Frustrated Ambition: General Vicente Lim and the Philippine Military Experience, 1910-1944

by Richard Bruce Meixsel

Overview

Vicente Podico Lim (1888–1944) was once his country’s best-known soldier. The first Filipino to graduate from West Point and a graduate of the U.S. Army War College, Lim figured in every significant military development in the Philippines during his thirty years in uniform. Frustrated Ambition is the first in-depth biography of this forgotten figure, whose career paralleled the early-twentieth-century history of the Philippine military.

As independence seemed increasingly likely for the Philippines in the 1930s, Lim positioned himself to take a leading role in developing armed forces for a sovereign nation. But as Lim maneuvered behind the scenes, Manuel L. Quezon, soon to be the commonwealth president, revealed that he had invited General Douglas MacArthur to serve as military adviser to the Philippines. Frustrated Ambition corrects the conventional historical narrative of events thereafter—one that emphasizes the failure of the nascent Philippine military under MacArthur and inflates the general’s heroic role in the defense of Bataan and Corregidor. Richard Bruce Meixsel restores Lim as the then-recognized leader of the opposition to MacArthur’s mission, and shows how Lim took the Philippine Army in a more tenable direction as MacArthur’s military system foundered.

World War II brought Lim to the fore. While MacArthur directed his troops from Corregidor, Lim commanded a division on Bataan that may have suffered more combat losses at the battle of Abucay than did all American units on Bataan during the entire campaign. When the U.S. high command turned its efforts to evacuating the Philippine Islands, Lim began to prepare for the ensuing underground struggle against the Japanese—a fight that cost him his life.

By recounting Vicente Lim’s career, Frustrated Ambition illuminates forgotten episodes in Philippine history, offers new perspectives on military affairs during the American occupation, and recovers the story of Filipino soldiers whose service changed the course of their country’s military history.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806159058
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	02/15/2018
Series:	Campaigns and Commanders Series , #61
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	812,268
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Richard Bruce Meixsel is Associate Professor of History at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is author of Philippine-American Military History, 1902–1942: An Annotated Bibliography.
 

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

AN UNTIRING ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE

FIRST CADET, 1910–1917

Why Vicente Lim chose to be a soldier is lost to history. His family did not have a military background, though Vicente had reputedly "organized the children his age to serve as couriers" for revolutionary troops during the Philippine-American War. Years later, a journalist wrote of him that "even in his youth, young Lim showed a fondness for military life and had a profound and consuming love for the glitter of the uniform and well-disciplined life of men in the service." When asked near the end of his life why he had joined the army a half-century earlier, a contemporary of Lim's, Mateo Capinpin, answered: for "the same [reasons] as any other young man, looking for adventure and attracted by the smart uniform." Eighteen years after Lim left for New York, Maximiano Janairo sought an academy education because it offered a "sure job after graduation" and a chance "to see what America was like." Similar goals may well have motivated Vicente Lim. If Lim was attracted to military life, he nevertheless probably knew little of the Philippine Scouts, to which he would be assigned. A few months before he was scheduled to graduate, the third Filipino to enter West Point, Rafael Garcia (class of 1916), asked the Bureau of Insular Affairs to send information about the Scouts. "I think it would be of great benefit to me," Garcia wrote, "if I know a little of the organization I am to join soon." Garcia explained that the class of 1915's Filipino graduate, Anastacio Q. Ver, had tried to find something about the Scouts in the academy library without success.

Perhaps no place was more emblematic of a nascent Philippine nationalism than Lim's birthplace of Calamba. The town lay thirty-five miles south of Manila in the heart of the Tagalog-speaking region of Luzon. A ten-hour ride by pony cart in the late-Spanish period when Lim was a boy there, Calamba was one of the larger settlements in Laguna, a province that extended around the southern half of the large lake known as Laguna de Bay. Compilers of the official government gazetteer of the Philippines wrote that Laguna had been labeled "the garden of the Philippines" because "every variety of tropical plant and tree known to the archipelago" grew in the province. Calamba is best known as the home of nationalist icon Jose Rizal. Rizal's family was involved in a celebrated dispute between tenants and Dominican landlords of the Calamba estate in the late 1880s and early 1890s and so too, reportedly, was the Lim family. The Lims had arrived in Calamba sometime late in the nineteenth century. Lim's father was a Chinese immigrant from Fukien (where Lim was a common surname); his mother was a Philippine-born Chinese mestiza. Most of the Philippines' many Chinese immigrants became involved in merchant activities, but the very arrival of large numbers of immigrants after midcentury pushed the Chinese mestizo community out of the traditional retail trades and increasingly into agriculture. Jose Ayala (a baptismal name) Lim-Yaoco and his wife, Antonia Podico, leased land to farm at Calamba and opened a small store in the town. Jose Ayala Lim died in 1897; Antonia outlived her husband by many years, during which time she gained a reputation as a shrewd and successful businesswoman.

Vicente (the spelling was changed from Vincente while Lim was at West Point) was their third child. Like most mestizos, the Lim children "grew up identifying themselves with the Filipino rather than the Chinese community," but Vicente thought his Chinese heritage worth emphasizing. On the academy admission form he listed his father's "nationality" as "citizen of Phil. Is. but of Chinese blood." Not until the appointment of the Philippines' fourth cadet, Luis R. Salvosa of Lucena, Tayabas, did candidates begin unequivocally to state their parents' nationality to be Filipino. The late Eugene Ganley, an army officer who spent two decades gathering material for a never-completed history of the Philippine Scouts, corresponded with many former Scout officers, and one named Issac Nichol, who had attended the Army War College with Lim in the late 1920s, informed him that American contemporaries tended to think of Lim more as Chinese than Filipino.

Given the tumultuous events in the Philippines at the turn of the century, Lim had acquired a better-than-average education before applying to West Point. Lim was eight years old when the revolution against Spain started and fourteen when the war against the Americans ended. Nevertheless, he got a solid grounding in the basics in public school and at the private Liceo de Manila. Founded in 1900 to provide young Filipinos with "la educación de estos dias, la educación moderna," the school's curriculum emphasized Spanish, Latin, arithmetic, geography, and English. At the Liceo, he proved to be a poor student. His family gave him too much spending money, and as a result he neglected his coursework. A year spent "deported" to a provincial school in Batangas Province (to Tanauan, a large town a few miles south of Calamba and a place where Lim spent several years of his childhood) taught him to takeeducation more seriously, and Lim returned to Manila to receive what he called "a real schooling" at the Philippine Normal School.

Begun by American educators in 1901, the Normal School was considered by its founders to be "the crown of the educational system of the islands" prior to the establishment of the University of the Philippines in 1908. But in those days, graduation from the Normal School was the equivalent of completing the second year of what by the 1930s would be a four-year high school course of instruction. Lim was one of a small number who actually studied to become a teacher; most students were interested in the school's professional and college preparatory classes. Lim completed a teacher education program in 1908, taught for six months at a public school in Santa Cruz, Laguna, and then returned to the Normal School for additional study. According to a report in a Manila daily several years later, Lim had been "well known as a baseball player at the Normal School" and had passed the school's final examination with "flying colors."

Encouraged by one of his teachers there, in 1908 he took the first West Point qualifying examination administered by the Philippine Bureau of Civil Service. None of the fourteen or so applicants passed the test, but Pablo del Villas of Nueva Caceres (now Naga) and Lim were considered "promising candidates" for admission, and Governor-General James F. Smith designated them candidate and first alternate, respectively. Concerned about their chances of success, the War Department's Bureau of Insular Affairs lined up a second alternate in the United States, Sotero Baluyut, a student at Iowa University. But Lim passed the army's qualifying test and arrived at West Point to begin his military career in March 1910. Taft had expected the first Filipino cadet to enter in 1909, but Lim could not have received his acceptance letter until mid-January 1909, and, by then, it would have been too late to have found a berth on an army transport that would have allowed him to meet the academy's reporting date. However, the delay meant that by the time Lim arrived at West Point he was, by less than a week, too old to join the corps of cadets and thus indulged in the time-honored practice of adopting a birthdate more amenable to academy regulations. At the time, cadets officially reported to West Point on 1 March and could not have passed their twenty-second birthday by that date. Army records show Lim's birthday as 5 April 1888, but To Inspire and to Lead, published by the Lim family, gives 24 February 1888. Had Lim acknowledged the latter date, he would not have been eligible to attend the academy.

Lim was not the first noncitizen to attend the United States Military Academy, but such cadets remained an uncommon sight. Most of the very few foreign cadets came from Latin American republics. The first Asians to make it through the academy, "two unusually bright Chinese boys," had left the year before Lim arrived. According to a newspaper report, they had been popular students, the American cadets being convinced that one was a nobleman and that the other — smarter, more popular, and, naturally, the better English speaker — was sent along as his companion. Lim's arrival at the academy coincided with a campaign by West Point's new superintendent, Maj. Gen. Thomas Barry, to upgrade potential cadets' preparatory training. Barry was scornful of foreign cadets, whom he claimed were routinely "carried along" despite their failure to meet academy standards. He had hardly more favorable words for many American applicants.

Lim entered West Point at a time of significant changes in the academy. The obligations of empire had led to the enlargement of the army and a concomitant need for more officers. The corps of cadets had nearly doubled in size over the previous decade and would double again by the time the country entered World War I. An average class in the 1890s graduated about sixty students. Lim joined more than twice that number of entering cadets at West Point in 1910 and was one of 107 to graduate in 1914. To provide the housing, training, and administrative facilities needed to accommodate the additional students, Congress since 1902 had authorized $6 million in construction costs. Much of the academy that Lim saw was newly built.

For many cadets, the first year at the academy was the hardest. Rigorous academic work and homesickness took their toll, and the initial summer months could be especially punishing. Cadets found themselves subjected to a regime of relentless physical activity and "disciplining" by upperclassmen. The hazing of "plebes" had become so out of control by the early twentieth century that Congress conducted an investigation into the practice and in 1901 passed a law forbidding the abuse or harassment of cadets. It had little effect. One of Dwight Eisenhower's biographers claimed that when the future president arrived at West Point in 1911, "hazing was more widely practiced than at any other time in the academy's history." Congress held additional hearings into allegations of hazing at West Point in 1909, 1910, and 1914.

Lim was helped through the ordeal by First Classman Clyde Selleck (class of 1910), an officer who would, like Lim but with less success, command a Philippine Army division on Bataan thirty-two years later. If Lim underwent the full rigors of "Beast Barracks" and experienced the other unpleasantries of plebe life, however, common sense suggests that President Taft's known interest in the Filipino cadets stayed the hand of even the most obtuse upperclassman. By contrast, the few black Americans who overcame the many hurdles to an academy appointment were spared the usual harshness of the cadets' first weeks only to show that they were not wanted and did not belong. As it happened, a senator from Wyoming appointed an African American as alternate to fill the state's West Point quota in 1910. Even the suggestion that "for the first time in more than a quarter of a century, West Point [would be] confronted with the possibility of having soon to admit a negro as a cadet" left the academy's officers and students apprehensive. Their opinion was unanimous that it would be better for all concerned that no African American come to the academy. "A negro cadet is never hazed," officers reportedly sympathetic to the plight of black Americans explained. "He is ostracized, and lives ... a being absolutely apart." There is no evidence to indicate that Lim or any future Filipino cadet confronted that even more unpleasant welcome to West Point. An explicit public statement addressing the treatment of Filipino cadets was left by Angel Miguel Jr., one of three Filipino cadets at the academy in 1924 (none of whom graduated), in which he asserted that they were treated just like the white cadets. Lim, however, bunked alone his first year at the academy and found a roommate only when the second Filipino to enter West Point, Anastacio Ver, arrived in 1911.

Unfortunately, Lim left little record of his cadet days. Fellow cadets whose academy years corresponded to Lim's and who gained enough stature to generate biographies or memoirs seem to have found his presence unremarkable. At least, they or their biographers say nothing about him. The academy archives do include a large collection of letters written by Donovan Swanton, whose five years at West Point (1912–17) overlapped those of Lim and the other early Filipino cadets. Swanton occasionally mentioned the Filipino cadets in his letters. In one, Swanton wrote that he had met the other fifteen Catholics in his class and commented that "the Filipino [Rafael Garcia] is a comical chap and everybody laughs at his antics." In another letter he noted that he had gone to a "hop" and danced with several cadets, including "a Filipino cadet in the second class." Other passing references to Filipinos suggest that they were familiar to Swanton's correspondents and that their presence did not excite particular attention. The cadets tagged Lim with the nickname "Cannibal," no doubt a reflection of their ignorance of the Philippines and possibly some residual memory of the muchhyped Filipino presence at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, in which the headhunters of northern Luzon and other esoterica featured prominently. The Philippine exhibit left the impression, wrote a foreign resident of the Philippines, "that the inhabitants of these islands were a race of naked cannibals and savages." The cadets demonstrated little imagination. When the second Filipino arrived in 1911, they gave him the nickname "Cannibal" too. Lim must not have objected to the moniker — he reportedly continued to use the name with his classmates for the rest of his life — but thereafter the trend was toward nicknames that Americanized the Filipinos rather than exoticized them: Rafael Garcia was "Ralph"; Luis Salvosa, the fourth Filipino entrant, was "Sal"; and so on.

Aside from a two-month furlough between their second and third years at the academy (during which many cadets returned home, although Lim obviously could not, given that Manila was more than a month's journey away by rail to the West Coast and army troopship across the Pacific), cadets enjoyed few extended opportunities to leave West Point. One Christmas, Lim visited New York City and Washington, D.C., where he honed card-playing skills that would stand him in good stead in the years to come. More importantly, Lim's academy years fell within Manuel Luis Quezon's tenure as Philippine resident commissioner. The former governor of Tayabas (now Quezon) Province and an assembly representative, Quezon was only thirty-one years old but already one of his country's most prominent politicians when he arrived in Washington, D.C., in December 1909. When he returned to Manila in January 1917, he took with him credit for having overseen passage of the Jones Act, a grant of autonomy and presumption of independence that ensured Quezon would find a position of greater political authority in the islands. He served as president of the newly created Philippine Senate from 1917 and would ultimately, in 1935, become president of the Philippine Commonwealth. Even as an army officer presumably isolated from the web of familial and social relationships that were the necessary precursors to preferment in the Philippines, Lim could benefit from Quezon's close ties to American officials who oversaw Philippine affairs. Later, with the establishment of the Commonwealth and the ten-year transition to a republic, Quezon's support for advancement in the new national army would be essential.

As part of the process of socializing cadets into army life, officers and their families assigned to the post were encouraged to invite the young men into their homes for dinner and other social events, while "cadet hops" provided the opportunity to meet suitable young ladies from the surrounding area. The latter posed obvious but not insurmountable obstacles to Filipino students. One cadet in the late 1920s, Eligio Tavanlar, dated a white woman from New York and introduced another Filipino cadet, Rufo Romero (class of 1931), to the woman's younger sister, Lorraine. Romero and Lorraine Becker later married. Whether based on his own experiences or on observation of the Romeros and other unhappy marriages between Filipinos and Americans, when his sons later attended the military and naval academies, Lim counseled them to have nothing to do with American women. Referring vaguely to some episode of his own at the military academy, Lim would advise his son Roberto, then a student at Annapolis, to "get along as much as possible with the people who surround you and mind your own business."

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 3

Prologue 9

1 An Untiring Advocate of Independence: First Cadet, 1910-1917 20

2 "A Good Future before You": At Home and Abroad, 1917-1929 39

3 "Keeping Down Filipino Leadership": War Plans Orange and the Filipino Soldier, 1929-1934 58

4 "We May Even Be There Indefinitely": Origins of the Philippine Military System, 1934-1935 80

5 "El Entusiasmo de Nuestros Jovenes": Implementing the Military System, 1935-1939 97

6 "We Will Handle the Army to Suit Ourselves": Changing Direction, 1939-1940 125

7 "Nothing Better to a Soldier": Preparing for War, 1941 148

8 "The Only General with Cojones": Lim on Bataan, I 167

9 "His Division, His Kingdom": Lim on Bataan, II 183

10 "You Could Have Stopped This Useless Fighting": Bataan to Capas, February-July 1942 209

11 Guerrillero: The Final Frustration, 1942-1944 235

Epilogue 264

Abbreviations 269

Notes 271

Bibliography 323

Index 341