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”
