Of recollection, the Irish author James Stephens wrote, “Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory.” A contemporary, American writer William Faulkner, offered a different notion: “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.”
I found myself up against these contrasting views the past few months. I learned that my belief in a wartime tale of American virtue could be seen by others as one inextricably bound to destruction and misery, and largely bereft of celebratory elements.
I had contemplated a personal trip this spring to the Philippine town of Palompon, on the West Coast of Leyte island, timed to the 80th anniversary of my father’s World War II work there as a U.S. Army doctor tasked with helping civilians recover from three years of harsh Japanese occupation and a destructive battle. I hoped to culminate a decade of research and writing about his special military civil affairs unit and cement an emotional connection to a formative part of his life that he had never broached to me.
My research used as a foundation the letters he wrote once or twice a day to my mother while overseas (numbering in the hundreds and which I discovered after she died) detailing the hospital and public health clinics he set up in Palompon. The letters led me to the National Archives, where I found a plethora of obscure documents to flesh out both his recollections and the brief descriptions in general Asian-Pacific war histories of civil affairs.
The “Eureka” moment came when an archivist brought out a large box of papers — unopened since being catalogued in the 1960s — with weekly medical reports of combat injuries and war-related epidemics compiled by my father over many months and sent to the Army’s Southwest Pacific Command. That command, at the express direction of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, had established the Philippine Civil Affairs Units (PCAUs) in his unshakeable belief in America as a singular force for good. I subsequently published accounts in both the United States and the Philippines of these largely unknown humanitarian efforts, and updated as new information appeared on the Internet as a consequence.
I received many positive comments from American readers on the essays, but no reactions from their Filipino counterparts. I took note at the time but reflected little on it, assuming that the article in a Philippine academic journal had garnered little circulation. Last September, imbued with the philosophy expressed by Faulkner, I began plans to visit the West Leyte region. I emailed a cross-section of Filipinos and provided links to my writings, eager for perspectives on Palompon’s legacy to make my time more rewarding upon arrival.
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.
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