China Coast Guard Impounds Philippine Navy Boats, Seizes Firearms in Latest Second Thomas Shoal Incident

A video of the incident shows seven small boats surrounding RHIBs next to Sierra Madre. According to the Philippine military, the China Coast Guard used blaring sirens and strobe lights to disorient the personnel. Tear gas and rocks were also thrown at and onto the Philippine vessels. A Chinese military aircraft was also claimed to be flying overhead in what was described as “a further display of excessive force and intimidation.”

A Philippine Navy RHIB transporting supplies, including seven disassembled and packaged CAR-15 rifles, was towed away from Sierra Madre, surrounded on by Chinese vessels and boarded. An image released by the Armed Forces of the Philippines shows multiple China Coast Guard personnel pointing batons and knives during the boarding action. While a brief fight occurred during this time, in which Brawner said the troops resisted with their “bare hands,” the Philippine personnel were eventually subdued. Marines on board Sierra Madre were seen throwing water at Chinese coast guardsmen during the encounter.

While Pinoys in American service back in the day proved doughty fighters, the Philippines has forever been ruled by one sackless wonder after another. Marcos could end this by invoking the defense treaty, thereby formally requesting American assistance. He hasn’t. This guy is a clone of Manuel Quezon, another silver-tongued moron of the kind Pinoys keep electing to high office.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2022/03/11/why-did-macarthur-wait-for-japan-to-strike-first/
[IN SEVERAL LITTLE-KNOWN written statements, MacArthur implies a more plausible reason for holding back his bombers: that he had deferred to Quezon’s hope that Japan would spare the Philippines. “Even after the attack upon Pearl Harbor,” MacArthur wrote to historians Paul S. Burtness and Warren U. Ober in 1962, “it was hoped that the Japanese would not attempt invasion of the Philippines in view of its…approaching independent status.” In 1954, he pointed to the source of this hope. “While I personally had not the slightest doubt we would be attacked,” MacArthur wrote to historian Louis Morton, “great local hope existed that this would not be the case.” “Great local hope” can mean only one thing: Philippine President Quezon, a view shared by John D. Bulkeley, a naval officer close to MacArthur, who insisted “it was Quezon who put the clamp on things.”

Quezon had a strong motive to encourage MacArthur to wait to see if Japan attacked. If the Philippines became a battleground, it would mean thousands of Filipino deaths and untold destruction—something Quezon wanted to avoid. Japan had promised friendship to his country and respect for its neutrality upon independence; Quezon seemed to accept these promises. Japan didn’t want to attack the Philippines, he believed, and would do so only if threatened by American forces there. If the United States launched a bombing mission against Formosa, he knew it would kill any chance Japan would leave the Philippines unharmed.

Even after Japan invaded the Philippines in Luzon’s Lingayen Gulf on December 22, 1941, Quezon clung to the hope that Japan might still be persuaded to spare his country. On February 8, 1942, at a time when Filipino and American forces had fought the Japanese to a standstill on the Bataan Peninsula, Quezon asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt for immediate independence for the Philippines so he could declare the country neutral. Whether Japan would have respected Philippine neutrality seems only a highly remote possibility, but this will never be known because Roosevelt refused to accelerate independence.

After being evacuated from the Philippines in February 1942 to avoid capture by the Japanese, Quezon told Dwight D. Eisenhower—whom he knew from Eisenhower’s days as a MacArthur aide—that MacArthur had waited for Japan to strike out of the hope that it would spare the islands. Then Quezon added a twist: He said it was MacArthur, not he, who believed Japan might bypass the Philippines. That scenario, however, is unlikely. As an experienced military officer, MacArthur knew Japan couldn’t ignore the threat U.S. forces posed there. He was also aware that American radar had detected Japanese planes flying nighttime reconnaissance missions over Clark Field on December 2-5, 1941, a sign Japan intended to attack the Philippines when war came.

But MacArthur had reason to defer to Quezon—something the proud military man would be reluctant to admit. MacArthur commanded fewer than 35,000 American troops, and too few were infantrymen. To defend the islands, he needed the 120,000-man Philippine Army—and the morale and staying power of the Filipino troops hinged on Quezon’s unequivocal support for the war effort.

Quezon was a revered figure in the Philippines. Just a month before the outbreak of war, he had won reelection with more than 80 percent of the popular vote. The U.S. State Department called him “the most important rallying point we have to keep the Filipino people loyal to the United States” and noted that Quezon had “gained the affection of the Filipino masses…as has no other Filipino leader.” The volatile Quezon’s support would be no sure thing if he believed MacArthur had needlessly brought war there.]

[Thanks for responding. Certainly, MacArthur never had a problem with ignoring the wall that should have separated military duty from political involvement. As soon as he heard about the Pearl Harbor attack, those B-17s should have been ordered to attack. At least this information provides a supposition of spurious reasoning on his part to what otherwise would seem mere dementia.]

Nothing spurious about his reasoning. Regional leaders made a separate peace with Japan. Many Asian postwar leaders served Imperial Japan. Not obscure figures, but national leaders like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Burma’s Aung San and Ne Win, Taiwan’s Lee Teng hui, Korea’s Park Chung Hee, Indonesia’s Sukarno and Suharto and Thailand’s Phibun.

If Quezon had given the word, native troops could have attacked the American garrison in alliance with Japan, or simply deserted. Much as Bill Slim needed Indian troops to ward off Japanese advances, and all kinds of political palliatives were issued to get their commitment to risk their necks for the British Empire, MacArthur found himself in a similar situation. Quezon could, as his local counterparts had done, have turned on a dime and issued orders to assist the Japanese in their operations. You gotta wonder about the extent to which the operation spiriting him out of the PI was aimed at preventing him from doing so.

[He must have been aware of Quezon’s attitude well before December 7. He should have pleaded his responsibilities as a US Army officer and inserted FDR into the conversation. It would be spurious from the point of view that he assumed a political role to which he was not entitled.]

How would inserting FDR into the discussion have changed anything? Quezon was looking to keep the Philippines out of the hostilities to come. He was perhaps trying to replicate what Thailand’s Phibun had done - staying effectively neutral while trying to convince whichever party was ascendant that he was on their side. Incidentally, Thailand had just about the lowest WW2 casualties of any nation/colonial holding in the region.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

This is how Quezon’s escape from the PI could be understood as an abduction, to prevent him from pulling a Phibun, a separate peace with Japan.

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