World War II through the eyes of an unsung hero

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COLONEL Narciso L. Manzano was the highest-ranking Filipino officer in the US Army under the command of General Douglas MacArthur.

During World War II, he led and was involved in multiple battles and intelligence operations, like the blowing up of the bridge in Calumpit, Bulacan, the defeat at the Battle of Bataan, and the resistance movement that sprang up against Japanese invaders. All this he did as a professional soldier who rose to field officer rank through merit, without having graduated from any military academy. Unfortunately, despite his numerous military achievements and strong reputation among MacArthur and his staff officers, his exploits have been seldom reported in detail outside of the US Army.

This is now being corrected through the publication of a book.

American author Craig Scharlin, who worked closely with Manzano as his secretary and personal assistant, has woven together the Colonel’s accounts of his life before and during the war for his new book, The Manzano Memoirs: The Life and Military Career of Colonel Narciso L. Manzano.

“This book is a compilation of three memoirs that I discovered many years after Colonel Manzano passed away. We didn’t know they existed for a long time,” Mr. Scharlin said during the book’s launch at the Ortigas Foundation Library on Feb. 6.

The book blends the three memoirs: one written by Colonel Manzano in 1948 which was initially handwritten on yellow lined pad paper; another that had been typed out in 1984 when he was already a retired colonel and real estate developer; and the last one by his son, Jaime Manzano, who had written about his family. At the book launch, Mr. Scharlin read a passage on Colonel Manzano’s childhood in Atimonan, Quezon, before he joined the army and became an integral part of the country’s defense campaign.

During the launch, Mr. Scharlin noted that the colonel often gave input that was not listened to by MacArthur’s officers, including about the Battle of Manila (whose 80^th anniversary falls this month).

“I know this is a controversial issue with the World War II experts, but Manzano had specific intelligence that the Japanese, if given the opportunity, would have retreated from that. Now, for the first time, people can read that Colonel Manzano said this,” he said.

“Filipinos suffered having to fight a war under the auspices of the Americans. They’re never given the opportunity to fight their own battles, and Colonel Manzano spent his whole war career fighting the war violently, gallantly, and heroically, but always under the shadow of the Americans. General MacArthur, General Willoughby, and General Whitney were always above him, keeping him from making the war probably more successful than it was,” Mr. Scharlin explained.

He added that he had met Mr.  Manzano in 1975, when the colonel was already retired and speaking out against the Marcos dictatorship, which he “took very personally.”

“Manzano fought throughout the entire war and put his life — and the lives of all the men and women who served under him — on the line, and many died. And so he took it as sort of a personal affront that Marcos again took away the freedom of Filipinos,” said Mr.  Scharlin.

Dr. Ricardo T. Jose, war historian and professor emeritus at the University of the Philippines, told BusinessWorld that this marks “the first time many details of the resistance movement are published” — especially with regard to the internal battle that Filipino officers like Mr. Manzano had to fight within the US army headquarters.

In his foreword, he details how Mr. Manzano was “a professional caught in between these different wars and between powerful and clashing individuals.”

“It is high time that the story of this Filipino hero is told, in his own words. It’s a story that we can all learn from,” said Mr. Jose.

The Manzano Memoirs: The Life and Military Career of Colonel Narciso L. Manzano is published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press. It is available at the Ateneo University Press Bookshop in Bellarmine Hall, and its official Lazada and Shopee stores, for P650 (paperback) and P1,850 (hardcover). — Brontë H. Lacsamana