War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942-1944

War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942-1944. James Kelly Morningstar. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2021.

James Kelly Morningstar’s War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942-1944 is a journeyman-like chronological discussion of the archipelago-wide Filipino resistance to the Japanese occupation that ultimately fails to move beyond simple narrative. His just-the-facts exposition is not accompanied by an analysis of the struggle as a Filipino insurgency and a Japanese counterinsurgency. While Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency appears in his bibliography, Morningstar delegates to the reader the task of applying elements of counterinsurgency (COIN) theory to the events he describes.[1] Had he integrated an explanation of that theory into his analysis of the conflict, he would have situated his study of the Filipino resistance and the Japanese effort to suppress it within the broader literature of asymmetric conflicts in twentieth-century East Asia.

Morningstar incorporates several features into his book that ably guide prospective students of the Filipino insurgency against Japan. He divides his study into chronological chapters and then into regional subchapters, giving the reader the ability to cross-compare developments in different locations. For example, subchapter “Mindanao, D425 / R-624” begins on 5 February 1943. The coded designation “D425” refers to day 425 of the occupation, and “R-624” refers to 624 days before MacArthur’s return.[2]

While his chronological and geographic approach militates against a broader thematic or analytic framework, it does permit scholars to more readily compare conditions, leaders, and events between regions. A set of excellent maps help the reader keep track of U.S.-designated guerrilla districts, U.S. missions to different islands, and a wide array of guerrilla dramatis personae. Many local guerrilla chiefs seem to have been more interested in competing with and impeding each other than in fighting the Japanese, a finding Morningstar fails to interrogate.

A propaganda poster depicts the Philippine resistance movement during the first year of Japanese occupation. (War Production Board/National Archives/Wikimedia)

Morningstar’s central thesis is that the Filipino guerrillas “inspired resistance by the general population on the national level, obstructed Japanese efforts to economically exploit the islands, and set the conditions for eventual liberation by U.S. forces.”[3] So far, so conventional. However, his book goes beyond the conventional view and documents a Filipino resistance bitterly riven by endemic internal divisions, impeaching the post-war narrative of a united, anti-Japanese Filipino people.

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Morningstar fails to explore the highly personalized, familial, and non-ideological nature of Filipino intra-elite political competition manifested in the internecine rivalries of the resistance. The pervasive internal conflicts of the insurgency manifested in numerous violent incidents between guerrilla groups as well as a menagerie of short-lived, quasi-guerrilla or criminal organizations that Morningstar brings up throughout the text. The Filipino resistance is ripe for an examination using categories contained in Stathis Kalyvas’ The Logic of Violence in Civil War. The central Japanese task was to create, protect, and expand a collaborationist consensus, gradually edging more Filipinos on more islands from passive towards active collaboration, as the U.S. successfully did during the Philippine-American War in 1899-1902. Beyond speaking of “shades of grey” Morningstar does not connect indigenous collaboration to the degree of insurgent or counterinsurgent control or loss of control over territory or population.[4]

The central Filipino task, to avoid annihilation and prepare for decisive outside intervention, was achieved in spite of geographical dispersion and organizational fragmentation. In this case, protraction worked to the advantage of the insurgency. The Japanese were defeated not by Filipino resistance but by U.S. naval, air, and ground combat power. The narratives of Filipino résistants became weapons during post-war political and familial struggles within the new republic, which Morningstar acknowledges.[5]

Morningstar makes extensive use of memoirs published long after the war, seemingly simple fact assertions contained in accounts published decades after the war by the survivors of fratricidal local struggles who had much to spin. In a sense, this is another aspect of the overall question of the remarkable degree of internal, self-limiting divisions within the Filipino guerrilla movement.

Morningstar succeeds in his stated intention to “provide a basis for a fuller discussion of resistance during war as experienced in the Philippines during World War II.”[6] As his work makes clear, localized regional insurgencies, both unified and fragmented, can coincide with and fit into larger symmetric conflicts. The Filipino resistance was an insurgency, albeit with serious limitations; the Japanese conducted a heavy-handed, non-nimble, poorly-resourced counterinsurgency. Armed resistance movements to foreign occupations should be analyzed using this framing, among others.

However, Morningstar ignores the evolution of the scholarship in elucidating the nature of asymmetric war. Specifically, he stops short of critically explaining the conflict that he otherwise ably narrates. By failing to explain, his analysis ignores the complexity of the Filipino insurgency, and the nuances of local dynamics are subsumed within larger, popular narratives, such as the American return to the Philippines.

John S. Reed, author of The U.S. Volunteers in the Southern Philippines, 1899-1901: Counterinsurgency, Pacification, and Collaboration, taught for twenty years at the University of Utah. He served as an Army reservist for twenty-six years, to include one deployment to Iraq in 2007-2008. He is currently working on a study of the social distribution of combat risk in the U.S. Army during World War Two.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] The edition most accessible to civilian scholars is The U.S. Army * Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3-24, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)—“an insurgency is an organized, protracted politico-military struggle to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government, occupying power, or other political authority, while increasing insurgent control”—page 2, emphasis added.

[2] James Kelly Morningstar, War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942-1944 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2021), 142.

[3] Morningstar, War and Resistance in the Philippines, xi.

[4] Morningstar, War and Resistance in the Philippines, 152, 274.

[5] Morningstar, War and Resistance in the Philippines, 275-76.

[6] Morningstar, War and Resistance in the Philippines, xi.