On October 14, 1943, in the midst of World War II, José Paciano Laurel was sworn in as president of a Japanese puppet government in the Philippines. The invasion of the archipelago – then a North American territory – had taken place two years earlier, exactly on December 8, 1941, one day after the surprise attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy on Pearl Harbor.
Despite being twice their number, General Douglas MacArthur's men could not resist the onslaught of the nearly fifty thousand men of the much better equipped and trained Japanese 14th Army.
Seven months later, the Bataan Peninsula, the last major stronghold of resistance, fell and brutal repression began, similar to what the Japanese had already carried out in China. Here, too, they did not distinguish between civilians and soldiers, killing almost twenty thousand just on foot to the prison camps. An order was issued to kill all the captives, which some officers did not comply with, considering that it violated the samurai code.
Obviously, for his compatriots, José Paciano Laurel was a traitor. In the diplomatic field, only the Axis powers recognized his government. But what did Spain do?
Since the islands had been theirs for more than three centuries, an important Spanish community remained there. In coherence with the position of the regime, they would have to collaborate with the invaders –so they asked from Madrid–, and, nevertheless, the majority did not do it. A prominent opponent was Andrés Soriano Roxas (1898-1963), the founder of Cervezas San Miguel, an originally Filipino brand, which cooperated with the government-in-exile.
He had his reasons. One of them was the brutal anti-Catholic persecution of the Japanese. However, none of this reached Madrid, which congratulated the new president through a telegram from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Francisco Gómez-Jordana. Radio Tokyo was quick to make the message public, selling it as a diplomatic success.
The New York Times, on the other hand, called for a crackdown on the Franco regime, which was not long in coming. On November 6, the US Undersecretary of State, Edward Stettinius Jr., was already demanding that he stop sending tungsten, an essential metal for the arms industry, to the Third Reich and that he expel German agents from Tangier (Morocco), a city then occupied by Spain.
As the Hispanist Paul Preston explains, that was a full-blown diplomatic crisis and a clumsiness on the part of Minister Jordana. The British had just defeated the legendary Erwin Rommel at El Alamein, Egypt, and the Wehrmacht was already bleeding to death in Stalingrad: just when the war could take a turn, it was a bad time to anger the Allies.
Paradoxically, the appointment of the allied Gómez-Jordana should serve to turn around Spain's foreign policy. It was one of the consequences of the crisis of August 1942, which took the most inclined Falangists out of the government towards Berlin.
The trigger was a failed attack by some exalted Falangists against the Minister of the Army, José Enrique Varela, one of those who put the most pressure on the regime to get closer to the allies. Like so many other soldiers, by the way, he too had been bribed by the British.
After the attack, Varela threatened Franco with his resignation if he did not remove Ramón Serrano Suñer, the most Germanophile of all, as Foreign Minister. He did not stop there, because he later campaigned among his colleagues so that no one would replace him in case the move went wrong and he was dismissed from the Ministry of the Army.
Franco, true to his style, changed everything so that nothing would change. He replaced Serrano Suñer with Gómez-Jordana, yes, but he also got rid of Varela. There was no insurrection, since he forced Lieutenant General Carlos Asensio Cabanillas to accept the position of Minister of the Army.
It was the worst crisis that the dictator had to face. Proof of this is what he told Asensio when he gave him the order to be a minister: "I already know that one day I will leave here feet first." As Preston explains in Franco. Caudillo de España (2022), he was warning him that he would not tolerate any more challenge to his authority, even if his life depended on it.
So, if in 1943 Foreign Affairs was in the hands of an allied minister, why did he send that congratulation to President Laurel? Preston sees two possibilities. It may have been a miscalculation, an attempt to appease the Germans with a rebound effect on the Americans. Another possibility is that Gómez-Jordana was forced by the pro-Axis officials who were still in the government. We must not forget that Franco came out of the 1942 crisis with a Solomonic solution, also keeping pro-German Falangists in positions of responsibility.
In addition, after that episode, he hastened to send a letter to Mussolini in which he reassured him, explaining that "the changes in the Spanish government do not affect our position abroad in the least." As Preston ditched, the Spanish still held out hope of Axis victory.
That is why he ignored the threats from the US ambassador after the famous telegram to Laurel. What's more, on December 3 he summoned the German ambassador in Madrid, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, to assure him that the tungsten would continue to arrive, because he wanted his victory in the war.
That raised the tension with the allies to the maximum. In addition to the tungsten issue, the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, took the opportunity to draw attention to the subversive activities of the Falange Foreign Service in Latin America, which, since the time of Serrano Suñer, had been promoting a Hispanicism of an anti-American nature.
Thus, on January 3, 1944, the White House suspended shipments leaving for Spain and ordered the embargo of oil supplies. Meanwhile, Anthony Eden, Secretary of the Foreign Office (British Foreign Office), was giving a speech in the House of Commons denouncing Spanish aid to the Third Reich. The Franco regime responded by closing ranks and explaining to the Spanish that there was an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to make them enter the war.
This is how Franco weathered the storm. However, barely a year later, Spain's painful role in the Philippine crisis ended up turning against it, when the Imperial Japanese Army perpetrated a massacre that included Spanish citizens.
Already in retreat before the advance of the US Sixth Army, before leaving Manila in February 1945, they put to arms nearly one hundred thousand civilians. Not counting the thousands of Filipinos of Hispanic culture and heritage, among them were a few hundred Spaniards who had not fled because they thought their passport was "friend."
Not at all. They looked for the refugees in churches, convents and even in the very Spanish consulate, which they set on fire with those who were inside. Those who came out were shot, and others were buried alive. Especially dramatic was the case of the girl Ana María Aguilella, a five-year-old Spaniard who survived sixteen bayonets.
It was time to fold sails as quickly as possible. The regime began a propaganda campaign against Japan, and even considered declaring war on them. Of course, then the defeat of the Axis was inevitable, and Spain was already working to smooth relations with the victors.
