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Wednesday March 29, 1939

President Quezon sends for us. [Vicente] Lim sends me a radio to Dau. Breakfast at Lim with Garcia.

Present at meeting –Pres. Q. Sec[. Jorge B.] Vargas and the three of us, later Auditor Hernandez and Comptroller Marabut. Pres. Q[uezon] asks this Question to Gen V.[aldes] Gen[eral], what do you understand to be your relation to the Military Advisor? Valdes stutters and could not answer promptly. Pres. Q. again asks Do you receive orders or advice from the Military Adviser? Valdes says sometimes he receives orders, sometimes advice. Pres. Q. tries to find the paper containing Sutherland’s indorsement to the Concentration study of mine. He could not find it from a stack of papers, so I open my confidential file which I brought with me and tell the Pres.[ident] that this may be what he was looking for. He looked at it and says yes. Pres Q[uezon] then asks Valdez how he interpreted the indorsement saying, Gen V[aldes] how do you understand this indorsement? Do you take it as an order or as an advice. Gen V.[aldes] says it is an order. Pres. Q.[uezon] then says the military adviser is adviser to him and not to the general staff so that he is going to redefine the relation of the military adviser to him.

He says “I have never seen this study” referring to the Concentration plan. “Gen. L.[im] says in his letter of resignation which by the way he did not sign which is the very proper way that the army will fail because we are training hundreds of thousands of reservists without the necessary number of officers — I am not a soldier but I need not be one to one that it will fail if this condition there.

Lim made an issue of Southerland’s indorsement on the subject of concentration as a point where he would not agree with the military adviser in his letter of resignation Lim says that he signed the letter of resignation but the president said he did not. My conclusion is that Lim is again lying. He handed an unsigned resignation for fear that such resignation is accepted if signed. He signed the other letter in which he told of the president’s previous advices to him on his military career.

We discussed the obsolete of the rifle that is being purchased. This is the reason why Hernandez and Marabut were called in.