The Fire They Could Not Occupy(Besao's Role in World War II and the Highland Resistance)

The Fire They Could Not Occupy

(Besao's Role in World War II and the Highland Resistance)

by Ginawang

"The mountains will always remember what the documents forgot."

— A saying passed among the i-Besao elders

I. Before the Planes Came

There is a particular quality to the silence of Besao at the early hours, when the pine forests still hold the night mist and the first roosters have not yet decided what kind of morning it will be. That silence is deceptive. It has always contained within it a readiness, a coiled alertness that the people of this municipality in the southwestern highlands of Mountain Province have carried in their bodies for centuries.

Besao sits at an elevation touching nearly 1,400 meters above sea level, its ridgelines folded one against another in the manner of hands pressed together in prayer. Its fourteen barangays cling to slopes that drop with little warning into ravines thick with mossy forest. The place is beautiful in the way that difficult things often are. And it was precisely this difficulty, this terrain of narrow trails and vertiginous descents, that would make it so consequential when the world broke open in December of 1941.

The name Besao itself carries a history of warrior culture. Ethnolinguistic records and oral tradition trace the word to "buso," an older reference to the headhunters who once defined the law of these mountains. Among the Kankanaey people, who populate Besao and the neighboring municipalities of Sagada, Tadian, Bauko, and Sabangan, the warrior was not merely a figure of violence but a custodian of community survival. The dap-ay, the men's council house at the center of village life, was where decisions of war and peace were deliberated with a solemnity that outsiders rarely understood and historians rarely recorded. This was the civilization into which the Imperial Japanese Army would attempt to march in 1942.

They would find it considerably harder than they anticipated.

II. The Fall of Baguio and the Silence That Followed

On the morning of December 8, 1941, Japanese warplanes appeared over Baguio City, which sits at the foot of the Mountain Province heartland. They bombed Camp John Hay, the American recreational and military installation, and shattered in a matter of hours the careful equilibrium that had held the Cordillera in a kind of colonial peace for four decades. The war in the Pacific had arrived on the doorstep of the highlands.

The Japanese ground forces moved into Luzon through Lingayen Gulf in January 1942. By April 9, Bataan had fallen, and General Edward King surrendered his forces to what became the infamous Bataan Death March. By June of that year, the Japanese had established occupation throughout much of northern Luzon, including Baguio, which would eventually become the site of General Tomoyuki Yamashita's own headquarters as the war turned against Japan in 1944 and 1945.

Mountain Province, however, was a different proposition. Its terrain swallowed armies. The winding roads cut into the mountain faces were narrow, often little more than a ledge above a precipice, and could be controlled by a small number of determined men familiar with every switchback. The Japanese entered Mountain Province, but they did not control it in any meaningful sense. They occupied towns. They did not occupy the mountains themselves, and they certainly did not occupy the people who lived among them.

Into this uncertain space between occupation and resistance, the i-Besao and their Kankanaey kin stepped with the same quiet deliberateness they brought to their rice fields. They would not announce themselves loudly. They would not organize spectacularly. They would do what mountain people have always done when threatened from below. They would use the land.

III. The Guerrilla War in the Highland Cordillera

The resistance movement across the Philippine highlands was not a single, unified uprising. It was a constellation of local acts of courage, fed by the cultural and physical geography of each community. In the Mountain Province, one of the most recognized guerrilla leaders to emerge was Bado Maduway Dangwa, a Kankanaey Igorot from Kapangan, Benguet, who before the war had built a transportation empire of 173 buses serving the mountain roads. When the Japanese came, he turned his knowledge of those same roads against them.

Dangwa was commissioned into the Philippine Army and eventually led what became the 66th Infantry Regiment of the USAFIP-NL, the United States Armed Forces in the Philippines, Northern Luzon, under Colonel Russell Volckmann. The 66th Infantry was composed largely of soldiers and fighters from Baguio and Benguet, with connections reaching into the wider Mountain Province, including the Kankanaey communities of Besao's neighboring areas. Dangwa organized what historians would describe as a crack guerrilla force. The camp in Baguio that today houses the regional police headquarters bears his name, Camp Bado Dangwa, a monument in concrete and asphalt to a man who made the highlands ungovernable for Japan.

But Dangwa was not working alone, and the 66th Infantry was not the only current flowing through the resistance. What made the Cordillera guerrilla movement genuinely effective was the network of ordinary people who fed it. Farmers who moved rice at night. Women who passed messages sewn into clothing. Young men who memorized Japanese patrol schedules and relayed them through channels of kinship that the occupiers could not map because they did not understand the social architecture of Kankanaey society.

Besao and its surrounding communities occupied a geographic position of considerable strategic significance. The trails through its barangays connected the southwestern Mountain Province to routes leading toward Cervantes in Ilocos Sur, the very corridor that would eventually be contested in the Battle of Bessang Pass. Anyone moving through the central Cordillera during the Japanese occupation moved through country where i-Besao eyes were watching.

IV. The Terrain as an Ally

It is difficult to overstate how much the Cordillera's geography shaped the character of the resistance. The guerrilla commanders of the USAFIP-NL, including Volckmann himself, repeatedly credited the indigenous knowledge of the terrain as essential to their survival and eventual effectiveness. Mountains that were obstacles to the Japanese were familiar ground to the Igorot fighters, who had walked their ridges since childhood and whose oral traditions were filled with knowledge about which paths flooded in the rains and which cliffs offered concealment.

For the i-Besao specifically, this was not merely tactical knowledge but ancestral knowledge. The practice of moving through the forest quietly, of reading the land for signs, of knowing where water could be found and where a trail could be hidden by undergrowth, these were skills inherited from generations of men who had navigated the same ridgelines in times long before the word "guerrilla" existed in their vocabulary. What the American military would have called terrain intelligence, the Kankanaey had simply called living.

The pine and mossy forests surrounding Besao, dense enough to close around a column of men and swallow it from aerial observation, provided natural cover that no engineering could have improved. The altitude itself was a weapon. Japanese soldiers, many from lowland regions of Japan, suffered from cold, from altitude sickness, from the sheer physical punishment of climbing mountain trails in full military kit while men in loincloths moved ahead of them without apparent effort. The psychological advantage this created for the Igorot fighters was not trivial.

Communities like those in Besao also controlled the food supply of their area in ways that the Japanese could not easily disrupt. The Kankanaey maintained their rice terraces even under occupation, and the guerrillas moved through networks of family and clan that the colonial and military command structure of Japan had no framework for understanding. You cannot counter an intelligence network built on kinship when you do not know who is related to whom.

V. The Battle of Bessang Pass and the Road Through Besao Country

By late 1944 and into 1945, the strategic situation in the Pacific had shifted decisively against Japan. General Douglas MacArthur's forces landed at Lingayen Gulf on January 9, 1945, and the liberation of Luzon was underway. General Yamashita, recognizing that the lowlands were lost, withdrew his headquarters from Manila northward into the Cordillera, eventually establishing his command in Baguio. This made the highlands not a peripheral theater but the central one for the final phase of the northern Luzon campaign.

The Battle of Bessang Pass, fought from late March through June 14, 1945, became one of the defining engagements of this final campaign. The pass, sitting at approximately 4,600 feet along Route 4 in the mountains above Ilocos Sur, was a gateway into the Cordillera and a critical supply route for the Japanese forces who controlled the Lepanto Copper Mine. Volckmann's USAFIP-NL, comprising the 11th, 14th, 15th, 66th, and 121st Infantry Regiments, with more than 8,000 fighters drawing from the ethnic minorities of the northern Cordillera highlands, fought to dislodge a fortified Japanese position that had been designed to be impregnable.

The USAFIP-NL forces captured Bessang Pass on June 14, 1945. The Japanese lost approximately 2,600 men in the engagement; the USAFIP-NL suffered 119 killed and 220 wounded. What made this outcome possible was precisely what had made the whole highland guerrilla effort possible, the indigenous knowledge of every ridge, every alternative trail, every point from which a position could be flanked. The northern guerrillas' familiarity with the Cordillera's mountain passes and terrain were, by documented accounts, crucial in breaking the last organized Japanese stronghold in northern Luzon.

Besao's country lay in the broader zone of this operation. The trails through its barangays, the mountain passes that its farmers had walked for generations, were the terrain over which this final campaign moved. Men from Kankanaey communities fought under the banners of these infantry regiments. Intelligence gathered by ordinary people in ordinary-seeming acts of daily life fed the tactical decisions that broke Japan's hold on the Cordillera.

VI. Women, Elders, and the Invisible Resistance

History, when it remembers guerrilla wars at all, tends to remember the commanders. It remembers Dangwa and Volckmann and the regimental numbers. What it rarely preserves, and what the i-Besao themselves hold in their oral tradition, is the work of the women and the elders and the children who made resistance possible without ever holding a rifle.

In Cordillera communities, women have always occupied a position of considerable agency in the social and economic life of the village. The women of Besao maintained the household economy during the occupation years, managing food stores, providing shelter to guerrilla fighters moving through the mountains, and passing information through the networks of market and kinship that connected one barangay to another. The daily act of a woman carrying vegetables to a neighboring village, common and unremarkable, could also carry a message about where a Japanese patrol had been seen.

The elders, the mambunong and the respected men and women of the dap-ay tradition, provided a kind of moral and cultural continuity that the occupation could not sever. They reminded the young that resistance was not a new thing in these mountains. The Kankanaey had resisted Spanish incursions into the Cordillera for three centuries, from the earliest proselytizing attempts in the late 1500s through the colonial period. They had maintained their autonomy when every other region of the archipelago bent. The warriors of their grandparents' generation had not submitted. Neither would they.

This continuity of resistance consciousness is not a romantic invention. It is documented in the ethnographic literature and in the oral histories that have been preserved by researchers and community members alike. The i-Besao drew on a deep cultural memory of what it meant to defend their homeland, and that memory gave them a framework for understanding the Japanese occupation that was older and more durable than any military alliance or political calculation.

VII. The Warrior Measured

There is a particular way in which a people's true character reveals itself under extreme pressure. Not in speeches, not in ceremonies, not in the monuments they build to themselves, but in the quality of their daily courage when the cost of courage is survival itself.

The i-Besao warriors of World War II were not warriors in the sense that their headhunting ancestors had been. They did not take heads. They were farmers, weavers, students, teachers, young men who had grown up under American colonial schooling and Episcopal mission churches, who had learned to read and write in English and who might have expected to live ordinary lives. The war made something else of them.

What it made of them was something that their ancestors would have recognized immediately. It was the daring of men who understood that the land belongs to those willing to die for it, combined with the patience of people who have always known that the mountains outlast the armies that try to cross them. It was intelligence used as a weapon, information treated as more dangerous than a spear, community loyalty held as the supreme military doctrine.

Cordilleran fighters, including those from the Kankanaey communities of Mountain Province, participated in operations that helped bring about the capture of Bessang Pass, the liberation of Baguio in April 1945, and ultimately the formal surrender of General Yamashita at Camp John Hay on September 3, 1945. That surrender did not happen in a vacuum. It happened at the end of a chain of events that included countless acts of resistance by people whose names were never formally recorded, in a municipality whose contribution to the war effort was never given its own chapter in the official histories.

The i-Besao were measured in that war. They were found to be exactly what centuries of mountain life had made them. They were found to be sufficient.

VIII. What the Mountains Remember

On September 3, 1945, when General Yamashita signed the surrender document at Camp John Hay, the city below the Cordillera exhaled. The war in the Pacific was formally over, at least in this corner of it. The Igorot fighters who came down from the mountains that year came back to a world that would soon forget what they had done, or that had never quite understood it in the first place.

The Philippine Veterans Affairs Office records show that hundreds of Cordilleran soldiers served in recognized units of the resistance. Only a fraction of them received full recognition and benefits under the Rescission Acts that followed the war. The records of the informal resistance, the intelligence runners and the women who sheltered fighters and the elders who maintained morale, were never formally compiled. What documentation exists is scattered across American military archives, Philippine government records, academic journals, and the living memory of those old enough to have heard the stories from the generation that lived them.

In Besao today, the war exists primarily as family story. A grandfather who disappeared for months and came back thinner. A grandmother who burned papers in the woodstove before the Japanese soldiers arrived at the next village. A great-uncle who knew every mountain trail between Besao and Cervantes and who spent those years putting that knowledge to use in ways he would not speak of directly even in old age. These are the stories that have not yet been collected in a single volume, that live in conversations rather than archives, that travel from old people to young ones in the particular cadence of Kankanaey speech.

They are as real as any document in any archive. They are, in many ways, more real, because they carry with them not just the facts of what happened but the texture of what it meant to the people it happened to.

The fire they could not occupy was not the pine forests on Besao's slopes, though those too remained beyond the reach of Japanese authority. The fire was the thing inside the people, the ancestral stubbornness, the mountain people's ancient understanding that sovereignty begins in the body and in the land and cannot be handed over simply because someone arrives with superior weapons. It was that fire, burning quietly through three years of occupation, that the Imperial Army could not extinguish.

And it is that fire, if we are paying attention, that still burns in the terraces and the dap-ay traditions and the memories passed from elder to grandchild in the barangays of Besao today.

⁂

This essay is written in honor of the unnamed i-Besao and Kankanaey men and women of the Cordillera whose resistance during World War II has never received the formal recognition it deserves. Their courage belongs to the public record, even when the public record has failed to hold it.

Sources and References:

The following published sources, institutional records, and oral tradition contexts inform this essay. Where specific claims are made about documented events, published references are indicated. Oral historical material from Besao and surrounding Kankanaey communities represents a living archive that continues to be preserved by community members and local historians.

1. Volckmann, Russell W. We Remained: Three Years Behind the Enemy Lines in the Philippines. New York: W. W. Norton, 1954. First-person account of USAFIP-NL operations in the Cordillera and northern Luzon.

2. Norling, Bernard. The Intrepid Guerrillas of North Luzon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. Documents the guerrilla bands of northern Luzon during the Japanese occupation, 1942 to 1945.

3. U.S. War Memorials. "Battle of Bessang Pass Memorial." www.uswarmemorials.org. Includes the official composition of the USAFIP-NL and the role of indigenous ethnic fighters from the northern Cordillera.

4. Pacific Atrocities Education. "The Makeup of USAFIP-NL." www.pacificatrocities.org. Documents the ethnic composition of USAFIP-NL and the Cordilleran contribution to the resistance.

5. Bado Dangwa Wikipedia Entry and Igorotage Profile. Documents the career of Major Bado M. Dangwa, founder of the 12th Infantry (later the 66th Infantry, USAFIP-NL), Kankanaey resistance leader, and later Governor of Benguet.

6. "In Cordillera, only 69 War Veterans Left to Mark Araw ng Kagitingan." Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 9, 2021. Documents surviving Cordillera war veterans, the 66th Infantry Regiment, and their role in ambush operations against the Japanese.

7. "War Vets' Tales to Teach Children to Defend PH." Philippine Daily Inquirer, September 3, 2019. Documents Cordilleran guerrilla fighters including those from Mountain Province who participated in the capture of General Yamashita.

8. "Igorots and Other Cordillerans: Heroes Too in RP History." Alt.Language.Balita-News, June 7, 1999. Names prominent Cordillera heroes of the liberation of Baguio and the 66th Infantry Regiment.

9. Quezon III, Manuel L. "The Guerrilla Movement from 1942 to 1945." www.quezon.ph, February 12, 2007. Places Bado Dangwa in the broader national context of Philippine guerrilla resistance.

10. Pawid, Luis I. "WW2 Memoirs of Ifugao Dep. Gov. Luis I. Pawid." SunStar Baguio, August 17, 2019. First-person diary account of the Japanese entry into Mountain Province and initial resistance at Ibulao Pass.

11. Grokipedia. "Battle of Bessang Pass." grokipedia.com, January 2026. Detailed military reconstruction of the Bessang Pass engagement including USAFIP-NL composition and outcomes.

12. "History and Culture of Besao." Scribd Document, originally compiled from municipal and cultural sources. Establishes the etymology of "Besao" and documents the municipality's historical and cultural foundations.

13. Yodisphere. "The Kankanaey People of the Philippines." www.yodisphere.com, September 7, 2022. Documents the geographic and cultural distribution of the Kankanaey, including Besao, Sagada, Tadian, Bauko, and Sabangan.

14. Grokipedia. "Mountain Province." grokipedia.com, January 2026. Documents the history of inter-tribal warfare, warrior traditions, and the Igorot communities of Mountain Province.

15. The Cordillera Review. "Guerrilla Priest: Al Griffiths and the Resistance Movement in Kalinga in World War II." thecordillerareview.upb.edu.ph. Academic documentation of early Cordillera resistance to the Japanese invasion.

16. Police Regional Office Cordillera Administrative Region. Philippine Television Wiki, Fandom. Documents the history of Camp Bado Dangwa and Dangwa's organization of the 12th Infantry.

17. Philippine Daily Inquirer. "PH Guerrillas Won War, Says History Group." newsinfo.inquirer.net. Documents the Japanese military withdrawal into the Cordillera and the final stages of the northern Luzon campaign.

18. Britannica Editors. "Igorot." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Provides foundational ethnographic context for the Igorot peoples, their warrior traditions, and their history of resistance to external colonial forces.

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