Tag Archives: Scharlin

Qwertyman No. 123: A Forgotten Hero

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 9, 2024

A HANDSOME book—as handsome as its subject—was launched last week by the Ateneo University Press, a biography of another unsung Filipino hero who would have faded into oblivion had it not been for the efforts of an American expat in the Philippines with a deep sense of history. 

The hero was Col. Narciso L. Manzano, the highest-ranking Filipino in the US Army during the Second World War, and the man who rescued his memory is Craig Scharlin, a former English teacher, gallery owner, and biographer who served for some time as Manzano’s personal secretary fifty years ago. I had met and known Craig earlier as the author, with his wife Lilia Villanueva, of the biography of Filipino-American labor leader Philip Vera Cruz; when he asked me to help him put together what eventually became The Manzano Memoirs: The Life and Military Career of Colonel Narciso L. Manzano, I agreed, especially after hearing his story of the life of this remarkable man. 

Craig had learned that the MacArthur Library in Virginia had a 260-page handwritten autobiographical manuscript that had been written by Col. Manzano in 1948, to which were later added another memoir written in 1983 for his grandchildren; his son Jaime had also written a family history. Craig acquired copies of all these and the necessary permissions to publish them; I helped stitch the manuscripts together into a more coherent whole and edit the text.

Though born in Manila in 1899, Manzano grew up in Atimonan, Quezon before leaving at age ten for Spain where his family hailed from. He was a mestizo through and through: Filipino by birth and allegiance, Spanish by blood, and American by military service and later citizenship. After returning to Manila and studying Engineering at UST, he signed up to join the US Army, hoping to fight in the First World War, which ended too soon for him. He went to the US for further military training, and served back home as a Philippine Scout, and then as a colonel in the US Army Corps of Engineers under Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

It had been one of Manzano’s pre-war missions to map out the Bataan peninsula carefully in preparation for War Plan Orange 3, which MacArthur eventually discarded. It was in this zone that Manzano would first earn praise for his bravery. As Craig’s introduction tells it, “It was Manzano, along with his American co-commander, Lt. Col. Skerry, who led their engineers in setting the explosives to blow the bridge at Calumpit, the last and most vital bridge in Central Luzon…. When Gen. Wainwright decided the bridge had to be destroyed to halt the rapidly advancing Japanese invading forces, the Army engineers assigned this task led by Manzano were on the wrong side of the bridge, the Japanese side. Manzano requested that Skerry wait to blow it until he and his men could get across… but Wainwright had no choice: the bridge had to be blown as the Japanese were advancing too fast in order to save the entire American and Filipino forces and allow them time to retreat to Bataan…. Somehow Manzano, along with another of his American officers was able to evade the Japanese on their own and made their way with all their men to Bataan.”

Working in intelligence in Bataan, he was later captured and imprisoned in Camp O’Donnell; upon release, he was quickly assigned to develop an intelligence network in Luzon, at which he proved exceptionally capable. His wife Charo was arrested and imprisoned by the Japanese. But he pressed on, and when his network was exposed, he moved to Mindanao from where he hoped to be taken by submarine to Australia so he could properly advise MacArthur, who was getting poor intelligence. MacArthur’s lackeys scotched that plan, forcing Manzano to improvise as a guerrilla until MacArthur returned. He later moved to the US with his family, where he died in 1986, proud of his life’s work despite being embittered by the betrayals he had to suffer, and disappointed at being passed over for the generalship he had expected.

That’s not even half of the story; brimming with the candor of a man with nothing to lose, Manzano’s memoirs are full of vignettes and reflections about people at war, and Manzano can be painfully scathing in his estimations of those he felt had betrayed his country. He whittles down MacArthur and his aides for what he saw to be their foolish and costly unwillingness to listen to lifesaving intelligence (an opinion shared by historians such as Hampton Sides, who wrote that “MacArthur’s judgement, clouded by his gargantuan ego, was sometimes deeply, dangerously flawed. The men who fought under him, and the civilians who happened to get in his way, often paid a terrible price.”) Manzano was highly critical of MacArthur’s abandonment of War Plan Orange 3, and even said that he would have testified in support of Japanese Gen. Masaharu Homma had he been asked.

He not only believed President Jose P. Laurel to be a collaborator, but plotted the failed operation to assassinate him on the golf course at Wack Wack. For this alone, the book should be well worth reading; I among others have a contrary view of Laurel, but Manzano was there and we were not. Manzano has spicy opinions of other wartime and postwar personalities whom we have named streets after—again, quite an eye-opener. He reserved some of his choicest words for Ferdinand Marcos, whom he called “a poser, a phony, a fake, a war profiteer.”

In his introduction to the book, Craig Scharlin recalls his first meeting with Col. Manzano in San Francisco in 1975: The movie “Scent of a Woman” with Al Pacino had not yet come out. However, the character Pacino played in that movie, Frank, was a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. As portrayed by Pacino, the character had Old-World charm, dressed impeccably, and even in his older age had ramrod-straight posture, showed strength of character and conviction, and the demeanor of an officer who had commanded other men and led them into battle. But he also carried scars of resentment and a certain sadness, a lament of unfulfilled destinies, of real battles won and others lost. And of course it was all Al Pacino—short, dark, brooding, yet still incredibly charismatic.

“That was the man I met in 1975 in a well-appointed penthouse apartment on Nob Hill in San Francisco. The only difference was that this wasn’t Al Pacino nor a fictional movie character, but the real deal—a retired US Army colonel named Narciso L. Manzano.”

Meet the rest of the man in the book, which you can order here: https://unipress.ateneo.edu/product/manzano-memoirs-life-and-military-career-colonel-narcisco-l-manzano.

Penman No. 382: Southern Gothic in Sugarlandia

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Penman for Monday, March 2, 2020

 

THE LAST time I visited Bacolod was more than a decade ago, when I was writing the centennial history of the De La Salle Brothers in the Philippines and had to look into their work in that southern city, an enterprise that began in 1952. Before that I had made occasional sorties to it, on short ferry rides from Iloilo and once, memorably, on a long pre-martial law ride across the mountains to Dumaguete with a busload of fellow activists, expecting to be stopped any minute by the paramilitary forces then lording it over the countryside.

Last week I returned on a far more civil mission, on research for another book I’m writing on a sometime icon of the sugar industry. That part of it was interesting enough—interviews with history’s participants and witnesses can be exhausting (especially in the transcription) but always fascinating for me—but as often happens on these out-of-town excursions, the sidelights proved no less engrossing.

Bacolod and its environs, of course, have always offered stellar attractions for visitors and tourists, and indeed my wife Beng and her high-school barkada of four lovely ladies were flying into town with me on their own itinerary. I was there for work, but the women had booked a day tour of the fabled old houses of nearby Silay. (You can find these heritage tours on Klook, among other places online.)

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While Beng’s party enjoyed Silay’s architectural treasures—among them Balay Negrense and the Ramon Hofileña ancestral home—I was many kilometers away in Bago City, treading carefully on the crumbling ruins of the Ma-ao sugar central. Opened in 1919 on a 56-hectare estate, the central was typical of the enterprise that turned Negros into Sugarlandia, creating fabulous wealth for an elite that held sway over the region’s history and politics over much of the 20th century. Over my three days in Bacolod I would learn more than I ever imagined I could know about sugar, its production, and, inescapably, the society it fed and bred.

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Indeed, from the airport in Silay on to the fringes of the city, the landscape is dominated by swaths of sugarcane greening at the foot of Mts. Mandalagan and Kanlaon, broken only by the occasional mall or hardware store, the signposts of the new commerce. “This is the best land for sugar in the province right here,” said my guide and driver, “and it’s owned by the Lacson family. There are two main streets in Bacolod, named after two generals of the Revolution: Juan Araneta and Aniceto Lacson, who forced the surrender of the Spanish forces through a clever ruse. They had nipa palms cut to resemble guns from a distance, and the Spanish general surrendered to avoid what he thought would be a bloodbath.”

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Such stories roll easily off the Negrense tongue, on this land watered by blood and champagne. As we drove on the highway, I recalled a passage in a biography of Rafael Salas—another native son, from Bago—that I had co-written last year with Menchu Sarmiento, about the horrific murder in 1951 of Moises Padilla, who had found the gall to run for mayor against the local kingpin: “They toured from town to town beating and torturing Padilla, displaying him in a public square while one of the boys announced: ‘Here is what happens to people who oppose us.’” At the same time, I couldn’t help recalling the story of that period’s loveliest and yet also saddest bride, the legendary Susan Magalona, at whose star-crossed wedding it was reported that champagne flowed from a fountain. (Millennials who’ve never heard of this story would do well to Google it, if only to learn something about the virtues of “non-consummation”.)

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In American literature, which I used to teach, these bizarre but also compelling comminglings of decay and grotesquerie on the one hand and beauty and the fantastic on the other took on the label of “Southern gothic,” a genre with such writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers among its avatars. Somehow I felt that I was in its presence here, too, in the rusted machinery and the tall grasses, out of which you half-expected some apparition in gauzy white to emerge. In the very middle of Lopez Jaena Street stands perhaps the quaintest cemetery in the country: the mausoleum of the Luzuriagas (photo below from steemit.com), where the traffic of life, you might say, comes to a perfect standstill.

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Inevitably I would hear a story about ghosts, in a place that would have been incomplete without them: the celebrated Daku Balay (“Big House”), Bacolod’s first and largest Art Deco mansion built on Burgos Street by Don Generoso Villanueva in 1936. We were lucky to get a private tour of this exquisitely sculpted home, thanks to our friend the American writer Craig Scharlin and his wife Lilia Villanueva, Don Generoso’s granddaughter, who have taken it upon themselves to preserve it for posterity. Craig told me how visitors who had strayed into the upper floors had found themselves being escorted by a charming couple—none other than the long-departed don and his wife Paz.

These specters were, at least, benign, and if I had lived in Daku Balay, with its helical staircase, nautical motifs, and Scagliola floors, I would have wished to inhabit it forever.

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