“The Japanese caught some of the women, poured gasoline on their heads and set their hair on fire.”
—ESPERANZA ESTEBAN,
TESTIMONY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1945
FRANCISCO LOPEZ HID IN THE CRAWLSPACE UNDERNEATH the German Club at the corner of San Luis and San Marcelino streets in the district of Ermita. The slender thirty-five-year-old film executive, who worked as the Philippines representative for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, joined more than five hundred of his neighbors and family members seeking refuge from the storm of American artillery and prowling Japanese troops. The morning of February 10 marked three days since Lopez had traded in the comfort of his nearby home for a dusty spot beneath the social club, where only four feet separated the ground from the overhead beams. Amid the darkness, no one dared light a match. “We had to stoop down,” Lopez recalled. “We couldn’t stand up.”
Japanese troops had harassed anyone who dared venture out, even swiping Lopez’s watch when he left once in search of food. Most refugees found it safer to stay underneath. Truckloads of additional troops rolled up around ten a.m. that morning and surrounded the club, forbidding anyone from climbing out of the crawlspace openings. Up above marines piled all the rugs, chairs, and tables in the center of the club, drenching them with gasoline and setting them on fire. The smell of fuel followed by smoke wafted into the crawlspace. Troops did the same outside, gathering the suitcases, parcels of canned food, and bundles of clothes refugees had brought with them, heaping them in front of the crawlspace openings before soaking them with gasoline. “You can just imagine the commotion and fright it caused,” Lopez later testified. “Women and the kids lost their heads and started screaming.”
“Tomodachi!” people yelled. “Friends! We are friends!”
German Club member Martin Ohaus, who had invited many of the neighbors to seek shelter at the facility, went out to reason with the Japanese officer. Ohaus explained that it was a social club filled with civilians who had taken refuge. Many of them were Germans, he added, allies of the Japanese. But the officer shoved him back and kicked him. Some of the women who were still nursing infants then volunteered to go beg for mercy. Lopez and others watched as several of the mothers with infant boys and girls cradled in their arms approached the Japanese and climbed down on their knees. To Lopez’s horror, the marines plunged their steel bayonets into the infants, skewering their tiny bodies like kebabs before hurling them to the ground. Troops then seized some of women by the hair, tore off their clothes, and began to rape them.
“Tomodachi!” people screamed. “Tomodachi!”
The Japanese repeatedly raped one young girl, whom Lopez estimated to be no older than thirteen. One marine would climb off as another mounted her. No fewer than twenty soldiers attacked the girl. Lopez struggled to comprehend what he was seeing. Moments earlier he and his family had simply sought shelter at the club; now Japanese troops had set fire to the building and begun an orgy of rape against the women. The violence only escalated. The marines sliced off the young girl’s breasts. One of the Japanese then scooped up a severed organ in his hand and placed it on his chest as though it were his own. “The others,” Lopez recalled, “laughed!”
The film executive witnessed Japanese troops rape several other women. When the marines finished, two of the women appeared to be dead, but Lopez saw the chest of the third victim still rise and fall as she breathed. Troops drenched all three of the women’s hair in gasoline and set them ablaze. Amid the chaos, Lopez spotted twenty-eight-year-old Bernardino Calub, one of his servants. Calub leaped through the flames, clutching his two-year-old son and namesake tight in his arms. The Japanese chased him down with a bamboo spear and stabbed the toddler. Calub turned on the murderer, beating him in the seconds before other troops pounced. The Japanese dragged Calub over to the ruins of the Lopez home and bound him to one of the concrete pillars of the garage. Troops tore down Calub’s pants and sliced off his genitals. “I saw the Japanese,” Lopez later told war crimes investigators, “stuff his severed penis in his mouth.”
The fire inside the German Club raged, devouring the tables and rattan chairs. Acrid smoke flooded the crawlspace. Lopez could hear the crackle of the flames as the hardwood floors overhead began to burn. His sixty-five-year-old mother reached out and embraced him along with his brothers and sisters. “We might as well stay in here,” she told them, “because you see what they are doing outside.”
Refugees choked on the smoke, and the temperature soared.
“Don’t go out, because it will be worse,” Carmen Lopez continued to assure her children. “If we have to die, let’s die all together in here.”
Francisco Lopez debated what to do. The Japanese would not rape him; the worst he could expect was to be shot or possibly bayoneted, both of which promised a more merciful death than the one he faced if he remained under the German Club. Lopez decided to try to escape. “I prefer to go out and get it over with once and for all,” he told his mother. “I don’t have the courage to be roasted alive in here.”
“If you decide that, go ahead,” she finally told him. “You have my blessing.”
Lopez wriggled out of the crawlspace and hurdled the burning barricade. His younger brother Jose followed, along with a neighbor, Joaquin Navarro, Jr. Troops sighted the trio and fired. Lopez glanced back to see a bullet rip through his brother’s chest. His neighbor fell next, a round through his temple. Lopez kept running, even after his trousers caught fire. The Japanese continued to shoot. A bullet tore into his left foot, and he collapsed. “I half-way fainted from the pain and the shock, all the time thinking that that was a bad dream, that it was a nightmare, that I had to wake from it.”
The wounded film executive lay flat, pretending to be dead as the conflagration swirled around him. Women continued to flood out of the crawlspace, only to be grabbed and raped by the Japanese. Lopez listened to the victims call on the saints in heaven for help and even beg the pilot of an American plane that buzzed overhead to bomb the club and end their misery. Amid the carnage, Lopez spotted his forty-year-old sister Maria, who tried to escape over the piles of blazing suitcases only to catch fire and burn to death. He likewise witnessed Japanese troops rape his twenty-eight-year-old sister-in-law Julia Lopez before slicing off her breasts, soaking her hair with gasoline, and setting her alight. Just steps away another woman Lopez knew fought off her attacker until a second marine came up behind her and swung his sword. “She fell to the ground practically decapitated,” Lopez recalled. “Her head was attached by only a very little flesh.” Even in death, the attack on the woman was not over. “This fellow right away jumped on her,” Lopez later testified. “He raped her, although she was already dead.”
Clouds of dark smoke climbed skyward as fire fully engulfed the German Club, turning the once-grand social hall into a death chamber for more than five hundred men, women, and children. The flames devoured the club’s walls, reducing the clocks and artwork to ash. So, too, went the ceilings and the hardwood floors where business executives once dined and couples danced. The burning timbers collapsed atop those who remained underneath the club. On the ground outside, bathed by the heat, Lopez had no choice but to feign being dead, even as the remainder of his family broiled just steps away from him. “I heard my brother and my mother,” he said, “screaming inside.”
TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD HELENA RODRIGUEZ likewise heard the cries as she huddled inside the German Club’s bomb shelter with her mother and two of her four brothers. The Rodriguez family had lived just a few blocks away, at 278 Zobel Street, until the Japanese began to torch the neighborhood. The family had sought shelter with friends who lived across the street from the club, but an artillery shell tore through the dining room ceiling, killing four people. “I survived,” Rodriguez recalled, “by changing places with a housemaid a minute before a huge piece of shrapnel hit her in the chest.”
The survivors had moved across the street to the club where Helena’s brothers Alvaro and Alfonso slithered under the crawlspace. Helena, her mother Remedios, and brothers Vicente and Augusto climbed down into the U-shaped trench. In recent days, as the Japanese continued to burn surrounding houses, other neighbors joined them in the dugout, pushing the total up to around fifty men, women, and children.
Rodriguez heard the screams of the victims outside, but before she could grasp the slaughter, Japanese troops tossed several grenades into the shelter’s entrance. Seconds later the bombs exploded, toppling two refugees. Smoke flooded the dark shelter, and people began to cough. “It was almost impossible to breathe,” Rodriguez recalled. “Everybody was crying; children were running about in confusion.”
“Let the children go out!” a few people hollered, hoping that the Japanese troops would show mercy on the young.
Rodriguez’s eleven-year-old brother Augusto joined four others who climbed out of the shelter. Japanese marines didn’t hesitate to squeeze the triggers. Forty-seven-year-old Remedios Rodriguez burst into tears. “Your youngest brother,” she cried to Helena. “He is out there on the ground. He is dead. They have shot him.”
Troops followed the gunfire with more grenades. Each explosion filled the air with smoke and dust, choking the refugees. Remedios Rodriguez could tolerate it no longer. She rose to leave, planning to plead with the troops. Helena saw the Japanese toss another grenade. Her mother recoiled but did not have time to dive for shelter. The bomb exploded, shredding her mother with a clap of thunder. “I just sat there and stared at her,” Rodriguez testified. “I couldn’t believe what I saw.”
Rodriguez retreated deep into the shelter, fanning herself with a piece of cardboard. The explosions stopped. A marine climbed down into the dugout, holding up a candle. He asked if the survivors had any firearms. “We told him that we had nothing, that we were civilians,” Rodriguez recalled. “You should have heard the children pleading before the Japanese, asking to have mercy on them.” The marine left, and the shelter fell quiet. A moment later refugees heard a crackling noise, like the burning of grass. Rodriguez crawled toward one of the entrances and peered outside. The Japanese had poured gasoline and set fire to the entrances, trapping the refugees. “Everybody began screaming,” Rodriguez said. “My sudden impulse was to jump out.”
Rodriguez darted through the wall of flames, burning her arms, legs, and face and singeing her hair. She stumbled into a nearby foxhole, which was covered by a piece of corrugated metal with a mattress on top. Others joined her, including her friend, twenty-one-year-old Inez Streegan, forty-year-old Emil Streegan, and thirty-two-year-old French national Rene Levy. The foursome pretended to be dead as Japanese troops hunted the grounds for any escapees. “After a while we heard screams,” Rodriguez recalled. “It was people who remained in the shelter who were being burned alive.”
One of those, she realized, was her brother, Vicente.
The Japanese discovered the survivors. Levy panicked and sprang to his feet. He ran, only to be brought down by a bullet. Rodriguez and Inez Streegan remained still, but Emil Streegan moved. The marines reached down, grabbed him, and yanked him up. One of the marines plunged the bayonet into his chest, pulled it out, and drove it in again. Face down in the dirt, Rodriguez listened to the butchery. “I heard the slashes he received,” she recalled. “The man kept screaming and asking for help.”
The Japanese dropped Streegan back into the foxhole, who, still alive, began to moan. His warm blood soaked Rodriguez. She felt certain she would be next and began to pray. To her surprise, the Japanese walked away, but the reprieve proved temporary. The marines returned with gasoline, pouring it atop the mattress and metal sheet that covered the foxhole. The fuel trickled inside and doused Rodriguez. The troops set the mattress ablaze and left, no doubt convinced Rodriguez and her companions would burn to death, like the hundreds of others crowded under the club. The Japanese had blown up her mother with a grenade, gunned down her baby brother, and burned to death her three other brothers, but Helena Rodriguez would survive even as the flames roared just inches overhead and that heat became unbearable. “It felt like being inside an overheated oven,” she recalled. “It was a miracle that our clothes didn’t catch fire.”
SATURDAY AFTERNOON FADED to dusk and then evening, while Francisco Lopez pretended to be dead. The inferno had finally brought down the roof of the club, leaving only the concrete bones of the building that had once been the epicenter of German life in Manila. The screams of Lopez’s mother, brother, and the hundreds of others had died out; so, too, had the howls of the violated women on the grounds around him.
Under cover of darkness, Lopez crawled to an air raid shelter in the yard of a neighboring home. That evening nine other men and women—all burned, bayoneted, or shot—joined him in the dugout that could comfortably hold half that many.
“Look out for my wound, my burns,” someone would cry when bumped.
The group cowered inside for almost three days. No one dared talk or even cough as Japanese troops patrolled outside, at times even walking atop the shelter. On the second day one of the refugees, armed with a piece of iron, dug a well in the earthen floor of the shelter. “That muddy water,” Lopez said, “we drank to keep alive.”
A shell ripped a hole in the shelter on February 13, revealing the occupants hidden inside. The refugees had no choice but escape. Lopez’s blasted foot had ballooned, making it impossible for him to walk. Sixty-year-old Joaquin Navarro, whose son and namesake had followed Lopez as he charged out of the crawlspace, grabbed one of the film executive’s arms. Navarro’s daughter-in-law Adela held the other.
Japanese troops occupied many of the nearby buildings, giving the survivors few options. The haggard bunch limped toward the nearby St. Teresa Academy. As the refugees approached the main entrance, which was blocked with sandbags, several Japanese troops popped up. The marines opened fire. Bullets blasted seven of the ten refugees, killing them. Navarro and his daughter-in-law, neither of whom were hit, instinctively dropped to the ground, pulling Lopez down with them.
“This is worse than death itself,” one of them muttered.
Lopez listened as his two surviving companions debated what to do.
“Let’s kneel before them and just plead for mercy,” one suggested.
“If they kill us, that is better than living this way,” added the other. “Anyway, we die of hunger or thirst, because it looks as if the Americans will take a little longer than we expected for them to cross the river and rescue us.”
“If both of you are of that opinion,” Lopez interjected, “let’s do it.”
Adela volunteered to untie the handkerchief that covered her burned left hand and wave it overhead to test whether the Japanese troops would fire. “As soon as I count to three,” she continued, “the three of us get up and walk towards them.”
“All right,” Lopez agreed.
Adela untied her handkerchief and thrust it into the air. The Japanese did not fire. She then counted—one, two, three—and still no shots. Adela and her father-in-law climbed to their feet and then leaned down to lift Lopez. The Japanese rifles roared. Both collapsed onto the ground beside Lopez. “There was blood spurting out of the neck of the girl,” he said. “The old man Navarro had been hit right in the kidneys.”
The two begged for water, but there was nothing Lopez could do. He could not walk, much less run. Minutes later Adela died. Lopez lay in agony, debating whether it would be best to pull himself to his feet and let the Japanese finish him. “I don’t want to live,” he confessed to Navarro. “I have lost all my family, all my possessions, my home, everything I had in the world. What is the use of living without anybody?”
Navarro, too, had lost everything. The Japanese had slaughtered his wife Angela, his son Joaquin, and his three daughters, Pilar, Natividad, and Concepcion. The bullet that now festered inside Navarro’s gut would soon end his misery.
“Don’t do that,” Navarro pleaded.
Lopez listened.
“When for the third time they haven’t hit you,” Navarro continued, “there must be a mission for you in this world—”
Before Navarro finished his sentence, Lopez knew he was right. “—to tell the truth of what they have done to us.”
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY miles north of Manila, General Yamashita holed up in his headquarters near Baguio, far removed from the carnage in Manila. Since his withdrawal from the capital in late December, the Tiger of Malaya’s mountain stronghold had come under increasing attacks from American bombers, including one raid that destroyed his residence, forcing him to relocate into a bunker.
The general would later claim that poor communications had left him ignorant of the battle for the Philippine capital, though his headquarters remained in wireless contact with Manila throughout much of the fight and General Yokoyama forwarded him daily reports with updates from Iwabuchi. Furthermore, Vice Adm. Denshichi Okochi, the supreme naval officer in the Philippines who was in Baguio with the general, would later tell American investigators that he and Yamashita received frequent reports on the battle’s progress, from the ferocity of artillery to the dwindling ammunition. “With the information I received,” Okochi testified, “I was able to picture the desperate situation of the Japanese units in Manila when the U.S. forces besieged the city.”
But Yamashita’s orders on the eve of the battle had been clear.
The general expected his troops to do everything possible to delay American forces, even if that meant holding them up for just half a day. The block-by-block fight showed Iwabuchi’s forces were doing precisely as ordered.
Meanwhile General MacArthur remained about sixty miles north of Manila in San Miguel, where he had set up his headquarters on January 25 on a sprawling sugar plantation known as Hacienda Lusita. The peaceful, rural setting stood in sharp contrast to the violence and destruction in Manila and likewise proved far more luxurious and comfortable than what his adversary endured in Baguio. The general established his headquarters in a large building encircled by tropical cottages—each adorned with screen porches and nice furnishings—that housed President Sergio Osmeña, MacArthur, and many of his senior aides, some of whom, like General Fellers, made frequent trips into the city. American author John Dos Passos, who had come to the Philippines as a war correspondent, described the setting in his diary. “There are gardens with brick walls,” he observed. “There’s a swimming pool where, whenever the water is not full of tanned Americans diving and splashing and whooping, beautiful red and blue kingfishers skim saucily over the surface.”
Since his visit to Bilibid and Santo Tomas on February 7, MacArthur had not returned to the Philippine capital. In fact, according to his diary, he would not set foot inside Manila again for twelve days. Throughout the twenty-nine-day fight for the city, MacArthur would visit the city only five times, and most of those occasions came long after the worst of the atrocities occurred and the heaviest fighting had ended. Like Yamashita, he left the fighting in the city to his subordinates, while his own diary records that much of the time he was engaged in “routine conferences.”
MacArthur could not escape the fact that this was a battle he alone had set in motion back on Oahu, when he had lobbied against the navy’s plan to take Formosa, berating Roosevelt over the need to return to Manila until his commander in chief needed aspirin. The general had sloshed ashore at Lingayen Gulf, convinced that the battle for the Philippines had already been won on Leyte. He had driven toward the capital, disregarding guerrilla reports on the city’s fortification, while choosing instead to plan a liberation parade. He had then stood on the balcony at Malacañan Palace overlooking the Pasig River and declared that a single platoon could capture southern Manila.
In each case, he had been wrong.
Woefully so.
There was little doubt that in the end America would win. MacArthur had more soldiers and superior firepower. The question that now framed the battle was how much would victory cost? How many civilians would die by Japanese blade and American shellfire? How much of the Pearl of the Orient would be destroyed?
AT THE SAME TIME as the German Club massacre, other troops went door to door through the district of Paco, just south of the Pasig River, rounding up hundreds of men. The Japanese did not target specific males but rather cast a large net, just as they had done days earlier in Intramuros. No one in this working-class neighborhood adjacent to the posh district of Ermita was spared. The Japanese grabbed men in their fifties and sixties alongside boys as young as fourteen. Victims likewise ranged from butchers and barbers to tinsmiths, kitchen helpers, and even priests.
One of those caught up in the sweep was Dr. Angel Enriquez, a thirty-five-year-old dentist. He was asleep inside his Dart Street home when marines banged on his door at two p.m., rousing the exhausted Enriquez, demanding he accompany them.
“Don’t,” his twenty-six-year-old wife Eva pleaded.
“No, no,” the Japanese marine assured her. “He will come back at six o’clock.”
Enriquez tried to comfort his wife. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I will come back.”
She watched as they marched her husband out the door.
Similar scenes played out in neighboring houses on that afternoon of February 10. A Japanese officer barged into the home of twenty-nine-year-old Francisco Aniban at 1188 Dart Street, climbing the stairs to find the family gathered. Troops seized Aniban and his sixty-five-year-old father-in-law Eugenio Balleta. “Forced labor,” the officer announced. “You are going to work and I will give you sugar and rice.”
In a city where starving families ate dogs and even rats to survive, the promise of food proved an intoxicating lure, one the Japanese used to entice dozens of others, including thirty-two-year-old Jesus Benitez. “You come along with us and work,” troops assured the Dart Street resident, “and we will give you plenty of food.”
Marines did not discriminate, grabbing Chinese immigrants alongside Filipinos, the healthy as well as the infirm. That was the case when several troops pounded on the door of forty-two-year-old Dr. Ambrosio Capili, who was bedridden.
“May I see him?” one of the marines asked his wife.
Celestina Capili showed the Japanese inside the home where one of the marines felt her husband’s pulse. “He can work, he is not very sick,” he declared. “Two hours only, then he will be back with plenty of food and medicine.”
Ambrosio Capili refused to stand, insisting he was ill. One of the officers unsheathed his saber. “I looked at the face of the Japanese and saw him very serious,” Celestina Capili remembered. “I called the attention of my husband.”
The doctor relented.
“When he was at the door I gave him his hat,” she said, watching as the Japanese led him up the street. “That was the last time I ever saw my husband.”
In one of the more prophetic encounters, the Japanese grabbed Ricardo Esquerra, demanding that the owner of Victoria Funeral Home accompany them.
“Why?” the forty-one-year-old asked.
“You are an undertaker; you bury dead,” one of the troops replied. “You better come with us and work with us to bury dead.”
Japanese forces herded the men individually and in small groups toward an empty field on Remy Street. Terrified wives and mothers watched out of windows, while small children peered through fences. “I was so frightened,” recalled Conrada Balleta, the wife of Francisco Aniban. “My children were crying and I was crying.” Beneath the sweltering sun, captives waited throughout the afternoon as troops continued to arrive with additional prisoners. By five p.m. the Japanese had assembled more than four hundred men, corralling them into a long line. Marines searched the captives for valuables and weapons before binding the men’s hands behind their backs, forcing them to squat.
When the Japanese tied Esquerra’s hands, the undertaker protested. “Pass! Pass! Tomodachi!” he hollered to one of the officers, meaning he had travel papers. The officer fished Esquerra’s pass from his pocket, read it, and then tossed it to the ground. “Why?” Esquerra pleaded. “That’s a very good pass.”
A second officer scooped the paper up and scanned the pass. He then unholstered his pistol and approached Esquerra. “You pass is good,” the Japanese officer told him in broken English. “You very good man, but you die.”
“Why?” the undertaker begged.
“Order,” he replied. “Order from high officer.”
Esquerra listened.
“Kill you,” the officer continued. “All you.”
Troops began seizing men in groups of ten from one end of the line, while marines at the opposite end marched captives off individually. Thirty-one-year-old Godofredo Rivera, an employee of the Asiatic Petroleum Corporation, watched as two marines grabbed his brother Arturo. Moments later he heard the crack of a rifle. They returned for Rivera, dragging him about twenty yards away from the line to the bank of the Estero Tripa de Gallina, a once-navigable waterway whose sinuous path had earned it the name Chicken Tripe. Rivera counted five marines, each armed with a rifle. The troops forced Rivera to his knees, where he faced the late-afternoon sun. Down below in the shallow water, he spotted the bodies of other victims, including his brother. Rivera knew he would soon share his sibling’s fate. The Japanese behind him took aim and fired. “The bullet entered the back of my neck and came out the cheek on the right side of my face,” Rivera later testified. “It fractured my jaw.”
Troops returned to the line and grabbed another victim.
Then another.
And another.
Every few moments a rifle fired, and another husband, father, or son tumbled down the muddy bank, swelling the pile of bodies that floated amid the green lily pads. The marines marched some of the victims, not to the canal, but to the weedy edge of several small lagoons, where some traded rifles at times for swords. Rivera’s seventeen-year-old nephew Aquilino suffered such a fate, though he, too, miraculously survived, despite a cut so deep in his neck that it exposed the vertebrae. Forty-one-year-old Jose Cabanero, who watched troops march his brother and cousin to their deaths, tried to run, zigzagging as rifles roared behind him. He almost escaped, but an officer finally brought him down with a sword. The marine slashed, stabbed, and kicked Cabanero, who rolled across the ground with each strike. “When I was facing upwards he gave me another blow right across the face, cutting my nose,” the merchant later testified. “He gave me two blows right over my ear, and took off part of my ear.”
Other victims tried to sway the killers, appealing to a sense of humanity that on this Saturday afternoon the Japanese lacked completely. Forty-two-year-old Federico Davantes, as he listened to the marine behind him work the bolt of his rifle, pleaded that he needed to live for the sake of his newborn son.
“Tomodachi! Tomodachi!” he cried. “Kodomo takusan!”
His pleas failed to sway the enemy.
The Japanese did more than just shoot and slash the civilians. Marines pulled seventeen-year-old Benjamin Urrutia and nine others from the line and led them toward Dart Street, pausing alongside a wall to blindfold each man. “Japanese and Philippines are good friends,” the marine said as he cinched each blindfold. “Tomodachi.”
A marine grabbed Urrutia’s arm and marched him through a gap in the wall. One of the troops hit the blindfolded Urrutia on the right side of his face and pushed him into a large hole. The teenager landed atop other men, only to have others topple down onto him. Guards then tossed several grenades into the pit. “When the hand grenades exploded blood began to flow out of my nose and mouth,” Urrutia recalled. “Others were groaning and moaning and making sounds as if they were all choking.”
The Japanese began to shoot those who had survived.
“We are all going to die together,” one of the men cried out.
Urrutia pretended to be dead. The shooting stopped, and the marines shoveled sand in the hole, burying the men with each toss in what would prove one of four mass graves that war crimes investigators later uncovered, containing a total of one hundred bodies. Urrutia felt the earth fall on top of him, but he dared not move. “I could hardly breathe,” recalled the youth, who later dug himself out, “because of the sand in my mouth.”
Those who were killed by bullets and grenades were the lucky ones. For the rest, the Japanese devised a ruthless means of extermination, one that required imagination and forethought to turn an otherwise ordinary two-story home into a chamber of horrors. One of those paraded through the nearby residence at 1195 Singalong Street was twenty-one-year-old Eugene Bayot, a mechanic pulled out of the line as part of a group of ten men. The Japanese marched Bayot up the stairs to a second-floor balcony, where a marine tore off his shirt and fashioned it into a blindfold. Two troops then escorted him into a bedroom. Bayot managed to slip his blindfold down. One of the Japanese he observed wore an army helmet emblazoned with a star. The other stood shirtless, soaked in sweat, and sported a shaved head. In his hand, he clutched a saber. The afternoon light filtered through a single window, illuminating a large jagged hole cut in the center of the floor, the edges around it stained red with blood. The Japanese forced Bayot to his knees alongside the hole. “I then felt a hard blow on the back of my neck and someone kicked me at the back,” he recalled. “I fell through a hole in the floor.”
A pile of bodies broke his fall. The Japanese had failed to decapitate Bayot, burying the blade in the thick muscle at the base of his neck. The mechanic freed his hands and dragged himself to a corner. A guard just outside the ground-floor room occasionally peered in and shot any men who survived. Bayot pretended to be dead, watching as other unfortunate souls dropped through the ceiling. Throughout the afternoon, the Japanese marched in group after group of men, each of whom waited patiently outside the Singalong Street home for his turn to die. During that time, twenty-six-year-old Chinese immigrant Sy Chia heard the groans from a few survivors. Others remembered that the executioners stank of wine. Julio Ramirez would later tell investigators that as soon as he stepped into the execution chamber, he smelled blood, an unmistakably metallic scent attributed to iron-rich red blood cells.
Terror seized twenty-six-year-old Virginio Suarez as he waited on the balcony alongside Father Jose Tanquilot, while the Japanese blindfolded the men.
“Perhaps this is our last on earth,” he cried out to the priest.
“Just pray to God,” Father Tanquilot told him.
With brutal efficiency, the Japanese led teenagers and even grandfathers into the kill room, like sheep to the slaughter. The executioners worked with the competence of an assembly line—kneel, chop, fall; kneel, chop, fall. The sweat Bayot noted that soaked the executioner testified to the physical stamina required to decapitate so many men, to wield a sword over and over again with the power to cut bone. Down below in the dark, the handful of survivors moaned in agony; others gurgled and choked. “This is my house,” one of the victims cried out, “and this is the place my head was cut.”
Twenty-seven-year-old Pablo Martinez called out for his cousins Ubaldo Magtal and Pedro Cruz, both of whom were in his same group of ten men.
“I am here,” Magtal replied.
But Cruz did not answer.
Ricardo Esquerra, the undertaker, spotted his friend Teodoro Valdez. “Teodoro!” he cried.
His friend remained silent.
Esquerra reached over and grabbed Valdez’s foot, pulling him toward him. Only then did he realize that his friend’s head was separated from his body. Twenty-five-year-old Felix Plata experienced a similar horror as the dead dropped around him. “I saw one head roll away,” he said. “That was the head of one of my neighbors.”
The executioners interrupted their murderous rhythm to swig wine or howl with laughter. “Banzai!” the survivors heard them shout amid chops. “Banzai!”
More bodies fell.
And the pile grew, a tangled pyramid of arms, legs, torsos, and heads, some attached, others not. Those who survived had to roll out of the way or risk burial beneath the dead. “I placed my hand and arm on the floor,” Suarez recalled. “I could feel several inches of blood.” Dentist Angel Enriquez, who later succumbed to his wounds, remembered even more. “I saw,” he said, “blood as deep as my ankles.”
The slaughter continued as the afternoon faded to dusk and then nightfall. By then, as survivor Fidel Merino later testified, the jumble of dead reached almost to the second floor. Fellow survivor Eustaquio Batoctoy concurred. “The pile was about eight feet high.”
That night, after the Japanese departed, the few survivors managed to escape, some via a board kicked out of one wall. Undertaker Ricardo Esquerra chose a different route. Like a mountain climber, he ascended the peak of bodies, pulling himself up via the arms and legs of the dead until he reached the hole through which he had fallen. “Within two or three days,” neighbor Bessie Chase recalled, “the stench and odor emanating from this house was so terrible that one can hardly stand it.”
The home burned like so many others in Paco. War Crimes investigators, who later tallied two hundred dead along the banks of the canal, lagoons, and pits, plowed through the ashes, attempting to determine the number of men who died in the house on Singalong. “We counted the skulls,” recalled Francisco del Rosario, the undertaker hired by the army. “There were approximately two hundred skulls at that location.” The investigative report into the slaughter of more than four hundred men that Saturday afternoon in Paco reads like the script of a horror movie. “The evidence clearly establishes a deliberate plan to exterminate all male civilians residing in the area,” it concluded. “A more brutal and cold blooded series of murders can hardly be imagined.”
MANY OF MANILA’S WOUNDED staggered through the gates of Santo Tomas—some carried in the arms of loved ones, others wheeled in pushcarts—all drawn to the promise of aid from American doctors. The swelling numbers forced medics to convert the Education Building into a hospital. Internees living on the third floor and in the gymnasium moved outside, camping in army tents. Other uninjured refugees poured into the camp as well, believing it to be one of the few safe places in the city even as the Japanese continued to shell the university almost daily. “There were so many clamoring for admittance to the camp,” Hartendorp recalled, “that measures had to be taken to prevent a greater influx than could be dealt with.”
Twenty more doctors and one hundred nurses flew in from Leyte on February 9. “Their arrival,” the company’s report noted, “was most timely as their services were so urgently needed. Our men and officers had begun to show the effects of the strain of working under constant fire with no sleep.” Internee nurses viewed the replacements as a godsend. “How strong, healthy, and beautiful they appeared to us!” Roka wrote. “Since most of the Santo Tomas nurses were ill and weak, we were glad to relinquish our work to the healthy and fresh nurses. Most of us were completely worn out from dodging shells, caring for the sick and wounded, and witnessing joy and anguished grief.”
On February 11 the hospital evacuated most internee patients to the Quezon Institute, a little more than two miles away on the city’s outskirts, wrapping up that evening at dark. The 287 beds available, however, were soon filled with civilians wounded by artillery shrapnel and gunfire. Once able, doctors transferred them to San Lazaro and the Children’s Maternity Hospital, both set up to care for locals. The horror in Manila was reflected in the figures compiled by the 893rd Clearing Company. From February 6 to 23, the hospital admitted 925 patients. Doctors performed 352 surgeries—an average of twenty a day—including nine amputations. Thirty-eight patients died. “The civilians were mostly serious surgical cases, many of them with wounds already two and three days old,” the company’s report noted. “Many already had tetanus.”
Through the wounded who poured in each day, internees learned of the slaughter beyond the camp’s iron gates. “They were in a pitiful state, and their stories were all the same,” Roka wrote in her diary. “The retreating and enraged enemy had gone on an orgy of massacre, rape, burning and destruction.” Robert Wygle echoed Roka in his diary, noting the mutilated condition of many survivors. “They are so far beyond recognition that, in many cases, one can’t tell whether they are men or women, boys or girls, dead or alive. Bloated, purple, twisted, matted and plastered with blood and dirt—apparently dead,” he wrote. “Oh, Japs, if only the folks back in the USA could only know you as you are. I’ve hated your insidious ways for many years, but I loathe, detest and despise you with a murderous hate now. Let’s take no prisoners.”
Robin Prising watched a Filipino push a makeshift wheelbarrow through the gate, carrying the slumped body of a woman, her thick black hair matted with dried blood. “In a sweat of anguish, the Filipino kept wringing his hands; he begged on his knees; he shrieked and stammered at the medic in broken English.”
“No, you go make her good. Make her alive. Please!” he begged. “Americans can do anything. Kill all Japs; win war. You can make her live, yes?”
“The woman’s face had been blown off,” Prising recalled. “While the man continued to rave, we washed his wounds and dressed them. Then the medic had to send him away. It was helpless agony to have to watch the man wheel the barrow back towards the Main Gate, to have to hear him whimpering crazily at every jolt, not knowing what he could do with his precious bundle of flesh that had once been a living woman with a face.” The cost of his freedom, Prising realized, had been paid by others. “The armless, the legless, the blood-spattered, an endless river of Filipinos flooded towards Santo Tomas, one of the few places of refuge—the prison camp where we white prisoners of war had been saved at the expense of a whole city of Orientals.”
Fellow internee John Osborn recounted in a letter the story of a mortally wounded Filipina woman who arrived in the camp’s hospital. “I know I am going to die,” she said, “but I shall die under the American flag, and that makes me happy.” One of the nurses affixed a miniature flag just above the woman’s bed. “Often, during the two days that she lived,” Osborn wrote, “her eyes rested on the small flag and she smiled, and when she passed peacefully into her last sleep, the smile still rested on her lips.” In another letter a few days later, Osborn was far more grim. “Refugees,” he wrote, “say they could have walked along the streets by stepping from one body to another.”
It wasn’t just the internees at Santo Tomas who witnessed the bloodshed. Terrified evacuees flooded the American battle lines on the city’s south side in such large numbers that troops had to stop fighting. “The whole street,” recalled Maj. Henry Burgess, “became choked with pitiful human beings as thousands moved south to escape the holocaust of Manila.” As Burgess and others soon learned, more than a few bore the wounds from Japanese barbarity. “Many nursing women had been bayoneted in their breasts, some had the tendons in the back of their necks severed by sabers and could no longer hold their necks up. Small children and babies had been bayoneted,” Burgess said. “We had been admonished to keep our medical supplies for ourselves, and not to help others. Of course, we couldn’t, and didn’t refuse them assistance.”
MacArthur’s declaration of the fall of Manila angered the American troops, who each day fought the Japanese, while folks back home believed the battle had been won. Many of the soldiers told internees that the urban fight proved far bloodier than the battles on New Guinea, in the Marianas, or on Leyte. CBS reporter Bill Dunn captured the views of the soldiers in one of his broadcasts, reporting on the fanatical enemy troops entrenched in the buildings and rubble. “It is now a question,” he reported, “of how long it will take to root each remaining Nip out of his hole and dispose of him.”
“Manila was secured!” one soldier scoffed as he spoke to Roka near the lean-to where she resided. “Why, I’m the only man left in my platoon!”
“Most of the officers and soldiers who returned to camp said very little,” she wrote in her diary, “but all were exhausted and grim-looking,”
Internee Emily Van Sickle encountered a similar response when she asked one of the soldiers she knew where his fellow troops were.
“They won’t be coming back,” the soldier replied. “We really got into it today. They sent us out to take a bridge—said everything was clear on the way. Before we reached the bridge, we ran into an ambush—Japs hiding in buildings that were supposed to be empty. They started pouring machine gun fire on us.”
Eleven-year-old Prising, who often led troops up to the top of Main Building for views of the city, befriended an American soldier named Stan, a twenty-two-year-old from Illinois who carried a worn copy of poems by Hart Crane. “I had never heard anyone talk as Stan did,” he recalled. “To him this war was part of the never-ending chaos of human misery, mankind’s untold, unmeasured suffering that would persist through the ages while each civilization rose and fell. All personal grief and experience would be lost in that enduring chaos. And to the generations that replaced our own, it would be as though we had never lived.” The soldier even shared a pint of beer with the boy, albeit with the warning not to get drunk. Prising looked forward to his time with him, spotting his fellow soldiers one afternoon without him. He asked where he could find Stan. None of the troops would look him in the eyes.
“Well,” one finally admitted. “He walked into a booby trap.”
The sacrifice of the troops was not lost on the civilians, who watched each day as wooden crosses mushroomed in the camp’s three temporary cemeteries, each affixed with a dog tag and covered by flowers grown in the meager gardens of internees.
The Japanese, meanwhile, continued to shell Santo Tomas, prompting shanty dwellers to lug mattresses inside and join other internees who moved out of rooms and into the corridors, hopeful that the thick internal walls would provide extra protection. A captured Japanese diary later detailed one such attack on the camp. Enemy forces opened fire from the third floor of a building inside the Walled City at eight-thirty a.m. on February 10, aiming at the upper right corner of the Main Building from a range of about two miles. “Thereafter we fired fifty to sixty rounds continuously; fell in the vicinity of the target.”
The attack that Saturday morning—just one week after American troops liberated Santo Tomas—killed six people, including a hospital patient recovering in his bed on the second floor of the Education Building. “A grim morning,” Robert Wygle noted in his diary. “No one is fooled into thinking our war is over. We realize that tomorrow may see more of us dead and mangled. Faces are getting more haggard and many are more serious—but the thumbs-up spirit is untouched.” Such unexpected attacks rattled the already fragile internees, as evidenced by Roka’s diary entry. “Still no sleep, no baths, and no rest!” she wrote. “The shells screaming through the air over our heads had unnerved us, and we wondered if we’d ever see our homes again.”
Wygle’s fourteen-year-old son Peter narrowly survived one attack that sprayed him with shattered glass and concrete. The youth later recalled other scenes of horror, including how shrapnel ripped off one internee’s right arm. “She was wandering down the hall,” he recalled, “carrying her arm in her left hand.” Another time he scooped up a field hat in the camp’s front yard. “Part of a skull,” Wygle said, “fell out.”
After one late-night Japanese artillery attack, Prising rushed to find his mother in the blasted Main Building. She was seated on the floor of her room, eyes distant and cradling a woman in her lap. With the help of another, Prising lifted the woman off his mother and helped her to her feet. “Still she did not recognize me,” he later wrote. “She did not hear my voice; her eyes, unseeing and white, gazed past my light.”
The youth led his mother by the hand out of the building and back to his father where Frederick Prising used a jug of water to gently rinse her head.
“No,” she finally said. “No more now. I don’t want any, any more.”
The constant fear of death from the skies drained the internees, most of whom still struggled physically from starvation and emotionally from the shock of liberation.
Anna Nixon, who taught Sunday school in Santo Tomas, recounted in her diary a conversation she overheard in the food line. “You know, we’re not out of danger yet,” one internee remarked, “but I’d rather be shot than to starve to death.”
The comment prompted a French woman in front to break down. “Who wants to die at all?” she cried out. “I don’t want to die of starvation, nor do I want to die in the shelling. We’ve come through all this. I love life. I’ve learned to appreciate it more now. Why do I have to die? Oh, God, I don’t want to die!” The internees around her fell silent. “We stood with bowed heads,” Nixon wrote in her diary, “partly because we respected her in the depth of her tender feelings, and partly because we knew she had expressed the desire of every soldier on the battlefield, and every single one of us.”
An American officer approached nurse Sally Blaine in the wake of the February 10 shelling. “Are you one of our nurses that’s helped us?” he asked.
“Yes, I am,” she replied.
He wrapped his arm around her.
“Wouldn’t you like to go home?” the officer asked.
Blaine broke down crying, the first time she had wept in years.
At MacArthur’s headquarters in San Miguel, army censors blocked all efforts by journalists to report on the shelling of the university, an act that drew scorn from the newsmen. American author John Dos Passos recounted in his diary the conversation of several reporters soon afterward in a run-down hotel, while swigging pink rum that tasted like chewing gum. “The shelling of Santo Tomas is the biggest story in the whole war and they won’t let you write about it,” one journalist complained.
“Why the hell couldn’t they have gotten those people out of Santo Tomas instead of leaving them there to be blown to pieces with shells?” another asked.
“Might as well pull out and go back to the States if you can’t write the news.”