“Food and freedom are like heaven on earth.”
—VERNON NEWLAND,
SANTO TOMAS SURVIVOR, FEBRUARY 5, 1945
JAPANESE TROOPS HUSTLED TO FORTIFY THE EDUCATION Building, blocking windows with mattresses and pillows and piling everything from beds and tables to chairs and broken bottles into the stairwells. Soldiers stood ready with rifles and bayonets. Internees who moments earlier had celebrated the arrival of the cavalrymen suddenly understood that the hasty blockades were designed to do more than just stall American soldiers. “We forced ourselves to realize the truth,” said Robert Robb, the thirty-eight-year-old former editor of the Philippines Free Press huddled inside Room 216. “We were the hostages of the jittery Japs who had barricaded themselves in the north wing.”
Robb surveyed his quarters. “Forty-three people packed into a room that at best accommodated 21,” he recalled, “three terrified women, one whimpering little boy, and 39 frightened men.” He heard the clamor of Sherman tanks outside as the mechanized monsters motored toward the Education Building, a three-story stucco structure.
“There are three tanks down there,” internee Ed Price whispered.
“Vacate the shacks around the Education Building at once!” the internees heard an officer below holler. “You’re in danger. There’ll be shooting.”
The grumbling grew louder as the thirty-ton tanks maneuvered into position, each armed with a 75 mm main gun that could hurl a twenty-pound projectile up to eight miles.
“They’re putting a tank on each wing of the building,” Price continued to narrate. “The boss man’s tank is right in front of the center door.”
From the windows up above, the internees watched as cavalrymen moved in behind the tanks, crouching low and out of the line of enemy fire.
“Those are big fellows, those tanks,” someone in the room whispered. “They got a mighty wicked-looking cannon sticking out of the front end.”
Japanese soldiers prodded internees to stand in front of the windows as shields, a bayonet at their back, while a second soldier peered over a captive’s shoulder or through the narrow gap between the arm and body. A few took shots at the Americans on the ground below. “The only reason that the hostages were not killed or injured was because the American soldiers refrained from shooting,” recalled Percy Ripka. “We suffered extreme mental agony during the entire time we stood in the windows.”
The Americans meanwhile continued to negotiate with Commander Hayashi, whose forces inside the Education Building numbered about sixty five; the hostages more than two hundred. Major Gerhart rejected the commandant’s request that he and his men be allowed to leave Santo Tomas, demanding instead that the Japanese capitulate. “The Commandant was given ten minutes in which to surrender under promise of fair treatment with all the honor of war,” interpreter Frank Cary wrote in a letter. “He stalled for time, busying himself burning a military map of Manila.”
Negotiations proved futile, triggering more drastic actions. The commander of the tank facing the building’s center door popped his head up through the turret. “We’ll give you Japs just three minutes to come out with your hands in the air,” he shouted. “If you don’t come out walking, we’ll blast you out.”
Panic seized many of the internees. “Hey, you,” one shouted from the second floor. “We’re up here on the second and third floors. We’re Americans!”
“The Japs got us cornered here!” another added.
“You guys hit the deck, lie flat on the floor, face down, and get behind any shelter you have. Use your beds and mattresses as shields. Keep away from the balcony. Get as far back from the windows as you can. Get back in the rear corridor.”
“Take it easy,” an internee from the neighboring Room 215 shouted. “We got women and children up here!”
Robb hugged the wooden floor, his shoulders pressed tight against internees on either side in the crowded room. “I closed my eyes and measured off the distance between us and the road where the tanks were preparing to fire into the building,” he said. “Just twenty-five feet away, they were. Just a hop, skip and jump to freedom. Just twenty-five feet in space, but in time an eternity away from us.”
“You Japs in there—this is your last chance!” the commander below barked.
Hayashi crawled into Room 216, binoculars draped around his neck and his head covered by a helmet adorned with green twigs. Robb saw the commander’s hands shaking. “At that moment he was undoubtedly the most frightened man in the world. And the thought hit me like a blow—in his fear he would do anything. He’d be a madman when the Americans shelled the building,” Robb wrote. “My hands grew clammy.”
“Okay, men,” the tank commander shouted as he dropped down in the turret, the metal door clanging shut behind him. “Let ’em have it!”
Hayashi scurried back out into the corridor, putting another wall between himself and the tank fire. The internees braced themselves. Robb watched a mother in his room pull her young son close against her body. Another internee squeezed his wife’s hand, while a woman nearby lowered her head her atop her husband’s shoulder. Up on the third floor, eight-year-old Rupert Wilkinson climbed under a bed with his friend Nick Balfour, the two of them huddled under blankets. All now awaited the assault.
Gunfire erupted below, blasting the building’s first floor. In Room 216, Robb felt the wooden floor suddenly vibrate against his face. “The machine-gun fire was deafening: a giant pounding on a colossal typewriter. Tracers flashed outside and occasionally across the ceiling,” Wilkinson wrote. “I was frightened enough—and not frightened enough—to tell myself my life was charmed; I would not die.”
Others were not so confident. “Mommy,” the boy in Room 216 cried out in a high-pitched voice Robb could hear over the shooting below. “Are the Americans going to kill us too?”
The gunfire continued.
“I’m afraid, Mommy,” the child whimpered. “Hold me tighter.”
The youth’s desperate cries moved Robb, who tried to reassure him, an impossible feat over the thunder of the guns. “Don’t be scared.”
Machine gun rounds tore through the building’s facade, blurring time for the panicked internees. “The shelling continued,” Robb said. “When had it started? Ten minutes ago? An hour? Two hours? Time didn’t register.”
The attack injured several Japanese troops. Others charged into the rooms with the internees, seeking shelter. “A very little thing at that moment—a word, a noise, or of all these things, a laugh—would have precipitated a tragedy,” recalled William Weidmann. “Luckily, the internees kept strict silence.”
The shelling finally stopped.
The tank commander stuck his head out again, demanding the Japanese surrender, but no one emerged. American forces opened fire again, filling the air inside the Education Building with dust that choked the internees. Many of the Japanese retreated to the third floor, taking refuge in the corridor behind Wilkinson’s room. “American machine-gun fire killed one guard and wounded another,” he later wrote. “Stray slugs and splinters struck several of our companions. When one elderly internee’s bedding caught fire, the man dropped dead, apparently of a heart attack.”
The guns again fell silent. The internees anxiously awaited the next move: would the Japanese surrender, or would the bombardment resume?
“Take it easy up there!” one of the commanders on the ground below finally hollered to them. “We’ll figure some way to get you out.”
THAT NIGHT MANY OF the internees carried on, oblivious to the standoff in the Education Building. Fueled by excitement and adrenaline, few dared retreat indoors and climb in bed, no doubt afraid to wake in the morning and discover that the long-awaited prayer of liberation had somehow been just a dream. “No sleep tonight,” Robert Wygle wrote in his diary. “Too much fighting. Too many huge fires and explosions. Too much excitement. THIS, my friends, after 37 months, IS IT!”
Internees who had saved a few cans of food popped them open, offering them up to the soldiers, like a meager reward for liberating them. “Blackout regulations were forgotten, and hundreds of fires were started with chairs, tables and benches,” Roka wrote. “As we shared our miserable food with the soldiers, we laughed, talked, and listened to their experiences. How desperately we tried to catch up on the years we had lost! How wonderful those boys looked to us! Their presence acted as a heady wine and we couldn’t seem to get our fill. We wanted them by our side all the time.”
The soldiers handed out cigarettes to the adults and candy bars and chewing gum to the children. “One of the unforgettable things was the slow smile of wonderment on the pale tense face of a little girl of four tasting chocolate for the first time, her entranced eyes filled with tears of gratitude,” International News Service reporter Frank Robertson wrote at five that morning in his first dispatch filed from Santo Tomas. “The misery of the internees and the gratitude, too, are almost indescribable.”
A small boy with bright shining eyes stared up at Robertson. “Will we have food now? Real food?” he asked. “Tomorrow morning, too?”
Another little girl, whom Robertson estimated weighed half of what a child her age should, grabbed his attention. “My name is Louise,” she said, her voice little more than a soft whisper. “You came on my birthday.”
Bitterness over the years of misery was evident, Robertson observed, even among the children, including nine-year-old Kenneth Roberts. “I am going to America,” the youth told Robertson, “to learn to be a soldier and kill Japs.”
Dunn watched one little girl pocket a candy bar she had been given rather than tear into it, like the other children. “Don’t you know what it is?” someone asked.
“Yes,” the girl replied. “It’s candy.”
“Aren’t you going to eat it?”
“No,” she said. “My daddy needs it worse than I do. He has beriberi.”
After months of surviving off of pigeons, rats, and weeds, the internees feasted that night on military rations and hardtack crackers. “The old army chow that G.I.s loathed,” Emily Van Sickle said, “tasted to us like ambrosia.”
Nurse Rose Rieper, whose weight had plummeted to just seventy pounds, stopped some soldiers who were about to discard unfinished army K-rations.
“Oh, can I have it?” Rieper asked. “Don’t throw it away.”
“You’re hungry if you eat that.”
Many of the internees, whose stomachs were accustomed to little more than watery gruel, found it difficult to digest solid foods. That was the case for Robert Wygle. “Sat up all night because a full stomach is too much of a discomfort and a joy to waste in sleeping,” he wrote in his diary. “A full stomach is such an amazing thing. It hurts and is really misery—but the grandest sensation I will ever experience.”
The rich treats sickened others. “I remember the first food we had. It was a cherry pie with evaporated milk on it,” recalled nurse Rita James. “We were all awfully sick after we ate it. But it tasted good. Better going down than coming up.”
The troops and the reporters understood the emaciated internees’ obsession with food, a point hammered home for Robertson that night when he visited a cell-like room that forty internees called home. The reporter let his eyes wander over walls plastered with pictures of T-bone steaks. “The fascination which the starved inhabitants showed for the army food last night was not surprising after we heard stories of children running their finger-nails along the grooves in the kitchen table to pick out minute particles, or stories of banana stem leaves and roots being eaten,” he wrote. “One woman said she and her husband had eaten three whole banana plants.”
The troops, many of whom had been away from home for months and even years, likewise enjoyed the camaraderie of fellow Americans. “It sure is good to see kids again,” one soldier told Emily Van Sickle. “And American women. It makes me feel almost like I’m home.”
The feeling was mutual, recalled internee Margaret Bayer. “We kept the poor exhausted soldiers talking and answering questions,” she wrote in her diary. “One soldier would be surrounded by 20 or 30 internees all asking the same questions.”
“Which way did you come in?”
“What about Bilibid?”
“What about Los Baños?”
In between chatting with internees, soldiers went to work, fortifying the camp. “What in the world are you doing?” Lowell Cates, Roka’s fiancé, asked one.
“Digging a fox-hole,” he replied.
“What’s a fox-hole?”
“Watch me, and I’ll show you!”
The soldier finished digging his hole and spread out his poncho so he could lie down on it. “Catch on?” he said with a grin.
Roka stared in wonderment. “This is a new world!” she wrote in her diary. “So much to learn and so much to forget.”
Despite the celebration, General Chase faced an immediate humanitarian crisis. Though the army would rush him ten thousand additional K-rations the next day, in the short term he did not have enough food to feed the nearly 3,700 starving internees the next morning for breakfast. He dispatched his supply officer to see the Catholic bishop of Manila, who resided next door to Santo Tomas. That night the bishop miraculously produced enough vegetables, rice, and fish to feed the internees. To Chase’s amazement, he even sent over a bottle of Old Parr scotch. “The internees are practically skin and bone,” Chase wrote in his first message to Mudge. “It would break your heart to see them.”
The doctors and nurses meanwhile toiled throughout the night. “We had civilians killed. We had civilians wounded,” recalled nurse Helen Cassiani. “It was a very bad scene. It was almost like being in Bataan again.”
Dr. Stevenson collapsed twice. Others likewise passed out and suffered dizzy spells, a by-product of the starvation that plagued them all.
“What’s wrong? They’re all fainting,” one of the newly arrived doctors said. “How long is it since you’ve had anything to eat?”
“Breakfast,” one of the nurses replied.
The doctor ordered each to have a can of condensed milk. “We worked that night. We worked all night,” recalled nurse Minnie Breese. “The doctors did too.”
Finally amid a lull around two a.m., Dr. Stevenson instructed some of the nurses to rest. “You may be needed in the morning,” he said, “if hostilities reopen.”
Nurse Eleanor Garen tried to sleep downstairs, but the chaos made it impossible. “The heck with it!” she decided, retreating upstairs to her room. No sooner had her head hit the pillow than a soldier entered the room and woke her up.
“You’re not supposed to be up here,” he told her.
“I’m so tired, I’m going to sleep!” she protested. “I don’t care what happens.”
The soldier left her in peace.
Nurse Sally Blaine likewise knocked off work in the middle of the night. She made her way down the center aisle, where just eighteen inches separated two beds. “I walked up to the first American guy who was a big burly redheaded sergeant,” she recalled. “I reached down and touched him on the shoulder.”
“You have no idea how good you look to me,” she told him, feeling, like many others, a sense of disbelief that American soldiers had arrived.
“You don’t look so bad yourself, kid,” he replied.
Nurse Denny Williams went to her room and stretched out, overwhelmed by exhaustion. “I’m free,” she thought as she drifted to sleep. “We’re all free.”
BUT NOT EVERYONE WAS SO LUCKY.
For those south of the Pasig River, news of MacArthur’s return arrived not by tank but by telephone. That was the case when Jack Garcia picked up the receiver to hear his uncle Carl Loewinsohn in the northern suburb of Blumentritt on the line.
“Call your Mother or Father, quickly!” his uncle demanded.
The ten-year-old handed the phone off to his mother, listening to his uncle’s animated voice even as he stood a few feet away.
“What’s happening?” his mother asked. “What’s going on?”
Her eyes suddenly grew large. “The Americans are there?” she cried. Excitement filled the room. “Cali,” she continued, using his nickname. “Cali, I can’t hear you.”
The phone went dead.
MacArthur’s forces had liberated the American internees at Santo Tomas, but the rest of the sprawling city—filled with more than one million Filipino men, women, and children—remained under Japanese control, and no one knew what the trapped enemy might do. That fear tempered the excitement felt by many, particularly as the sounds of war thundered across the capital. “From every section of the city we hear the detonations of tremendous explosions and the skies around us are aglow with fire,” Marcial Lichauco wrote in his diary at eleven p.m. “For the past two hours, therefore, my entire household has been busy packing up food, clothing, medicine and a few other important belongings just in case we are forced to leave our house on short notice.”
The scenes of the coming fight mesmerized sixteen-year-old Lourdes Reyes, who had climbed to the third-floor tower of her home to watch the brilliant sunset that afternoon. The room that topped her family’s stately residence—with its commanding views of the high-rises along Dewey Boulevard—was where she often retreated to read books, assemble jigsaw puzzles, and play chess. As a fifth-grader, she had spent months there, quarantined with diphtheria, while her mother fed her medicine and sponged her clean. In an effort to make her not miss Christmas that year, her father had set up a small tree, which the family had decorated and encircled with gifts. Her only escape from the room during her months-long illness came on those mornings when her father smuggled her out for dawn walks along Dewey Boulevard.
Lourdes watched from the room that had once been her hospital ward the bloodred sunset over the bay, an image she would never forget. “By evening,” she recalled, “towards the north where the sounds came from, the sky glowed the same vermilion. Thick clouds of smoke blew up against the clear night—higher and higher.”
The horror of war approached, a hurricane on the horizon.
“The fires seem so near,” her grandmother said that night, shivering.
“It is only because it is night time,” Lourdes assured her. “They must be far off.”
But not for much longer.
DAWN ROSE OVER SANTO TOMAS on February 4, accompanied, as Prising noted, “by the rich odor of bacon and ham.” He found a group of black soldiers.
“Skin and bones,” one of them said.
The troops sized up his shriveled body, feeling his toothpick arms and legs as though in disbelief that that an eleven-year-old boy could be so slight.
“You hungry?” one asked.
Prising said he was. “They fed me, frying tinned ham and eggs over their fire,” he recalled. “But warm food is too much for the starving. I was going to be sick as hell and didn’t want the soldiers to know. So I managed to get away and in a moment retched and gagged, vomiting worms, bile and a mouthful of food.”
As the sun climbed in the sky, troops shaved and washed, while others nursed mugs of hot coffee. General Chase cracked open the bottle of Old Parr, pouring himself a scotch and water with no ice to wash down his breakfast of a hard-boiled duck egg. The transformation of Santo Tomas from internment camp to military base continued. The worn grass where internees had paced away the years was now a parking lot of jeeps, trucks, and tanks. “Steadily through the night,” Prising recalled, “soldiers had pitched tents and dug trenches and foxholes: now, surrounded by bazookas, howitzers and machine guns, they were building fires, heating their rations and oiling their gun mountings. Meantime, more tanks and truckloads of soldiers were coming through the Main Gate. The encampment smelt of sweat, fried food and machinery.”
Nurse Denny Williams opened her eyes in search of confirmation that it was all real. “On Sunday when I woke and I looked out the windows,” she remembered, “I knew I had not dreamed of freedom.” Others did the same, including former NBC correspondent Bert Silen. “With the dawn,” he said, “we could see for the first time in three years the color of American tanks and our brave American soldiers. I can’t begin to tell you what that sight meant to us.” David Boguslav watched two soldiers take a break, strip down to the waist, and pick up a baseball. “Complete with fielders’ gloves and ball, they were playing catch,” the former journalist wrote. “They had come back, and everything was all right again.”
In the Education Building—surrounded still by tanks and riflemen—the standoff continued. More than a dozen internees had escaped during the night, using knotted sheets to climb down. Parents, wives, and friends loitered outside, anxious for a safe resolution, while prisoners shouted messages down to others from the windows. A steady stream of buckets, hoisted up and down on ropes, delivered food, water, and hot coffee. “Hey Prising,” one of the youth’s friends yelled down, “get me out of here.”
Over at the clinic, nurse Sally Blaine chatted with Lt. Col. Haskett Conner, who had been injured at the front gate by grenade shrapnel. “You had sort of a rough time last night, didn’t you?” she asked.
“I slept like a baby,” the officer replied. “I don’t remember a thing after I laid down here last night.”
Others treated wounded soldiers, internees, and even a few of the Japanese guards, including one who had the fingers on one hand blown off.
“Say, you nurses have had a rough time,” one of the newly arrived doctors told Denny Williams. “Why don’t you slack off? We’ll take it from now on.”
“We’re too keyed up, too happy,” she said, shaking her head no. “Why, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.”
Additional forces arrived Sunday, albeit some of them tardy after the Japanese blew up the bridge in Novaliches. “To a certain extent this delay was appreciated,” noted the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division’s artillery report. “A brewery at the river crossing was full of good cold beer and all that was necessary was to turn on the spigot and carry it away. Many a tired soldier refreshed himself at this point and considered the hardship of the advance on Manila well paid.” Maj. Gen. Robert Beightler, the division’s commander, saw no reason to stop his troops, some of whom filled five-gallon cans with cold beer. “In a few hours all the bottled beer and two vats of mature beer were gone,” he wrote in his report. “What a picnic.” One of those soldiers was Pvt. First Class Daniel Catale of New York, who for months had tasted nothing but chlorinated water and army coffee. Catale raised his glass. “This,” he declared as he blew the foam off the top, “is like a shot in the arm. Now I’ll be able to walk into Manila like I was fresh.”
Just as villagers en route had celebrated America’s arrival, thousands of manileños crowded the roads leading into the capital, waving, cheering, and crying. “Manila,” one tank soldier wrote in his diary, “looked more like a parade than a bloody war.” The crowds at times proved so thick that Capt. Bob Brown lost sight of his men. “A few Filipinos were still removing their hats and bowing low,” Beightler observed, “just as they had had to do when the Japanese soldiers passed by.”
Excited internees swarmed each vehicle that rolled through the gates of Santo Tomas. “Every time an army truck tore into the camp we rushed to the doors and windows to see if they had brought us food,” Roka wrote. “Our camp ration of rice was increased and we had lima beans for lunch, but, unfortunately, hundreds became ill.”
Internees still marveled over the meals, including Howard Hick, a former superintendent with General Foods in New York, who sat down to a table with his wife, Maybell. “If ever I’ve prayed,” he announced. “I’m going to pray now.”
“When he took his hand from his eyes,” Maybell recalled, “he was crying.”
The healthy young soldiers proved popular. “I can’t resist touching them,” one woman told Carl Mydans. “I’d forgotten that men looked this way.”
Roka noted the same in her diary. “Our camp was buzzing with handsome officers and soldiers,” she wrote. “The girls in the camp were besieged by dates and they were starting to primp and pay more attention to their appearances.”
Santo Tomas had become a beachhead, a toehold that American forces held in Manila. The Japanese had grossly miscalculated, allowing a small advance force to penetrate the city without much of a fight, capturing both Santo Tomas and Malacañan Palace, the home of the Philippine president. But the Americans had gambled as well. General Chase’s troops were not only far outnumbered, but now faced the added burden of caring for almost 3,700 men, women, and children, many on the verge of starvation. If Noguchi’s Northern Force retaliated, Chase faced two options, both of which were terrible. He could abandon the thousands of civilians and battle his way out, or he could hunker down and face a siege until reinforcements arrived. Both scenarios shared a tragic commonality—the promise of heavy casualties. “We were short of food and ammunition, and would have been hard pressed to hold the compound,” Chase recalled. “Again—we were lucky.”
The intelligence picture likewise remained murky, as evidenced by a report that morning: “Enemy strength is not known, identifications are uncertain, and contact is mainly with small arms sniping from buildings and street barricades.”
Throughout the day, troops labored to repair the camp’s battered front gate—flattened by tanks the night before—while foot patrols roamed several blocks in all directions. Soldiers established an observation point atop the Main Building, offering views over the city. Several large fires spotted in the business district grew to seventy-eight by late afternoon. “The Japs were starting a systematic destruction of the business and Port Area districts,” noted the Fifth Cavalry’s report. “All bridges over the Pasig River were reported blown with the exception of the Quezon Bridge.”
Chase ordered a small task force to roll out immediately and secure the vital span, which was about a mile southwest of the university. That same day, unbeknownst to Chase, Admiral Iwabuchi had demanded his Northern Force blow both the Ayala and Quezon bridges, the first of which now sat on the muddy bottom of the Pasig.
It was now a race for the latter.
A convoy of American tanks and trucks aimed south down Quezon Boulevard, heading deeper into Japanese-held Manila and navigating around several enemy roadblocks. The objective loomed ahead, the last span connecting north and south Manila. One block from the bridge, the convoy ran into a large tank trap made of mines, abandoned truck bodies, and steel rails hammered into the roadbed. Maj. Frank Mayfield and one of the tank drivers dismounted to investigate. It was impossible, Mayfield realized, to bypass it. Furthermore, all other routes to the bridge appeared impassable. He radioed the bad news to Chase, who ordered the men to return. “Numerous wrecked cars lined both sides of the street,” noted the cavalry’s report, “leaving only a narrow passage through which the convoy had to pass.”
Just as Major Mayfield ordered his convoy to turn back, Japanese machine guns and even antiaircraft cannons opened fire. Projectiles rained down from the first and second floors of adjacent buildings. The Americans had driven into a shooting gallery. Drivers struggled to maneuver in streets crowded with wrecked vehicles. “All the men dismounted and found what cover they could,” stated the cavalry’s report. “The trucks were turned around and the men mounted up with several wounded and killed.”
No sooner had the task force pulled out than Noguchi’s forces blew the arched steel span. “All bridges across the Pasig River were now out,” lamented the cavalry’s report, “and we would have to ferry across or build a bridge.”
Inside Santo Tomas, Prising approached the troops who manned the camp’s gates. “Yesterday’s guards had been Japanese,” he observed. “Today’s were American.” The youth convinced one of the cavalrymen to let him outside the front gate, on condition he stay close and return within ten minutes. Outside the walls, Prising met several Filipinos, who were waiting for news of interned friends, family, and former employers. Many urged Prising to return to the camp where he would be safer.
“All the streets are mined,” one warned.
Prising felt eager to taste freedom after years of being locked behind a wall, but the world that awaited him proved foreign. He saw burning buildings, including an entire block of leveled homes. Water mains had burst, leaving mud thick in the streets. American soldiers charged inside a nearby house, followed by an explosion and smoke. He waited, but no one came out. “My spirits sagged like my knees. I was afraid. It was as if the sun had been suddenly covered, a blackout in daylight,” he wrote. “What I expected was an experience of total freedom; I wanted to be one of the first prisoners to leave the camp, but now as I stood in the street I realized that I was still a prisoner of war. Rubble blocked my way; a stuttering machine gun punctuated my despair; I turned back.”
Back inside Santo Tomas, the ugly reality of war was likewise evident. Laborers buried nine Americans—three internees and six soldiers—in a plot separate from the graves dug for the despised Abiko and two dead Japanese soldiers.
Carl Mydans meanwhile explored the campus, snapping photographs that would populate the pages of Life. He spotted an emaciated couple under a tree, observing how beriberi had swollen their ankles. Adjoining them sat two healthy young army lieutenants. “The man held an unopened carton of cigarettes in one hand and in the other a K-ration chocolate bar which he was eating,” Mydans wrote. “The woman sat sewing the fatigue shirt of one of the officers who was bare and brown to the waist.”
“Tell me honestly,” the man said. “What’s it like out there?”
“Oh, it’s going to be all right,” one of the officers replied. “Our outfit got across the Novaliches this morning and they’re fighting on the outskirts of the city right now. Don’t you worry. They’ll be in here today, and it won’t be long before we have this city.”
Mydans noted that the internee didn’t respond. His female companion lowered her sewing and looked up at him.
“I didn’t really mean Manila,” the internee continued.
“He means the outside,” his companion added.
The officers realized what weighed upon them. “It’s going to be fine out there,” the other lieutenant assured the couple. “Don’t concern yourself with that. All you’ve got to do is to get your strength back. That’s what you need now, food and strength.”
The internee fell silent again, a bewildered look settling over his face, reminding Mydans of a child. “It’s hard,” the internee finally said slowly. “It’s awfully hard after all this while—to explain what I mean.”
Mydans spotted Spike Heyward, who before the war had served as the managing director of the largest sugar company in the Philippines. Mydans had known him during his own brief time at Santo Tomas, where he had admired Heyward as a thoughtful leader. “He was distinctly familiar but I was not at all certain who he was. He was so wasted and feeble that when, at last, I was sure it was he, my stomach tightened,” Mydans recalled. “His arms were thinned to the bone, his chest was a skeleton stretched with skin, and like so many others I saw around me, his legs and ankles had swollen with beriberi into clublike appendages. When he walked he was clearly in pain.”
Despite his physical condition, Heyward chatted with soldiers.
“Spike,” Mydans interrupted.
“Well, indeed!” he exclaimed when he turned and saw the photographer. “I see you came in with more this time than you did the last.”
Heyward sat down atop some ammunition boxes, and the two men chatted as Mydans worked up to the question foremost on his mind. “How was it, Spike, when you saw that tank and those troops coming in through the gate last night?” he finally asked. “Did it look like we always said it would?”
“You know,” Heyward said, “I didn’t see any of it last night. After all those years of waiting, I never left my shanty.”
Heyward fell silent.
“It seems odd this morning, now that I’ve felt the strength to move around and have a look,” he continued. “But last night I just lay there and listened to it.”
Mydans concentrated on his old friend.
“It wasn’t till this morning I felt I could walk out here and have a look,” Heyward continued. “And you know, Carl, it looks just as I thought it would when I pictured it last night—and all those other nights.”
Journalists filed the first news reports from Santo Tomas, announcing the camp’s liberation and telling the world of the cruel starvation the internees had suffered. News stories spared little of the horror, describing how on the eve of liberation internees were forced to eat the raw hide of a carabao that Japanese guards had slaughtered for themselves. “Almost everyone has beriberi, pellagra or malnutrition,” wrote Frank Robertson. “At least 70 percent of the children are underweight—many kiddies of six or seven have gained no weight since internment three years ago.” Bill Dunn of CBS speculated on the probable fate of the internees had American forces waited any longer to break into Manila. “If our arrival had delayed another thirty days,” he reported in his first broadcast, “the results might have been completely tragic.”
Around dusk General Chase rolled up outside the Education Building in a jeep. His goal was to peacefully end the standoff, which had dragged on for almost twenty-four hours. The positive news story of the rescue of almost 3,700 internees did not need a bloody postscript about the murder of a few hundred.
“We’re going to let those Japs go,” Chase announced. “Our mission is to save these prisoners, not get them killed. And it’s a good trade, two hundred Americans for less than half that number of Japs. Good—if we can make it.”
His officers listened.
“There’s a Jap lieutenant colonel in there, named Hayashi,” he continued. “We know enough about him not to trust him very much. But we’ve got to try it. We’re going to offer him and his men safe conduct out of this prison into an area somewhere out there in the city near their own lines. That means we’re not going to have to take them very far. Somebody’s got to go in there and talk to him.”
Chase shot a glance at Lt. Col. Charles “Todd” Brady, executive officer of the First Cavalry Brigade. The wiry Brady’s most distinguished feature was his moustache, the ends of which he fastidiously twirled into fine points.
“Todd,” the general said. “You’re the one who’s going to do it.”
Officers ordered the men to hold fire as Brady approached and entered the building. Mydans kept his eye on his watch the entire time, feeling the minutes drag past. After a quarter of an hour, Brady emerged from the shell-scarred building.
“How did it go?” Chase asked.
“Pretty well, sir,” he replied. “Hayashi wants safe conduct with honor—and he says to a Japanese that means full arms and ammunition. I agreed to side arms and rifles, but no grenades or machine guns. He finally accepted. I told him to come out at dawn with rifles on the shoulder and form up into a column of threes and we would see him into an area between the lines. And I think he’ll do it.”
“Good,” Chase answered. “You take him out in the morning.”
Mydans had listened to the entire exchange. “What was he like, this Hayashi?” the photographer piped up.
“He’s big for a Jap; about my height. And a rough customer. He came up to me wearing two pistols on his hips and stood with his feet apart and his hands on his guns, raising them up out of the holsters and dropping them back in while I talked.”
“What did you do?” Mydans pressed.
“My hand twitched so, watching that son-of-a-bitch that I had to twirl my mustache to keep it steady.”