The First Filipino Infantry Regiment
and San Luis Obispo County
by Jim Gregory
Bill Mauldin, the GI cartoonist who created
the perpetually muddy world of Willie and Joe in World War II
Italy, once said that his mother was the worst cook in the
world. He said it lovingly, but he needed a reference point.
Army food, he added, was far, far worse.
It makes sense that a GI with a short pass
from California's Camp Beale would make a beeline, in 1943,
for civilian food, for a meal in a real restaurant where cream
chipped beef on toast was nowhere on the menu.
Chinese food would have been a perfect
choice. But when four soldiers from Camp Beale sat in a
Marysville Chinese restaurant-they wanted rice, something they
hadn't had in months-they waited for service. And waited. And
waited some more. Finally, their sergeant called for help.
A flustered assistant manager came to their
table. He had the decency to be embarrassed.
"I'm sorry. We don't serve Asians."
The four GIs, from the First Filipino
Infantry Regiment, must have looked incredulous. No Chinese
food? For Asians?
"It's a city ordinance," the assistant
manager told them. "I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do about
it."
The story eventually got back to the First
Regiment's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Offley, a
veteran of Douglas MacArthur's Philippine Army.
In a meeting with Marysville's city
fathers, Offley was flexible. He gave the town officials a
choice:
"My men are American soldiers. You will
treat them as such, or I will place Marysville under martial
law."
This is why the First Regiment's GIs-part
of the "Manong" ("Older Brother") generation, who had
volunteered in such huge numbers after Pearl Harbor-were able
to eat Chinese food in Marysville California, for the
remainder of their time at Camp Beale.
It was about this time that the regiment
began referring to Offley as "Tatay"-Tagalog for
"Papa."
Lt. Col Robert Offley,
the First Filipino Regiment's commander, at front left.
The Philippines' Vice President Sergio Osmena is third
from left.
Few immigrants lived in a twilight world
like the Filipinos who emigrated to the West Coast in the
early twentieth century. They weren't aliens-the Philippines,
after three years of vicious combat in the Philippine
Insurrection, were a "protectorate"-but neither were they
American citizens, a privilege limited to whites by the
Naturalization Act of 1790, a law repeatedly upheld by Supreme
Court.
In San Luis Obispo County, many Filipinos
came to work in the fields, restaurant kitchens and hotels of
the Central Coast, and they suffered the same kinds of canards
that had been heaped on their predecessors in California, the
Chinese and Japanese, whose immigration was by the 1930s
severely limited. The Filipinos came because, like those
earlier immigrants, they had a powerful work ethic, and they
came in large enough numbers to make their work cheap: their
value trumped the virulent racism they would have to endure.
They were overwhelmingly male. Few
Filipinas were permitted to come to America, and, in many
Filipino "tiger towns"-ghettos-in California, males, most whom
intended to send money home to their birth families,
outnumbered Filipinas in many towns by as much as a hundred to
one.
That irony was lost on editorialists like
Madge Ditmas, Arroyo Grande's town historian, whose columns
were a feature in the local weekly newspaper for decades. In
1934-a year of incredible labor tension in California, with
strikes that spanned the state, from Irish San Francisco
longshoremen to Mexican Imperial Valley lettuce workers to
Filipino Nipomo pea pickers-Madge let the Filipinos have it
with both barrels, in a letter to the editor. She railed
against "unmarried Filipinos with no homes to pay taxes on,
and no families to support, given work that they took away
from white men."
Ditmas also overlooked, in citing home
ownership, the informal but rigidly enforced covenant that
would have prevented any person of color from buying a home in
Arroyo Grande in 1934. It was a soldier, a Filipino-American
veteran named Pete Guion, who would finally break that barrier
when he bought a home here in 1949.
But Pete Guion, by then, was an American.
He was among 250,000 Filipinos who joined the World War II
military. The home that Pete Guion bought-housewarming photos
show Filipino, Japanese and Caucasian friends over for his
barbecue-was one that he had earned.
Arroyo Grande sailor
Felix Estibal served on the destroyer USS Walke
(DD-416), here seen leaving Mare Island in San Francisco
on her final voyage, in August 1942.
The birth of Filipinos' service in the
United States Army came at Camp San Luis Obispo with the
formation of the First Filipino Battalion in 1942. Filipinos
had long seen service in the navy, but the only rating to
which they could aspire was as a mess steward-essentially,
they were servants. Two Arroyo Grande men served as such in
the rigidly segregated wartime navy: Felix Estibal died in the
sinking of the destroyer Walke off Guadalcanal in the fall of
1942; Camilo Alarcio survived the near-sinking of the
legendary carrier Franklin off Kyushu in 1945: hit by two
550-lb. bombs, the carrier suffered the greatest single-ship
loss of life since Arizona, but she, and Alarcio, somehow
survived to make it back to the Brooklyn Naval Yard near the
war's end.
The Army was hardly a paragon of tolerance:
my father, a Quartermaster officer during the war, carried a
.45 on his hip during his 1944 transatlantic voyage to keep
black gasoline supply company troops in their place-which was
below decks-during the long trip to England.
But the First Filipino Infantry Battalion
was not segregated by edict: these were young men who wanted
to fight together to liberate their homes and to fight for the
nation that seemed to find their presence so distasteful.
It soon became apparent that the number of
volunteers-technically, the young Filipinos could not enlist,
as non-citizens, but they were doubtless the most willing
inductees of the war years-would demand a larger unit. The
First Battalion would become, at Fort Ord, the First Regiment,
and the Second Regiment would later be formed and began
training at Camp Cooke, near Lompoc.
A cadre of training officers and non-coms
was grafted onto the First from the 77th Infantry Division. It
became immediately apparent to them that their trainees were
going to be superb soldiers. They took to every aspect of GI
life, from cleaning the M1 Garand to the drudgery of company
drill, with quickness and enthusiasm.
They were distinctly different from other
GIs in one way: their choice of sidearms. The bolo knife,
fundamental to the Filipino martial art, escrima, became an
indispensable part of their training, and since, unlike M1s or
creamed chipped beef on toast, bolo knives were not available
in wartime arsenals or commissaries, amateur armorers made the
weapons from automobile leaf springs. [These were uncommonly
resourceful young soldiers: wooden traversing wheels used in
artillery practice also proved ideal for roasting pig.] The
bolo knife became a singular trademark, and one that conferred
immense pride, for the men of the First Regiment.
In a still from a wartime
film, Filipino GIs train in hand-to-hand combat with their
bolo knives at Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Space Force Base).
The weapon was featured on this vegetable crate label.
Sergio Reyes' Arroyo Grande ranch was a home away from home
for Filipino GIs; Gabe De Leon would become Arroyo Grande's
mayor after the war-the first Filipino-American mayor in the
United States.
The First's commander, Lt. Col. Offley,
faced yet another legal hurdle, more formidable than
Marysville's town ordinances, when the time came close for his
men to ship out to the Pacific. Many of them had fallen in
love-with young Caucasian women-which was ironic and
inevitable. Because of the prewar immigration restrictions,
there were few single Filipinas, yet the state still had rigid
miscegenation laws on the books. Offley could not declare
martial law on the California State Legislature, but he could
requisition buses. In the spring of 1944, he instituted a kind
of marriage by shuttle: his men could marry legally in Gallup,
New Mexico, and did, thanks to Offley's "Honeymoon Express."
That year, the Arroyo Grande
Herald-Recorder identified at least sixteen Valley
Filipino-Americans (in 1943, Congress had passed legislation
allowing them American citizenship) fighting under MacArthur's
command-first in New Guinea, where they'd had to endure
another racist insult, used by one general as manual labor
until an enraged generalissimo intervened. MacArthur's
fidelity to the Filipino people was genuine.
One of his chief aides was the Filipino
soldier-statesman Gen. Carlos Romulo, who would someday become
secretary-general of the United Nations. Romulo came to
Guadalupe to speak in April 1944. During the war, he seems
tireless: he's a leader of the resistance to Japan, a war bond
fundraiser, and perhaps the most important recruiter for units
like the First Filipino Infantry Regiment. In the fall of
1944, MacArthur would make good on his promise to return when
American forces came ashore at Leyte, they followed by their
commander, determined and dramatic, splashing through
knee-deep water to mark his own personal invasion. Romulo is
just behind him.
MacArthur--and
Romulo--return to Leyte.
The combat record of the California
Filipinos who Romulo helped to recruit would be a
distinguished one, including service with the Alamo Scouts,
commando units that operated deep in enemy territory on New
Guinea and in the Philippines. The majority of the
Filipino-American GIs would see their first action in Leyte
and on Samar, an island where, during the Philippine
Insurrection and after taking heavy casualties, the
intemperate Gen. Elwell Otis had ordered the killing of every
Filipino over the age of ten. They would later fight with
Sixth Army in the invasion of Luzon, with the Alamo Scouts and
a ranger battalion meantime pulling off one of the most
dramatic raids of the war. In January 1945, they liberated 500
Allied prisoners of war at Cabanatuan, including survivors of
the Bataan Death March, and some of them had been anticipating
retribution-execution by their captors-as American forces
advanced. The "Great Raid" spared them that fate and, in
February, American forces re-took Manila.
A second campaign would follow the war. It
wasn't led by MacArthur, but by GIs like those in the First
Regiment: the War Brides Act permitted them to marry, bring
their brides home, and finally start families. The
Manongs-older brothers-were by now even older, many in their
thirties or even early forties, so their courtships were
speedy, bypassing the traditional proprieties of chaperones
and protracted negotiations with potential in-laws. They had
to get back to the States.
One war bride, Evelyn Betita, found her new
home intolerably cold--the first thing her husband Perfecto
bought when they arrived in summertime San Francisco was a
warm coat for his shivering wife. Evelyn, perhaps a little
idealistic about life in the United States, was dismayed when
she remembered, with her wonderful sense of humor, that her
new home in Arroyo Grande "was all muddy and farmy"-and the
war brides discovered, as well, that their new husbands showed
no evidence that they had been good housekeepers.
Twenty-five years later, I would attend
Arroyo Grande High School with Perfecto and Evelyn's children.
The Manong Generation had finally found a home.
Jim Gregory was raised in the
Upper Arroyo Grande Valley. He taught history for thirty years
at Mission College Preparatory Catholic High School (Mission
Prep) in San Luis Obispo and at Arroyo Grande High School. His
book, World War II Arroyo Grande, is to be released
January 11 by the History Press.
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