World War Two Veteran ‘Loved the Filipino People’

By: Bob Boyer

 

Every year I devote my October or November column to World War Two veterans from Northeast Wisconsin who fought in the Philippines and died in the past year. This year both months will be about recently deceased veterans. This present column will be about a dear friend of many years. I had interviewed and written about him almost fifteen years ago. Here, with some edits, is what I wrote.

“I recently got re-acquainted with Father Brendan McKeough, a Norbertine priest and a fellow retired teacher at St. Norbert College. We were playing pool, which is a story unto itself, and he was beating me, so I was making conversation. When I mentioned that I had taught in the Philippines, he looked at me and said, ‘I was there for a year. I loved the Philippine people.’”

“Fr. Brendan sailed from Camp Pendleton, California for New Guinea where, in November of 1944, he quietly marked his twenty-second birthday. His name was Jack then. He did not enter the priesthood until several years after the war, but I will refer to him throughout this interview as Fr. Brendan. He arrived with the 87th Engineers at Lingayan Gulf on the northwestern coast of Luzon in February of 1945, during the latter stages of the fierce fighting there.”

“The engineers eventually made their way southeast to Cabanatuan, a name they all recognized. The Americans who had surrendered to the Japanese at the beginning of the war had been imprisoned near Cabanatuan, and the few survivors had been liberated, weakened and emaciated, only months earlier.”

“The engineers spent several months in the Cabanatuan area, working on roads and bridges. Fr. Brendan remembers that a nearby town had a deep gorge right in the middle; it divided the town into two halves. The engineers replaced the bridge over the gorge, much to the delight of the townspeople, who gratefully threw a party for them. He remembers eating wonderful pork. ‘The rind was crisp and tasted like candy. They even provided the music.’ The next time he heard their village band, he recalls with a smile, was at a funeral. The funeral procession walked down the road playing the Beer Barrel Polka.”

“Other memories of Cabanatuan were more poignant. The local children and their parents quickly learned the eating schedule of the soldiers. The children lined up at garbage cans to intercept the scraps from the soldiers’ plates. The cooks gave the children tin containers, ‘number-ten cans, with handles,’ Fr. Brendan remembers. He recalls a ‘weather-beaten guy, a tough soldier from Tennessee. ‘John couldn’t handle seeing these kids. He simply wept and couldn’t eat his supper.’”

“Sometimes the bigger children muscled the smaller ones aside. ‘There was one shy little girl,’ whom Fr. Brendan took pains to make sure she got some scraps. ‘Whenever we had cake, I tried to get two pieces, so I could give one to her. I guess I adopted her.’ One evening when Fr. Brendan was on guard duty he heard a rustle behind him. He swung round quickly but saw no one. Then he noticed the two fresh eggs placed with care on a near-by stone. ‘The little girl left them and took off before I could thank her. One of the most precious gifts I ever got. We never had fresh food like that.’”

“The people were always so friendly and appreciative. They had nothing, but they were always happy, or seemed to be. You could practically run over them with a jeep and they would laugh and wave. Fr. Brendan and others hired women from the village to wash their clothes, as a way of helping them out. ‘Once I noticed that a sock was missing and simply asked if it got mixed with other clothes. The women got so upset over losing just an old sock, I could hardly calm them down.’”

“Fr. Brendan recalled a comical but realistic incident. The engineers had constructed for themselves a raised platform with posts for more convenient showers. There were no curtains, and the women from the village came to watch out of curiosity. ‘Here were these big, tough guys, the same ones you see line up in the evening for prostitutes. Now here they were all embarrassed, trying to cover themselves modestly while taking a shower. The women giggled.’ Fr. Brendan greatly enjoyed the irony in this scene as he recounted it so many years later.

Brendan McKeough died on November 13, 2020, two days after his 98th birthday. His obituary notes his love and care for indigenous people.

Contact Bob Boyer at Robert.boyer@snc.edu.