“The screams of my wife continued for some time and finally died out.”
—ENGRACIO LOSA,
TESTIMONY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1945
JAPANESE MARINES FANNED OUT THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 9 through Malate, rounding up men, women, and children and marching them to St. Paul’s College, where troops assured residents they would protect them at the Catholic school.
One of those seized was fifty-nine-year-old Spaniard Cayetano Barahona, who had prepared to sit down to an eleven-thirty a.m. lunch in his Wright Street home. Two marines banged on the outside gate, telling him that soldiers planned to blow up the nearby Bureau of Science Building. “You have to leave,” marines demanded.
Barahona protested, prompting the Japanese to raise their bayonets.
“No use of arguing,” Maria Barahona pleaded with her husband.
Cayetano Barahona asked if the family might instead go south to Pasay.
“No,” troops barked. “You must obey.”
A similar scene played out in the Herran Street home of twenty-nine-year-old Domingo Giocado, who was asleep when enemy troops encircled his house. “Wake up,” his wife told him. “Plenty of Japanese around this building.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
Marines banged on his door moments later. “Filipinos go to St. Paul’s,” they told him. “Much better there at St. Paul’s so that you will not be killed.”
The Japanese not only went house to house, but they also rustled residents from bomb shelters. That’s where marines found forty-four-year-old Clara Rice.
“Ma’am,” Rice’s servant told her, “they want us to get out.”
She climbed out.
“Go,” marines barked in English.
“Where?” she asked.
“Just go.”
Other times troops grabbed residents off the street, including Dr. Luis Vazquez and his brother Daniel, both of whom wore medical uniforms and were en route to work at the Philippine General Hospital. The duo protested without success.
“You can’t get through,” the Japanese insisted.
Throughout Malate, individuals and families wandered onto the grounds of the Catholic college, prodded along by bayonet-armed sentries.
“Kura,” the Japanese barked, ordering them to move along. “Kura.”
Marines searched the new arrivals, stealing money, jewelry, and watches before ordering them to sit in the garden. The Japanese directed a few, including thirty-two-year-old Gurmuksing Kanusing of India, to pray before a shrine.
“You go to see Christ,” the troops admonished.
As morning turned to afternoon, the college’s garden filled up. A few Japanese troops, in a juvenile effort to show off before the detainees, bayoneted banana trees. One officer brandished his saber before twelve-year-old Salvador Sepulveda. “This,” the officer bragged, “is the one I will use for the Americans.”
Rain began to fall, prompting the Japanese to herd the soaked captives inside. “Don’t bring your packages,” the marines demanded. “Don’t bring anything.”
The detainees followed orders, including twenty-eight-year-old Josefina Punzalan, who eyed the fixed bayonets and the hostile faces of the Japanese. Fear washed over her. “We said some prayers,” Punzalan recalled. “We said the rosary.”
Captives may have traded the rain for a roof, but the conditions inside proved cramped at best as the marines ushered scores into a single room with no ventilation. The Japanese refused pleas to open a window, fearing shrapnel. Many of the babies cried, while several women passed out. “All the people,” recalled Serafin Sepulveda, “were screaming and shouting because there was no air in the room.”
“In case we are led to another room,” Cayetano Barahona told his family members, “try to place yourself near the windows.”
The Japanese finally relented and shuffled the detainees into the school’s kitchen and then into the college’s cavernous dining hall, a rectangular room that measured sixty-six feet long and twenty-nine feet wide. Several large windows offered views out toward Florida Street. Refugees sat in chairs and climbed atop the half-dozen tables. Others leaned against the walls, and still more plopped down on the floor.
“Stay near the windows,” Cayetano Barahona reminded his family.
The numbers continued to swell until several hundred detainees crowded inside the dining hall, including dozens of children and pregnant women. Nationalities ranged from Filipinos and Chinese to Spaniards, Russians, and Indians.
Around five-thirty p.m., an officer accompanied by four troops strode to the center of the room. “Wait and be quiet,” the officer said. “We are going to give you food.”
The refugees struggled to understand.
“Who knows how to speak Japanese?” the officer asked.
Two Indians volunteered to translate. The officer explained that the Japanese planned to burn the houses in the neighborhood, but that those inside the dining hall would be safe. The troops held up candy and drinks, going so far as to open a couple cans and take a few swigs. The Japanese then dumped the food on the floor.
“Get the candies,” the officer said.
The troops filed out of the dining hall as the starved detainees dove toward the center of room, a massive huddle of humanity tussling over candy.
Josefina Punzalan felt her earlier fears return. “Do not stand up, any of you,” she ordered her family.
Others in the dining hall shared her suspicion. “Maybe it’s poison,” Luisa Barahona said.
Cayetano Barahona echoed his daughter. “Don’t stand,” he warned his wife and children.
Overhead hung several chandeliers draped in blackout paper, including one over the center of the room where people scurried for candy. A few of the refugees spied wires running from the fixtures through the transom and into the corridor.
“Miss,” Luisa Barahona’s maid said to her. “The lights are moving.”
Luisa looked up just as the chandelier over the center of the room dropped and exploded. The other booby-trapped fixtures fell and detonated almost simultaneously. Witnesses would later recall the bright—almost blinding—flash of light that preceded the thunder of explosions. The first blast was deafening, followed by others that to damaged ears seemed muffled, even far away. At the Assumption Convent across the street, Sister Anna de Jesus saw the roof blow off, ultimately landing about three blocks away. “The college was burning,” she said, “flames in all directions.”
Inside the dining hall, the successive explosions shattered the windows and punched a gaping hole in the western wall of the room large enough for a truck to pass through it. On the ground where children and adults alike only seconds earlier had scrambled for candy lay dozens of shredded bodies, many missing arms and legs. Blood flowed on the floor, while dust and smoke clouded the air, choking the survivors. Few could see more than a few feet in front of them, including twenty-nine-year-old Pacifico Benito, who looked down. “I saw my right foot bleeding and also the calf of my left leg,” he said. “I could not remember what happened then. I felt my head grow big. I did not even remember my wife.” Others suffered similar trauma, including twenty-five-year-old Eutiquio Antipolo. “I vomited blood,” he said, “because of the shock.”
In those first few seconds after the initial explosion, disoriented and bloodied survivors struggled to sit up or stand. Cayetano Barahona, who had warned his family to keep away from the center of the room, found that even at that distance the explosion had blown off all his clothes except for his shoes and pants. Others felt themselves wearing the blood of strangers. Thirty-two-year-old Virginia Sepulveda woke up to discover the blast had burned her hair. Dazed and disoriented, the survivors stumbled toward the exits, some of them oblivious to the carnage around them. “I could hear children crying, men shouting and people asking for help,” remembered thirty-year-old Marcelino Punzalan. “Because of this panic, people were stepping on the bodies of the men who could not stand.” Sixty-one-year-old Theodore Blendo did just that as he held tight to his wife’s hand. “We walked,” he said, “over dead children and mothers with children.”
“Let’s run,” people began to shout in Tagalog.
Outside in the corridor the Japanese tossed grenades through the transoms, which exploded and caused more chaos. Marines then stormed the dining hall and opened fire. Others attacked survivors with bayonets. Those who were able poured through the hole in the wall and ran toward Florida Street, where troops there greeted them with the rattle of machine guns and bayonets. Angeles Barahona staggered to her feet in time to witness a Japanese marine yank a baby boy from his mother’s grasp and toss him into the air just as one might throw a ball. “Another Japanese with a fixed bayonet came in and just stuck the baby right in the middle of his stomach,” Barahona later testified. “I saw the baby dangling with the bayonet still in his stomach.” Her father witnessed it, too, noting how the impaled baby did not immediately die. “I could see,” Cayetano Barahona later told investigators, “how the baby dangled moving his hands.”
Twenty-five-year-old housekeeper Rosario Fernandez saw survivors jumping out of one of the windows. She followed, but as she prepared to climb up, a heavyset woman on the ground grabbed her dress. “She was pleading to me to save her.”
“I cannot carry you,” Fernandez said.
The Japanese opened fire behind her; Fernandez could wait no longer. “I tore that part of my dress she was holding and I jumped out.”
Thirteen-year-old Winfred Colma clung to his mother as the marines continued the slaughter. “She was holding my hand at that time when the Japanese machine-gunned her,” Colma recalled. “After that her hands lost hold of me.”
“My child,” Concepcion Colma cried. “My child.”
A grenade exploded, killing Colma’s nine-year-old sister Violeta, fourteen-year-old brother Camilo, and fifteen-year-old sister Illuminada. Colma stared at the remains of his oldest sister. “Her right leg,” he said, “was cut off by the explosion.”
Thirty-two-year-old Camilo Diego woke up in the corridor outside the dining room, where the explosion had hurled him along with his four-year-old daughter Lydia and thirteen-year-old daughter Alicia. Inside the dining hall lay the remains of his wife, Cocha, their eight-year-old daughter Rosalinda, and twelve-year-old son Romeo. Diego watched Japanese troops toss grenades and charge into the dining hall.
“Father,” his eldest daughter Alicia cried, “I am burning.”
Diego patted out the flames with his hands, but she, too, succumbed to her wounds, leaving him alone in the corridor with his badly injured four-year-old; they were the last two alive of a family of five. Diego pretended to be dead as troops chased survivors out into the garden and shot them, leaving bodies sprawled atop the compound walls. Marines hunted others who fled into the yards of neighboring homes, grenading a bomb shelter where dozens hid and massacring others in a maniacal fury.
“Kill me,” one mother pleaded, “but don’t get my baby.”
The Japanese ignored her pleas.
A marine seized the newborn, tossed it into the air, and skewered the baby on a bayonet. The mother screamed before a marine mercifully shot her.
Terrified survivors swarmed the yard of Dr. Herminio Velarde, who heard the excitement and rushed downstairs, expecting to welcome American liberators. Instead the physician watched the Japanese scale his wall and begin murdering civilians. One marine seized a teenage girl who tried to hide behind a banana tree. On her knees, she begged for mercy. “He got his knife, held her by the long hair, raised the little girl and started to strike at the neck,” Velarde recalled, “but he paused at this moment to get the rest of his comrades and they laughed and giggled, then finished the act. The girl fell dead on the spot.”
Inside the college’s dining hall, the slaughter subsided. Troops rifled through the valuables of the dead, the tally of which war crimes investigators later reported as 360. Camilo Diego watched the Japanese then douse the bodies with gasoline and set them on fire, turning the room into an inferno. Amid the chaos, Diego slipped away, carrying his wounded daughter Lydia to the college’s chapel. He wrapped her tiny body in a cloak and placed her on the altar before God. “That child of mine,” he later said, “died right at the altar.”
AT THE SAME TIME Japanese troops rounded up residents at St. Paul’s College, others went through the posh district of Ermita extracting families from homes and bomb shelters and marching them to the Plaza Fergusson. By five p.m. the Japanese had corralled about two thousand men, women, and children of all nationalities. Troops separated the men and boys, herding them to the Manila Hotel. Others led the women to the Bay View Hotel. The nine-story hotel on Dewey Boulevard, which sat just across the street from the waterfront, was a short walk south from the Manila Hotel. The luxurious lodging had served as Jean MacArthur’s first home in the Philippine capital before she resettled at the Manila Hotel with the general. Troops this Friday evening marched the captive women into the lobby, which was filled with guns and ammunition. Injured marines sprawled out on the floor along with the bodies of a few dead. The Japanese prodded the young women and girls upstairs to the third floor, depositing a group of about two dozen in Room 211 with a single window that faced Dewey Boulevard and Manila Bay.
“Matte, matte,” the marines ordered. “Sit, sit.”
The women did as ordered, surveying the room that measured about fourteen by fourteen feet. “It was bare but had some mattresses on the floor. There was no light, no water, no bathroom, but just a small closest in one corner,” recalled twenty-five-year-old Lucy Tani, a stenographer. “It was very dark and hot in the room.”
The marines closed the door, but the women could hear them on the other side. “We tried to make ourselves comfortable, but everybody was nervous and praying,” said Esther Moras. “There was hardly room enough to lie down.”
The women barely had time to sit when the door opened again at ten-thirty p.m. and several marines entered, carrying flashlights and candles to illuminate the faces of the women. “We pulled our hair down over our eyes and turned our faces to the wall,” Moras said, “and crouched into the corner attempting to avoid their scrutiny.”
The marines left, only to return again moments later. One of the marines grabbed fourteen-year-old Evangeline Garcia. Another marine with gold teeth—and armed with a pistol and bayonet—grabbed her fifteen-year-old sister, Priscilla.
“You go,” he demanded.
Priscilla refused, prompting the marine to kick and slap the terrified teenager. “What else could I do but go?” she later said. “He had a gun.”
The marines dragged the two teens by the arms to an empty room on the hotel’s fifth floor that overlooked Alhambra Street. One marine took Priscilla into an adjoining room, while the other attacked Evangeline. “He pulled my dress up and noticed at that time that I was having my menstrual period,” she said. “When he saw this, he kicked me in the buttocks, pulled his revolver from the holster and pointed it at me.”
“Kill,” the marine barked. “Kill.”
To her surprise, however, the marine didn’t shoot, but instead dragged her back downstairs to the room with the others. She searched out her older sister Esther, collapsing in her arms. “She was crying like her heart would break,” Esther recalled. “I tried to soothe her and ask her what had happened.”
“Nothing happened to me because I am menstruating.”
“Where is Pris?” Esther pressed. “Where is Pris?”
“Oh,” Evangeline cried out, “they are doing things to her, Esther! They are doing things to her!”
Esther pulled her younger sister close and held her. “Everybody in the room,” she later said, “knew what was going to happen to us.”
Evangeline’s respite did not last. Three Japanese barged into the room minutes later and began searching out girls by candlelight. One grabbed Evangeline, prying her from her sister’s grip. “I was not strong enough,” Esther later said. “Everyone in the room was crying and trying to hide under mattresses and nets.”
The marine dragged her back to one of the hotel’s upper floors. She again protested that she was menstruating. He did not believe her, so he took a piece of cotton on the end of his finger, inserted it inside her, and pulled it out.
“I leave you here,” he said.
Priscilla Garcia, meanwhile, was helpless at the hands of the marine who dragged her up to the fifth-floor room, empty except for a mattress on the floor and pillows. “He took me to the window and told me that there were many Americans on the other side of the river and that neither of us would get to see them as we would be dead shortly.”
The marine grabbed her blouse and tore it off of her. He ordered her to remove her skirt, but Priscilla refused, prompting him to threaten her with his pistol. She relented. “He told me to lie down on the floor and seeing that I could not do anything, I obeyed him,” she said. “I was crying and very much frightened.” The marine slapped her and barked at her in Japanese. “He placed his pistol on one side of me and the bayonet on the other and then removed all of his clothes,” Priscilla testified. “After removing his clothes he got on top of me.” But the marine proved unable to force himself inside the fifteen-year-old. “He took his knife, cut me open, and then he finally succeeded.”
When the marine finished, he ordered Priscilla to get dressed. She pulled on her clothes, which were soon soaked in blood, before he led her back downstairs.
“You will have Japanese baby,” he told her, “not American baby.”
Priscilla found her sister, Esther. “She was perspiring,” Esther recalled. “Her hair was all messed up; her dress was turned around, and she was bleeding all over.”
“Esther,” Priscilla cried, “they did something to me! I want to die! I want to die!”
Pacita Tapia sat nearby and saw Priscilla return. “She seemed to be so dazed that she looked like she had seen something unspeakable,” she said. “Her eyes just seemed to stare out into space and she acted as though she were in a trance.”
Half an hour later, at about eleven-thirty p.m., another marine came for Priscilla.
“Get up,” he ordered.
“No, no,” she protested. “I am finished.”
She was not.
The Japanese raped Priscilla two more times that night.
Her older sister’s trauma was only beginning. Three marines grabbed Esther, dragging her to a room down the hall, where one of the troops ripped off her pants while the other two laughed. “I was struggling, kicking, and striking out with my arms, but the one who was holding me down slapped me all about my face with his bare hands,” she recalled. “I became dazed from the slapping and when I finally got exhausted, I lay on the floor like a log.” The marine then mounted her, finishing in less than three minutes. “He stood up, and one of the others got down on me. He had his trousers unbuttoned and his organ was out and he forced it into me,” she said. “I tried to resist him but I knew all was over and I was lost.” Esther covered her face. “When he finished, he got up and the third one attacked me in the same manner. “
The rape by three marines lasted less than twenty minutes. The troops then left her hurt and disoriented on the floor. “I crawled on my hands and knees, struggled to my feet, and somehow managed to get back to the room where I had been taken from the other girls,” she recalled. “I just fell on the floor and sobbed.”
But Esther’s reprieve proved short-lived.
Another marine grabbed her moments later.
Then another.
Time and again marines dragged the twenty-four-year-old out and raped her, so many times, in fact, Esther lost count. “I was raped between 12 and 15 times during that night. I cannot remember exactly how many times,” she later testified. “I was so tired and horror stricken that it became a living nightmare.” At times, the Japanese grabbed her singly, other times in groups, often only moments after she had collapsed to the floor of the room from a preceding attack. “On each occasion I did my best to prevent the attacks, but as I grew weaker and weaker and my private parts became more inflamed and painful, I gave up all hope of living and expected them to continue until they killed me.” Her horror finally ended about four a.m. “I was raped by a marine whose organ was so large that it tore my insides and I bled from my private parts,” she said. “Only then did they leave me alone utterly exhausted, in great pain and bleeding badly.”
The Garcia sisters were not the only ones marines attacked. Over the next several nights, troops returned to that room and others throughout the hotel again and again, often targeting the teenage girls and the young women, particular those with lighter skin. Similar abuse occurred at the nearby Alhambra and Miramar apartments. “They were like mad, wild dogs,” recalled Paquita Coastas Garcia. Pacita Tapia echoed her. “They were not even human beings—they acted like animals.”
Many of the girls fought back only to be dragged away by the hair, arms, and legs, kicking at the walls of hallways lit by candle and flashlight. In the upper-floor rooms where tourists once enjoyed the legendary sunsets over Manila Bay, troops slapped and punched women to force them to submit. Others wielded guns, bayonets, and swords. “I wanted to die,” recalled Fanny Gadol. “Everything seemed lost.”
The women returned to the downstairs rooms with bloodstained dresses. Others wore blank stares. A few shared their stories to warn the others.
“My God!” one woman howled. “The dirty bastards. They have raped me.”
“I want to die,” cried another. “I want to die.”
“These Japanese beasts have evil designs on all of us.”
Women cowered in fear in the darkened rooms, while the thunder of artillery at times shook the hotel, and a red glow rose from the dying city. “The girls were all crying, sobbing and screaming,” recalled Vicky Gadol. “Everything was in confusion,” added Margarita Salado Ghezzi. “Each time we heard the sound of the boots in the hallway, we would start praying.”
Drunken marines with bloodshot eyes and red cheeks stumbled down the corridors, armed with whiskey bottles. Others opened the doors, their penises already dangling out of the front of their trousers. “We could smell the liquor from their breath when they came into the room,” remembered Erlinda Querubin. “The Japanese were dirty, unshaven and smelled like pigs.” A few of the troops attempted in a juvenile manner to demonstrate their bravado, including one inebriated marine who barged in and brandished his bayonet. “He showed the girls how sharp his bayonet was by cutting a big gash on the door,” Ghezzi recalled. “He took that same bayonet and ripped open the skirt of a girl from the bottom hem up to her hips.”
To deter attack, the women tried to make themselves appear unattractive, pulling their hair over their eyes and smearing their faces with mud from their shoes. One woman stuffed her mouth with rags to make her cheeks look swollen. “I took out my artificial teeth and told them I was very old,” recalled Rebecca Habibi. Julia Ghezzi feigned illness. “I stuck my finger down my throat,” she said, “pretending to be vomiting.” Pilar Garcia Viuda de Castaner told a marine her daughter suffered from tuberculosis. “No good, no good, she is sick,” Castaner protested. “She has blood in the mouth.” Other women resorted to bribery, including twenty-four-year-old Carmencita Ballesteros, who offered a marine her wedding and engagement rings along with her husband’s watches that she had in her purse. “When he saw the watches, which I was offering,” she said, “he grabbed them and put them in his breast pocket and offered to pay me for them.”
Conditions inside the once-luxurious hotel meanwhile deteriorated by the hour. Absent electricity, there were no elevators, lights, or fans to circulate the stifling air. Temperatures in packed rooms soared. Without running water to flush filthy toilets or to even drink, sanitation proved another nightmare. The few pails of water the Japanese provided were hauled from the nearby swimming pool of the Army and Navy Club. Many captives suffered from a brutal thirst, which the Japanese cruelly exploited, tormenting women with buckets of undrinkable salt water and even water mixed with kerosene. Others resorted to choking down the stagnant green water from the toilet tanks. Querubin described the desperation in her room that followed the time the Japanese brought in a bucket of water. “We grabbed the pail and started to drink the water like animals,” she recalled. “Some water was spilled on the floor and some of the girls licked up the water on the floor.”
Over the women hung the uncertainty of who would be next. “Every night was the same—the Japanese would take girls all night long,” said Luisa Guevara. “I lost track of what was going on—I thought we were all going to be killed.” The captives tried to protect the young girls in each room, crowding them in the center surrounded by a wall of older women. The few prostitutes likewise offered themselves. Paquita Coastas Garcia recounted the agony of hearing her own daughter being abused down the hall, screaming for her. “I was so upset,” Garcia said, “that I could not think straight.” The days of terror turned Rebecca Habibi’s hair white. “I could hear screams and cries and pleadings and prayers every night in our room and in the rooms around us,” said Raymunda Guevara. “All of us,” added Pilar Miranda, “were praying incessantly throughout the night.” The fear wore down everyone. “It was so terrible,” Querubin said, “none of us expected to escape with our lives.”
The strain of the battle showed on the Japanese, who rather than rest spent each night drunk. A sense of doom had set in among the troops, who seemed to realize after only one week of fighting that MacArthur’s larger forces, with superior firepower, would in the end win. It was only a matter of time, maybe even days. Some of the Japanese troops sought emotional comfort from the kidnapped women. One marine put Trinidad Llamas de Garcia and her daughter Teresita up in his private room, spoiling them with canned food and orange juice while professing his love for her daughter. “He told me,” Garcia said, “that before he left to go forth and die he wished to have intercourse with my daughter as his last worldly pleasure.” Other troops begged Filipino women to marry them, including Isabel Caro, imprisoned in the nearby Miramar Apartments. “He had a pistol,” she said. “He told me that he was going to kill me if I did not marry him.”
Finally on February 13, American artillery discovered the Bay View. Shells hurled from north of the river pummeled the once-grand hotel. Fires erupted that afternoon on the upper floors, while flames from the neighboring Coffee Pot restaurant reached through the windows of the ground-floor ballroom. “The place was in bedlam,” Paquita Coastas Garcia said. “The women and children were screaming.” The Japanese initially turned the bayonets on the women, refusing to let them leave, but later relented. The former captives flooded out the Bay View’s main entrance onto Dewey Boulevard and into the middle of the battle. “The hotel was burning fiercely,” said Trinidad Llamas de Garcia. “We barely escaped being burned to death.”
INSIDE SANTO TOMAS, many of the internees, who only days earlier had celebrated liberation, now struggled as the euphoria waned and the battle worsened. Not only did the barrage of artillery rattle nerves, but many wrestled with cramps and diarrhea sparked by the rich new foods. Adding to the misery, the lack of running water meant that the only means of flushing toilets was with buckets of water hauled in from outside. The challenge exacerbated the emotional strain for internees, including Roka. “No matter how hard I tried to chew my food slowly and tried to remain calm, nothing seemed to help. I wished desperately that I could have sat down to one meal without starting to bawl. I was beginning to dread mealtime,” she wrote in her diary. “How I despised my weakness!”
Parents attempted to teach children, who had spent years eating little more than a watery gruel known simply as mush, about all the tasty new foods that awaited them. Bill Dunn captured one mother’s efforts in a radio broadcast. “She tried,” Dunn reported, “to describe cornflakes with fresh fruit and cream—ice cream, cakes and cookies—all the things which mean so much to the average child.”
“Yes, mother,” the boy replied, “but will I get plenty of mush?”
Six-year-old British internee Robert Colquhoun later recalled a similar experience when he spotted a strange elongated object. “It was a loaf of bread,” he remembered. “The first I had ever seen.” Colquhoun was enamored of a new product called Klim—milk spelled backwards—which was an evaporated dairy product. “I particularly loved eating the milk powder as it was,” he wrote. “It stuck to the roof of the mouth, where it had to be dislodged with the tongue, and tasted delicious.”
Despite that, he, too, struggled with the foods, landing in the camp hospital, where during lulls in the battle, American troops took time to visit the sick children. “One gave me a bullet case,” Colquhoun recalled, “which I especially prized.”
A February 11 report to MacArthur showed that the average internee gained more than one pound per day. Despite the improvements, MacArthur’s staff noted with alarm that some internees had begun to sell Red Cross medical supplies to outside hospitals, pharmacies, and private practitioners. Furthermore, his staff was outraged by the sale of necessary goods at usurious prices before the camp’s liberation. The report went so far as to list nineteen internees believed to have been the worst offenders. MacArthur put out a notice to all internees that he considered any such debts void. “I cannot bring myself to believe that there are American citizens who would so debase the cause of our country to seek to profit from the misfortune and tragedy that has been the common lot of all American and Allied civilians imprisoned by the enemy,” MacArthur wrote. “I have directed the appropriate agencies of this headquarters to make thorough investigation thereof with a view of affording all protection within my power to any who have been wronged and bringing to justice all persons responsible therefor.”
Internees meanwhile watched the haunting glow that hung over Manila as the city burned. “The nights are pretty hellish, with red sky and the sighing of shells over us,” Robert Wygle wrote in his diary. “Manila is still burning, but what there is left to burn after six months of fire is hard to imagine.” Even for veteran journalists, who had seen some of the war’s worst over the years, the destruction proved surreal. “There’s something unreal about watching a great city go up in flames,” Dunn wrote. “You know it’s happening because it’s right there before your eyes, but still there’s a feeling that your senses must be playing you false.”
Despite the struggles, fear, and uncertainty, a few internees found new happiness, including nurse Bertha Dworsky, who married John Henderson in the Main Building museum on the same day the Japanese artillery attack killed so many. “A few days ago we couldn’t have thrown rice at them,” Eunice Young wrote in her diary. “We needed it too badly to eat, but to-nite we could throw all we wanted.”
DURING THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION, Nick Reyes had run into a former employee of his from Far Eastern University. She had asked his thoughts on the war.
“The worst,” he confided in her, “is yet to come.”
That prophecy materialized on the afternoon of February 9 as the Reyes family now contemplated escape. Only the night before, Reyes and his daughter Lourdes had watched troops round up males and torch nearby homes.
One of the survivors of that horror visited the Reyeses’ home that Friday, exhausted and with bloodshot eyes, asking for food. A former employee of Far Eastern University, he dropped to his knees and pleaded with Reyes to flee.
“It is your turn to be attacked tonight,” the employee said. “You have grilled windows. How will you jump out when they burn your house?”
For Reyes, escape proved a painful proposition. He had built his elegant three-story mansion only a few years before the war with the help of one of Manila’s finest architects, Pablo Antonio. The home featured a library, grand staircase, gardens, and stables, not to mention a matching playhouse. Like so many others, the war had cost Reyes dearly. He had shuttered the university he had labored so hard to build and sold his home in Baguio. In the final weeks of the occupation, the Japanese, in a failed effort to steal his beloved Arabian horse, had flogged Kublai Khan so mercilessly that Reyes had to euthanize the animal. “There was a shocked silence in our house for days,” Lourdes recalled. “Somehow, Kublai Khan’s loss was like a loss of innocence—our rudest awakening to the cruelty of our oppressors and the inhumanity of men.”
Only recently had the Reyes family, whose home a Japanese mining company had commandeered for much of the war, been allowed to finally return. Now the family once again faced the possibility of evacuation and loss.
The bigger challenge confronting Reyes and thousands of others across Manila was where to go. The Japanese controlled the southern part of the capital, much of which troops had begun to burn. Iwabuchi’s marines had mined the streets and now sniped at civilians from pillboxes. Few even knew in what direction to flee to find the American lines. Beyond that, Reyes family members ranged from small children to the elderly; many of them wouldn’t be able to make a miles-long trek across a war-torn city.
The only nearby place to seek refuge was De La Salle College, but Reyes found the gates locked. Rather than flee, he decided the family would instead hide in the three large bomb shelters in the garden, each cavernous and with camouflaged entrances. Enemy troops finding the house empty would assume the residents had fled and likely not search the gardens. “Safe in there,” Lourdes recalled, “we could even survive the burning of our houses.” Reyes instructed members of his extended family who lived nearby to return home and pack enough food and clothing to endure a long siege. Reyes likewise told his wife and children to pack knapsacks with food and to dress in dark clothes. He and his son Luis slipped on khaki trousers and long-sleeved shirts. His wife Amparing Reyes wore a dark dress, while daughter Lourdes put on a navy blue one with stripes. The couple’s youngest daughter Teresita wore a dark blue dress with white polka dots. Reyes then asked each family member to bring him any prized valuables to lock in the safe. Lourdes handed over her stamp collection and the watch her father had given her for graduation.
The family prepared to sit down at four p.m. for an early supper before heading to the garden shelter. The table was set, knapsacks readied, and shoes laced tight. Upstairs Amparing Reyes finished up as the others gravitated toward the table.
Outside a rifle shot shattered the late afternoon, followed by the howl of a dog and then the stomp of boots. The family’s cook Delfin charged into the room.
“They’re here, señorito,” he cried. “They’re here!”
Amparing Reyes had seen the Japanese troops shoot the dog from her balcony above and charged down the stairs to the living room, where her husband gathered the family around him. Lourdes scanned the faces. Along with her father and mother, she spotted her sister Teresita, brother Luis, and the orphaned Milagros. Lourdes counted her uncle Maximo, aunt Purita, and her six-year-old cousin Edgar along with the family’s laundress Vicenta, her son Atanacio, and the servants Paula and Liling. The footfalls of the troops approached. The Japanese began to pound on the door.
“Be brave,” Nick Reyes told his family.
Japanese marines filed one after the other into the home and fanned out in the room. Lourdes counted ten, each armed with a rifle and fixed bayonet.
“We’re only civilians,” her mother pleaded.
One of the troops banged on the family’s piano with the butt of his rifle. “The strange sounds,” Lourdes recalled, “eerily rang like a death knell.”
Marines seized Luis, Milagros, Edgar, and Atanacio, pulling the four children toward the garden. Purita charged after them, clutching a can of biscuits for her only son. “Candy,” she pleaded. “Candy for the baby.”
One of the troops hit her with his rifle.
The Japanese corralled the rest of the family. Marines grabbed Lourdes and Teresita, marching the siblings to the third-floor tower. Lourdes held tight to her little sister’s hand. “Side by side,” she recalled, “our little fingers linked.”
“Pray,” Lourdes whispered to Teresita.
One of the marines led Lourdes back downstairs to her bedroom, searching for a rope to bind them. He shredded a bedsheet and then blindfolded her and tied her hands. Lourdes spread her hands so that the binds were not too tight. The marine stepped outside of the room, presumably to take the bindings to the other troops. Lourdes seized the moment to slip her ties and lock the door. The marine returned and tried the door. He raised his rifle and fired, but the dense Philippine Narra wood held. Lourdes retreated into the bathroom and locked the inner door. She climbed behind a dresser—her rosary held tight in her fist—and recited the popular Catholic prayer, Memorare: “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored they help, or sought thy intercession, was left unaided.”
Lourdes finished her prayer but remained hidden as the minutes ticked past. Only when she smelled smoke did she climb out from behind the dresser and unlock the door. The Japanese had doused the ground floor of her home with gasoline, setting it on fire. The smoke rose like a specter up the grand staircase as she set out to find her family. “No words,” she recalled, “can describe the horror I found in each room.”
Lourdes first encountered her mother. The Japanese had bound and bayoneted her along with her aunt Purita, Vincenta, and maids Paula and Liling. Of the five, Lourdes discovered, the maids were dead. She hurried to untie her mother.
“Go look for your father,” her mother told her.
Lourdes set off again through the smoke-filled home. In another room she found her father badly wounded and her uncle Maximo dead.
“Look for Ching,” Reyes pleaded with his daughter, using the nickname for Lourdes’ sister Teresita.
Lourdes placed her rosary in her father’s hand and started for the stairs to the tower, the room where she and her father days earlier had watched the faraway battle, a storm on the horizon that had finally found them. Lourdes reached the top of the stairs. Teresita was unresponsive. She tried to shake her awake but realized she was gone. “In her white dress,” Lourdes recalled, “she looked like a sleeping angel.”
She descended the stairs to find her mother giving water to her father. The heat from the flames rose up through the home. Nick Reyes instructed them all to climb to the tower. Lourdes helped her father, while her mother and aunt crawled up the stairs. The flames and smoke increased. On the third-floor Purita pleaded with Amparing to let Lourdes escape and then begged the teenager to care for her son Edgar.
Nick Reyes slipped into unconsciousness. The others decided to flee. Reyes and Purita crawled down to the second floor, while Lourdes struggled to lift her father. The teenager heard her mother down below beg the family’s laundress, Vicenta. “Help her! Help her bring señorito down!” she pleaded. “Haven’t I always been good to you?”
Lourdes wrapped her father’s left arm around her shoulder and slipped her right arm around his waist and lifted. “His lifeless body weighed heavily on me,” she later wrote. “Dusk had set in. Smoke from the fire in the lower floors reached the entry to the top floor, making my steps precarious in the dark stairway.”
The teen collapsed halfway down the stairs. Vicenta suddenly appeared, and the duo struggled together to lift Reyes before the laundress finally quit.
“It’s useless—useless!” Vicenta cried. “He is dead! He is dead!”
The fires closed in on them. Overcome by shock and fear, Vicenta fled in search of her son Atanacio. Lourdes remained on the steps alongside her father’s lifeless body. She could not lift him alone, but if she stayed on the stairs, she was guaranteed to die alongside him. Lourdes had no choice but to abandon him.
Flames feasted on the grand staircase, forcing Lourdes to follow her aunt and mother and escape down the circular back stairs. She reached the backyard and climbed over a wall behind the family’s stables into a neighboring field. She found her mother, aunt, and grandmother, the latter of whom had returned to her own home next door before the massacre occurred. Lourdes joined about a dozen others under a makeshift lean-to made from salvaged metal sheets. Amparing lay on the ground next to her mother, who in shock sat in silence atop a stool. “Night came,” Lourdes recalled. “The burst of artilleries and the rain of rockets intensified.”
Vicenta had found her eight-year-old son Atanacio in the living room of the burning home, bayoneted along with Chito, Edgar, and Milagros. The only one still alive was Milagros. Vicenta dragged Milagros outside to the playhouse where the Reyes children had enjoyed untold evenings, watching the stars come out each night. Together the two hid there in the miniature home with its red Spanish roof tiles as the flames roared in the night sky and the embers and ash drifted down on the yard like snowflakes.
Over in the field behind the family home, Amparing fell into despair, unable to grasp why her own mother sat in silence on the stool. “Is Nanay mad at me?” she pleaded. “Why is she not talking to me? Please talk to me, Nanay.”
Lourdes listened to her mother cry, while the others sat in silence, the only interruption being the thunder of artillery. “Night had descended, but one would not have been able to tell,” she wrote. “The sun had been banished for days by the heavy pall of smoke that hung over the city.” Bright flashes of gunfire pierced the acrid fog; so, too, did the flames that had at last engulfed the third-floor tower, where she had spent countless hours with her beloved father. The grand home that for so long had been the epicenter of her family and of her childhood had been transformed into a funeral pyre that now incinerated the bodies of her brother, sister, father, uncle, and cousin.
On the ground nearby, her mother continued to bleed, her life slowly ebbing away. “Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me,” Lourdes repeatedly whispered in her mother’s ear. “I love you very much.”
“Stay with your aunt, Angelica,” her mother urged her. “She has many good things to teach you.”
Lourdes watched her mother grow delirious, murmuring as her mind wandered. At one point, Lourdes sensed that her mother dreamed of her brother.
“Stop it, you naughty boy,” she said playfully, “stop it!”
Another time Amparing cried out to her eldest son, who had joined the army air force and was at that moment in a German prisoner of war camp.
“Avenge us,” she hollered. “Avenge us!”
Throughout it all, Lourdes kept watch over her grandmother, occasionally silhouetted by the shellfire. “She was not cringing, nor covering her ears at all from the maddening sounds,” Lourdes recalled. “I realized that she was shell-shocked.”
Amparing calmed down and appeared at peace with those who had slaughtered her family. “It is all right. It is all right,” she said. “I forgive them.”
Despite her drift into incoherence, Amparing at times pulled her daughter close when the shells whistled overhead. “Sagrado Corazon de Jesus—”
Amparing interrupted her prayer to pull Lourdes down, wrapping her arm around her just as an incoming artillery shell tore into the shelter. The explosion ripped her grandmother in half and killed her mother and more than a dozen others.
In a crater filled with the dead, Lourdes flirted with consciousness. Hands reached into the dirt, grabbed Lourdes, and lifted her out, like a body from the grave.
“She’s alive,” someone shouted.
TO CAPTURE SOUTHERN MANILA, war planners carved up the city. The Thirty-Seventh Infantry would clear the area from the Pasig River south to Harrison Boulevard and then turn west and drive toward Manila Bay, seizing the districts of Pandacan, Paco, Ermita, the Walled City, and the port. The First Cavalry, having secured the Novaliches Dam, the Balara Water Filters, and San Juan Reservoir, would cross the Pasig near the Philippine Racing Club and enter Manila from the east. Bound on the north by Harrison Boulevard and to the south by Libertad Avenue and Route 57, the cavalrymen would charge toward the waterfront paralleling the infantry and capture the districts of Santa Ana, Pasay, and Malate. The Eleventh Airborne would race up from the south, closing the door on any exit.
The bloody battles for the Paco Railroad Station and Provisor Island had proven an initiation for the infantry in the challenges of urban warfare, demonstrating that with a little creativity, the enemy could turn a benign power plant or rail station into a death trap. The ferocity of the fight hammered home a new realization for commanders, one spelled out in the 148th Infantry’s report. “It was now evident that we had reached the point where the enemy elected to make his final stand,” the report concluded. “From now on until the final day of the battle for Manila we were to encounter an unbroken succession of heavily fortified buildings, mutually supporting pillboxes at all street intersections, thickly sown mine fields, mined buildings, an abundance of all types of weapons, innumerable snipers, and an enemy who elected death over surrender.”
Major Henne understood that reality firsthand, as the infantry’s pace south of the river slowed to a crawl. Iwabuchi’s Central Force had constructed pairs of supporting pillboxes at most intersections en route to the bay. Each one would have to be eradicated before soldiers could advance to the next block. A headlong approach, Henne realized, proved perilous, forcing his men into the enemy’s line of fire. Troops could zigzag north or south to work around a pillbox, but often that would lead them into the crosshairs of Japanese marines holed up in the adjacent block’s fortifications. The only way to advance was through the buildings, a fearsome experience as troops had to enter darkened stores, homes, and offices expecting, at every turn, to encounter the enemy.
Once inside, troops cleared every floor of the building and then blew a hole through the western wall and charged into the neighboring property.
Then the next.
And the next.
Each building or backyard taken proved a milestone in the long slog down a block. “Surely they heard us coming, blasting our way through walls of buildings,” marveled Sgt. Mike Campbell, “but they stayed put in their pillboxes.”
Infantrymen closed in and finally charged the rear of each pillbox, hurling satchel bombs and grenades at the Japanese marines. “Gains were measured,” Henne noted, “more by street intersections cleared rather than city blocks secured.”
The slow progress frustrated American commanders, including General Griswold of XIV Corps. “The fighting in South Manila is very bitter,” he wrote in his diary on February 10. “Japs organize each big reinforced concrete building into a fortress, and fight to the death in the basement, on each floor, and even to the roof. This is rough. I’m getting a lot of unavoidable casualties.” General Beightler of the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division agreed. “The fighting,” he wrote in his report, “was building by building, floor by floor and room by room.”