You’re a member of the Hukbalahap – often known as the Huks for short – a rebellious,
communist insurgency movement that operated in the Philippines between 1942 and 1954.
You’re patrolling the back streets of Pampanga, a province around the Northern Shore of Manila
Bay where the group’s stronghold was based.
It’s night out, full dark, no stars.
You may be shouldering your rifle, but something just feels…wrong.
There’s evil in the air.
That’s when you find a body laying on the side of the road.
It’s Rodrigo, one of your fellow soldiers.
Dead.
And even worse, he’s got gaping wounds in his neck, and appears to have been completely
drained of blood.
It seems to you that there’s one obvious conclusion: Rodrigo has been devoured by a
vampire.
While, given the context, you can’t be blamed for believing that, the reality is even more
bizarre – your fellow soldier has actually been killed by the US Central Intelligence
Agency.
And the vampire thing wasn’t an accident, either.
During their 1950s conflicts with the Huks, the CIA was framing vampires to strike fear
into their superstitious enemies.
Okay, okay, this is a lot to take in.
Let’s go back to the beginning and figure this all out.
During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in 1942, a myriad of Filipino peasant guerrilla
groups rose up to fight their Japanese oppressors.
The radical communist Hukbalahap group was one of the most successful of these – fighting
both the Japanese forces, and assassinating wealthy Filipinos who collaborated with the
occupiers.
The Huks were strong, effective, and popular, and by the end of the 1940s they’d achieved
sizeable political gains.
They’d seized large portions of Luzon, the country’s most populated island.
They established their own independent government in Luzon in the aftermath of the war.
They created their own system of laws, collected taxes from citizens, and even hoarded an impressive
stockpile of around 500,000 rifles.
Naturally, a militant, communist satellite nation with a huge stockpile of weapons wasn’t
something a Cold-War-Era US Government took kindly to.
In 1946, things took a turn for the worse.
The Philippines was scheduled to finally achieve independence from the US on the 4th of July,
much like the United States’ independence from the British Monarchy.
An election was held to determine government positions in the new, independent Philippines,
and the Huks took part.
However, Luis Taruc, the leader of the Huks, was unseated from the Filipino congress by
their rivals, the Liberal Party.
This was the beginning of the Hukbalahap Rebellion.
The new Liberal Government, lead by President Manuel Roxas, took an aggressive stance towards
the Huk forces.
This, however, ended up seriously backfiring.
The government troops suffered from a lack of training and low morale, and their oppressive
retaliations against villagers only helped grow support for the more populist Huks.
As a result, over the next four years, the numbers and support of the Huks grew to the
point that they were ready to stage a siege on Manila by the year 1950.
The Philippines looked like it might be going red.
That’s when President Harry S. Truman decided to put his finger on the scale.
The 1950s were a busy time for the Central Intelligence Agency, who were meddling in
foreign affairs left and right in the name of democracy….
sort of… and the American Way.
That same decade, they overthrew democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh’s government
in Iran to install Monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
They also rigged elections in Italy in favour of a right-wing government, deposed Guatemalan
President Juan Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, and supporting military dictator Fulgencio Batista
in Cuba.
Ok, maybe the US was less interested in democracy and more in keeping the status quo.
Throwing their weight behind crushing a Communist Filipino insurgency was all in a day’s work
for the CIA.
If you have a passing knowledge of Philippine political history, you probably remember the
large shipment of advanced weaponry kindly donated to the Liberal Philippine Government
by the US Government in the early 1950s.
What you probably don’t know is how the American military weaponized local vampire
superstitions as a form of psychological warfare against the Huks.
Psychological Operations, or Psyops, typically consist of using demoralising posters and
pamphlets to chip away at enemy morale.
But there technically wasn’t anything in the Psyop rulebook that said you couldn’t
fake a string of brutal vampire attacks, especially if your commanding officer wasn’t exactly
averse to the crazy.
Enter Lt. Col. Edward G. Lansdale, an American military operative well-known for his creativity,
whether it was taking part in the US Military’s hundreds of attempts on Fidel Castro’s life,
or writing Vietnamese astrological almanacs to better understand the spiritual side of
the Vietcong.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need
not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
This was a mantra that Lansdale took to heart – as he immediately set a contingent of
his men to study local folklore and superstition.
The Huks were a populist group, formed largely of conscripted volunteers from local villages
during World War II.
As a result, many of them were staunch believers in local Philippine legends.
Lansdale knew this, and intended to take advantage of it.
But in case you think Lansdale was being a real blue-sky thinker here, this wasn’t
even the first time the US government has used supernatural tactics to gain a psychological
advantage in battle.
During World War II, The Nazis were notoriously superstitious people who invested a lot of
resources in the occult – Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the terrifying Nazi SS, even
owned Wewelsburg Castle, a location where he and his soldiers were believed to have
performed occult rituals.
In order to psych out the German populace, the US army weaponised astrology, distributing
horoscopes with grim futures for Germany in order to hurt morale.
It’s also believed that the British Military made fake monsters during World War II to
strike fear into the hearts of superstitious villagers in fascist Italy.
And a few decades later, the US Army deployed the spookily-named Operation Wandering Soul
to freak out the Vietcong.
Vietnamese Buddhists held the strong belief that if one’s body is not given proper burial
rites, their soul will wander the earth as a tortured spirit forever.
The US took advantage of this by blasting recordings supposed to mimic the tortured
wailing of displaced Vietcong souls whose bodies still lay strewn across the battlefield.
Yeah…It’s a little messed up when you think about it, but war has never been a picnic.
And all of this will seem like child’s play compared to some of the plans Lansdale concocted
and laid out during his offensive against the Huks.
Lansdale and his men studied the sociocultural beliefs of the Huks extensively, finding information
on myriad Filipino curses and monsters.
Lansdale practiced by convincing locals that they’d be cursed if they supported Communism,
to modest success, but he truly fell in love when he discovered the monstrous Aswang.
For those of you not familiar with Filipino folklore, the Aswang is like a particularly
horrifying variant of the vampire exclusive to the Philippines.
It’s said to take the form of a seemingly normal woman during the day, but at night
it’s a whole different story.
They’re shapeshifters that can take the form of various people or animals to get close
to their intended victims, but what really separates the Aswang from your garden-variety
vampire is the way they feed on their victims.
Unlike Western vampires, with their two very sharp canines, the Aswang is believed to have
fed with its long, blade-like tongue.
That’s right, almost like a giant, horrifying mosquito, the Aswang would extend its long,
hungry tongue towards the neck of its victims, pierce, and suck.
What’s more, for an Aswang, there’s more than just blood on the menu.
It’s also believed, in most variations of the legend, that Aswang also use their bladed
tongues to pierce the navels of pregnant women and feed on the fetus within.
In particularly superstitious communities, Aswang attacks are often the assumed reason
for tragic miscarriages during pregnancy.
Most people would read the accounts of the Aswang and feel a shiver crawl down their
spine.
This thing makes Dracula look like a Teddy Bear.
But not Lt. Col. Edward G. Lansdale.
Being an experienced military strategist, and also ever so slightly insane, Edward G.
Lansdale looked at the Aswang and saw a great opportunity for waging psychological warfare
against the Huks.
And that’s exactly what he did, in perhaps the most violent and terrifying way you could
possibly imagine.
The plan was to fake a series of Aswang attacks on Hukbalahap soldiers in order to sow fear
and discord – they’d already spent weeks spreading rumours of a vicious local Aswang
in the hills, but to really seal the deal, they needed to do something a little more
practical.
There was no polite was to do this, so Lansdale jumped straight to brutal murder and proceeded
from there.
His first opportunity to test out his new psychological warfare attack was on a seemingly-impenetrable
hilltop fortress in Luzon held by the Huk.
Any attack staged against the settlement seemed bound to fail, and Filipino government forces
were almost ready to give up on reclaiming it.
Huk soldiers would patrol nightly in shifts to secure the area, and after meticulously
planning his attack, Lansdale and his men were ready to strike.
After weeks of observation, he’d noticed that the last patrol of the night was performed
by a lone soldier.
Under Lansdale’s orders, his men swooped in and kidnapped this lone patrolman.
This terrified Huk soldier was dragged into the woods to become the first guinea pig in
Edward G. Lansdale’s Aswang experiment.
The unfortunate soldier was hung upside down by his ankles and stabbed in the throat with
a combat knife, and quite literally bled out like a stuck pig.
The average adult body weighing from 150 to 180 pounds has around 5.5 litres/ 1.5 gallons
of blood, and Lansdale spilled all of this unfortunate patrolman’s blood on the ground
of the Luzon jungle.
They then took his exsanguinated corpse, and dumped it on the roadside.
To anyone who wrongly assumed – like the Huks – that the US army couldn’t possibly
be crazy enough to do this, it seemed like a pitch-perfect Aswang attack.
When the patrolman’s bloodless body, complete with a ragged puncture mark in his throat,
was found by his fellow Huk soldiers the next morning, terror spread among the guerrilla
forces.
This hilltop settlement that seemed previously immovable suddenly relocated.
The Huks may not have feared Japanese, Filipino, or American soldiers, but an Aswang?
That was way out of their league.
The hilltop was soon reclaimed by the Philippine government in the Huks’ absence.
Lansdale had done it – he’d successfully faked a vampire attack and terrified a powerful
military enemy.
And all it took was horrifically mutilating the body of an unfortunate Huk patrolman in
Luzon.
Naturally, Edward G. Lansdale didn’t stop there.
Inspired by his success with the Aswang mission, he employed other strange supernatural “Psywar”
tactics to freak out the Huks into submission.
Another one of his trademark techniques – most of which played out almost like sadistic practical
jokes – was what he dubbed the “Eye of God.”
For this tactic, he and his men would sneak into villages at night and paint sinister
eyes on buildings in the area – normally facing the homes of suspected Huks sympathisers,
as though they were being watched by some mysterious, supernatural force.
This was another success for Lansdale.
He later wrote in his memoir, “The mysterious presence of these malevolent eyes the next
morning had a sharply sobering effect.”
That memoir, by the way, was titled In the Midst of Wars: An American's Mission to Southeast
Asia.
Personally, we would have gone with How To Win Wars By Being An Absolute Maniac, by Edward
“The Aswang” Lansdale.
And they did indeed win the war.
By 1954, the Hukbalahap Rebellion was brought to its knees.
The combination of unconventional Psywar tactics like the ones incorporated by Lansdale and
his men, the huge shipment of weapons given to Filipino government forces by the US, and
the election of popular president Ramon Magsaysay – which brought the hearts and minds of
the Philippine public back to Manila- all served to bring success.
When the Huk leader, Luis Taruc, surrendered on May 17th of that year, things were pretty
much over for the Huk forces.
Another war successfully interfered-with by the CIA.
So, what have we learned today?
Sometimes, when you want to achieve success in life, you need to think outside the box,
just like Edward G. Lansdale.
Just maybe think twice before you hang a man upside down by his ankles and drain all the
blood from his throat…
Thank you for watching this episode of The Infographics Show!
War is hell, but expanding your mind with fun, educational videos is heaven.
Want to know more about crazy wartime antics?
Check out “How A Soldier Single-Handedly Liberated An Entire German Occupied City”