The War Through a Child’s Eyes- My Personal Experiences-An Update
https://chateaudumer.blogspot.com/2024/11/my-childhood-experiences-during.html💚
The following is an excerpt and more detailed event from my article listed above.
I was only a small boy when the Japanese-American War in the Philippines reached our corner of Panay Island, but the sounds and shadows of those years have never left me. Sirens, hurried whispers, the rustle of belongings packed in the dark, these are the fragments that stitched my childhood together as war replaced the ordinary rhythms of provincial life.
When the Japanese arrived, our world shrank to the hills above Barotac Viejo, Iloilo. We left behind our small city (Jaro) and the comfort of familiar streets and moved into a life of hiding.💚 The grown-ups spoke in low voices about raids and arrests, about men taken in the night, about families who simply disappeared. I did not yet understand strategy or geopolitics; I understood only that we had to be quiet, that light at the wrong time could mean death, and that my father was now part of something both dangerous and necessary.
My father joined the guerrillas (USAFFE)💜, and with that decision our family stepped fully into the shadows. He would come and go at odd hours, sometimes gone for days, returning leaner, more tired, but resolute. We children watched his movements with wordless awe. He seemed to carry the entire war on his shoulders, though he treated us with the same affectionate firmness he had before the Japanese came. The difference was in his eyes, there was a vigilance there, as if he never fully put down his guard, even at home.
One of the earliest lessons I learned in that time had nothing to do with reading or numbers. It was a lesson in survival, distilled into a single instruction: Never say our real surname. My father gathered us and explained that if strangers asked, we were to say we were “Katigbak,” not “Katague.” Somewhere, he said, the Japanese had lists, names of guerrillas and their kin and our true surname might draw them straight to us. As a child, I could not imagine such lists, but I understood the fear in his voice.
From that day on, I whispered the borrowed name to myself like a strange prayer: Katigbak, Katigbak, Katigbak. I repeated it as I walked the narrow paths in the hills, as I tried to sleep on a mat in some temporary shelter, as I listened to distant gunfire roll across the night. I wanted it to be the first word on my tongue if anyone ever pointed a rifle at me and asked who I was. My identity, which should have been simple, became something I had to rehearse, a mask I might need to wear to stay alive.
The war was not just a matter of secrecy; it was also a matter of silence. We learned to lower our voices at the slightest noise outside. I remember nights when the adults froze mid-sentence, faces turned toward the dark, listening. A dog barking somewhere, the echo of boots on a distant path, the faint rumble of trucks, each sound was a question: had they found us? The air itself seemed thinner in those moments, as if even breathing too loudly might betray our hiding place.
Stories of atrocities traveled faster than the wind in those days, and even a child could feel their weight. News reached us of the Noel Balleza clan in Barotac Viejo, relatives on my mother’s side. They had taken refuge in a hideout not far from where we stayed. One day, word came that their entire family had been slaughtered. Only one member of the Family survive and was able to tell the story. I did not witness it, but the adults’ stunned grief was its own kind of testimony. Their faces, set in a shocked, quiet horror, told me enough: the war was not a distant battlefield; it was inside our own family tree.
Later, I would learn of another massacre of relatives, this time on my father’s side. My aunt, Adela C(K)atague Guillergan, and her family in Negros Occidental were also killed. At the time, these were fragments of information, spoken around me rather than to me. As I grew older and traced the branches of our family, I realized how many of those branches had been cut short in those years. The war, which I had first understood as soldiers and uniforms, revealed itself also as empty chairs at the table, names no longer called during reunions.
Despite the fear, life did not entirely stop. Children find ways to be children, even in the shadow of occupation. We played with improvised toys, chased one another along the mountain paths, and stole moments of laughter when the adults were not looking. Yet even our games were edged with caution. We knew which directions were forbidden, which trails might lead toward Japanese patrols or informers. Our playground was a landscape of invisible borders drawn by danger.
The line between collaborator and neighbor became blurred, even to a child. I heard the word “traidor” whispered with contempt, Filipinos who aided the Japanese, pointing out guerrillas and their families. It was a sobering lesson: fear and hunger could twist some people into betraying their own. As a boy, I did not judge them with the harsh certainty of adulthood, but the knowledge that someone who looked like us, who spoke our language, might lead soldiers to our door added a new layer to the anxiety of each day.
As the war dragged on, the boundaries of time dissolved. There were no reliable calendars in the hills, only seasons and rumors. We knew something was changing when the mood around us shifted, when whispers of American landings and retreating Japanese forces began to filter through. Hope is a dangerous thing in wartime: it glows softly at first, then flares at any sign of confirmation. For us children, hope meant imagining a future where we could use our real name again without fear.
When liberation finally came, it did not arrive as a single, clear event in my memory but as a gradual loosening of the invisible ropes that had bound our lives. Soldiers changed, flags changed, and with them, the quality of sound in our village changed, too. There were still stories of fighting and revenge, but the constant, suffocating tension lifted. One day, almost without ceremony, the name “Katague” could be spoken freely again.
Looking back now, my memories of that “Japanese-American War” in the Philippines are a mixture of sharp images and lingering impressions: my father’s serious face as he taught us to deny our surname, my mother’s quiet efficiency in making a life out of almost nothing, the hushed accounts of massacres that claimed the lives of people I would never meet, and the subtle shift from terror to tentative relief as the occupation ended.
As an adult, and later a father and grandfather, I came to understand that what I experienced as a child was only a small part of the larger history. Yet those years shaped me in ways I still feel. They taught me that identity is both fragile and stubborn, that courage can look like a man slipping into the night to join guerrillas or like a child memorizing a false name to protect his family. They taught me that war does not just redraw maps; it redraws the interior landscape of memory, leaving marks that endure long after the guns fall silent.
In telling these stories now, I reclaim those days not only as episodes of fear but as proof of survival. The boy who whispered “Katigbak” in the dark grew into a man who can sign his real name without hesitation. That simple act, so ordinary in peacetime, is, for me, one of the quiet victories of a life lived beyond war.
💜United States Arm Forces of the Far East ( USAFFE)
- Internment Life: Children in camps like Santo Tomas often tried to maintain normalcy through structured activities and play, though conditions deteriorated into severe malnutrition and fear by 1944.
- War Games: To cope, children sometimes turned the conflict into games, such as "playing guards" or daring each other to stand still during strafing runs by planes.
- Guerrilla Involvement: Some teenagers and even children as young as 12, like Martin Bantug, joined resistance units to fight for freedom.
- 💚Survival in Hiding: Many Filipino families fled to the mountains to avoid Japanese patrols, facing constant hunger and the threat of discovery.
My Animated Photo of the Day- Me and Knitz at her Wedding Day, 1976
