Richard Bergholz was an Associated Press correspondent embedded in the U.S. 24th Infantry Division when the doughboys launched in April 1945 the mission to liberate Davao City. As stringer, his stories throughout the campaign were carried by periodicals around the world.
Bergholz’s accounts of the war were first-hand reports on how the Allied forces and the Filipino guerrillas braved the challenges faced against the brutal Japanese juggernaut. The narratives afford an inside story into the ordeals the soldiers endured–their injuries and deaths—in the name of freedom, most of these already forgotten.
Upon arrival in the city after the U.S. troops successfully tore down enemy defenses, Bergholz wrote a poignant account about the feat. In a story (‘Davao City and Dishonored, Shows Signs of Jap Activity’) carried by the Washington-based The Evening Star in its June 27, 1945, issue, he related: ‘The city of Davao, hub of the world’s greatest hemp producing center and hotbed of pro-Japanese activities in the Philippines before the war, now is a dirty, broken, dishonored city—unwanted and unused by its conquerors.’
Despite the city’s liberation, the reporter observed that public antipathy towards the Americans was open, suggesting this display of antagonism was part of the active Japanese propaganda that won over Filipino sympathy. He also attributed this to the fact that before the war Davao was ‘a virtual Japanese colony, independent of most commonwealth politics,’ and the reality that for years the Japanese had controlled the Davao economy.
He added: ‘So, it is understandable that over a period of time, particularly of steady employment and relative prosperity that some Filipinos became what the Japanese call as “Shin Nichi”—Japanese lovers… There is [also] a feeling here… that these Filipinos were not glad to be “liberated.”’ This aversion, he assumed, is a racial card that reflects ‘the Japanese propaganda line that the white man tries to pretend he is superior to the Filipino and that Asiatic peoples should resist Occidental domination,”’
He called the anti-American antagonists as pro-Japanese Filipinos, chiefly Japanese civilians and Filipino women married to Japanese men who sympathized with the Imperial forces when they fled to the mountains just as the city was about to be liberated:
‘There have been several authenticated cases where armed civilians have been killed while fighting in the line with the imperial forces. It now is pretty well determined that almost every able-bodied man from Davao’s Japanese colony has been impressed into the Japanese Army.
‘So, while the hungry and sick Japanese men, women, and children, are compressed farther and farther back in the mountains, the city of Davao remains an ugly reminder of prewar days of “Dai Nippon”—of the great Japan.’
Due to hostility, he wrote, ‘American ships avoid the Santa Ana docks at Davao. American trucks skirt the city. Even the gregarious soldier has found that Davao is pretty much of a dump.’
But in liberating the city, Bergholz earlier reported (‘Aussies Capture Taraken Center. Full Possession of Airfield Falls to Australians, Dutch’) in the May 7, 1945, edition of The Wilmington Morning Star that ‘The Japanese defenders of Davao counterattacked heavily before they withdrew to the north… [and] the counterblow momentarily threatened the American hold on the city but was finally beaten off with flamethrowers, mortars, and automatic weapons.’
Bergholz, who later joined the Los Angeles Times, is the same man who quizzed gubernatorial bet Richard Nixon in 1962 regarding his comment on opponent Edmund Gerard ‘Pat’ Brown’s stance on communism. He died on December 28, 2000, at age of 83 from a heart attack.
