Charles Bohannan and Guerrilla warfare in the Philippines (1939-1954)

[Ridler]

Dear SWJ Crew,

I'm a historian currently writing a biography of counterinsurgency pioneer Charles Bohannan (1914-1982). Along with Edward Lansdale and Ramon Magsaysay, Bohannan was a critical player who contributed to the defeat of the Huk rebellion in the Philippines (1946-1954) before becoming involved with Lansdale's efforts in Vietnam.

I was hoping folks here might offer suggestions on either books or journal articles regarding both the Huk rebellion and also guerrilla warfare in the Philippines during the Second World War. Bohannan was involved with many guerrilla groups after being smuggled to the islands before the unleashing of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. I'm most interested in service articles from the era (1945-1960) that discussed the Huk campaign, but am also generating a healthy bibliography on the subject of both Guerrilla Warfare in the Philippines (1939-1960) as well as the Huk rebellion specifically.

I'd also thought I'd ask if folks here could fathom a guess why the defeat of the Huk rebellion has not garnered the same attention today from modern COIN practitioners and theorists compared to work on Algeria, Vietnam, and Malaya. Given that it was a joint American/Filipino success story, I find this somewhat odd (though it is good to see Bohannan's book COUNTER GUERRILLA OPERATIONS: THE PHILIPPINE'S EXPERIENCE is back in print).

Thanks in advance for your .02 cents

Jay Ridler, Ph.D.
Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley.

[Dayuhan]

It could be argued that the Huk rebellion was less defeated than suppressed, and that it re-emerged later, in a much more sophisticated form, as the New People's Army. The extent to which the restoration of the decaying feudal status quo ante that generated the rebellion in the first place can be considered "victory" might be seen as debatable. Magsaysay's promises of reform had some impact on the course of the rebellion, but the reality on the ground never lived up to the promise, leaving the area ripe for further insurgent organizing. Anyone treating the Huk rebellion as a case study of "victory" in COIN should also treat it as a case study of how failure to follow up a transient military victory with real changes in governance simply generates "rebellion 2.0"... often a much more difficult rebellion to manage, as rebels tend to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors.

Many reviews of the Huk period, especially from the US and Philippine military side, focus on the role of counterinsurgency tactics in degrading the rebellion and overlook the internal friction within the Huk side. Luis Taruc and Casto Alejandrino were undoubtedly communists, but they had the ability to present doctrine in terms that made sense to the less ideological, more reform-minded peasantry that formed the backbone of the Huk fighting force and local leadership. This ability was not shared by the Lava brothers and the urban ideologues that gained influence in the leadership ranks as the rebellion progressed. This largely educated, doctrinally rigid clique was rooted in urban labor organizing and, while they were able to maneuver their way into leadership positions in the Huk movement, never really connected to the peasant masses and alienated much of the local leadership. The eventual decline in the influence of the Huk leadership was largely driven by this split, though many analysts at the time had a vested interest in attributing it to successful counterinsurgency tactics.

It's certainly on your list already, but Benedict Kerkvliet's work on the Huk Rebellion is almost a mandatory starting point. Unlike much other work on the rebellion, it's based on field research and extensive direct contact with people who participated in and were affected by the rebellion, often at the ground level. This perspective is notably missing from much other scholarly work, which often gets mired in cold war stereotyping or the personal bias of various "leaders" and "experts", from both sides of the fence, that are relied on as primary sources.

One aspect of the roots of rebellion that has, to me, been inadequately treated is the extent to which the MacArthur/Roxas alliance and its insistence on restoring the prewar feudal elite to power actively participated in creating the conditions that allowed the rebellion, and to some extent the later rebellion of the NPA, to flourish.

[Ridler]

Excellent points on the "limited" or "unfinished" nature of the victory against the Huk. That it was seen as a victory in 1954 does not mean in the long run the initial reforms became manifest or successful, especially after Magsaysay's death. Thanks.

I agree that Taruc in particular has not been dealt with well in the literature on the initial defeat of the Huk. Most scholars use his two memoirs (the first co written with Jesus Lava and William Pomeory, the second a prison memoir edited by Douglas Hyde) for mere color and haven't given them serious consideration. They're highly charged works, to be sure, jingoist in different directions, but very valuable and illuminating when read in conjuncture with other work of the era, like, as you mentioned, Kerkvliet's stunning one volume history. The division between the more socialist/nationalist members of the Huk, vis a vi the more doctrainaire or hardline communists, was one of the seeds of discord that thrived as Magsaysay, Lansdale and Bohannan shifted the strategy between 1950-1953.

Many thanks for your thoughts, Dayhan.

[Dayuhan]

Excellent points on the "limited" or "unfinished" nature of the victory against the Huk. That it was seen as a victory in 1954 does not mean in the long run the initial reforms became manifest or successful, especially after Magsaysay's death.

One thing I've learned in 30+ years in the Philippines is that it's very easy for national leaders to announce reforms in Manila. Getting those reforms implemented on the ground in the face of overt and covert opposition from entrenched local and regional elites is extremely difficult, more difficult than Manila-centric analyses of Philippine governance often admit.

The division between the more socialist/nationalist members of the Huk, vis a vis the more doctrinaire or hardline communists, was one of the seeds of discord that thrived as Magsaysay, Lansdale and Bohannan shifted the strategy between 1950-1953.

There's a bit of a semantic challenge in describing the not-quite-communist elements of the Huk, and "nationalist and socialist" has often been the accepted default. I'm not really sure it's appropriate. The peasant unions of the 1930s, the precursor of the Huk movement in Central Luzon, might better be described as reformist. That's not to say they weren't militant - many of them were - but few of them had any consistent national agenda or coherent ideology. They were driven primarily by grievances specific to the peasantry of Central Luzon, and had little interest in wider agendas. The Communist presence was pretty minimal, mainly because the PKP wasn't interested. Prewar Philippine Communists followed a strict Marxist dogma focused on the urban proletariat as the driver of revolution, and held the peasantry in generally low regard. Disinterest in mucking about in the rice fields may have played a part in that.

Of course that changed post-war, but the continued inability of the urban Communists to connect to a primarily reform-minded peasantry proved a major internal constraint for the Huks.

While both Malaya and the Philippines in the age of the Huk might be seen as COIN "successes" in the immediate military sense, I'd be hesitant to apply lessons extracted from those conflicts elsewhere. It seems to me that both movements failed more due to their inherent limitations (ethnic in Malaya, geographic in the Philippines) and their relative lack of sophistication than due to the effectiveness of the COIN strategies applied. Lansdale found Vietnam a much tougher nut to crack, and I'm not convinced that the approaches used in Malaya or against the Huk would have much impact on a more modern and more capable insurgency. Not to say it's not worth studying, but any recipes deduced would have to be applied with caution elsewhere.

One lesson that can I think be deduced would fall in the "how not to do it" column. One of the key events that drove the reform minded Huks into alliance with the PKP was the government's refusal to allow the six Democratic Alliance candidates who won in the 1946 elections to take office. In retrospect it's fairly clear that if they had been allowed to take office they could easily have been co-opted and/or marginalized, just as left-wing party list representatives are today, and that they'd have been less a threat in office than they were in the hills. Of course according to the Cold War ethos of the day that was unthinkable, but it's worth remembering today!

[John T. Fishel]

Ridler, take a look at what happened in Guatemala. Insurgenices 2.0 and 3.0 followed due to the failure to address the root causes. As Sir Robert Thompson put it, all the reform in the world will not defeat an insrugency once it is organized. However, without reform you get insurgency 2.0.

[Bob's World]

Jay,

I assume you have a copy of "In the Midst of Wars- An American's Mission to Southeast Asia" by Ed Lansdale?

Interesting read. I agree with Dayuhan and John T. as to the Huks only being suppressed, rather than defeated. Insurgency has never been resolved in the Philippines, as that resolution demands a change of governing philosophy that the ruling class is either unable or unwilling to adopt.

In Lansdale's book one gets a clear look into how he participated in the suppression of the Huk rebellion, and then carried those lessons learned to Vietnam to shape the strategic framework for a similar suppression there. This was the height of the Cold War and any effort that prevented an expansion of Communist Chinese/Soviet influence into Southeast Asia was a "win," even if the legitimate governance concerns of the affected populaces were merely suppressed to achieve our larger policy win.

As an aside, and I toss this to Dayuhan for his more informed opinion, there may well be a cultural trait in the Philippines that makes it very difficult to truly resolve insurgency there. A friend and former Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines Commander and I were discussing the situation there and he offered this insight:

The Filipino people do not take personal responsibility for things. For example, if one were to knock a plate off of a table, causing it to fall to the floor and break, he would say 'the plate fell on the floor,' or 'the plate broke' rather than 'I knocked the plate on the floor' or 'I broke the plate.

It is my position from my study of insurgency that a critical early step to designing and implementing an effective COIN campaign is the understanding and acceptance of responsibility by government for what actions and policies are contributing to the conditions that create the type of political vulnerability that is then in turn exploited by some internal or external actor for their own purposes, employing some ideology or another that is tuned to the populace in question.

So my theory is that the cultural aversion to accepting responsibility for actions is a major attribute of why the Philippines has been in a nearly continuous state of suppressed and active insurgency since the Spanish first arrived.

Therefore, any strategic COIN campaign for the Philippines would not begin by sending security forces out to seek to exert control over the NPA on Luzon, or the MILF, MNLF, ASG, etc in the south; but rather to get the Philippine government to admit: "Hello, I am the government of the Philippines, and I have a problem."

Cheers!

Bob