1 - War and Peace, 1939–1948

Summary

In January 1946, a council of 240 delegates in the Philippines representing more than 10,000 U.S. soldiers chaired by Sergeant Emil Mazey (Sub-Base R, Batangas, Luzon) lodged a protest with the War Department against the slow pace of troop demobilization. The war was over. American troops had clasped hands with Red Army soldiers at the River Elbe in April 1945; Berlin fell in May, Japan in August. Why were they not yet home? Continued occupation of the Philippines was needless, for the Filipinos were friendly. Guerrillas in the Hukbalahap – the People's Anti-Japanese Army – had helped secure the islands. Since the Huks were initiated by the Communist Party of the Philippines, however, the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) was overseeing their suppression by measures including summary execution. In this context, GI resistance was not just about going home; it was an act of solidarity with Filipinos. When two Senators visited Luzon, Emil Mazey stood in a room full of generals risking court martial to testify that the Army had burnt surplus shoes, blankets, and jackets that could have gone to Filipinos. The occupation, he held, was laying the groundwork for peacetime conscription and a permanent military presence in Asia.

As part of a worldwide U.S. troop “bring us home” movement, the Philippines rebellion was connected in myriad ways to a 1945–1946 working-class upsurge in the United States, where pent-up resentment about an inflation-pinched standard of living and vast wartime corporate profits resulted in the largest strike wave in American history. Millions struck in one sector after another: oil, coal, lumber, glass, textiles, trucking, meatpacking, and steel. The epicenter was auto, where the United Automobile Workers (UAW) – whose factory-occupation sit-down strikes in 1936–1937 propelled the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) – walked out at General Motors (GM), the nation's largest corporation. “Open the books!” declared Walter Reuther, director of the union's GM department, demanding that the company boost pay without increasing consumer prices – or lay bare its ledgers to prove it could not. That was a page taken from Leon Trotsky, who had envisioned factory committees saying, “Show us your books; we demand control over the fixing of prices.” Soon GM granted a large wage increase, though without keeping prices down.

Mazey, the son of Hungarian immigrants raised in Michigan, had worked in Detroit's auto plants before entering the armed services.