PH guerrillas won war, says history group

BAGUIO CITY—Filipino guerrillas should be credited for fighting the battles and discovering the key to ending World War II in the Philippines, when Japanese Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita surrendered to the Americans and their allies at Camp John Hay on Sept. 3, 1945, according to a military historian.

Members of the Philippine Historical Association and the Philippine Veterans Affairs Office (PVAO) on Thursday lamented that military history still referred to the rescue of the Philippines from the Japanese Imperial Army by the Allied Forces, instead of the loose units of Filipino guerrillas who stayed in the country to fight.

They spoke at a forum on the end of World War II held at the Baguio Convention Center.

The forum was held in Baguio “where the war began and where the war ended,” said retired Brig. Gen. Restituto Aguilar, a military historian and chief of PVAO’s Veterans Memorial and Historical Division.

He was referring to the Dec. 8, 1941, bombing of Camp John Hay by the Japanese, after Japanese warplanes bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, igniting World War II in the Pacific.

The US ambassador’s residence at Camp John Hay also served as a venue for Yamashita’s official surrender 70 years ago.

Facing defeat, Yamashita relocated the Japanese military headquarters to Baguio, and withdrew further into the Cordillera mountains, pursued by guerrillas, historians said.

‘Koga papers’

But it was the discovery by Filipino guerrillas in Cebu of documents detailing Japanese war plans that hastened the defeat of the Japanese, Aguilar said.

The documents were prepared by Japanese Adm. Mineichi

Koga, who designed battle plans for Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, he said. These were seized after a plane crashed off the shores of San Fernando town in Cebu in April 1944, Aguilar said, citing books written by the late Col. Manuel Segura.

Accounts cited by Aguilar said a seaplane crashed in a thunderstorm and its Japanese passengers were observed dragging a body, while chanting “Koga.”

Aguilar said Koga was eventually declared lost at sea, but it was never established that the body seen in Cebu was his.

The existence of the “Koga papers” is not discussed in military science courses, he said, addressing a crowd of high school and college students and cadets from the Philippine Military Academy.

Japanese search

The Japanese began to terrorize communities there, holding Filipinos hostage as they searched for survivors and documents from the crashed seaplane, he said.

Aguilar said the Koga papers were recovered and buried by a resident named Pedro Gantuangko.

The papers included Koga’s plans for “combined Japanese fleet operations,” and indicated an assumption made by Japanese intelligence officers that the Americans, who fled to Australia, would return and land in Sarangani Bay in Mindanao, Aguilar said.

Koga’s plans were approved in 1944 by the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, he said, so the Japanese Army reinforced southern Mindanao “intending to face the Americans head on.” These required building a base in Davao, which at the time “had the biggest concentration of Japanese nationals,” Aguilar said.

US mission

The guerrillas soon had custody of the papers and were taught to “waterproof” the documents, he said.

The papers were fetched by a submarine sent by American Gen. Douglas MacArthur. To conceal its mission, the submarine also took in 40 evacuees, Aguilar said.

The Koga documents showed that only 17,000 Japanese troops were left to fight in Leyte province, where MacArthur and the American forces eventually landed. The Americans fought their way up to Luzon through Lingayen town in Pangasinan province.

This detail of the Filipino guerrillas’ contribution to ending the war is recognized only through a simple marker in Cebu, Aguilar said.