A search and share of information about Chaplains ...

If you have information about Chaplains in the Philippine Defense Campaign please pass it along to either of these two scholarly gentlemen who are doing research on that subject.   Every little bit may help:

Dr. Ernesto De Pedro
P.O. Box 1677 CPO Manila, P.I.
E-mail: eadepedro@hotmail.com

The Rev. Dr. Richard Roper
P.O. Box 4961 Annapolis, MD 21403
E-Mail: roperrs@toad.net



Father Edwin C. Ronan was a Passionist priest, who was a chaplain in World War I.   He arrived in Manila with MacArthur when Mac became Field Marshal of the Philippine Army being organized by the Philippine Commonwealth.   He was appointed Chief of Chaplains, organized and trained the Chaplains' Corp with a comprehensive two-month course circa 1938 at Camp Paciano Rizal in Laguna Province.   His first recruits were Catholics, Protestants and one Muslim imam.   I can't get to the records right now, but he probably had 18 chaplains, all Filipinos, under him.

As you know, the Philippine Commonwealth Army was integrated into the USAFFE, when MacArthur was recalled to the service as commander of the USAFFE in July 1941.   I don't have anything after that  --  except that Ronan, then in Corregidor after MacArthur left, was summoned to Australia by President Quezon, who asked him to be his family's chaplain wherever the Quezons went.   He was loaded on one of the last two PBYs that left Corregidor for Lake Lanao, and on to Australia.   Unfortunartely, the plane hit a log, either upon landing or on taking off, so the 20 passengers of that plane  --  Ronan, some nurses, Fertig  --  were stranded in Mindanao waiting for another plane that never came.   He could have stayed the rest of the war in the Mindanao hills when Wainwright surrendered Corregidor and the rest of the Philippines.   But the KGEI broadcaster Winters praised the chaplain to high heavens over Radio San Francisco  --  which is how the Japanese heard of Ronan.   They sent a contingent to Mindanao to pick him up and brought him to Bilibid.   So he was a POW.   He was kept in solitary until [Japanese] members of the "Catholic Unit" of the "Religious Section" of the Propaganda Corps visited him in Bilibid, and allowed him to say Mass.   When he was shipped to Japan, among the first batches sent there, the Archbishop of Manila protested, but the Japanese sent him anyway.

Upon his release in Manchuria, he returned to the Philippines to say hello.   Among the first calls he made was to the officers of the Chaplains' Aid Association, which had furnished him with the Mass kit that he used in Bilibid and Manchuria.

He returned to the States, and by 1947, was running a Passionist Seminary in St. Louis, Mo.   I read a note that identified him as "a former chaplain" but there is no time frame indicated.   Of course, in 1947, he was a "former chaplain."   Does it mean that when the Philippine Army was integrated into the USAFFE in July 1941, he did not join into the USAFFE with the rest of the Filipino chaplains, who were all in Bataan?

A Japanese Catholic priest, Fr. Shoji Tsukamoto, who visited him in Bilibid, identified him in his diary as Chief of Chaplains.

It was Ronan, and the First Lady, Mrs. Aurora A. Quezon, who organized the Chaplains' Aid Association in 1938, to support the requirements of the Chaplains' Corps.   After the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, this Association, led by Miss Lulu Reyes, managed to operate openly with relief sorties into POW camps, with the patronage of Marquis Tokogawa, the highest ranking Japanese civilian in Manila in 1942.   When Archbishop O'Doherty requested to meet with the "Religious Section" on June 12, 1942 to negotiate access to POW camps by Catholic Action groups, it was General Homma himself who showed up at the meeting.   The Chaplains' Aid Association, represented by Miss Lulu Reyes and the German SVD missionary, Fr. Theodore Buttenbruch, was given permission to visit the POW camps.   Their last recorded sortie  --  minus Buttenbruch who was executed in November 1944  --  was to Los Banos in December 1944, where they brought Christmas cheer in one long truck, used for hauling sugar cane, owned by the Spanish Dominicans.   (Spain at that time represented Japan in most Latin American countries).

There are many blanks I need to fill out, and the first is whether Ronan was a USAFFE chaplain at all.

If Fr. Cummings, who volunteered to be a chaplain as the troops retreated to Bataan, is in the list, there should be no reason for Ronan not to be in the list too.

I have not been able to find more on Ronan, and would like to get all I can.

Ernie A. De Pedro, Ph.D.