Opinion: The ‘Very Human American Effort’ That Underpinned Philippine Independence 80 Years Ago

America’s World War II return to the Philippines commenced 80 years ago Sunday on Oct. 20, 1944, when 150,000 U.S. Army troops began storming Leyte island from an armada of 740 ships manned by 50,000 sailors — a scope exceeded at the time only by that spring’s 1944 D-Day invasion of France.

Within this massive deployment was a small untested Army detachment of 1,470 men, activated by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and rooted in his unshakeable belief in America as a singular force for good. Divided into 30 teams labeled Philippine Civil Affairs Units (PCAUs), its unique mission was to reboot the basics of civil society, sundered by three years of Japanese military occupation, and thereby strengthen an American promise of independence in 1946.

Yet the group’s outsized role and lessons learned are little-known and now largely lost to historians. As early as 1995, Morton Netzorg, a Philippines WWII history bibliographer, lamented that the undertaking had become one that “few Filipinos or Americans know of even vaguely.”

Eight decades on, Monsie Soques of North Hollywood remembers, at age 103 among a handful of PCAU participants alive. She retains poignant vignettes of her work with Army doctors in West Leyte. Fierce fighting had destroyed her family’s home in Palompon town on Christmas Day 1945, but within days of the retreat of Japanese soldiers, the multilingual pharmacy student became the first local hire for the area’s PCAU “bamboo” hospital.

“They saved the lives of so many wounded children, and later helped people understand how to avoid getting sick,” she recalled, noting that under Japanese rule violence, food shortages, water degradation and diseases such as tuberculosis and dysentery had mounted rapidly in the months before the American invasion.

The devoted Soques even wheedled critical extra medicines, especially penicillin, blood substitutes and drugs to fight intestinal parasites, from a sympathetic Maj. Winthrop Rockefeller (later Governor of Arkansas 1966-70), temporarily billeted nearby as an Army regiment supply officer, after he spent nights witnessing the PCAU’s numerous military and civilian medical rescues.

Each 49-member unit included 10 officers specializing in administration, labor, education, agriculture and medicine, and 39 Filipino-American support troops who had volunteered from immigrant communities in California. Into July 1945 when major fighting ended, these teams followed immediately on the heels of assault troops to assist war-damaged regions on the archipelago’s major islands. They initially shepherded civilians in the tens of thousands away from combat and provided emergency food and medicine, then fanned out to improve public health, put people to work, restock stores, reopen a thousand-plus schools, and restore local governance.

MacArthur’s concept stemmed from having spent much of his career in the colonial Philippines. In early 1942 he eluded by boat and plane capture after American and Filipino soldiers were overwhelmed by Japanese forces following the Pacific War’s outbreak with the Dec. 7, 1941 bombing of Oahu.

With the U.S. returning, MacArthur saw his prestige on the line to ensure 1946 sovereignty as provided in a pre-WWII Congressional act. “He astonished me by his active support of Philippine independence,” a top aide, Lt. Col. Edgar Crossman, wrote in an unpublished memoir. “He not only believed in it but he was going to promote it and expedite it if possible.”

Crossman drafted MacArthur’s September 1944 letter to the U.S. War Department demanding “utmost care be taken that an imperialistic attitude not be introduced under the guise of military necessity.” The general then publicized his views to a United Press correspondent, saying there would be no American military government following Japanese capitulation.

MacArthur won the bureaucratic battle and implemented his plan that another aide, Lt. Col. Joseph Rauh, had fleshed out. (Rauh had clerked prewar for two Supreme Court justices, and later worked for Pres. Harry Truman and as a nationally prominent civil rights attorney.) For his template, Rauh used the 1944 novel A Bell for Adano by famed war correspondent John Hersey.

The story fictionalized the bungled 1943 Allied effort to restore civil society in Sicily after German withdrawal, where combat officers micro-managed beleaguered Civil Affairs personnel. In his oral history archived at the Truman Presidential Library, Rauh said that he “helped write the plan based on the novel. I read it, reread it, and read it again; a marvelous book, it taught you how to do civil affairs.”

The self-contained teams largely met MacArthur’s directives for stabilization. In his memoir, Sixth Army Commander Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger, whose troops spearheaded the Leyte assault and later mounted the invasion of the main island of Luzon, cited PCAUs for getting refugee chaos under immediate control even while fighting raged. This was crucial during the February 1945 battle of Manila when suicidal Japanese military elements fought building-by-building to delay the U.S. advance. The PCAU’s emergency hospital for civilian casualties there is today the national Philippine Orthopedic Center, one of two wartime medical facilities that remain.

Crossman observed that the “nearer that Army units got to the fighting, the more the Army appreciated” PCAUs for relieving them of responsibility for civilians. MacArthur credited the detachment with preventing widespread starvation, public disorder and, crucially, epidemics which would have spread quickly to troops. “Civil government under constitutional process has been progressively restored in an orderly manner,” his command’s fall 1945 analysis concluded.

Of course, the success enjoyed by PCAUs was facilitated by strong pro-American feelings among the vast majority of Filipinos. The recollections of centenarian Soques mirror those postwar from PCAU members who found themselves overwhelmed at their reception from Filipinos.

Medical officer Maj. Nathan Cohen wrote in 1946 of “deep and inexpressible gratitude” from residents in the southern Mindanao city of Zamboanga treated for malnutrition and war-related illness. Capt. Sam Yorty, an education officer ( and later Mayor of Los Angeles, 1961-1973), was lauded by MacArthur’s staff for his ambitious work in reopening schools in Tacloban within three weeks. In 2016 in Honolulu, Sgt. Domingo Los Banos, from the Army’s 1st Filipino Regiment, recounted the “sparkling eyes of children” in Valencia who quickly received clothing, paper and pencils for attending school following liberation.

Townspeople serenaded the unit of my father, a PCAU physician along Leyte’s war-torn west coast, when its boat departed after three months of effort for another battle-scarred area on Mindanao around Cagayan de Oro. “It feels good to know that for them a hospital is no longer a place to shun, not a place to go to die, but rather a place to go to get well,” he penned in a letter home.

Frustrations expressed by PCAU participants came largely from trying to do too much with finite resources within a compressed time frame and limited mandate. In an apt summary written when Japan surrendered, Capt. Theodore Sendak (later Indiana attorney general 1968-1981) characterized the PCAU mission, during which he had held labor and public safety positions, as a potent symbol of American idealism. So disappointments were natural despite an understanding of the constraints, he wrote. “It was no pristine panacea but still a very human American effort.”

The detachment’s coda validated its work: the dawn of independence for 18.6 million Filipinos on July 4, 1946.

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