Opinion: Historical perspective hits home amid competing views of wartime virtue and misery

I wrote to the parish priest at Palompon’s historic St. Francis Xavier Church, a landmark dating to 1784, which American bombers heavily damaged in advance of  a Christmas Day 1944 amphibious landing by the 77th Army division that captured the port and sealed Japan’s defeat on Leyte. My father in the week following built his “bamboo hospital on stilts” in the seaside courtyard of the church, whose stone walls miraculously survived despite the interior’s total destruction. He described the incongruity of weddings open to the sky between Filipino-American soldiers and local women as if absence of a roof was somehow natural.

I hoped that church officials, curiosity aroused, might identify elderly parishioners with knowledge of the immediate postwar period. I queried local government and education officials as to particular locations symbolic of the war and residents with artifacts or family accounts. I contacted journalists who have written about Palompon to ask how they see memory playing out in the region.

The several private replies to my queries initially stunned me. One writer said there had been no effort to preserve World War II memories in Palompon because the war years had brought only deprivation and destruction to a population helpless to influence invaders and counter-invaders of their land. He knew of no monuments or artifacts — certainly no remnants of medical relief efforts — and suspected that few contemporary residents were even dimly aware of what had transpired locally. In his perspective, after 80 years the period had been, and was best left forgotten. Palompon’s population had doubled since the war and the town is desirous to emphasize its eco-tourism reputation with excellent diving areas and extensive marine sanctuaries. 

Another wrote that any wartime memory over the eight decades had focused on the small coterie of Palompon men who had joined guerilla bands in the nearby mountains to harass the Japanese occupiers. While my father’s work was certainly important and well-intended, he opined that it represented the minimum which the Americans should have done after the havoc they helped to bring upon the Philippines, and in particular to Palompon and later Manila, from 1942 to 1945.

Of course I was welcome to visit. But I would be met with polite shrugs and disinterest in trying to ferret out stories or anecdotes, or to earn plaudits for what my father had done. Given this thread of thought, and perhaps to be diplomatic, church officials never responded to me.

A professor who had read my essay in the Philippine journal offered a more general observation, beyond that of a natural generational waning of historical interest, for why he and probably others had found the heroic take on my father somewhat jarring and paternalistic. With the passage of decades, he explained, the immediate postwar view of the United States as a kindly liberator dispensing unconditional sovereignty transitioned into a more ambiguous portrait of a calculating colonial power. Americans might see themselves as having been a compassionate overseer, but he said many scholars have come to fault the U.S. both for failing to protect the Philippines from harsh Japanese conquest in 1941-42 and then exposing the population to unnecessary suffering and death during the 1944-45 retaking.

So, he continued, any story today of American military benevolence, such as mine highlighting my father’s medical work, is unlikely to stir interest among Filipinos. To the extent that the populace retains any wartime memory, it is more likely attuned to a continuing fight for full payment of U.S. military benefits to Filipinos who were recruited to fight alongside American soldiers.

As I digested these comments, serendipitously I realized that they perhaps also tap into emotions my father wrestled with after the war and why he never talked or wrote about his experiences. He too may have moved on, concluding that while his work was humanitarian and saved lives, it was carried out within the parameters of horrific violence and that its necessity merited no garlands, not even from a well-meaning son.

With that understanding now, my emotional link has been secured without validation of a visit.  I have fully assessed my father’s wartime history. Its past is past.

David Smollar is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer. He lives in Tierrasanta.