“We never believed that they would kill us.”
—CELEDONIA DE ARQUILLO,
TESTIMONY, JULY 23, 1945
JUST A FEW BLOCKS SOUTHWEST OF SANTO TOMAS, PRISONERS at Bilibid woke up that Sunday morning still under the dreaded control of the Japanese. The 1,275 men, women, and children had passed a long night in the crumbling old Spanish prison, watching the fighting in the streets outside and praying for liberation. The excitement had begun earlier that afternoon when prisoners had spied American planes swoop low over Santo Tomas. That was followed a few hours later by a subtle tremble of the buildings. Mining engineer James Thompson had gazed up Quezon Boulevard, where he spotted what appeared to be an endless column of tanks, personnel carriers, and jeeps rolling into Manila. Others had joined him to watch. “We were transfixed and utterly dumbstruck at the sight of such a powerful armed force,” he recalled.
“It’s the boys I tell you,” Thompson shouted. “It’s the boys.”
“American tanks!” others hooted. “They’re here, they’re here!”
Fern Harrington had refused to believe the news, convinced starvation had made her fellow captives hallucinate. To be safe, the missionary climbed the stairs to see for herself. To her surprise, two American tanks, separated from the others, clanked to a stop behind Bilibid’s back wall.
A head popped out. “Hell, Harvey,” she heard one of the soldiers shout. “We’re on the wrong street!”
That confirmed it for Harrington. “Never had profanity sounded so beautiful,” she later wrote. “Everyone went wild, momentarily forgetting that we were still prisoners of the Japanese. I stood impassive, too stunned to comprehend what was happening as others cheered, laughed, cried, jumped and embraced one another.”
The battle beyond the gates had escalated as the hours ticked past. “Manila was in flames, and as the city crackled with gunfire, the prisoners in Bilibid crouched near the windows of their cell blocks to watch the battle,” recalled Charles Brown, an army doctor who had survived the Bataan Death March. “The masonry and steel of the prison trembled with every salvo of heavy artillery shells that fell perilously close to the walls.”
Forty-six-year-old American Natalie Crouter, interned with her husband Jerry and two teenage children, could not look away. “I was so excited all night that I almost burst,” she wrote in her diary. “I was up most of the night, going from one end of the building to the other to watch new fires that leapt into the sky.”
Her husband, bedridden with beriberi, scolded her. “You damn fool, go to bed,” he demanded. “You’ll be dead tomorrow if you don’t stop running around.”
“I don’t care if I am,” Crouter shot back. “This is the biggest night of my life and I’m not going to miss any of it.”
Dawn had brought little relief from the excitement. But as the morning wore on, the earlier euphoria gave way to fear, summed up by a single question: Where were the Americans?
MacArthur’s forces had charged right past the prison the night before, liberating nearby Santo Tomas. Internees at the university woke up free that morning, where the lucky ones, like Robin Prising, feasted on fried ham and eggs. But their fellow prisoners, several blocks away at Bilibid, still starved under the frightful yoke of the Japanese.
The enemy had fortified the prison, shoveling dugouts and stacking sandbags to make machine-gun nests. The element of surprise had vanished. Japanese troops stood alert, scanning all approaches to the octagon-shaped prison from the rooftop. Many wondered if Bilibid’s liberation would end in a bloody battle. Internee Donald Mansell glimpsed what such violence might look like when a fellow captive told him about a dead Japanese soldier sprawled out in the intersection of Quezon Boulevard and Calle España, a sight the curious internee could not pass up. He climbed the stairs and looked in the direction of where he saw the tanks the night before. “The dead man had been stripped of his clothes and shoes and was beginning to bloat,” Mansell wrote. “It was macabre.”
Around ten-thirty a.m., the Japanese summoned Maj. Warren Wilson and his civilian counterpart, Rev. Carl Eschbach. As Bilibid’s senior medical officer, Wilson oversaw the 810 military prisoners of war who occupied half of the seventeen-acre compound, many of whom the Japanese had deemed too sick or lame to evacuate to the home islands in late 1944 to work in mines, shipyards, and factories. Eschbach represented the 465 civilian internees, whom the Japanese had transferred to the prison from Baguio in December and now kept segregated from the captured troops. Guards forced the duo to wait twenty minutes before ushering them into the office of the camp commandant, Major Ebiko. The enemy officer rose to his feet and read aloud a proclamation in Japanese. An interpreter then read it in English before giving Wilson the handwritten cursive message bearing Ebiko’s name:
1. The Japanese Army is now going to release all the prisoners of war and internees here on its own accord.
2. We are assigned to another duty and will be here no more.
3. You are at liberty to act and live as free persons, but you must be aware of probable dangers if you go out.
4. We shall leave here foodstuffs, medicines and other necessities of which you may avail yourselves for the time being.
5. We have arranged to put up sign-board at the front gate, bearing the following contents:
Lawfully released prisoners of war and internees are quartered here. Please do not molest them unless they make positive resistance.
Unlike Santo Tomas, where a standoff had ensued in the Education Building, the Japanese guards at Bilibid prepared this Sunday to simply walk away. There would be no massacre of prisoners and internees, no final firefight with American liberators.
A dumbfounded Wilson thanked the major, signed a receipt for the number of prisoners at Bilibid, saluted, and departed. He immediately shared the news with fellow prisoner Carlton Vanderboget, an army surgeon.
“I don’t get it,” Vanderboget said.
Neither did Wilson. He gathered with his staff officers and organized a plan to guard the prison until the Americans arrived. “A number of baseball bats had been stashed away,” he recalled. “These were brought out and issued to the guards who were assigned to cover all gates, doors, and other points of ingress into the Bilibid compound.”
Eschbach likewise summoned all the civilian internees into the main corridor, where the men, women, and children crowded around him. Others spilled out the front door and down into the courtyard. “Gangway,” someone shouted.
The internees turned to see eight Japanese soldiers march down from the prison’s roof, their hobnail boots clicking on the steps and then the floor. The departure of Bilibid’s rooftop guards symbolized that the promised liberation was real. “A hush swept over the crowd as we stepped aside to make a pathway for them,” Harrington recalled. “They walked resolutely forward, looking neither right nor left.” Tensions still soared. “I just held my breath for fear a hand grenade or two might be dropped,” Ethel Herold wrote in her diary. Crouter studied the faces of the enemy, the guards who like so many others had for years stood between her and her freedom. “They filed through the narrow lane we left, they and we silent, their faces looking sunk and trapped,” she wrote. “The corporal’s fat face was sullen and defeated.” The troops gathered at the gate, while others loaded weapons and equipment onto trucks. Not to be forgotten were the camp ducks and pigs, which the guards took with them. “They all went out without a backward look and the gate stood open behind them,” Crouter wrote. “We were alone.”
Many prisoners accustomed to Japanese brutality stood stunned by the anticlimactic departure. “Not a shot was fired,” Vanderboget recalled. “We thought there would be a battle to defend the place, but there wasn’t. Everything was calm, except our own personal emotions.” Harrington, in contrast, felt torn. “I could never describe the emotion I felt as I watched them leave—a feeling of tremendous relief but also pity for them,” she wrote. “I feared they were walking out to certain death.”
Back inside the main corridor, all eyes turned back to Eschbach, who clutched Major Ebiko’s message, his exciting announcement superseded by events. “I have our official release from the Japanese,” he announced.
Eschbach read aloud the proclamation Ebiko had shared with him and Wilson. Upon conclusion, internees erupted in cheers as Eschbach held up a homemade American flag, prompting the newly liberated to sing “God Bless America” and “The Star Spangled Banner.” “Here we are,” Mansell wrote in his diary, “free after one thousand one hundred and thirty-four days.” Crouter ducked out to find her husband Jerry and the couple’s daughter, June. The family’s three-and-a-half-year ordeal was now over. “I put my arm around his shoulder,” Crouter wrote in her diary, “and the three of us sat there with tears running down our cheeks for quite a long while, not saying anything.”
The prisoners and internees were technically free, but in all reality the men, women, and children remained hostages of the battle that raged just beyond the camp’s walls. To venture outside into a city filled with enemy troops was suicide. Prisoners and internees settled down to wait for American forces to rescue them.
Wilson organized a detail to ransack the Japanese storeroom, while others climbed to the third-floor roof to watch the battle. Around three p.m., internees spotted American troops in the streets below, darting for cover amid enemy fire. “We waved,” Thompson recalled. “We dared not shout for fear of attracting sniper fire to them or to ourselves, but they did not see us.” Crouter witnessed the fighting as well. “I began to feel horribly sick in my soul as I watched war hour after hour—snipers picking off men; men cornering snipers, creeping down alleys; hunting; cornering; killing,” she wrote in her diary. “There was plenty to watch, hour after hour, our own men and the enemy.”
UNBEKNOWNST TO CROUTER, Sgt. Rayford Anderson and a squad of nine American soldiers crept just outside Bilibid. Twenty-six-year-old Anderson, whose bald and wrinkled head made him resemble famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle, was on a patrol, searching for an overdue platoon that had failed to return.
As the soldiers approached the prison’s main entrance, Anderson noted that the cheering crowds of Filipinos who had greeted American forces had vanished, a sign he feared meant the enemy was close. The soldiers spotted two Japanese sentries near the prison’s gate. All ten took aim and fired, dropping them in the street. A Japanese machine-gunner up ahead opened fire, the bullets tearing into several lampposts. The sergeant offered his men the chance to abort the mission, but the soldiers refused.
“We didn’t want to be chicken,” Anderson later said.
The sergeant ordered his men to pull back and work around toward the prison’s rear, hugging the walls and keeping in the shadows. The soldiers checked the surrounding houses and alleyways for snipers and then climbed to the second floor of an adjacent home, offering a view over Bilibid’s towering stone walls.
The sergeant was stunned. He had expected the prison to be empty, but inside he spotted scores of Caucasian men, women, and even children. He waved, and the prisoners waved back.
The other infantrymen in his squad worried that it could be a Japanese ruse designed to draw them out.
The sergeant weighed his options. “All right, boys,” he announced. “We’ll advance till we draw fire.”
The infantrymen darted across the street, pausing alongside a building attached to the outside of Bilibid’s stone wall. Anderson ordered three of his men to provide cover while he and the other six forced the door. Sgt. Billy Fox tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. He raised his rifle and fired two shots from his M1 into the lock. He then rammed his rifle butt into the door, busting it open. He slipped inside, followed by the others. “The windows of the room we got into were all boarded up,” Anderson recalled. “It was mighty scary, sneaking into a room and poking around in the dark.”
The room contained a few dusty chairs and desks littered with old papers. The soldiers spied a lone rat and a pile of feces that the men surmised had been left at some point by a Japanese sentry. They pressed on into an adjacent room, only to find a similar scene complete with boarded-up windows. At the far end of the room, Anderson spotted a ray of light shining through a crack in a board. “I stuck my eye up against it,” he said. “At first I saw just a yard. Then I saw a bunch of men in blue denim trousers standing around right beside the window. It seemed hard to believe, but there they were. I rammed my gun against one of the wooden planks covering the window and broke it.”
“Hey!” Anderson whispered. “We’re Yanks. Come over here.”
To his surprise, the men froze.
One of the infantrymen sang a few bars of “God Bless America,” hoping to assure them the soldiers were Americans, but still no one moved. Another infantryman then tossed in a pack of Philip Morris cigarettes.
The soldiers watched and waited.
One of the prisoners retrieved the package and inspected it.
“By Jesus,” he exclaimed. “It’s the Yanks!”
Other prisoners approached and inspected the cigarettes before one of the captives finally summoned his courage and trotted over to the wall. Anderson shoved his hand through the broken board. The prisoner grabbed and shook it.
“I’m Sergeant Anderson,” he told him. “I’m here with some American soldiers. We’re all around you. You got nothing to worry about.”
Word spread, and excited captives appeared, thrusting hands through the opening in the boarded window. Major Wilson soon arrived and dispersed many, but not before several prisoners hoisted up a stretcher that held an elderly man.
Anderson waved.
“I just wanted to see a Yank,” the relieved prisoner said.
Major Wilson gave Anderson the tally of prisoners and internees, whereupon the sergeant and his men huffed it back to the battalion with the news.
Before long other troops reached the prison. Army doctor Theodore Winship was cooking corn and rice when he looked up and saw an infantryman at the gate. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I am an American soldier of the Thirty-Seventh Division,” the young man replied. “We’ve come to free you.”
“Where the hell have you been,” the doctor barked. “We’ve been waiting three years for you.”
Throughout Bilibid, prisoners and internees celebrated the arrival of the army, an excitement best captured by Robert Kentner in his diary. “The camp was more than elated—words cannot express the emotions of all prisoners,” wrote the navy pharmacist’s mate. “This day will be the most unforgettable day of all our lives.”
Internee Natalie Crouter had just dozed off when she heard the cries of excitement followed by the arrival of a boy hollering the news: “Mummie, come, come!” he shouted. “They are here!”
After a long night and day of uncertainty, Crouter chose to stay on her bed. “I was too worn down to go out and join the crowd, so I just rested there letting the tears run down and listening to the American boys’ voices—Southern, Western, Eastern accents—with bursts of laughter from our internees—laughter free and joyous with a note in it not heard in three years,” she wrote. “I drifted into peaceful oblivion.”
ADMIRAL IWABUCHI KNEW the time to fight had arrived.
The same day American cavalrymen liberated Santo Tomas, he ordered the final destruction of Manila. Japanese forces had already begun to demolish the port, arsenals, and motor pools that might help the reoccupying American forces, but those earlier efforts now evolved into a deliberate strategy to torch the city’s commercial and financial districts north of the Pasig, a move designed to slow the cavalry’s advance while Noguchi’s Northern Force retreated across the river to form a second line of defense. “The demolition of such installations within the city limits will be carried out secretly for the time being,” Iwabuchi ordered, “so that such actions will not disturb the tranquility of the civil population nor be used by the enemy for counter-propaganda.”
A special order would follow, the admiral noted, for the destruction of the city’s water system and electric utilities. “As large a quantity as possible of aviation gasoline and bombs,” Iwabuchi instructed, “will be transported from the storage areas in the suburbs to suitable places within the city and to the vicinity of various key points, and will be made use of as weapons of attack.” He also ordered troops to blow up all the bridges in the suburbs. “The demolition must be done completely and thoroughly,” he mandated. “In order to prevent the guerrillas from action to construct bridges, and to prevent speedy transmission of intelligence and passage across, several guard personnel will be posted at the completely demolished principal bridges.” Iwabuchi likewise warned his forces to be vigilant about maintaining radio security. “The enemy may use our passwords, but the fact that he is not a Japanese can be detected by his pronunciation,” he cautioned. “If you suspect him, talk to him in fluent Japanese.”
North of the Pasig River, incendiary squads fanned out through Santa Cruz, Binondo, and the city’s downtown retail and business districts. At nine a.m. on February 4, Dominador Santos, a Manila police captain en route back to the station, saw six Japanese troops slip inside the three-story Singer Building at the northwestern corner of Soler and Reina Regente streets, both carrying what looked like dynamite. Santos ducked into a nearby building to observe. Ten minutes passed before he witnessed the troops leave. “A few minutes later I heard a terrific explosion in the Singer Building and a fire broke out,” he recalled. “I felt the shock and concussion of the explosion where I was hiding.” Later that same day Angel Dionzon saw four troops with a five-gallon drum of gasoline in front of the Banco Hipotecario. The soldiers soaked gunnysacks in the fuel and hurled them inside the China Bank Building on Dasmarinas Street before lobbing a lone grenade. “The whole ground floor,” Dionzon later said, “was burned out.”
The following morning around nine-thirty, a large truck with eight Japanese troops rolled to a stop on San Vicente Street behind the Yucan Seh Drug Building. Yu Cheng Pho, the thirty-four-year-old employee of the Yutivo Hardware Company, looked out a mezzanine window into the truck bed and spotted what appeared to be a dozen airplane bombs, each about four feet long with blue noses and fins on the tails. One of the soldiers lugged a half-dozen inside the rear entrance of the Crystal Arcade, the four-story art deco building that fronted Escolta. One of Manila’s finest commercial centers, the Crystal Arcade, so named for its intricate glasswork, housed the Manila stock exchange, cafés, and other luxury stores. The truck then motored down to the Yutivo Hardware Building on Dasmarinas Street, where Japanese sentries unloaded more bombs. Then it continued on to the corner of Rosario Street. Troops again hauled the weapons inside nearby buildings, targeting the modern concrete structures. That evening at seven p.m. the inferno began. Pho watched as the bombs gutted the once-grand Crystal Arcade. “There were explosions all over this area by this time and fires reached all around me,” he recalled. “I ran to a Japanese air-raid shelter located behind the Capitol Theater Building on San Vicente Street. That is how I saved my life and the lives of my family.”
The destruction intensified, prompting residents and merchants to flee. Japanese troops at times used rifle butts to smash glass doors, unloading more airplane bombs, including some hauled in the back of a horse-drawn cart. Others resorted to sloshing gasoline and using long bamboo poles to ignite it or tossing Molotov cocktails into lobbies. Building after building soon exploded. The Romanch Music Store went up in flames. So did the Philippine National Bank, the Roces Building, and Bank of the Philippine Islands. Black clouds billowed skyward as the flames marched down the Escolta, reducing Manila’s Fifth Avenue to scorched rubble. Sixty-five-year-old real estate manager Vicente Arias was close enough to see Molotov cocktails explode. He held out as long as possible before fleeing with his family toward the American lines. “By this time,” he recalled, “all of the surrounding buildings were ablaze.”
AT THE SAME TIME that Japanese troops began to torch Manila, soldiers under Colonel Noguchi swept through the working class district of Tondo, rounding up suspected guerrillas on the north side of the river who might help the Americans, a net that would snare scores of women and children. One of those the Japanese grabbed was twenty-five-year-old Ricardo San Juan, a married father of three who worked in the city slaughterhouse killing pigs. Eight Japanese soldiers broke into his house at eleven on the night of February 2 and tied him up along with his wife Virginia. The Japanese marched San Juan and his family, including his father-in-law and three children ages one, three, and five, to the Isabelo Delos Reyes Elementary School on Sande Street, which the soldiers used as a garrison. There the Japanese held the family, along with dozens of others, overnight in the back near the school’s kitchen.
At six p.m. on February 3, troops prodded the captives to a nearby house owned by Dr. Santiago Barcelona. The Japanese segregated the men, forcing them into one room and the women and children into another. Two hours later—as American forces closed in on Santo Tomas—nearly two dozen Japanese troops pulled out a group of male captives and led them across Juan Luna Street to the Dy Pac Lumberyard, which the Japanese had seized during the occupation to manufacture wood. “When we reached the place we were lined up in one straight line beside a canal,” San Juan recalled. “Our hands were tied behind our backs and I was the last man in the line.”
Via the beams from Japanese flashlights, San Juan counted twenty other men in front of him. A few of the men, like San Juan, had fought as guerrillas, but many others had not. At the head of the line stood thirty-two-year-old Fructuoso Viri, who also worked at the city slaughterhouse. Like San Juan, two Japanese soldiers had rustled Viri out of bed in the middle of the night, binding his hands behind his back and then dragging him off, leaving behind his pregnant wife and children.
The Japanese untied Viri’s hands this evening and prodded him about twenty-five feet away from the group. Guards then forced him to kneel. One of the soldiers, whom San Juan estimated to be about five feet six inches tall, clutched a sabre. Illuminated by the flashlight, the soldier raised the blade above his head and brought it down on Viri’s neck. “His head,” San Juan recalled, “was completely cut off.”
The Japanese moved on to the second man in line. Then the third, fourth, and fifth, each one suffering a similar fate.
Twenty-three-year-old Ricardo Trinidad, who earned a living working as kitchen help, stood sixth in line. The Japanese had grabbed him, like the others, in the predawn hours of February 3, rousing him from bed by pressing a Luger against his head. Guards this evening untied Trinidad’s hands and led him out in the field. A moment later a soldier bayoneted him in the right side of his back. To Trinidad’s horror, the blade passed through his torso and popped out the front of his chest between his ninth and tenth ribs. “I fell forward on my face and while I was on the ground, I was again bayonetted on my right arm between my shoulder and elbow,” he would later tell American war crimes investigators. “I did not say anything or cry. I pretended to be dead. The two Japanese soldiers left me and returned to the main group.”
The slaughter continued.
In some cases the victim’s head rolled off, but other times it did not. That was the case for Venancio Pimentel, the fourteenth man in line. The Japanese struck Pimentel once on the neck. He moaned. The soldier hit him a second time, but again Pimentel did not die. Finally one of the soldiers crushed his skull with the butt of his rifle.
San Juan’s father-in-law, sixty-three-year-old Twan Yap, suffered a similar fate. “Oh!” Yap cried after the first blow. “How painful.”
San Juan could only listen to his father-in-law, powerless to intervene. “When the Japanese heard him groan he was struck for the second time,” San Juan recalled. “When he groaned again the Japanese hit him the third time till he died.”
The soldiers continued down the line, eventually reaching the twentieth man, Dominador Antonio, who had lost his right hand the previous September in an American air raid. Like the others, the thirty-five-year-old Antonio did not fight or struggle. In the flickering beams of a flashlight, San Juan watched as the Japanese forced him to kneel and chopped his neck. “His head,” he said, “was not separated from his body.”
Then it was San Juan’s turn. “When the executioner came to me,” he later testified, “I was struck on the back of my neck by a saber. I fell forward and pretended to be dead.”
As with several before him, the soldiers had failed to sever San Juan’s head, striking him in the thick muscle just below his neck. The doctor who treated him seven days later would tell investigators that the saber ripped a gash thirteen inches long, three inches wide, and one and a half inches deep in the base of his neck.
Convinced he was dead, the Japanese abandoned San Juan. Moments later he pulled himself about two meters away into the towering weeds.
But the night’s terror had only begun.
The Japanese returned to the same spot with a second group of captives. On his belly in the brush, San Juan counted nineteen women and twenty-seven children. Among them, he saw his twenty-five-year-old wife Virginia and the couple’s three children. Four months pregnant at the time, Virginia held the couple’s youngest child in her arms, one-year-old Jose. The Japanese had tied the adults together with a long strand of rope looped around the upper left arm of each woman. Guards herded the women into a circle around the children. The Japanese then formed a perimeter around them.
To San Juan’s horror, the soldiers began to bayonet the children and even the infants, including two-month-old Celia Fajardo, wrapped in a gray flannel sleep suit. “Some of the babies were grabbed from the arms of their mothers and were held by their two hands in mid air by one of the Japanese soldiers,” he later told investigators. “At that instant the executioner would stab them in that position.”
The orgy of violence escalated. Hidden in the dark thicket barely eight feet away, San Juan watched a soldier plunge his bayonet into the chest of his five-year-old son, Cresencio. He heard the boy cry out before he collapsed and died. The same soldier then snatched up his infant son Jose. “That baby of mine,” San Juan recalled, “was thrown into the air and then caught with the point of a bayonet.”
Soldiers likewise killed his three-year-old daughter Corazon—her name Spanish for Heart—but San Juan did not see it; that was the only mercy he experienced that night.
With the children littered on the ground dead, the Japanese pounced on the mothers with blood-soaked bayonets. The same soldier who had tried to cut off his head ran his blade through the belly of San Juan’s pregnant wife.
“Oh, how painful!” she cried, her final words echoing those of her father.
Then she, too, died.
And before the night was over, so would dozens more.