Tears in the Darkness by Michael Norman Page A

but most wore rubber-soled canvas shoes that fell apart or rotted in the wet climate; in their initial training they used lengths of wood and stalks of bamboo instead of rifles and had only limited opportunities to handle or test-fire real weapons.
    More than half of them were illiterate peasants drawn from the provinces. They came into the training camps speaking a hundred regional languages and dialects, and orders often had to be translated and retranslated three or four times before a man could understand them. During their first week of “training,” they learned how to operate flush toilets and were lectured on the value of washing their hands before they sat down to eat. In the mornings they were taught how to march, stand in formation, tender a crisp salute. In the afternoons they worked in the camp gardens raising vegetables, and tended herds of livestock and flocks of fowl so they would have something to eat.
    Their officers were often wholly ignorant of the most basic military subjects—map reading, troop movements, tactics, even simple self-defense. An American adviser once asked a Filipino officer to order his men to dig foxholes, and the Filipino, out of earshot, turned to a subordinate and whispered, “What is a foxhole?” 8
    Had they been well trained and well led, the Filipinos might have made superb soldiers. Generally a passive people, they followed the custom of
pakikisama,
Tagalog for “just go along with it” whatever the “it” was—the rule of government, the will of the family, the preferences of friends. And if going along put trouble in his path, well, then, the weary
magsasaka
(farmer) would just
bahala na,
“leave it to God, come what may.” But wrong him, insult him, slander his family, question his honor, and the average Filipino would likely turn his bolo from cutting sugarcane to harvesting someone’s head.
    A handful of Americans in the islands, veterans of the Spanish-American War, had experienced this fury. After the United States invaded the islands in 1898, Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the Filipino revolt, and his peasant army fought pitched battles with the Americans, then became a guerrilla force that regularly harassed and ambushed the American troops who pursued them into the provinces. Impressed bythe Filipinos’ capacity to fight, the American Army created within its ranks a unit called the Philippine Scouts, ten thousand highly trained Filipino troops considered by some in 1941 to be the best light infantry in the Pacific.
    Unlike the veteran Scouts, however, the much larger Commonwealth Army, only five years old, had no experience and little support. When the Japanese set sail from Formosa, the native force preparing to meet them was ill led and underequipped. Morale was high—the Filipinos shared their American overseers’ contempt for the Japanese and were proud of their birthright and eager to defend it against the invaders. But without the proper equipment and preparation for the hard fight ahead, they were just “multitudes of men,” as the ancient Roman, Vegetius, might have called them, waiting to be “dragged to slaughter.” 9
    MacArthur knew of these deficits but never corrected them. Instead he concentrated on the politics of the moment, building morale and maligning his enemy. In May 1941 he told a reporter that the Japanese Imperial Army had suffered so many casualties in China, it was now a “third-class” force, a statement that said more about the general than the Japanese. Only a handful of American intelligence officers had the ability to analyze the strength and caliber of the Japanese troops, and these men had scant information in front of them. Japan was a police state in 1941, and everyone—natives, foreign residents, diplomats, and travelers—was under surveillance. So American operatives in Tokyo could only guess at the proficiency of the emperor’s troops,