case became the most noted case of, I think, of all the collaborators. And probably set the stage for the treatment that they received at the hands of the government when the post-war period began. He was very strongly protected by MacArthur. I guess that’s a fair way to put it. …Roxas was a man that was respected by the Americans very much. Then Quezon left, Roxas chose not to go along. And then he was captured in Manila, I think.
And when he was captured, he agreed to become the minister of economics, whatever the position was in President Laurel’s cabinet, under the Japanese. And there were a lot of Americans who felt that this was a terrible thing for him to do. When he was taken into custody by the Americans, it was a common conversation, what would MacArthur do to Roxas? And the answer was not that long and coming. And MacArthur and Roxas met after Roxas was liberated. And I don’t remember how long their conversation between the two lasted, but for a long time. But anyway, when the conversation was over, Roxas emerged not as a Colonel any longer, but with one star and was promoted.
And that showed very well what General MacArthur thought of him. This stirred up a great controversy over what should be done with the collaborators there in Manila. I think at this point it might be useful to pinpoint the difference between what was happening in Washington’s, as far as attitude toward the collaborators was concerned. And what was happening out there in the field. There were many in Washington who felt that we, Americans, ought to be very tough on collaborators. In Manila, the feeling was different. There were some Americans, particularly those who had not been in Manila before the war and who saw this thing as a black and white issue, felt that they were very anti-American. They had taken an oath of loyalty to the United States, not the Philippines, the United States, because after all, they were our colony.
They had gone back on that oath, and therefore they ought to be treated very harshly. Then there were others, and I think General MacArthur was among the others, who had a great deal more sympathy for them and was inclined not to be harsh on them, and rather left it to the Filipinos to pass judgment on their own people. But after all, it will be much better for the future of the Philippines if the Philippines themselves decide, who should be punished as collaborators and who should be honored as guerrillas and who should be just simply left free without any kind of judgment at all. Well, naturally, a good many Filipinos had tremendous sympathy for men like Laurel, Men like Recto, and Aquino’s father. These people had all been unreservedly on the American side when the war broke out.
When Quezon left could only take a few cabinet officers with him and left these other folks behind in Manila. And so it was up to them to continue in some kind of position of leadership. But they had new people behind them. Instead of the Americans wielding the actual power, the Japanese wielded the actual power. And they had to do what their Japanese masters forced them to do. Did you know the father of the Ninoy Aquino, – picture of that? Yes, I don’t think it’s fair to accuse Ninoy’s father of being either more pro-Japanese or more anti-American.
The fact of the matter is that he was a very active pro-Filipino. He said, after all, my father before me fought against Spain. And I feel that what I can do, I’m going to do, for the Philippines. And whether I move under Americans or under Japanese for an earlier achievement of Philippine independence, that’s the thing that I want to do. And he organized this outfit Kalibapi, I think, it was called some fancy name that was to mobilize labor forces to help the Japanese. But in Aquino’s mind, what he was doing was giving jobs for some … Filipinos. And any prosperity or any increment for survival that he could bring to Filipinos was a perfectly good thing.
…I only know that there were people like Guinto and Jose Abad Santos who lost his life. And ?Zulueta? and these fellows were first-class men. I mean, they were leaders in the community. And they were cabinet members. They all had positions of dignity and responsibility under Quezon. And of course, Laurel was the one that was the most spectacular of the group and the one that had to make the toughest decisions when the chips were down….
I’m reminded of a story one evening in 1941, early 1941. I was sitting in the porch at Malacañan with President Quezon, and his Secretary of Finance, Manuel Roxas. And we were discussing the future of the sugar market. After the Philippines would get its independence, the Philippines sugar would have to pay the duty levied on foreign sugar. The price would go up, and the thought was that the market would shrink. And Quezon and Roxas were both very worried whether circumstances like this wouldn’t hurt the Philippines after independence.
And Quezon was genuinely concerned, although he was the most outspoken advocate of independence, the Philippines. When it got to be very close, when the fact of independence got to be very close, Quezon got more and more worried, particularly in view of the coming of World War II. He was speculating on what independence would mean to the Philippines economically. And he showed very well that he was aware of the difficulties, but he would not worry about giving up his own platform of independence. He turned to Manoling, to Roxas, and he said, “It looks to me, Manoling, as though I’ve got the damn thing, independence. Now it’s going to be up to you to worry about what to do with it.” It showed that re-examination, which a good many people advocated, was not a practical alternative for the Philippines at that time.
