'Casseroles' vs. Red Army, April 1945

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 315-316:

When the Soviet Red Army finally launched its attack on the city with Stalin Organs, tanks, howitzers, and other artillery, it was faced by forty thousand Wehrmacht and SS troops, and about forty thousand Volkssturm men, assisted by Hitler Youths. Volkssturm and Hitler Youths were called “casseroles” by the veteran soldiers, a mixture of old meat and green vegetables. The casseroles were armed with little else than a Panzerfaust, the handheld anti-tank weapon. The trick was to get as close as possible to the enemy tank, preferably right beside the tracks, and launch the weapon from below. Hitler Youths were ordered to do some of the most odious and dangerous jobs. It was they who were told to fight the Soviets in the subway tunnels. And it was they who were ordered to shoot into any house that displayed a white flag of surrender. They were also less likely to desert than the older Volkssturm men, and more eager to demonstrate their willingness to fight to the death.

Somewhere in the vicinity of Spandau, which saw some of the heaviest fighting in Berlin, a boy in a brown shirt and shorts came up to Helmut and asked for a cigarette. Helmut wanted to know his age. Thirteen, the boy said. His story was far from unique. He had been snatched by the SS from his home in Oranienburg, together with a number of other boys, and made to fight in an SS platoon. These boys were not even Hitler Youths, but mere Pimpfs. When the leader of their small troop refused to lead the boys into yet another suicidal battle, he was hanged from a lamppost by SS and SA men. The boy told this story without a show of any emotion. He asked for another cigarette. Helmut gave him a packet.

One of the most gruesome features of the hopeless Battle of Berlin was the cruelty inflicted by Germans on their compatriots. There was no consideration for civilians at all. Women and young girls were forced to fight too. SS men and soldiers commandeered soup kitchens and used their machine guns to prevent civilians from helping themselves to food. After clearing houses of their inhabitants, officers would rob what they could find and take off with the loot in military vehicles, often in the company of their wives and girlfriends. More than a hundred thousand civilians died in less than a month in an entirely futile battle that could not be stopped as long as the Führer was alive. Even as the city was being demolished street by street, house by house, by bombing and shelling and hand-to-hand fighting, propaganda stories still promised miracles. There was talk of a General Wenck coming to the rescue, even though his largely phantom army had already been decimated outside Berlin. Hitler was convinced of this fairy tale almost until the moment he killed himself. When he was told the truth, he flew into a rage against the generals who had “betrayed” him. Peace with the Anglo-American Allies was also said to be imminent.

...

Very quickly, the battle over Berlin turned into a massacre. Helmut describes the scene at the bridge over the Havel River in Spandau, where terrified civilians were trying to flee from the bombardment of rockets, flamethrowers, bombs, and tank shells: “Women carrying babies and holding on to their children, Hitler Youths, young girls, old men and women, are falling all over, dragging others down with them. Shot to pieces. Blood everywhere…Tanks crossing the bridge, rolling right over the people, crushing them into a pulp under their chains. A wide avenue of dead bodies and blood, of broken limbs and shredded corpses, stretches over the river that runs under the bridge.”

Living Underground in Berlin, 1945

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 305-306:

Living underground was for many Berliners an oddly democratic experience; one had to sit, sleep, eat, and defecate together with people of all classes. Nazis threw away their uniforms, burned their documents, and shared underground spaces with people who had always despised them. Germans shared spaces with foreigners, and sometimes even with Jews. “I no longer hid from the neighbors,” Marie Jalowicz recalled. “We didn’t go to the bunker but lay in the slit trenches…. In a rather foolish way, I was annoyed to see the war ending in so tediously banal a way, and finding that I was not part of the turmoil of battle.”

The lack of water and toilets must have been a particular torment to fastidious Germans. The smell inside an almost airless bunker where people lingered for many days was foul. When they had a chance, the youngest girls, who could run fast, would dash out between bombing raids or street battles to a nearby pump to fill pails with water. Some made it back to the bunker, some never did. Boys were less keen to undertake such forays, lest they get forced by chain-dog [Kettenhunde, nickname for military police] patrols to join the suicide forces.

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted in her diary on April 24, “Life in the cellar commences. We sit side by side without speaking, jammed in between piles of clothes and junk. The war goes on over our heads. The barrage of deadly fire is making a terrible racket. After eleven, the electricity is cut off. It is cold and dark. The contrast between the inferno outside and our own forced inactivity is increasingly unbearable…. Fabian winds up the phonograph and plays a song from ‘The Beggars’ Opera.’ The words ‘You gentlemen who think you have a mission to purge us of the seven deadly sins…’ echo tinnily off the basement walls. Then, ratatatat. The first machine guns. Our walls are lashed by bullets.”

Getting hold of food was an added problem. The economy had largely broken down, and much was now down to barter: cigarettes for cabbage, or a bar of chocolate, or clothes. There were still some mobile field kitchens operated by Wehrmacht soldiers, called “goulash cannon [Gulaschkanone],” where people could fill pots with soup. And as soon as there was a rumor about stores or factories that could be plundered, it was every man—or, more likely, woman—for him or herself. Order, so much a part of German life, collapsed. But sometimes the habit of discipline was so ingrained that women would stand in a queue at a goulash cannon, even as they were being strafed by enemy fire. Bodies crumpled; the line was held for a bowl of soup.

In fact, the word “democratic” goes only so far in these circumstances. Not all shelters were the same. A certain pecking order still remained intact. It was no doubt far more comfortable sheltering in Albert Speer’s huge bunker in central Berlin, originally built for railway employees, but later accessible to other people too, than to be exposed to bombs, Katyusha rockets, and howitzer shells in an open trench for foreign workers or POWs. There was room for three thousand people in the Reichsbahn bunker. Water still ran from the taps. Speer himself would sometimes put in an appearance and acknowledge the crowd with a friendly “Heil Hitler!” Ursula von Kardorff spent some time there before leaving the capital. She recalled Speer as an amiable fellow, with none of the mannerisms of the officious party boss. Soon, many more than three thousand people found their way in.

Berlin's Full Mobilization, 1944

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 279-280:

But [Heinrich] George did not have to worry. He was one of the very few to be put on a special list of national geniuses (Gottbegnadetenliste), along with Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Heinz Rühmann, who were exempt from wartime mobilization.

Women, too, were ordered to take on the jobs of absent men. Sabine Alenfeld, whose Jewish husband, Erich, was becoming a nervous wreck, worked from 6:45 p.m. till 4:45 in the morning, sewing military uniforms. She was terrified that things would get worse. She heard rumors that parents in mixed marriages would be separated from their children and put into camps. This didn’t happen. Mischlinge and Jewish husbands were forced instead to labor in the most dangerous construction jobs, or clear out the rubble after bombings. Sixty hours a week was the norm. Sabine wrote to her sister on November 13, “Our lives are turning more and more into a race, a race against…well, what. A race against death, of course, but also against the possibility of living.”

The words fanatisch, used in an entirely positive sense, and Volksgemeinschaft dominated the newspaper headlines. Such words were uttered, often without making any sense. The Völkischer Beobachter on September 25: “Fanatically we will stand together. Leadership that is harder than fate will always win in the end.” On October 16, Hitler announced that all able-bodied men between sixteen and sixty in every province (Gau) of the Great German Reich had to join the people’s militia (Volkssturm). Sabine Alenfeld was terrified that her frail husband would be called up. But Mischlinge and Jews were exempted. They were given a “certificate of exclusion.” How could they possibly be included in this great fanatical enterprise?

The Volkssturm army would “defend the Heimat soil with every suitable weapon.” Many of the men were not able-bodied, but fragile and sometimes even invalids. Since suitable weapons for fighting a modern war were now in short supply, the old men and young boys, some in ragged civilian clothes, some in Hitler Youth uniforms, and some in their everyday clothes, were handed primitive weapons, occasionally dating to the last war, and given minimal instruction how to use them. The main weapon was the Panzerfaust, a portable grenade launcher to fire at tanks at close range. Many of the instructors were elderly veterans, whose knowledge of modern warfare was limited. But that didn’t matter. It was the fighting spirit of the Volksgemeinschaft that would surely be enough to defeat Germany’s enemies.

Goebbels wrote in his diary how pleased he was with the enthusiasm of Berliners who signed up willingly: “I will pay special attention to the Volkssturm and make sure that in this respect, too, Berlin will outdo every other Gau.” The hope was to raise an army of millions. The papers reported that long lines of men waited patiently to file into the recruiting centers, decorated with swastikas and busts of Hitler, their eyes shining with the requisite fanaticism.

That many people were perhaps less than keen might be gathered from a joke that did the rounds at the time: “Why is the Volkssturm Germany’s most precious resource? Because its members have silver in their hair, gold in their mouths, and lead in their bones.”

Berlin After Stalingrad, 1943

  From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 202-205:

An even worse damper on the public morale than the bombings was the news from the eastern front, where the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Soviet Red Army at Stalingrad. On February 2, amid the stench of rotting corpses, blood, and human waste, only about ninety thousand exhausted, hungry, freezing German soldiers were still alive to be taken prisoner. Hitler was furious. He had demanded a battle to the last man. As martyrs, he declared, the German soldiers would have earned “national immortality.” The Wehrmacht took up to a million casualties in the battles around Stalingrad. The victorious Red Army lost even more.

...

Propaganda in the Nazi press had swung from triumphalism to the need to bring Opfer [sacrifice], of course, but also to dark warnings over what the barbaric Russians might do to the Germans in their thirst for revenge. Some conscience-stricken Germans already assumed that the British bombing raids were not only a payback for London and Coventry, but a just punishment for what the Germans had done to the Jews. In the words of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, “Hardly anyone understands that what is happening now was caused by what happened before; caused by Coventry, by Dunkirk, by atrocities against the Jews, by the destruction of cities and by concentration camps.” Perhaps more people might have sensed this than Ruth assumed. The absolute need for German victory was no longer presented just as a way to rule the new Europe, but to save the German people from their unforgiving enemies.

The annual commemoration of the war dead on March 21 was initiated in 1922 to remember the soldiers who died in World War I. Once they were in power, the Nazis turned what had been a solemn commemoration into a ritual of hero worship, and renamed it Heldengedenktag, “Day of Commemoration of Heroes.” But in 1943 it was more like a state funeral, with Hitler, looking subdued and much older than his fifty-four years, greeting wounded veterans who raised their bandaged arms in the Hitler salute.

...

Hitler might well have died on this occasion, for an officer named Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff had concealed a bomb in his pocket, timed to go off while Hitler was inspecting captured Russian weapons at the Armory. Unfortunately, Hitler, apparently bored by looking at Russian guns, left much earlier than anticipated, and the bomb had to be defused in a nearby lavatory. Hitler, quite unaware of what had occurred, emerged from the Armory to be met by Paul von Hase, the commanding officer of the Berlin garrison, which snapped to attention. One year later, Hase would be hanged for taking part in the plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. (Gersdorff, who also took part in the attempt on the Führer’s life, was one of the very few plotters to survive the war, because his friends refused to name him under torture.)

German 'Workforce Turnover', 1942

 From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 155-57, 181, 191:

If things were bad in Berlin, they were far worse on the eastern front, where many soldiers were freezing to death. The people back home caught glimpses of the Russian campaign on the Wochenschau [weekly newsreels]: horse-drawn carriages and tanks bogged down in knee-high snow; soldiers in white camouflage outfits, rather like hooded bathrobes, skiing or plowing their way through the ruins of Russian villages that were “utterly destroyed by the mighty arms of our heroic shock troops”; German planes dropping food parcels for the soldiers marching in the glacial steppes. Letters home spoke of frostbite and amputated limbs. There were images of “Bolshevik corpses” littered around the icy Russian plains, but never of German soldiers, for that would be too upsetting.

One of the main items on the Wochenschau in January celebrated a domestic campaign that had been ordered by the Führer in December 1941: to donate socks, pullovers, scarves, ski boots, furs, fleeces, blankets, or anything else to keep the troops warm on the front lines....

What was not reported on the Wochenschau, or anywhere else, was an event that occurred at much the same time, on the western shore of the Wannsee, in a grand Italianate villa that once belonged to a rich industrialist and now served as a guesthouse and conference center for SS officers. Houses around the lovely Wannsee were sought after by the wealthiest Berliners. Before 1933, Jews lived in some of the finest homes. After the Nazis came to power, these were confiscated by senior figures in the regime. Goebbels owned a house on the lake, at Schwanenwerder. Walther Funk, the minister of economics, resided in a grand house that had once belonged to a Jewish family, now decorated with swastika tiles. Albert Speer lived nearby, as did Heinz Rühmann, the movie star. 

...

Reinhard Heydrich, director of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), invited fourteen senior figures in the Nazi regime to a secret meeting followed by breakfast on January 20 at the SS guest house on the Wannsee. They included top bureaucrats from various ministries, as well as Roland Freisler, the notorious judge on the People’s Court who sentenced more than five thousand people to death between 1942 and 1945. Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for managing Jewish deportations, was asked to take the minutes. What needed to be discussed on that chilly morning, alleviated by a steady supply of fine brandy, were some practical aspects of the extermination of the Jews.

That the Jews were to be eradicated was no longer a matter of dispute. Just one week before the Wannsee Conference, Goebbels wrote in his diary, “The Führer once more expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no sentimental squeamishness about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them.” Mass killings had already been taking place in Poland since 1939. Jews who were not murdered on the spot were to be worked to death. But two questions still needed to be cleared up. How to administer the genocide in an orderly and efficient manner? And how to define who was Jewish? Should Mischlinge be included in the killing program? Heydrich believed that they should. Others wanted to postpone the decision until after the war. After some to-ing and fro-ing, Heydrich settled for that. The logistical issues were cleared up pretty quickly to everyone’s satisfaction, so the gentlemen could enjoy a leisurely glass of cognac in front of the fireplace.

...

The first sign that deportations were imminent was a questionnaire sent through the mail to be filled out meticulously: financial assets, family history, personal details, and so forth. After some days, or sometimes weeks, the Gestapo would come beating on the door. There was no way back after that. In 1942, sixteen transports, each with loads of roughly one thousand people, left the Berlin railway stations. The trains carrying their human freight were mostly bound for the ghettos of Warsaw or Riga, or the death camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor, where those not deemed fit to be worked to death were immediately gassed. In the summer of 1942, the killing of Jews had reached a bloody peak. Millions had already been shot or murdered by other means before the gas chambers of Auschwitz were employed day and night. The General Gouvernment had become a giant killing field, presided over by Governor General Hans Frank.

...

There were now more than three million foreign workers in Germany. Many were French POWs. A number of men from occupied countries in Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Scandinavian countries, had volunteered for work. Then there were male and female workers from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and other parts of the Soviet Union. Some had come willingly, many had not. The Russians and Eastern Europeans, called Ostarbeiter, often mere teenagers, were treated appallingly. Cooped up in dismal work camps, they were so underfed that many died, or had to be shipped home in horrible conditions. One description of these transports: “There were dead passengers on the returning train. Women on that train gave birth to children that were tossed from the open window during the journey, while people sick from tuberculosis and venereal disease rode in the same coach. The dying lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was thrown onto the embankment.” Treatment of Jewish slave workers in concentration camps, such as Sachsenhausen, was of course even worse.

And yet, a semblance of normalcy for most Berliners continued despite the griping, the bad news from different battlefronts, the horrors endemic in a murderous police state, and “Berlin pessimism.” The soccer competition carried on as always. BSB from Berlin Mitte beat Minerva from Schmargendorf. Tasmania was too strong for Tennis Borussia. And FC Wacker from Reinickendorf lost to Blau-Weiss 90.

Soldiers on Leave in Berlin, 1941

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), p. 133:

Perhaps Moltke was not just thinking of German victims, but it was difficult to disguise the toll the war was taking on German soldiers. Death notices of men who had “fallen for the Volk and Führer” increased in the newspapers. And bitter strains began to be felt between the men who had to do the fighting and the people at home. The Wunschkonzert for the Wehrmacht had been stopped already in May, for reasons that are not quite clear. By midsummer, German soldiers on the eastern front might no longer have had time for such distractions.

In December, a curious letter of complaint was sent by a soldier to officers in the high command, who forwarded it to the Nazi Party authorities. On leave in the capital of the Reich, this soldier had been shocked by the behavior of Berliners. While men on the front were dying for their country, or losing their limbs, or freezing to death, he remarked, Berliners, many of them men under thirty-five years old, who had managed to be excused from military duty, were carousing in the packed bars and restaurants. Women, often without male company, used ration coupons belonging to soldiers on leave to gorge themselves. He was deeply offended by the cynicism he encountered. “The morals of Berlin are beneath contempt,” he wrote. “When it comes to eating, pushing black market goods, and fraudulence, 80 percent of the population has no conscience. And what about those Judeo-Bolshevik jokes that endanger state security in the worst way? If Berlin were Germany, we would have lost this war long ago.”

From Sitzkrieg to Blitzkrieg in the West

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 92-93:

When German troops invaded Denmark and Norway in April [1940], “to save Scandinavia from British influence,” according to the Nazi press, victory came so quickly that the public was not especially alarmed. On the contrary. The SD reported, “The occupation of Denmark and Norway has made a huge impression on the entire German people, which rejoiced almost without exception.” It helped that Denmark was a major producer of ham, butter, and eggs, supplies the occupation army was not slow to plunder to feed the Volk back home. Moltke wrote to his wife on April 13, “The process by which Denmark is gradually to be made like Poland begins today. I did what I could to prevent it; but when I first heard about it the people who should have done something had already given their consent.” Denmark would never be like Poland, but the occupation was bad enough.

Meanwhile, Goebbels’s Promi [Propaganda Ministry], echoed by the obedient press, made sure that once an attack on Britain and France was launched, the blame would fall squarely on the belligerents in Paris and London. On May 8, the Berliner Volks-Zeitung reported that France and Britain were preparing aggressive war plans. Chamberlain, of all people, was depicted as a warmonger: “Never before has a responsible statesman played with the fate of nations in a more villainous and shameless fashion.” An article on the same page exulted in the extraordinary change in Norwegian public opinion. Somehow, all the old sympathies for Britain had vanished:

...

On the evening of May 9, Major Sas, the Dutch military attaché, anxious to get information on the latest German war plans, visited the home of Hans Oster, his friend in the Abwehr. Oster told him that the Germans would invade the Netherlands the next morning, unless Hitler gave a counterorder later that night. The Dutch ambassador, meanwhile, was dancing with his wife, Nini, at the home of a friendly German aristocrat. Sas and Oster waited fearfully for more news. Perhaps things might still turn around at the last minute. When the counterorder didn’t come, Oster said, “My dear friend, it’s all over. I hope we’ll see each other again after the war.” The Dutch capitulated four days later, after German Luftwaffe bombers did to Rotterdam what they had previously done to Warsaw: The center of the city was obliterated. This marked the end of the Sitzkrieg, the Phony War.

Sitzkrieg Begins in Berlin, 1939

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 50-51:

The next air raid, on September 9, was as harmless as the first. The alarm lasted for forty-five minutes, but nothing happened at all. This, too, helped to further calm the nerves of Berliners. Helmuth von Moltke wrote to his wife from Berlin that “an infectious optimism has spread in the well-known way of mass psychology; the optimistic assumption is that the people of France won’t fight; it is claimed that French soldiers put big placards on their bunkers, in German: ‘If you don’t shoot, we won’t start.’ The story seems too fantastic. Still, it is true that nearly a week after the outbreak of the war the French and British have not yet done anything to come to the aid of their ally [Poland].”

Moltke had been drafted into the Abwehr, the military intelligence service, run by Wilhelm Canaris, a Nazi supporter who began to turn against Hitler after the invasion of Poland. As an intelligence insider, Moltke knew more than most people, but even he was puzzled by the lack of action from the Allied powers. Many Berliners hoped this meant that the war would be over soon. Surely, the occupation of Poland would be accepted as a fait accompli, just as the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the annexation of Austria had been in 1938. Rumors of imminent peace started spreading around town. As Christabel Bielenberg, the Anglo-German living in Dahlem, had already observed before the invasion of Poland: “With all normal channels of information successfully under control, rumor and hearsay took over and ran riot.”

This is exactly what happened on October 10. Quite how the rumor of imminent peace negotiations began is unclear: A misinformed telegram sent by a clerk at the Berlin central post office was the explanation of the SD, short for Sicherheitsdienst, the fearsome Nazi security service. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich: “A rumor is running through town this morning, like wildfire: the English government has fallen; a ten days’ truce is proposed…. All Berlin is on the telephone. ‘Had you heard…. Is it really true?’ ”

People stopped working in offices. Students at the Friedrich Wilhelm University were celebrating. There was a rush on government bonds at the stock exchange. Christabel Bielenberg went shopping at her local market, passing the church of Martin Niemöller, who had been arrested in 1938 for resisting Nazi persecution of Jewish converts to Christianity. Groups of people gathering around stores and street corners discussed the sensational news. The French had given up all resistance. The abdicated King Edward VIII, who held rather warm feelings toward the Führer, was about to reoccupy the British throne. Hands were stretched to Christabel in congratulation. Frau Schmitz, who ruled the food market behind her vegetable stall, “all overcoat and apron, a bulging monument to the peculiar ribald stoicism which characterizes the true Berliner,” knew exactly what was up: The gentlemen at the top had changed their minds, they were coming to an agreement! A plane all the way from Britain was about to land that afternoon at Tempelhof airfield. Extra rations of tomatoes, bread, and cabbage were slipped into the shopping bags of grateful customers. Rationing would soon be history anyway.

Spread of Islam in Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia's Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle p. 193:

The establishment of Melaka and rise of Demak and other Muslim-dominated communities on the north coast of Java coincided with a power struggle within the Majapahit realm. Islam presented a challenge to Java’s Hindu-Buddhist kingship notions. Internal dissension was also apparent, possibly caused by conversion of some of the aristocracy to Islam, and by intermarriage with Muslims, such as the Cham princess who married King Kertawijaya. This eventually forced the Majapahit to focus on the land base of the kingdom, moving the capital back to Kediri on the upper Brantas. Meanwhile the north coast saw the rise of independently minded trading entities dominated by Muslims, many from India, China and Arabia.

Trowulan was reported to be thriving until very shortly before it was utterly destroyed in 1478 in a war, exacerbated by a dynastic dispute, with Demak. The young sultanate effectively conquered Majapahit but claimed dynastic continuity. The end of Trowulan was the beginning of the end for all Hindu Majapahit, which finally saw its remnants retreat to Bali as Islam made a huge step towards eventual dominance of most of the southern part of the Nusantarian archipelago.

After being razed, Trowulan became overgrown with a teak forest. Stamford Raffles, who, as lieutenant-governor of Java under its brief British rule, initiated the first excavations there in 1815, described it as ‘this pride of Java’ Even then, few physical remains were left of a once great city. Yet the years of Majapahit glory remain deeply embedded in the Javanese collective memory. The memory (and myth) of Majapahit and its empire in Nusantaria remains at the heart of modern Indonesia’s sense of identity, generally overriding Muslim identity and also proving an historical basis for a state created in its present geographical form by the Dutch. Wawasan nusantara, or ‘an archipelagic outlook’ brings the islands together, while the national motto, bhinneka tunggal ika (‘unity in diversity’), is from a Javanese poem, ‘Sutasoma’, of the Majapahit era.

Kublai Khan vs. Kertanegara

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia's Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle p. 182:

Kertanegara’s expansion goal was intended partly to pre-empt designs that the Mongol Yuan dynasty, which had already attacked Japan and Vietnam, might have for a southern maritime empire. He also sought to thwart further southward expansion by the Siamese. But he paid a high price. He only subdued Jambi and Palembang after a long fight and his hold there remained tenuous. However, he did succeed in bringing the smaller straits and southern peninsula ports under his sway to become the leading regional maritime power.

Upset at this expansion of Javanese influence, Kublai sent envoys to demand Kertanegara pay tribute to his empire. But the king responded by deliberately provoking the emperor Kublai, giving his envoys tattoos before sending them back. A furious Kublai then sent a vast fleet, said to be of 1,000 vessels with 100,000 men, to punish him. Before the fleet arrived, Kertanegara was killed in battle by the forces of the leader of Kediri in league with a disloyal general. The details are murky, but the Javanese managed to turn their divisions into an advantage. Kertanegara’s son-in-law Raden Wijaya survived and appeared to align himself with the rebel general against Kediri. They persuaded Kublai’s commander that there was no longer a need to fight the dead Kertanegara but to punish Kediri instead. After Raden’s Kediri rivals had been eliminated, Raden then turned on the Mongols with an ambush.

Although the Javanese could not defeat the invader in pitched battle, they could harass them readily enough. Time was not on the invaders’ side. With supplies running short, Kertanegara dead anyway and facing the change of winds which would have kept them there another six months, the Chinese decided to cut their losses and sail away. Thus ended China’s first military incursion into Nusantaria. It was driven not so much by lust for territory but by a mix of hubris – the demand for fealty – and control of the profits of trade.

One legacy was to leave behind many Chinese stragglers, who helped establish the local Chinese community. Fei Xin, who visited Java with Zheng He’s expeditions more than a century later, noted: ‘Right down to the present time some Chinese live intermingled with the natives because at that time over a hundred were left here and later they brought up families.’

Rise and Fall of Champa

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia's Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 134, 147:

Nusantarians, protected by their seas and ships, were relatively safe on their islands from more populous mainland powers. But it is remarkable that their mainland foothold – the Cham territory – on the southern coastal border with China lasted as long as it did: from settlement, probably from Borneo, around 1000 BCE to Champa’s final extinction by Vietnam in 1832.

Champa was the political successor to the Sa Huynh culture but came under Indian cultural influence while retaining its Austronesian language and living by its seafaring traditions. At its greatest extent Cham territory ran from Vishnupura, near modern Dong Hoi, to Phan Thiet, just north of the Mekong delta. The importance of this narrow strip between the sea and the mountains lay not in its resources but in its position. Journeys from Guangzhou to Siam, Sumatra, Java, Borneo and beyond could be direct, but a stop-off point was often needed for safety. Its ports could also serve as entrepôts for goods from Borneo and Mindanao. From early trading communities there developed more organized, Hindu states, tied together, sometimes loosely, as Champa.

...

Another Vietnamese advance in the early seventeenth century included the capture of Nha Trang. The Cham state was formally wiped off the map in 1832 when the Vietnamese took its last stronghold Panduranga (Phan Rang) and advanced through the hitherto Khmer-ruled Mekong delta to the Ca Mau peninsula, modern Vietnam’s southernmost point. Cham resistance to the Vietnamese continued long after the capture of its territory. Vietnamization was a slow process brought about by a mix of immigration and adaptation.

...

By the time the shrunken Cham territory was finally absorbed by the Vietnamese, the majority were Muslims. Today the small Cham minority in Vietnam is divided by religion, though most are non-Muslims. Following the fall of Panduranga in 1832, many Cham Muslims fled to Cambodia, where they remain as a small minority speaking and writing Cham and maintaining such Austronesian characteristics as matrilineal descent. Some also left for Kelantan in Malaysia. Few Cham speakers are left in Hoi An, which inherited a trading tradition from the Cham and was settled by merchants from China and Japan who built the riverside town which is today a World Heritage site like My Son itself. So different in style, My Son and Hoi An are a microcosm of some 1,500 years of Nusantarian history. 

Tamil Chola vs. Srivijaya, 1000s

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia's Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 126-127:

For centuries Nusantaria’s seafaring skills and island geography protected it from outsiders. But in 1025, those walls were breached by another trading state, this one from across the Bay of Bengal. The Tamil Chola dynasty attacked and sacked Palembang, seized Kedah and for several decades had a permanent presence on the peninsula. The attacks on Srivijaya by the Cholas were the only known direct military engagement of an Indian state in Nusantaria. They changed trading dynamics and seriously weakened Srivijaya.

By contrast, their cultural impact may have been slight because Indian-derived culture was so embedded in the region that the Chola military intervention barely added to it. Chola interaction with the region pre-dated the attack as Nusantarian trade and cultural relations with south India had long been close. For example, its architectural influence can be seen in Java’s Prambanan temple, built 70 years before the attack. As late as 1016 the Chola King Rajendra donated funds for the upkeep of a shrine in Nagapattinam erected by the Srivijayans. This referred to the Sailendra family as the kings of Srivijaya and Kedah.

These relations between Chola and Srivijaya were further enhanced by the trade boom of the Tang era which saw the rise of the Chola kingdom to control the whole of southern India. A professional army and bureaucracy brought strong government which undertook public works such as damming the Kaveri River and created an environment in which the arts and literature flourished. From its base at Nagapattinam on the Kaveri delta, it expanded its land borders to the west coast and eventually sent its forces north as far as Bengal. The Cholas did not have a permanent navy, but had at their disposal merchant ships able to transport armies complete with elephants. This naval power enabled it to conquer Sri Lanka and the Maldives and become the dominant force in eastern Indian Ocean trade. Before taking on Srivijaya they had had much practice in a war against the Sinhalese: Sri Lanka saw half a century of Tamil rule of most of the island and the establishment of Shivaite temples.

The Cholas were Hindu with a predominantly Shivaist alignment, though Buddhist shrines continued to be patronized. The main driver of rivalry with Srivijaya was commerce, not belief. The Chola kingdom was strongly influenced by its merchant guilds who, emboldened by conquests elsewhere and seeing Srivijaya being challenged by east Java, wanted to reduce the Srivijayan grip on trade and be noticed by China as an important country. Arab sources record how the Srivijayan king controlled the whole of the [Malay] peninsula but the Cholas wanted to capture some of this trade for themselves and not be dependent on Srivijayan cooperation. Indicating their ambitions, they sent an embassy to China for the first time in 1015.

This was a time when trade was expanding again after a pause caused by the declines of the Tang dynasty in China and the Abbasid one in the Muslim world. Now the Song were in control of China and the North African-based Fatimids were the biggest power in the Muslim world. Already by 985 an Arab was writing: ‘Baghdad was once a magnificent city but is now fast falling into ruin […] Al-Fustat of Misr [Cairo] in the present day is like the Baghdad of old.’

War may have started well before the 1025 Chola sacking of Palembang and capture of the king.

When Java Was Buddhist and Hindu

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia's Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 117-119:

Srivijayan dominance of Nusantaria was for a long time bolstered by cooperation with fellow Buddhists in central Java, the Sailendra dynasty. Indeed, Srivijaya’s dominance attained its greatest geographic reach following the linking of Sailendra power to Srivijaya’s through a dynastic alliance. The Sailendra’s economic contribution to the alliance was greatly aided by Java’s ready access to the Spice Islands, which added to its agricultural wealth, and by its relatively large population. The Sanskrit name ‘Sailendra’ means ‘Lord of the Mountain’, a reference to the towering volcanoes such as Mount Merapi [Gunung Merapi 'Fire Mountain'], which overlooks the great Buddhist shrine of Borobudur which they built. Although their power base was in Java, the Sailendras were Malays from Sumatra. This explains the use of old Malay, not Sanskrit or Javanese, for some of their inscriptions.

...

Java, known as Yavadipa, had originally been a centre of Hinduism which reached its peak in the seventh and early eighth centuries. Its spiritual base was the Dieng plateau, literally ‘Mountain of the Gods’ in Sanskrit. The plateau is reached from the plain through a series of rich valleys and then by a narrow mountain passageway to the 2,000-metre high caldera of an extinct volcano, which still has sulphurous springs. Here there were sacred bathing sites and the centre of a cult of Shiva, the god of fertility. It was once the site of some 400 temples of which only eight survive, the oldest stone structures on Java.

The Dieng plateau’s best recorded patron was the early eighth century ruler Sanjaya, who erected a sacred lingam in praise of Shiva, invoking the spirit of his ancestors and noting how in learning and harmonious government he ‘had his feet high above the other kings of good family’. He was titled both a Ratu – the Austronesian noble title found from Fiji to the [Malay] peninsula – and a Maharaja, the Indian king of kings.

The history of the relationship between the Sailendras and Javanese Sanjayas is unclear, but at some point they were joined by marriage alliances in which the Sailendras were dominant; however, despite their Buddhism the Shiva worship of the Sanjayas lived on. Indeed, loyalty to the Sailendras was more important than choosing between Shiva and Buddha.

...

The Sailendras also extended their power outwards. Using Srivijayan seapower they conquered Indrapura, the leading Khmer city, and in 802 installed the Khmer prince Jayavarman II as ruler. (He later rejected fealty to the Sailendras and moved his capital inland to Hariharalaya, south of Siem Reap. He reigned for nearly 50 years and initiated what became the Angkor dynasty.)

The Sailendras were also sometimes in conflict with the Cham, who competed for some of Srivijaya’s China trade. The Cham were not only closest to the great China market, they also had sea links to Borneo and the Philippine islands, from which they could source some of the forest products in demand in China. An eighth century Vietnamese account describes people from Java and Sumatra raiding as far north as Tonkin. A Cham account in Sanskrit of the same era, found at Nha Trang, described how in 774 ‘men living on food more horrible than cadavers, completely black and gaunt, dreadful and evil as death, came in ships’ and burned a temple and stole the lingam before being beaten off by Satyavarman. These might have been orang laut engaged in freelance raiding or have been encouraged by Srivijaya because, only a few years later, in 787, ‘the armies of Java’ came and destroyed another temple. More generally, however, the era saw the strengthening of its trading and settlement posts including Manila bay and Sulawesi.

Srivijaya Thalassocracy

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia's Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 106-110:

No empire in historical times has disappeared as completely as Srivijaya. Yet this vast Nusantarian enterprise thrived for almost a thousand years, feeding on and sometimes dominating seaborne trade between China and the archipelago on the one hand and India and beyond on the other. Its importance was noted many times in Chinese annals, yet, unlike other vanished empires, it left barely a physical trace. Its existence was almost unknown to modern historians until the 1930s, when Georges Coedès defined it by reference to Chinese records of a place named Sanfoqi and some inscriptions written in Old Malay. Later, aerial photography identified a system of irrigation canals and other works which once supported a large population. Archaeologists unearthed Buddhist statues, Chinese ceramics and other items so that it is now possible to identify Palembang on the banks of the Musi River in south-east Sumatra as its principal city.

This may seem an unlikely spot for a capital, some distance from the sea and surrounded by flat but not very fertile land, better for root crops than for rice. The same conditions apply to a similar old settlement, Jambi, known also as Melayu, farther north on the Batang Hari River. This was at one time a rival of Srivijaya and later its capital. Jambi at least still boasts the remains of a Buddhist temple from the seventh or eighth centuries; Palembang has no such evidence of its former glory.

The lack of physical imprint has several causes. First, it was what is called a thalassocracy – an empire built on control of trade not of land. The lack of stone or brick evidence of Palembang’s greatness is because buildings on land, including fortifications, were all of wood. There was no nearby supply of stone. Records were written on palm leaves which perished long ago. Most people lived on rafts. There was a practical reason for this: floods were not uncommon in the rainy season and spring tides on the Musi River were up to 4.5 metres. Nothing much changed over the centuries. Even in 1820 a European visitor noted that only the rich lived on dry land in houses with tiled roofs. While the sultan and some senior persons lived on separate islands, all trade and transport took place on the river.

So why Palembang? Its location seems scarcely ideal: it was 120 kilometres upriver, mangrove swamps occupied most of the area down to the sea and its land was incapable of supporting a large population. However, its position on a river which was navigable far inland gave access to the jungle products and timber for ships as well as more precious items from the interior including gold and foodstuffs from the fertile Sumatran highlands. The coastal lands were of marsh and mangrove. Terra firma began at Palembang. There was plenty of space where vessels could anchor and stores be unloaded. The river is wide, deep, tidal for a long distance and its mouth lies close both to the southern entrance to the Melaka strait and to the Sunda strait between Sumatra and Java, thus giving access to the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. It is well south of the typhoon belt and, being almost on the equator, has calm seas and is an ideal location to wait for the change of monsoon winds from south-west to north-east. Also, the mangrove swamps at the mouth of the Musi and its many inlets meant the city could easily be defended.

...

While there appears to have been an increasing dependence on the growing China trade, reports from I-Tsing and other records show the high level of development of Palembang, the size of its forces and the respect of the Chinese for its Buddhist monks and practices. This was no petty state kowtowing to China but one seeking trade preferences from an equal. Correspondingly, Chinese sought enlightenment from the west (India and Sri Lanka) via Sumatra. The Palembang inscriptions also show that, although the kingship systems, the rituals and the religion were of Indian origin and it was a place where Chinese could study Sanskrit, the official written language was not Sanskrit but Malay. Also, for its inhabitants, commerce, not religion, was its mainspring. Srivijaya’s rise to dominance was also reflected in a change of the Chinese name for it. Prior to 903 it was known as ‘Shih-li-fo-shi’, a phonetic translation, or just ‘Fo Shi’, but it then became ‘Sanfoqi’, the san suggesting that Foqi (Vijaya) had three centres: probably Palembang, Jambi and Kedah, or one of the Java ports.

With its small population and shortage of agricultural land, Srivijaya’s first achievement was its superior organization of the people of the region, the orang laut (‘sea people’). They had centuries of seafaring behind them and could act as pilots or pirates as opportunity offered. By bringing them under its umbrella, Srivijaya could reduce piracy by allowing the orang laut a share of the spoils of war and thereby encourage trade. Trade brought merchants, money, advanced ideas from India and the wherewithal to buy from elsewhere the food needed to sustain the urban settlements. Through better marshalling of the talents of the local sailors and boatbuilders, Srivijaya was able to conquer Melayu. The interior could supply the forest products and gold which Srivijaya needed for trade. In turn, the population of the interior provided a ready market for Srivijaya’s goods. The interior also supplemented Srivijaya’s manpower so that King Jayanasa could field an army several thousand strong as well as a large naval force.

Migration into Mindanao

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 183-187:

The island of Mindanao is the most misunderstood part of the nation. Decades of on and off conflict in its Muslim region has long stolen the headlines. Under President Duterte, this provided an excuse for declaring martial law over the whole island. The reality is that for decades the island proved a land of opportunity for hundreds of thousands who moved from over-populated islands, mostly the Visayas, to the relatively underpopulated Mindanao.... Movement from the Visayas to Mindanao long pre-dates the Spanish.

...

The big boost to settlement came with the Commonwealth government, President Quezon recognizing the agricultural and forestry potential of the region as a way to underpin the national economy and raise the Christian population to counterbalance the Moros.

...

The big boost to settlement came with the Commonwealth government, President Quezon recognizing the agricultural and forestry potential of the region as a way to underpin the national economy and raise the Christian population to counterbalance the Moros.

...

The Davao region, meanwhile, had attracted large numbers of Japanese to develop timber and plantation industries and Davao city was on its way to becoming the largest in Mindanao, with far more Japanese than Americans. Japanese ran shops, restaurants, fish canneries and export enterprises, often with sleeping Filipino partners to get around alien laws. The 1930s Japanese-led developments were key to making Davao the premier city of the island that it soon became. Although many Japanese left in 1945, their lands and enterprises were quickly taken over by immigrants from the Visayas and Luzon.

...

The scale of the internal colonization after 1935 was only partly a result of colonial rule or the Quezon initiatives. The underlying demographic driver was that because of improved government in the late Spanish period, and the impact of the US on public health, the population in the Visayas and Luzon in particular grew exceptionally fast. The people of Mindanao had far more land than they were able to occupy and cultivate.

...

Worst off have been the Surigao provinces where few benefit from mining and forest wealth. The Paper Industries Corporation of the Philippines (PICOP) once employed more than 10,000 people in and around Bislig on the coast of Surigao del Sur. At its peak it was the biggest pulp and paper operation in Asia.

...

Caraga encapsulates many of the problems of the wider nation. In theory, it is endowed with great forests, well-watered lowlands and lakes, a variety of mineral deposits, a coastline which offers opportunities for fisheries, and beaches and scenery to lure tourists. The regional capital, Butuan, is the oldest identifiable city in the country, dating back more than 1,000 years and with trading links to Java and China. In recent times, however, Butuan has been overshadowed by the growth not only of Davao City but also Cagayan de Oro to the west.

...

One large mining company, Nickel Asia, operates modern mines but much mining is small- to medium-scale and uncontrolled, raising little if any revenue for the government while polluting rivers and lakes.

Well, this will have to be my last post from this book, since I've nearly reached the publisher's limit for copying. (I appreciate the warnings when I hit 80% of the limit.) The book has a fair number of little proofreading errors, and navigation to the helpful maps on the Kindle often drops you back into the Table of Contents. But the author covers a wide range of topics in great detail.

Decline Under Marcos

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Magsaysay Era in the Philippines

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 60-62:

Magsaysay was dynamic, reorganizing and enlarging the army, improving discipline and reducing corruption. He exuded a man of the people image, meeting peasants and joining troops on operations. His close links to the US was not an issue for most Filipinos, Huk-leaning peasants included, who were still grateful to The US for helping rid them of the Japanese. He acknowledged peasant grievances and talked of land reform, increased crop shares and offers of free land in Mindanao. Copious US funds brought clinics, roads and services to poor villages. Lansdale was a behind campaigns to discredit the Huks, frighten their peasant supporters with psywar propaganda and use money and the media to highlight the positive. Those measures were at least as important as the military ones. Gradually, the tide turned against the rebellion which remained focused on Central Luzon despite Huk efforts to develop movements in Bicol, the Visayas and Mindanao.

By the time Magsaysay became president, the Huks were weakening, their forest camps threatened by Magsaysay’s troops. They were short of arms and divided ideologically between urban mostly well-born idealist Communists, several of whom were arrested, including the party boss, Jose Lava, as well as Taruc and his men in the field. Many peasants felt they had been heard and that conditions were being ameliorated. The rebellion faded, particularly after Taruc’s surrender following negotiations with Magsaysay’s envoy and a young well-connected journalist, Benigno Aquino Jr. The son of a leading collaborator he was to use the resulting fame to propel his own political ambitions.

Magsaysay was very much America’s man in foreign policy, the Manila Conference of 1954 creating the South East Asia Treaty Organization – a US-led anti-Communist alliance. He also declined to join such giants of anti-colonialism as Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno at the Afro-Asian Bandung Conference in 1955, though he did agree to send foreign secretary Carlos Romulo. Magsaysay’s clout in Washington enabled the nation to re-visit some of the provisions of the odious 1946 Trade Act. Jose Laurel represented the Philippines in negotiating what was known as the 1955 Laurel-Langley Agreement. This freed the Philippines to set its exchange rate against the US dollar and significantly improved trade access to the US through preferential tariffs and quotas. In particular, it benefitted sugar producers now able to sell in the US at a higher price than the world market. Parity rights for Americans were maintained but the Agreement was to expire in 1974. Also in 1955, the Philippines finally reached a reparations agreement with Japan, providing $550 million and a promise of another $250 million in private sector investment.

The flow of US money was the first key to a rapid recovery of the economy, even if it was mostly evident in Manila and a few other cities. Japanese reparations followed with private US investment arriving to take advantage of its privileges. The nation was seen as the most likely to prosper in the region because of its mix of education, access to the US and relatively stable political outlook. Indeed, from 1950, when its GDP per head was already higher than Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Thailand, it had the region’s highest annual GDP growth rate of 6.5 per cent.

Magsaysay died in a plane crash in Cebu in March 1957 and was automatically succeeded by Vice-President Carlos Garcia. He had served as Foreign Secretary under Magsaysay and was identified as a pro-American anti-communist, chairing the 1954 Manila Conference which saw the creation of the South East Asia Treaty Organization. One of his first acts in office was to sign a law making the Communist Party illegal, but in other respects he was a staunch nationalist who resented foreign commercial domination, a reference to the local Chinese as well as to the US interests. Garcia was elected President in late 1957 as a Nacionalista with 41 per cent in an election with several prominent candidates, but his running mate, Jose Laurel, the son of the president appointed by Japan, lost the vice-presidency to Diosdado Macapagal of the main opposition Liberal party. The Nacionalistas controlled Congress, with a representative from Ilocos, Ferdinand Marcos, as the minority leader.

...

The creation of an indigenous capitalist class was a natural goal and one pursued elsewhere in Asia. However, it rested on three pillars: one was the landowning elite who used their resources, wealth and political clout to expand their economic role but were not natural entrepreneurs; the second was the Chinese who, evading laws to deter them, managed the shift from middle-man role to into newer manufacturing industries; the third was the state, supposedly in command but without institutional roots, short of funds and at the beck and call of politicians and rent seekers. The policies did have the effect of bringing more local investment into protected manufacturing. The anti-Chinese Retail Nationalization Act in the longer run helped the Chinese by forcing them out of retailing into manufacturing, whose percentage of GDP rose from 10.7 per cent in 1948 to 17 per cent in 1960.

Philippines Under Japan

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 51-54:

At least initially, few of the elite saw reason to confront the Japanese. A majority of senators joined the Executive Commission; others kept a low profile. A few were enthusiastic, including Laurel who admired Japanese order and devotion to the nation. Laurel could reasonably claim that some cooperation with Japan was necessary for the good of the people. Accepting the Presidency of the supposedly independent republic, however, was another matter given that the elected president and vice-president had a government-in-exile in Washington.

Another key collaborator was Benigno Aquino, a lawyer and landowner from Tarlac, who had been Secretary for Agriculture under Quezon. The Japanese made Aquino head of a new appointed assembly, known by the acronym Kalibapi (the Association for Service to the New Philippines). Also banging the drum for Japan was the MaKaPili, the Patriotic Society of Filipinos, led by former Sakdal leader Benigno Ramos. Former revolutionary general, Artemio Ricarte, who had always refused allegiance to the US, returned in late 1944 after thirty years in exile in Hong Kong and then Japan. Even Emilio Aguinaldo resurfaced, urging close cooperation with Japan.

Spanish citizens, who were still numerous and influential as priests or from the old elite, were divided. Many had supported the Falangists during the Spanish Civil War and were thus prone to be sympathetic to Japan, but Andres Soriano of the giant A. Soriano Corporation stuck with Quezon as a member of his cabinet even though he had been the local leader of Spain’s Falangists. Others played an equivocal role. Manuel Roxas, who Quezon originally favoured as vice-president over Osmena, was captured by the Japanese and became an adviser to Laurel. The Japanese hoped to make him president in 1943 rather than Laurel but he declined. Late in the war Roxas may have provided intelligence to the Americans.

Whatever its notion of Asia for Asians, the occupation had several problems which fed on each other. The first was the arrogant and often brutal behaviour of the Japanese military for whom easy-going Filipino ways were alien. There was also a demand for comfort women for the soldiery, for which there was little local consent. Second was the quest for raw materials by Japan, combined with the inevitable shortages of a wartime economy shorn of foreign trade. The Japanese needed local resources to feed a 400,000-man army in the Philippines. Food shortages and unemployment were caused by Japanese demands for materials and the collapse of export industries which had been focused on the US market. A third factor was that antipathy towards the Americans was found more among the elite than lower down the social order where the US was associated with progress and aspiration. In exile, Quezon and Osmena provided a focus for resistance, there was pride in the Filipinos’ sacrifices in Bataan, and before long an expectation that the Americans would return.

Guerrilla activity developed, in many cases led by former soldiers, and provided some support brought by American submarines. As only Americans could defeat the Japanese, many Filipinos now longed for their return, past sins forgiven. They provided information and help to the Americans while appearing to be loyal to the puppet government. As resistance grew, so did reprisals and fear of the kempeitai, the Japanese military police. Disorder reigned too with some supposedly anti-Japanese activity becoming a cover for settling feuds between rival families. The resistance spawned many heroes but also, in the aftermath, many bogus claims to it. The most significant resistance, at least in the longer term, was provided by the Hukbong Bayan Laban na Hapon – the People’s Anti-Japanese Army – or Huks in Central Luzon, heart of rice and sugar cultivation, and of big haciendas. Feudal and paternalist tenancy systems, which at least provided stability for families, had been significantly replaced by sharecropping and small farmers, reduced by debt, into becoming wage labourers. As anti-landlord as it was anti-Japanese, some of the movement’s leaders drew inspiration from Mao Zedong. The movement was headed by Luis Taruc, a protégé of early nationalist and convert to Marxism, Pedro Abad Santos, brother of the Chief Justice. Taruc, who had been a full-time peasant organizer for the Socialist, then Communist, Party since 1934, was the leader of several thousand members from the sharecropper and landless workers, mainly in Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga and Tarlac. The Huks were, however, predominantly a peasant organization born of injustice more than ideology.

...

Post-war tales of Japanese atrocities and Filipino suffering during the occupation helped provide a focus for the nation in the early years of independence, which finally occurred on 4 July 1946. Yet not far under the surface of this massaged history was the reality that the elite recognized. There was little instinct for retribution against collaborators. Aquino was charged with treason but released on bail and died the following year. Laurel was likewise charged with treason but never tried. In 1948, as President, Manuel Roxas, whose own cooperation with the Japanese remained questionable, declared an amnesty. Only five years later, Laurel stood unsuccessfully for president as the Nacionalista Party candidate winning 37 per cent of the vote. The victor was Elpidio Quirino who, despite the deaths of many family members in the Battle of Manila, pardoned the Japanese convicted of war crimes. Vargas went from the puppet republic’s ambassador in Tokyo in 1945 to head of the National Planning Commission in 1946.

Whatever mixture of class solidarity, family relationships, Catholic notions of forgiveness or common nationalism, the quick post-war healing was in sharp contrast to experiences in many other countries occupied during the 1937–45 wars. There were also cross currents. Lingering Spanish and Church sentiments were in favour of the Spanish dictator, General Franco, as a bastion against atheistic communism and hence highly critical of the anti-clericalism of leftist nationalists. Those with Chinese affiliation, on the other hand, were influenced against Japan by its invasion of China. Nationalists came in different colours with some interested in sustaining the status quo but without the Americans. Only those on the far left were consistent in being anti both Japanese and US imperialism and even they were sometimes divided between middle class Marxist revolutionaries and rice farmers fighting landlords.

Honolulu FBI vs. Mass Internment

From Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor, by Christine Kuehn (Celadon Books, 2025), Kindle pp. 160-161:

There was intense pressure to intern the entire Japanese population of the island—160,000 men, women, and children. Hoover and President Roosevelt, fearing an uprising, wanted a crackdown. Surprisingly, the man who stood in their way was the straitlaced conservative Robert Shivers. He fought it tooth and nail, astonishing Hoover and putting his career at significant risk. The close bond Shivers had formed with his Japanese American “adopted daughter,” Sue, had swayed him.

“I couldn’t have let you and thousands of people like you be arrested,” Shivers told her. The thought of Sue and scores of other innocents like her being forced into a camp had fueled a fire within that spurred him to take on the highest levels of the government.

On the west coast of the U.S. mainland, 120,000 Americans with Japanese heritage would be put into camps and not released until the end of the war, with virtually no one ever being charged with a crime.

Even the spy Yoshikawa, who was interned for a short time with Japanese Americans after his capture, saw the irony. “We were taken to a relocation camp full of innocent American Japanese,” he recalled. “They had done nothing. It was a cruel joke. You see, I couldn’t trust them to help me in Honolulu. They were loyal to the United States.”

While most of those held on Sand Island and in internment camps on the mainland were innocent of any wrongdoing, that was not the case with Otto and the rest of the Kuehns. Before it was over, they would have to navigate the ire of an enraged American public, a furious government, and federal prosecutors hell-bent on punishing someone for the heinous crime of December 7.

Dusko Popov vs. J. Edgar Hoover, 1941

From Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor, by Christine Kuehn (Celadon Books, 2025), Kindle pp. 119-120:

Special Agent Shivers was convinced the Kuehns were spies; he just didn’t know for whom. The payments pointed to the Japanese, but the FBI was getting information that the Nazis also had an interest in Pearl Harbor. That revelation came from another German spy turned double agent for the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6: Dusko Popov.

Popov was a well-educated Serbian who attended law school at the University of Freiburg in Germany in 1935. A few years later he was recruited by a former classmate to work for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service.

Popov immediately contacted the British diplomatic authorities, who enlisted him as a double agent. Within a short period of time, the Germans had come to trust him implicitly, even fronting him $50,000 to set up a spy ring in London. Popov was supposed to turn the money over to MI6, as part of a plan to fleece the Germans out of chunks of cash.

Ian Fleming, a British intelligence officer who would go on to create the character James Bond, was assigned to watch over Popov and make sure the cash made it back to London. After receiving the money from the Germans, Popov met Fleming in Portugal for the trip back to England. The Serbian, a well-known ladies’ man and gambler, made his way to Casino Estoril, an oceanside casino that was a well-known hangout for spies and other international highfliers.

While gambling at a nearby table, Popov overheard a Lithuanian businessman pompously declare he would match any bet, no matter how high the amount. Popov sauntered over to the table, sat down across from the man, and, without saying a word, dropped $50,000 on the table—MI6’s $50,000, the equivalent of $1 million today. The casino went quiet, and Fleming went white watching Popov potentially wreck the entire operation. The flustered Lithuanian asked the casino if they would lend him the money if he lost. Not unexpectedly, they declined, and the man walked away from the table, red-faced. Popov pulled the money off the felt with a grin, loudly proclaiming that gamblers like that are “an annoyance to serious players.”

Popov was, like Otto, a risk-taker, a bit of a narcissist—and Popov was purportedly Fleming’s inspiration for James Bond. The baccarat scene was even re-created, blow for blow, in his first book, Casino Royale.

In August 1941, the Germans sent Popov to the United States with $58,000 and a directive to establish a network of spies. Then he was to head to Hawaii and gather as much intelligence as possible on Pearl Harbor. Unbeknownst to Otto Kuehn, Popov was to be his replacement.

The Japanese had grown tired of Otto’s flamboyant lifestyle and considered him a growing security risk. Frequent phone calls and visits to the consulate, exorbitant spending, wild parties with military officers that made the local gossip column—Otto was becoming a threat to the operation. Fresh blood was needed, and Japanese intelligence asked Goebbels to replace him.

Arriving in New York, Popov set up a meeting with the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover was suspicious of the double agent, agreeing to let his staff meet with Popov only after the British reassured him. Popov was eventually summoned to the Commodore Hotel, where he showed the agents his orders, written in microdots, a new technology invented by the Germans that reduced entire pages of information down to the size of a period.

Almost half the hidden directives consisted of questions the Germans wanted answered about military operations in Hawaii: the depths of the water at Pearl Harbor, the torpedo nets under the water’s surface, exact locations of air bases at Hickam, Wheeler, and Kaneohe, and locations of submarine stations, along with sketches of the Pearl Harbor piers. “Is the Crater Punchbowl being used as ammunition dump?” read one question.

The warning was clear: The Nazis wanted Popov to gather intelligence the Japanese needed for an attack on Pearl Harbor. That got Hoover’s attention, and the FBI director decided to come to New York and meet with Popov personally. But when the two met face-to-face weeks later, the rendezvous was a disaster. The FBI director could barely contain his disdain for the German double agent. “You’re like all double agents,” he berated him. “You’re begging for information to sell to your German friends so you can make a lot of money and be a playboy!”

Popov brushed off Hoover’s comments and reiterated to the FBI director his warning of an impending attack. “But he just wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say,” he said later.

Hoover had deployed a lot of manpower to the FBI office in Hawaii and stepped up the pressure on Shivers. Yet here was the plan for the entire Japanese assault in front of his face, and he ignored it. While Hoover did notify President Roosevelt that the FBI had discovered a new microdot technology, forwarding a small portion of the text from Popov, he sat on the most important information: The Japanese were planning an attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Abwehr, meanwhile, aborted Popov’s mission to Hawaii. The glaring spotlight thrown on him from Hoover would bring too much attention to Japanese operations there. Otto would remain in place as Japan’s spy. But Germany’s role in the Pacific was now obvious. It was working in concert with Japan toward a common goal of knocking out the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, and they were using a network of spies to do it.