Frustrated Ambition: General Vicente Lim and the Philippine Military Experience, 1910–1944 by Richard B. Meixsel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Frustrated Ambition: General Vicente Lim and the Philippine Military Experience, 1910–1944 by Richard B. Meixsel Maria Felisa S. Tan RICHARD B. MEIXSEL Frustrated Ambition: General Vicente Lim and the Philippine Military Experience, 1910–1944 Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. 351 pages. Together with Josefa Llanes Escoda and Jose Abad Santos, Vicente Lim is memorialized in the Philippines's 1000-peso banknote. But sadly, no in-depth biography over the past decades has been written about him by any Filipino scholar or historian probably due to the lack of written sources. The closest to a biography there was on Lim was the compilation of his letters to his wife and sons, To Inspire and to Lead (1980), which was published privately by his granddaughter Nieves Lim Ledesma. It is thus commendable that an American military historian, Richard Meixsel, has written a biography on Lim: Frustrated Ambition: General Vicente Lim and the Philippine Military Experience, 1910–1944. The author is an associate professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA. Meixsel has also written articles on Philippine and US military history, and he is the author of two books, Clark Field and The US Army Air Corps (2002) and Philippine–American Military History, 1902–1942: An Annotated Bibliography (2003). Frustrated Ambition contains eleven chapters that trace Lim's military career and his involvement in every significant military development in the Philippines. Unlike the standard biography where the focus is on a [End Page 407] single person's life, this book juxtaposes Lim's story with the formation of the Philippine Army. The amount of detail on the history of the Philippine Army and the various personalities involved with the institution is both the book's strength and weakness. While the idea of interspersing facets of Lim's story with that of the Philippine Army is an interesting one, it overwhelms the reader with too much information on the Philippine Army, leaving too little on Lim in most chapters. This difficulty can be gleaned for instance in chapter 4, where the author provides a lengthy discussion on the origins of the Philippine military system and then, toward the end of the chapter, merely quotes a lecture that Lim delivered arguing that the Filipinos recruited to the Philippine Army should be military-minded (91). From these eleven chapters, the information pertaining directly to Lim can be summarized as follows: Born on 5 April 1888 in Calamba, Laguna, Lim graduated from the Philippine Normal School and later taught for six months at a public school in Santa Cruz, Laguna. In March 1910 Lim began his military career when he was accepted in the US Military Academy at West Point, New York. He was the first Filipino to graduate from West Point, after which he received his commission as a second lieutenant. After Lim returned to the Philippines in 1914, he joined the Philippine Scouts and was subsequently assigned to Fort San Pedro in Iloilo. During his stay at the fort, Lim disclosed that he was not happy with the way his American commanding officer was treating him, but he neither explained how nor stated the reason why he was treated that way. He reported the American officer's behavior to higher authorities, and the officer was relieved (33). Although membership in the Philippine Scouts represented the peak of one's career for both Filipino officers and American enlisted men, Lim was not satisfied with this achievement; he kept looking for opportunities to expand his military education and experience. In 1916 he was attached to the Philippine Constabulary (PC), then the country's militarized national police. Lim had hoped to head the PC. However, the US War Department turned down Gov.-Gen. Theodore Roosevelt's request for Lim's leadership of the PC not because of his qualifications but probably because of his character (72–73). Lim had a temper, and he lacked tact, allegedly not an easy person to get along with (105). [End Page 408] The National Defense Act of 1920 permitted Filipino Scout officers to attend service schools in the US. Lim took advantage of this opportunity to further improve his military education. From 1926...