World War II Remembered

Problem of the Bamboo Poles

126 Astaple character in Hollywood war movies is the officer who is so committed to strictly obeying formal regulations that he ignores common sense. That officer was alive and well in the Philippines immediately following World War II. In November 1945, I arrived at the American Army base in Batangas , at the southwest end of Luzon. The region had been liberated from Japanese control only a few months earlier, and American forces were just getting settled into a post-war routine: mopping up remnants of enemy troops, concluding unfinished business, and preparing for peace. I had been assigned to the post of Purchasing and Contracting Officer. When I reported to Headquarters, I found it located in a huge, ostentatious, castle-like building. I entered and went to one end of the long hall to check in. While I was on the way in, and still a bit awestruck by the unexpected surroundings, my attention was drawn to a noisy commotion at the other end of the hall. It turned out to be a group of Filipino natives, ordinary workers, clamoring to be paid by Problem of the Bamboo Poles • Robert Stanton U.S. Army Problem of the Bamboo Poles: Robert Stanton 127 a flustered American officer who was trying to explain that there was no way he could pay them. That was my introduction to the problem of the bamboo poles. The campaign to liberate the area had produced a good deal of destruction. When American forces took over, they wanted to prepare for peacetime use. Among other things, that called for building many new structures for storage, PX, barracks, and so forth. For such construction , the Army needed wooden poles, and in the Philippines that meant bamboo poles. So the military agreed to pay native workers 50 centavos per pole. The area was still not completely pacified, and conditions precluded a cash-and-carry operation, so the Army developed an ad hoc payment system. When a worker brought some poles, he would receive a chit indicating the number of poles he had delivered; the next time he brought poles, he would get another chit; and so on. Each chit had to be signed by the enlisted man immediately running the operation, who attested that the number was correct, and then it had to be countersigned by the officer in charge. The workers were promised that, when the work was finished, they could turn in their chits to Army headquarters, where they would receive the cash they were owed. That was a common-sense, workable system, but it had one flaw. The officers who were supposed to countersign the chits were frequently not available: many were still in the jungle rounding up Japanese or were otherwise occupied. Therefore, they left the supervision of pole collecting to perfectly competent and reliable sergeants or corporals. The result was that most workers accumulated a batch of chits that, while accurately showing the number of poles they had delivered, did not accord with the rules set out by the American Army: they were not countersigned by an officer. Therefore, when workers sought to get paid, and discovered their chits were worthless, they became very agitated , to say the least. The decision not to pay for un-countersigned chits was made by the colonel commanding the base. He was a crusty regular Army officer with many years of service. He believed that Army rules were created for very good reasons and should be followed to the letter. Departure from the rules was bad for discipline, ultimately undermined morale, and simply created chaos. He would certainly not violate the rules 128 World War II Remembered because of a bunch of clamoring Filipinos whom he didn’t like very much anyway. His chief subordinates tried diplomatically to change his mind, but he would have none of it. Chits not countersigned were not to be paid. A New Agreement I was very disturbed by these events. I empathized completely with the workers and felt their sense of outrage at being so shabbily treated. Moreover, I felt ashamed that my country should be represented—or, rather, misrepresented—by an officer who was so petty, inflexible, and devoid of compassion; that was not the America I wanted foreigners to see. One of my chief tasks in earlier postings and, in fact, as a civilian before joining the Army, had been to negotiate supplemental agreements to contracts between the...