Our town was on the road to Bataan and Corregidor and was the last village
before the dusty road that ended at Camp O'Donnell. Here the "Death
March" ended. Day after day, truck-loads of Japanese headed south.
Then they came back empty. We were sure the Americans
and Filipinos (don't forget two-thirds of the troops were Filipinos) were
killing them as fast as the Japanese could get there. I saw some
odd sights those days. For example, I saw a busload of German sailors
heading down that road. I have never figured out what they were doing
in that part of the world.
Then, the impossible happened. Bataan fell and the march began. Stories preceded the prisoners'
arrival in our town. The women of the town made small loaves of bread
when they learned our soldiers were starving. We kids were designated
to bring the bread and, more importantly, water to the soldiers.
Then the soldiers started to arrive. They looked like skeletons.
Americans are much taller than Filipinos and I thought you would die before
you got as thin as they were. We brought the victuals to them.
The Japanese were displeased to put it mildly. Fortunately they only
hit us with their rifle butts to fend us off.
Guys were dying every day in the camp. We were close enough to
see the burial details bring out the bodies. They would remove the
deceased's clothes and shoes because the living needed them. The
body was wrapped in paper and buried outside the barbed wire fence.
Now and then, we would hear shots. These were executions.
The very last truck carrying prisoners finally turned off our macadamized road to the Death Camp. The
prisoners threw their money into the air for us to grab. I didn't get any. I read a lie later
that the people gave or sold food to the soldiers. The latter did not happen. When
you consider the danger we were in there was no way we could bargain with the soldiers even
if we were inclined to do so.
During this entire time, the only act of kindness I witnessed on the part of any Japanese soldier
was when one guard walked an American soldier to a small nipa shed so he
could defecate (most of the prisoners had diarrhea as the result of malnutrition
and diseases they caught). I had thought the American was being led
off to be killed.
The village school reopened. The entire system was built on some
40 years of American occupation. Our books were the same primers
used in the U.S. Even the language of instruction was English.
We were made to bring in rice paste and paste together any pages with American
flags or even American looking scenes. We ended up with rather bulky
books.
We had one Japanese teacher, Watanabe san, who taught us Japanese. He had been a teacher in
his homeland. He was a gentle man and a Christian who would furtively stand in the back of
the church on Sundays. The villagers thought this was a risk to him since the rest of the
Japanese worshiped the emperor.
The occupying troops would go to a house where women with a lot of makeup
lived. My eight-year old eyes noticed that most of the women had
big bellies. I wondered what made them swell up but no one told me
and I never asked.
It is unlikely that more than a dozen of us who survived the battle
in of Ermita (a district in Manila) are still alive. A few years ago, a Filipino friend asked
me where I was at that time. When I told him, "Ermita," he responded
with, "That's impossible. No one came out alive." The bottom
line is that our home was burned to the ground along with everything else,
so I have no pictures of those days.
We had returned to the capital, Manila, in 1943 to live with my mother
and stepfather. Ermita was inhabited primarily by Caucasians: Spanish,
Italians, German Jews, American women married to Filipinos, White
Russians; and some African-Americans. Most of us were trapped in this section of the
city and were forbidden to leave. Anyone trying to leave would have been easily identified
and arrested. Unlike some of my compatriots, "heading for the hills" was never an option
because of my American mother. We lived at 12 Plaza Ferguson (now Roxas Boulevard) in Ermita.
The Japanese males would bathe at an open fire hydrant near Fergusonn Plaza.
Filipinos passing by were expected to stop, face these worthies and execute a deep, polite bow
then proceed deferentially, never turning their back to them.
Once I saw one of my compatriots, who must have omitted part of this protocol,
receive a lesson in manners from these good gentlemen. He was held to the street by several naked
Japanese, then one of these nude fellows jumped up and down on the belly of the hapless man.
My young mind tried to picture the bathing practices in Japan. I wondered if
both genders cavorted happily together on their public streets.
There was also a fountain at Plaza Ferguson with a busted pipe that drained day
and night for years. As a result, the earth there was muddy. The Japanese soldiers would throw
their leftover rice into this quagmire. The wretched, starving Filipinos would scratch this up and
suck on the muck for the rice. The Japanese would howl with laughter at the sight.
Prostitutes also used the Plaza. They discarded smelly coffee cans of prophylactics
in some kind of brown liquid. The wretches would wash them off with the flow from the broken pipe,
dab them dry and sell them back to the proprietess at a side door to the house.
I knew this guerrilla who instructed me
and my friends to bury Molotov cocktails by designated coconut trees.
Had we been caught with these, we would have been shot on the spot, or
tortured first by the Kempei. Dressed
as girls, we would also walk by the ammunition dump with a perambulator,
steal gunnery shells and hide them. We had no basement so I kept
them in an area beneath our house. We thought we were great big
spies. Fortunately we were never stopped.
In early February 1945, our family was going to seek refuge at my uncle's
house where we had hoarded salted pork and water, but we never made it
there. My mother told me that uncle had called and said the streets
were too dangerous for us to hazard the trip, but I knew the real reason.
One of our servants had come to our house and we gave him food for his
family. He opened the door to leave, took a few steps and was shot
dead. We tried to re-open the door to pull him in, but this brought
a hail of bullets in our direction. I tried to peek out a second story
window to see if he was alive, but I dove to the floor when bullets came
through the window.
The visible city around our house was ablaze. Glowing bits of
paper were sailing like leaves against the orange-black sky. Japanese soldiers ordered us out of our
our house and directly ahead of us I could see hundreds of people being
shouted at and pushed by Japanese troops as they tried to assemble them
into some order. As I shuffled across the street, my foot knocked
over an inverted flower pot. I knew this was a cover for an aerial
bomb buried with the fuse pointing up. We had watched the Japanese
dynamite holes to emplace them. Civilians memorized these locations
so we could warn the American tankers when they came. A Japanese
soldier came up to me and yelling "Kura!" shoved me away. Had my
heel struck the fuse, that would have been it. The Jap was going
to die anyway, sooner than later; I didn't.
In the plaza, the men were being pushed to the left and the women and
children to the right. The Jap shoved me to the left, but my stepfather, knowing something was going to happen to the men, shoved me to the left. Hey, I'm the kind of guy who would have put on a dress and scarf on the Titanic!
My stepfather later told me the men were walked to the Manila
Hotel, where they were taken out in groups of 30 and killed.
The Japs would bale a group of men with wire, after which gasoline was
thrown on them followed by a hand grenade. It wasn't as efficient
as the Germans, but personal.
Those of us in the group of women and children were driven down the
walkway of the Bay View Hotel. Each side of this walkway was lined
with soldiers who pointed their fixed bayonets at us as they shouted orders
to go into the hotel. It was used as a garrison so all the furniture
had been taken out long before we were herded into the rooms there.
American artillery pounded the area throughout the night. Sitting
on the floor of the room, there were flashes of light, deafening noise,
and the building shook.
There was no food or water. We drank toilet water which was rationed
out a few gulps-per-day. Then the tanks ran dry. My mother,
who pretended to be crazy, complained to the
officer so much that he grabbed my ten-year old sister and me and led us
to the Manila Hotel swimming pool with empty buckets. The shelling
was heavy. When it got close, the three of us would duck into a Japanese
bunker. I remember soldiers sitting there. They would look
up startled at the two children and then when the officer who escorted us entered, they
seemed bemused. I don't think his presence saved them from us, but
I know it saved us from them. We were so used to the American shelling
by then that we could predict patterns. Each time there was a lull
in the bombing, we darted towards the Bay View.
Not all of the rooms at the hotel were barren. The Japanese officer
in charge had a nicely furnished room, food, drink and a mistress, Nadja.
Nadja was a White Russian woman who lived near
us. We passed by their room on one occasion, and when she saw us,
she invited us to stay with her. My mother declined the invitation.
My dad later told me that when the Americans got close, the survivors of
the Manila Hotel massacres ran towards the lines. Nadja lay shot
on the ground, alive and begging for help. Men ran around her, but
no one stopped. Her beau had shot her as he took off for his last
banzai.
I knew all along that these murderous bastards were going to fight and
die to the last man. They were determined that none of us would live.
I think the Filipinos had been a great disappointment to them. Sure
there were traitors and collaborators as in any war, but the puppet government
never raised an army to join the fight for the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere."
In general, resistance to the occupation took the form of graffiti and
the guerrillas. The former were constrained, because anytime a Japanese
soldier was killed, innocent civilians were executed in retaliation. This made it
very difficult to support guerrilla activity. Puppet officials ran civil affairs
exclusively and were later pardoned by my stepfather's uncle, Elpidio Quirino, when
he became president of the Republic. This was no less than remarkable. The elder Quirino and his
family suffered attacks during the Occupation for his refusal to collaborate and
lost a two-year old child who was thrown in the air to be speared by a Japanese bayonet for
sport. There were really no Quislings or Lavals,
and we preferred a civil government to direct Japanese martial rule.
At times, there were no troops around and I would wander around some
empty rooms of the hotel. I came upon a large bound book, opened
it and found that it contained the Sunday colored comic strips of Tarzan.
There must have been a year's worth of the comics. I spent hours
reading the comics and looking at the pictures. I wondered if the
Japanese had a Tarzan fan club.
Sometimes I would look out the window of the hotel from our floor (I
think we were about six stories up). The view was, of course, of
Manila Bay. The first time I looked out, I saw a Filipino with his
hands up on the beach approaching Japanese soldiers. When he got
into range, they shot him. He dropped instantly. I recognized
the man as my guerrilla friend who had had us bury Molotov cocktails.
Ere long the Japanese started taking the young girls out of the rooms
to rape them. The older women would cross themselves and lament,
"She is such an innocent girl. She has never missed a day of mass."
The girls were usually shoved back into the same room by these "gentlemanly"
escorts. The process was unrelenting. I did not witness these
atrocities of course. My sister, Nan, hid laying down behind my mother,
my seven year old brother, Mike, and myself. With my mother acting
crazy, the Japanese did not go near us and did not see her. In time
some of the people, who had been scrounging for food said they saw a soldier
raping the corpse of a dead girl. By then, having accepted these
Japs as animals, this did not surprise me.
After about a week, the building was burned. I am certain this
was set off by the Japanese, since mortar and howitzer fire could not put
a dent in the walls of this building, built to withstand earthquakes.
Smoke came up the hallways. The building was designed so that each
cross section contained an empty square within a square. The smoke
came up these center, vacant squares.
The Japanese would not let us leave. I remember the next sequence
of events vividly. My mother, who was in her thirties at the time
had some knowledge of Japanese psychology, perhaps acquired
during the frequent interrogations by the Kempei she underwent at Fort
Santiago. She spotted the Japanese officer in charge and said to
him, "Number one man say no can go." Whatever his reason, I presume
it was to "save face," this officer said, "I number one man, go!"
So without further ado, we started streaming out of the building into the
shelling outside. The entire Ermita section was now rubble.
By now, instinctively we hit the ground when we heard the whistle of
incoming fire. During our run through the debris ridden city, I fell
face down on the ground next to the trunk of a fallen tree when I
heard an incoming shell. The shell exploded on the other side of the
tree. I would guess that the impact was not more than five to ten
yards from me. I came very close to proving the theorem that "two
objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time." Oddly enough,
I didn't think it was a big deal or close call at the time.
We looked for any structure that would give us cover. There were
some buildings standing, albeit lacking much of their walls. The first
place we went to had housed a beauty shop. The wall facing the Bay
View Hotel was gone. I sat under a sink, with an inverted pot over
my head, facing the Bay View - I remember by sister laughed at my appearance. Suddenly
a terrific explosion shookthe hotel. Plaster and smoke came out of every window. Then
there was a second blast. The building withstood both explosions, but I'm certain
that we wouldn't have. I understand that after the war, the building
was repaired and resumed functioning as a hotel.
We ran from ruin to ruin, hoping to get nearer the American lines.
By now I believed I brought bad luck to everyone I spoke to. They
all died. I remember sitting in a room with my friend, Eddie L_____.
We looked at each other, but neither of us spoke. I last saw Eddie
when we were running out of a ruined building, to which we had attached
a sheet with a large red cross. We poor souls thought this would
save us from friendly fire. The Americans opened up on our feeble
ruin. Eddie's mother laid against a fallen sheet of corrugated galvanized
roofing with a red spot in the center of her white top. Just that,
no blood pouring elsewhere. She probably was dead. Later my
father told me he ran into Eddie and Eddie told him he saw me and I looked
scared. Hey Eddie! If you read this please understand that
I didn't speak to you because I didn't want you to die too. It's
weird how kids think under such circumstances.
Now there was no food or water. We went to another building, and I laid down on the floor of a room at ground level. A shell hit the room on the other side of the wall from us. The wall fell. There had been a group of refugees in that room which was now filled with fire, smoke, and dead and dying people. The survivors were bleeding and groaning. There was no way for us to help. Then we learned that there were more groups of people in other rooms of the building. All of a sudden, a couple of Caucasian men in civilian clothes, speaking unaccented English approached our group. One guy said, "watch out for the boots, they are hobnailed." Then they left and returned a few minutes later with a soupy pot of boiled rice. We gratefully ate what was given us and never saw these guardian angels again.
The upper floors of the building were infested with Japanese soldiers. The shelling got worse and worse and more civilians died, but the Americans could do no wrong. People said, "they have to shell because the Japanese are in the building."
In desperation, it was decided that the blonde women and children would step outside and wave a white flag at the Piper Club spotter planes. It was no use. Within a few moments, the shelling opened up in saturation mode. This time we rationalized that "they think the Japanese have forced us to wave the white flag so the Americans will stop shelling." I thought the spotter pilot was an S.O.B. He killed a lot of us, but I doubt that his judgment accounted for one additional Jap. He was probably the same guy who called fire on our "Red Cross" building. We had to leave this building. When we did, we headed directly for the sound of small arms fire because we knew it had to be the American lines.
We ended up in a vacant house. I lay on the floor of the kitchen.
There was a catalog of the 1939 World's Fair. I read this from cover to
cover. No food in that kitchen. Then a terrific explosion hit
the building. The bomb landed in the living room. I went to the place where
the bomb had landed. Dante would have been inspired. Flames,
blue smoke, bodies or parts thereof were strewn all over the place.
A mother carried the upper part of her four or five year old daughter,
while another daughter carried the child's leg. The three of them were dazed, scared, crying hysterically, and wandering in shock. The little
one was still alive, but unresponsive. The fire was getting hotter
and hotter. We left the building for the streets again. Someone
said, "Americans would never do this. The Japanese must have planted
a bomb." Any explosive was called a "bomba" whether it was an aerial,
a howitzer a land mine or a booby trap.
We ran across more debris and ruins, as we got several yards away, a
Japanese soldier ran by waving a pistol at us. He seemed to be smiling,
but did not shoot. We had not had face-to-face contact with any Japanese
for several days, and I was certain that this was it for me. I looked
him in the eyes, I don't know why. Perhaps I thought this would be
my last sight on earth. Who knows? Maybe human eye contact
elicited a touch of pity or mercy. He did not shoot me.
As I write of these experiences, I have lost count of the close calls
and have only written the memorable ones. I haven't counted starving
as one.
When we were about a block from the burning house, the heat was so intense
that even today, I can feel my body heating up when I recall the scene.
I literally felt as if I would fall to the ground from the extreme temperature.
We passed through more rubble, another burned-out building. The
small arms fire got closer and closer. Someone came and said there
were Caucasian soldiers nearby, but didn't know if they were Germans or
Americans. Before the war, Americans wore the same helmets as the
British - "Tommy helmets." Their new helmets resembled the German
helmets we had seen in pictures. We had to decide whether to run to
the American lines or wait for them to reach us. My mother said without
hesitation, "We're going to the lines, whatever they are they can't be
any worse than these Japs." About half of the survivors elected to
go with us. I later found out that those remaining were all killed
in the room-to-room fighting. Americans had to throw grenades into
each room. Of our group, about half lived.
As I ran for the American lines, the Japanese in the upper floors were
shooting at me. Bullets kicked up spots of dirt about me. I
was a speedy and by then streetwise eleven-and-a-half-years old.
I instinctively knew that running in a non-linear fashion would give them
less chance to draw a bead on me. I never slowed up or looked back.
My speed and the broken field would have won me the Heismann trophy.
I took this business of shooting at me personally, the other times were
more random.
Then there was quiet. A vacant street, with three dead Japs in
the middle of it. Corpses do not keep well in the tropics.
The bodies were black and bloated, the bloated skin had split in places
with yellow fat visible. The eye and mouth apertures looked like
they were full of boiled rice moving incessantly. These were maggots,
feasting. Some would drop off and fall down a chin or cheek.
Some people were kicking the corpses. I didn't. First of all,
I didn't think to and secondly, the bodies were soggy and my foot would
have would have gone into or through them.
Tired, we sat on a curb. Looking behind us, we saw five or six
more putrid, bloated bodies. "Mom," I said. "There are some
dead men behind us."
"They're just Japs."
"No mom, they're Filipinos, their hands are tied behind them."
Silently, we continued with our rest stop.
We heard English voices. They were G.I.s. Holding their rifles from
behind a low cement wall. Someone in our party yelled: "We're Americans."
From behind the wall came a, "So are we lady, get back. In about five minutes
the artillery is going to open up right where you stand." Prudently we
moved on making no more idle chit-chat.
We walked deeper and deeper into the ruined city. Several G.I.s were
sitting on the ground, eating K rations. I was starved, but too proud to
beg, but my emaciated face must have said it all because one of the guys
said, "Sorry kid. This is the first food I've had in days." Those k-rations
sure looked good. Since the end of the war, my mind goes back to this episode
whenever I hear soldiers or veterans gripe about army chow.
We were safe at last, but poor refugees. The Red Cross handed us dry rice and the meat we found was putrid, coming from swollen tin cans.
Fortunately I didn't know what botulism was. The city was ravaged. Finally, my mother, my
brother, my sister and I took refuge in an abandoned store. We slept
on the dirty, debris littered floor. We would wander the streets
looking for familiar faces or relatives to help us. We did not know
if my stepfather survived. Eventually we found a distant relative,
a Mason, who could predict the future. We would sit with him at a
table which had a candle placed in the center. He would murmur "San Anton.
Is he dead or alive?" St Anthony is the patron of lost objects. Then
he told us, "San Anton says he is alive." In a couple of weeks my
stepfather came to our hovel. I guess the soothsayer was right (or
a good guesser fifty percent of the time). Still we had no work, no food, no home, and
no relatives - they were all dead. My parents made the decision to
report to the U.S. Army for repatriation to the States.
Within six weeks of the final battle,
we were processed at Santo Thomas, then put aboard the SS Monterrey - a prewar
cruise ship commandeered during war to transport troops, and enroute to
San Francisco. That was on May 3, 1945. While we were at sea,
the captain announced that Germany had surrendered. We didn't care.
That was another war in another world.
As I mentioned above, the area of Manila we lived in was predominantly Caucasian-inhabited: Spaniards, Italians,
German Jews, American women married to Filipinos, White Russians and American Negroes, which reminds me
that even in hell humans are all the same.
As we wandered through the battered, burning city a brown-haired woman said to my mother, "My dear we
mustn't mingle with the natives." My mother shot back, "Back home you couldn't walk on the same side of the
street with me." Later, I asked my mother "Why not?" She said, "because she is an American Negro."
I still didn't get it until I observed racism in the U.S. Shortly after disembarking in San Francisco, we
were put up in barracks in Oakland. I made my first American friend there. I would go to his house, where his mother
always made us cookies and other treats. Then I was told, "You shouldn't be playing with that boy." I asked, "Why not?" and was
told "Because he is a Negro." Incredible!
My mom had sisters in Los
Angeles. We stayed with them for about a year. In 1946 my stepfather's
uncle was elected vice president of the new Philippine Republic.
My stepfather was appointed to the Philippine embassy in Washington, DC.
More than half a century later I am still here, having gone to grade school,
high school, Georgetown College and School of Medicine. I married
a beautiful, wonderful girl from Indiana in 1960. We have 4
beautiful daughters, a handsome son, and eleven loving grandchildren.
Despite the influences of the Vietnam generation they have grown
up drug free and have both my wife's and my quaint old values. I
am blessed with the most stable and loving family anyone could hope
for.
PRINTER-FRIENDLY FORMAT
