Odyssey of a Philippine Scout: Fighting, Escaping, and Evading the Japanese, 1941-1944 (review)

The late Arthur Whitehead was an army reserve officer called to active duty in mid-1939 and sent to the Philippines in early 1941, where he was assigned to the Philippine Scouts' 26th Cavalry Regiment at Fort Stotsenburg. This book, originally published in 1989, recounts his prewar and wartime adventures. Unable to reach Bataan after his troop was cut off in northern Luzon in the early days of the war, Whitehead instead made his way to Panay where he was assigned to the Philippine Army's 63rd Infantry Regiment. In May 1942, he surrendered with other American officers (few Filipino officers did so) but escaped when sent by the Japanese to contact unsurrendered units elsewhere on the island. Whitehead spent the next year and a half hiding in the central Philippines until he and several companions reached Australia in early 1944. Until then, Whitehead relied completely for survival on the support of friendly Filipinos. He admired their stoicism in the face of adversity and their ability to make do with diminished resources. As political actors, however, Whitehead held them in contempt. Early on, he dismissed "the possibility of a guerrilla movement" because, Whitehead wrote, he "had not talked to a Filipino who felt he should fight for his country. It was all up to the Americans" (p. 83). Those Filipinos who were willing to fight did not merit his respect, either. Macario Peralta, the 61st Division officer who organized a guerrilla movement on Panay, may have been a hero to Filipinos; to Whitehead he was a "deserter" whose actions caused "a great deal of embarrassment and difficulty" to the American general who had commanded Panay (p. 191).

How does this book differ from the 1989 edition, of which no mention is made? It has photographs, different maps, and lacks an appendix found in the original listing American soldiers whom Whitehead met hiding on Cuyo Island, near Palawan, in 1943. (These were mostly air corps enlisted men, and several had married and settled in for the duration. "The girls in Cuyo were very pretty [Whitehead explained], of lighter complexion and with finer features than I had noticed elsewhere" [p. 217].) Unfortunately, an editor silently rewrote portions of the original text. Sentences have been added, others deleted, and some rearranged with jarring effect: Whitehead wrote "arrangements were made with the Negros [Island] commander" (1989; p. 141), for example, not "with the commander of the Negros" (2006; p. 125). The publisher is to be congratulated for making Whitehead's fascinating story available to a wider audience, but poor editorial choices mean scholars wanting to quote from the book will need to consult the 1989 version.