“The Western mind cannot grasp the realities of this awful crime. One must grope into the shadows of history to find a parallel. Genghis Khan, the Mongol Horde blazing a trail of utter destruction.”
—GENERAL HEADQUARTERS,
SOUTH WEST PACIFIC AREA,
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE SECTION, GENERAL STAFF
HUNDREDS OF REFUGEES HUDDLED IN THE RUINS OF SANTA Rosa College in the Walled City. Included among them were the doctors, nurses, and patients from San Juan de Dios Hospital as well as families forced out of the Manila Cathedral. The ruins resembled a squatters community with makeshift tents constructed from corrugated metal tucked amid the scorched and crumbling brick walls of the school. Artillery shells whistled continually overhead even as refugees boiled rice over outdoor fires. Tensions soared, as Japanese marines periodically showed up to drag off groups of men.
Around seven p.m. on February 11, the Japanese again visited the refugees. This Sunday evening, however, marines came for the women and children. Troops rounded up fifty, including eleven-year-old Rosalinda Andoy and her mother Adelaida, ordering them to march across Solana Street to the ruins of Santo Domingo Church. At the front of the church, the marines stopped them, demanding that the refugees enter three at a time. Rosalinda walked in next to her mother, where three troops greeted them. One of the marines raised his rifle and drove his bayonet into Adelaida’s breast. She dropped to the ground in a seated position. Another plunged his blade into her back. “My mother caught me by the arm and pulled me down on my back,” Rosalinda said. “A Japanese stepped on my head while I lay on the ground and bayonetted me several times. I turned my body facing the ground and the Japanese bayonetted me in the back.”
But the marine refused to quit.
As Rosalinda squirmed beneath his boot, the marine plunged his bayonet into her again and again and again, puncturing her chest, back, arms, and legs.
Her intestines popped out.
Yet the steel blade continued to rise and fall, rise and fall.
The marine finally stopped, pulling his blade out after the thirty-eighth blow. Rosalinda pretended to be dead, her blood draining onto the church floor.
The marines ushered in another group of three victims. The sounds of the slaughter mixed with the moans of the victims, many of them children.
“Mother,” Rosalinda heard one child cry, “I am dying.”
Sixteen-year-old Rosario Nieves entered the church following her mother Balbina. Her twelve-year-old sister Isabel had gone in moments earlier behind Rosalinda and now lay on the ground bleeding. Balbina realized what was about to happen and pushed her daughter to the ground. Rosario looked up just as the marine attacked her mother. “She received seven bayonet thrusts,” she said. “After my mother had been bayonetted the Japanese stepped on my head and bayonetted me twice at the right side, twice near the center of my back, once in the left shoulder and once in the left neck.”
Finally the Japanese left.
The scorched church, where before the war families had celebrated baptisms, communions, and weddings, had devolved into a slaughterhouse. Rosario regained consciousness about an hour later. Her sister Isabel was alive, though she would succumb to her wounds within hours. “I went to my mother and tried to wake her up,” Rosario said, “but she was already dead. So I slept by her side till morning.”
Rosalinda likewise crawled over to her mother and curled up next to her in the dark, no doubt feeling the warmth of her body as she lay amid the rubble of this once holy place. Despite her own wounds, Adelaida tried to comfort her daughter and prepare her for the inevitable. The Japanese had killed Rosalinda’s father, and soon Adelaida would join him. “My mother brushed my hair and said she was dying and that I must be a good girl.” Rosalinda said. “My mother died and I slept beside her.”
FIRES CLOSED IN ON the Garcia family home off Taft Avenue on February 12. Ten-year-old Jack could hear the screams of his neighbors fleeing the conflagration, adding to the soundtrack of war that included the rattle of machine guns and the explosions of artillery. That afternoon Furuda-san visited the home to deliver a warning. Ida Garcia had met the stocky young Japanese soldier in the latter days of the occupation, when he knocked on the front gate and asked to draw water from the family’s well. Through that one-time act of kindness, an unlikely friendship had formed. Furuda-san had visited often, helping to repair the chicken coop gates and tussling with the family’s two dogs, Rex and Tiger. The enemy soldier even managed to score a twenty-five-kilogram bag of sugar for the family, worth a small fortune in the latter days of the occupation.
But today was not a social visit. “You must leave now,” he warned. “All of you must go away now.”
His words frightened the family.
“Very dangerous,” the Japanese soldier continued. “Soldiers burn house. Americans coming, shooting, shooting, please go now.”
The neighbors who sheltered at the Garcias’ home listened to Furuda-san’s warning. Several begged to go to De La Salle, which was right around the corner. The Garcias’ emergency plan all along, in fact, had been to seek refuge at De La Salle, where Jack and his older brother Ramon attended school. Brother Xavier had called in the latter days of the occupation, inviting the family to preemptively move into the school. Ida Garcia’s sister Helen Vasquez-Prada was already there with her husband and four sons after troops commandeered their home in January. The Garcia family had decided to wait, but just in case, Ida had dropped off food, clothing, and folding cots.
But Furuda-san balked at De La Salle.
The soldier told them his commanding officer would not allow any residents on Taft Avenue, which ruled out the school. “Was it Japanese officialdom that didn’t want us to go? Or was it Furuda who thought it best that we give De La Salle a miss?” Jack Garcia would later speculate. “Did he know something we didn’t?”
American artillery aimed at enemy troops in Rizal Memorial Stadium continued to fall short of the sports complex, shaking the ground and showering residents in the Garcias’ yard with dirt and debris. One such errant projectile two days earlier had likely killed more than a dozen people in the makeshift shelter behind the home of Nick Reyes, which was just a few blocks from the Garcia home. His daughter Lourdes at this very moment lay amid the rubble of her family’s home, waiting for rescue. Japanese troops, meanwhile, had turned over several orange trams, blocking Pennsylvania Avenue and Vito Cruz Street. Marines had piled sandbags alongside and created machine-gun nests. Rifle fire greeted any resident who dared venture onto the street.
Despite the danger, the Garcia family had no choice but to try to escape, a challenge made all the more perilous as artillery fire increased through the afternoon. With De La Salle no longer an option, the family decided to try for St. Scholastica’s College, a Catholic institution that occupied an entire city block and was ringed by a high adobe wall that would offer protection from shrapnel and gunfire. To go there, however, meant the family had to cross Pennsylvania Avenue, right in the line of fire.
Furuda-san reluctantly approved of the plan.
“Quick, go now,” he told them. “Take everything, you have only short time to move your things. Quick, maybe later you no can cross street anymore.”
The family grabbed the prepared bundles of clothes and gathered with four other families in the vacant lot next door, which fronted Pennsylvania Avenue. A glance in either direction revealed Japan’s fortifications. “There were,” Jack recalled, “more machine guns than we envisaged and there were mortar emplacements everywhere, strategically positioned and hidden behind heavy sandbags.”
The families charged across Pennsylvania Avenue. Miraculously the Japanese guns remained silent, but the family’s good fortune ran out. The gates at St. Scholastica were locked. Ida banged on the metal gates, but no one answered.
Artillery shells whistled overhead. She banged again and again.
“Who is it?” one of the nuns inside finally asked.
Ida explained that five families needed shelter, but the nun refused to open the gates. “We are full and cannot take in any more people.”
Out on the street—and in the line of fire—the families grew desperate. At any second troops might open fire. Ida detected the nun’s German accent and switched languages, appealing to her in her native tongue. “We bring food. We carry rice, tinned meat, and sacks of beans,” she pleaded. “For the love of God, let us in before the Japanese start firing at us or one of those bombs kills us all!”
The families waited. Finally the gate yawned open to reveal a young nun, who hugged Ida and ushered the families inside. Ramon Garcia and other neighbors ferried in the food. No sooner had the family arrived than Jack Garcia looked back to see an artillery shell blast the family’s home, destroying the back. “There goes my bedroom, the kitchen, and part of the dining room,” the youth said to himself.
The nun’s claim that the school was full proved accurate. Refugees crowded the rooms and even passageways, many of them neighbors and friends. The Garcia family finally found a spot in a second-floor room, where Jack collapsed atop some cushions, while his father set up folding chairs he found. Artillery shells continued to buzz through the air, one of which hit the school and shrouded the room with smoke. The family relocated to the ground floor, settling down in a crowded corridor.
“Help me,” someone down the hall cried. “I’ve been hit in both legs.”
Several refugees had ferried rice across Pennsylvania Avenue—the same spot where the Garcia family had moments earlier crossed—when the Japanese opened fire with machine guns. Bullets had shredded one man’s legs. Jack Garcia went to see the commotion, staring at the wounded man’s slacks, bright red with blood.
“Where’s the doctor?” someone shouted.
The image haunted the ten-year-old, who listened to the injured man moan as the afternoon turned to evening. “What next?” the youth wondered. “I was scared. It was an uneasy and emotional apprehension that was building up within me and I couldn’t help but dread that something frightful was about to happen.”
JUST ONE BLOCK AWAY at De La Salle College, sixty-eight men, women, and children, including some of Manila’s most prominent families, listened to the thunder of artillery as American soldiers closed in on the Japanese. The Catholic educational school, which enrolled twelve hundred students before the war, served as one of the safest shelters south of the Pasig River. Set back off Taft Avenue with a wide lawn and circular drive, the three-story concrete structure was built in the shape of the letter H with a northern and southern wing. Beyond its sturdy construction, the school—widely recognized as one of the finest in the Philippines—was an elegant building with a white neoclassical facade adorned with four Corinthian columns and topped by statues of children gazing up at Saint John Baptist de La Salle. Arched windows and doors opened onto the garden, while second-floor balconies offered views from above. Classrooms occupied most of the first and second floors, each one crowded with rows of wooden desks.
The Japanese had commandeered the school during the occupation, converting it at one point into a hospital. They had interned the nine American brothers but allowed the seventeen German missionaries to stay, albeit confining them to the south wing. There brothers had attempted to continue the school’s mission throughout the occupation in the limited space, which consisted of a large ground-floor assembly room. A wide staircase led to the second-floor chapel, while the area underneath it functioned as a wine cellar and now doubled as a bomb shelter. The third floor housed the offices and private rooms of the brothers. The chapel served as the spiritual heart, providing a graceful space for daily mass, baptisms, and communions. An arched entrance opened onto the green-and-white-tiled floors with a long center aisle that divided the rows of wooden pews, each carved with the school’s emblem. Chandeliers dangled from the barreled ceiling, while behind the polished communion rails rose the altar.
On the eve of battle, Japanese troops had seized nearby homes, prompting Brother Xavier to open the school as a refugee center. Four families—three Filipino and one Spanish—had jumped at the offer. Included among them were the wives, children, and servants of Judge Jose Carlos, Dr. Antonio Cojuangco, Dr. Clemente Uychuico, and Enrique Vasquez-Prada, a Spanish businessman. The fifty-nine-year-old Vasquez-Prada was joined by his wife Helen, who at forty-one was eight years younger than her sister Ida Garcia. The couple’s four sons ranged in age from five to twenty-one, all of whom attended De La Salle. The family was well liked in Manila. Enrique Vasquez-Prada was known for his great sense of humor, though he had suffered recently from pleurisy that left him weak. Helen was “tall and slim, with a pale complexion,” remembered one friend. “She had blue eyes and golden hair, like that of the fairies in children’s stories.”
The forty-three civilians joined the seventeen brothers, seven school employees, and refugee priest Father Francis Cosgrave, a forty-eight-year-old Australian who had come to De La Salle after the Japanese seized his church and home in the Manila suburb of Baclaran. Servants outnumbered the family members, helping to draw water from the well, prepare meals from canned goods, and care for the children, the youngest of whom was three. The refugees mostly congregated on the ground floor sleeping atop mattresses and blankets scattered around the base of the stairs with the exception of sixteen-year-old Antonio Cojuangco, Jr. The teen spent most days in bed in a small room beside the chapel entrance, where he battled typhoid under the anxious care of his father and a male nurse, Filomeno Inolin. “That boy looked forward to the coming of the Americans,” recalled his brother-in-law Servillano Aquino. “He prayed and prayed.”
“If I die, I should like to see the Americans first,” the youth repeatedly said, “because we have suffered much under these people.”
The refugees had passed the nine days since the Battle of Manila began waiting for the Americans to appear on Taft Avenue, monitoring the progress of MacArthur’s forces via a shortwave radio hidden on the third floor. Dr. Uychuico saw firsthand the results of the fighting, summoned by the Japanese to perform surgery on wounded marines. Father Cosgrave meanwhile said mass each day, and Brother Lambert Romanus held classes for the children. During lulls in the shelling, refugees climbed to the rooftop to watch the march of fires across the city, while five-year-old Fernando Vasquez-Prada was thrilled at the sight of the American observation planes that buzzed in the skies. Like so many others caught in the gauntlet between American and Japanese forces, fear remained a constant burden on everyone, especially Helen Vasquez-Prada. She could not shake a fortune-teller’s long-ago warning that she would one day die by the sword.
The fear of violence had only escalated in recent days as the tenuous peace long maintained by the brothers and the Japanese began to break down. Japanese troops stormed the south wing on February 7 allegedly hunting for weapons. Marines forced all the refugees up to the second floor and searched them, using it as a chance to molest the women. “They were pretty rough and nasty,” recalled Brother Antonius von Jesus. Aquino echoed him. “I don’t think you could hide a gun in the pocket where a dime couldn’t be hidden.” The Japanese bound Brother Xavier and Judge Carlos and marched them out the door, neither of whom was seen again. Before leaving, troops ordered the rest of the refugees to remain inside at all times, to stay off the balconies, keep away from the windows, and even refrain from singing in the chapel. “From then on,” Cosgrave recalled, “we were virtual prisoners.”
Artillery fire escalated as the Americans targeted Japanese forces dug in at the sports stadium that backed up to the school. On February 10, a shell tore through the second-floor dining room, peppering Dr. Cojuangco with shrapnel. “Everybody got scared at that time,” called Aquino. “It was getting very close.” Aquino helped his sick brother-in-law downstairs as a precaution. Cosgrave likewise moved his daily mass to the chapel’s windowless entryway, the same place he later chose to baptize the Cojuangco’s adopted three-year-old son Ricardo. During intense shelling the refugees gathered at the base of the stairs or crowded in the wine cellar, praying the rosary, while Father Cosgrave gave absolution. The heat and lack of air only increased the stress. “We could hear these shells exploding against the building,” Cosgrave said. “The fighting seemed to be coming closer and closer.”
The morning of February 12—the same day Furuda-san warned Ida Garcia to take her family and escape—Cosgrave canceled mass. Shells buzzed the church and machine guns rattled on the street. The refugees huddled in prayer. By mid-morning, the fighting had let up enough that Aquino helped his brother-in-law back up to his room on the second floor, which offered better ventilation. Aquino remained, eating his lunch with the teenager and his nurse, Inolin. Aquino’s wife, Trinidad, and father-in-law, Dr. Cojuangco, joined them. Others climbed to the second floor, including several of the brothers, a few servants, and three of the Carlos children: Rosario, Asela, and Tony.
Around noon a Japanese officer accompanied by about twenty enlisted marines arrived, claiming to hunt for three guerrillas believed to have been firing from the second floor. Troops searched the premises and seized several servants.
“You can’t do this,” one of the brothers protested.
The Japanese officer hit him.
The marines marched the servants out the door, a departure followed seconds later by gunfire. The Japanese returned after a few minutes, hurling the battered servants back inside the building. The refugees at this moment remained scattered throughout the premises. A few hovered around the stairs, while others hid inside the wine cellar and still more were up near the chapel. Brother Flavius Leo, who had just sat down with Cosgrave next to the wine cellar, heard the officer bark an order.
“They’re going to kill us,” cried Leo, who understood Japanese.
The missionary turned to Cosgrave. “Father,” he pleaded, “give us absolution!”
Before anyone could respond, the marines lunged, aiming their steel bayonets at the refugees. “I raised my hand to give him an absolution,” Cosgrave later testified, “and the bayonet of the Jap passed under my arm into his heart.”
Leo collapsed on top of the priest’s knees, pinning him in place. The marine stabbed Cosgrave through the left side of his chest, pulled the blade out, and drove it into his shoulder. The Japanese next attacked the Vasquez-Prada family, bayoneting twenty-two-year-old Enrique followed seconds later by twenty-one-year-old Herman. “They were hit in the throat,” recalled youngest brother Fernando, “and killed instantly.”
The toppled siblings could no longer shield Fernando from the attackers. One of the marines plunged his blade into the five-year-old’s chest. He yanked it out and rammed it in again. “My mother seeing the Japanese soldier going for a third blow sprang up and scooped me off the floor,” he recalled. “Like an enraged tigress she fought back, she kicked, she bit, she swung her fists.” Her efforts did little. “My mother was slashed across the shoulder. A big piece of flesh was hacked out of one thigh,” Fernando said. “My poor mother tried to protect herself with her hands. The fingers of both hands were sliced away. She was stabbed in the abdomen and fell to the floor.”
“Let her take time to die,” the officer sneered.
The marines then butchered fourteen-year-old Alfonso before plunging the bayonet twice into the chest of the elder Enrique Vasquez-Prada. The attacks on the missionaries and the Vasquez-Prada family sent other refugees diving into the wine cellar and fleeing up the stairs toward the chapel. Antonio Madrileno, who worked for the Vasquez-Prada family, joined others inside the shelter. Refugees lay on the floor and covered themselves, listening to the shouts and screams outside. “Some of the women and children,” Madrileno recalled, “were crying and the brothers were praying.”
The Japanese split up to pursue the refugees. Some entered the darkened wine cellar armed with a light, motioning everyone outside. One after the other the men and women filed out, each one struck by the butt of a rifle. The Japanese then ordered them to turn and face the wall. Seconds later the marines began to shoot and stab them. The unfortunate souls who cried or moaned received additional jabs. “When the Japanese had finished bayoneting us they pulled and dragged the bodies and threw them in a heap at the foot of the stairs, the dead being thrown upon the living,” recalled Cosgrave, who wound up near the bottom of the pile. “Not many were killed outright by the bayonetting, a few died within one or two hours, the rest slowly bled to death.”
Other troops bounded up the stairs, hunting the rest of the refugees. Marines caught thirty-two-year-old Juanita Tamayo, who worked as the cook for the Cojuangco family, on the second landing along with Juanita Carlos and her twelve-year-old daughter, Cecilia. “I raised my hands,” remembered Tamayo, who opted not to watch. “I tried to cover my face and a bullet came through my hand.”
The round blew off the little finger on her right hand. Marines killed Juanita Carlos and shot her daughter in the stomach. Cecelia lived long enough to later crawl up the last few stairs and collapse at the chapel entrance where she died.
Twenty-one-year-old Rosario Carlos, her twenty-year-old sister Asela, and fourteen-year-old Fortunata Salonga, who worked as a maid for the Aquino family, were also on the second floor. Each one fell moments after being discovered, the victim of a bullet or a blade. Rosario Carlos, who preferred to be shot rather than stabbed, positioned herself in front of the one marine whose rifle did not have a bayonet. The attacker stood face to face when he squeezed the trigger. The bullet ripped through the left side of her chest just below her collarbone and exited her back.
Steps away Aquino huddled inside the small room to the right of the chapel with his brother-in-law, wife, father-in-law, and the nurse, Inolin. When the massacre began, he had started to go down to investigate, but others below motioned for him to retreat and hide. He had slipped back in the room and closed the door. The five refugees waited and listened as Japanese marines with hobnail boots climbed the stairs. “We heard four rapid shots,” recalled Inolin, “followed by the wail of women.”
Aquino cracked the door open for a peek. The Japanese fired a single shot into the room, the bullet digging into the wall. Aquino slammed the door again, but the Japanese ordered them to come out. The trapped refugees had no other option.
The nurse opened the door to reveal a Japanese officer clutching a pistol and two marines armed with fixed bayonets. The troops motioned again for the five of them to exit. Inolin departed first, followed by Dr. Cojuangco and then Aquino. As soon as he emerged, Aquino surveyed the scene, spotting his maid sprawled on the floor, soaked in blood. A few feet away lay Rosario Carlos and her sister Asela, whom he had heard scream. “She was sitting down and bleeding. Her arm was shot and it was dangling, hardly connected to her body,” he recalled. “Blood was all over her.”
The Japanese ordered Inolin to turn around and face the wall. “When the nurse obeyed,” Aquino said, “the Japanese stabbed him with the bayonet.”
“Oh!” he cried.
The Japanese pulled out the blade and drove it into him again and again. “I received four thrusts,” Inolin later testified, “two in the back, one in my right arm and one in the right side of my neck.” Dr. Cojuangco saw the nurse drop and darted for the chapel, but the Japanese caught him seconds later. “He was stabbed,” Aquino recalled. “He was able to get inside a few more steps before he collapsed.”
Aquino chose to fight. The twenty-four-year-old lunged at the closest marine but missed. The Japanese drove his bayonet into Aquino’s chest just below his left nipple. The blade popped out his back. Aquino tumbled to the ground, and the marine stabbed him again on the right side of his chest. Blood spilled out of him, making the tile floor slippery, but Aquino refused to quit, crawling toward the marine, hoping to grab his legs. “He let me come close to him,” Aquino said. “When I was about a foot away from him, he stabbed me on the right shoulder near the base of my neck.” The marine crouched down so as to draw more strength from his legs. “He decided to push me just like a broom from the wall toward the other end of the corridor.”
With each step, Aquino felt the blade drive deeper into his body until the rifle barrel penetrated his shoulder. His wife Trinidad, who had come out of the room behind him, watched in horror. She wrested free from the marine who held her and ran toward her husband. A rifle cracked. Aquino watched her lose her balance, stumble, and collapse on her hands and knees near the chapel entrance, a bullet in her back. The marine followed and stood over her. He raised his bayonet and plunged it into her back. Aquino watched, powerless to intervene. The marine pulled his blade out and rammed it into her back again and again before returning to Aquino and bayoneting him twice more. “At that instant,” he later said, “I turned my head wishing I was dead.”
One of the marines then entered the room and seized his sick brother-in-law, dragging the sixteen-year-old out to the center of the corridor. The youth who had prayed to see American troops before he died instead looked up into the face of a Japanese marine, who raised his bayonet and drove it into him, killing him.
The Japanese turned to the chapel, where more than a half-dozen refugees and brothers hid among the wooden pews. Near the entrance, troops found brothers Alemond Lucian, Lambert Romanus, and Hartmann Hubert. Marines butchered the latter two, but Lucian tried to defend himself, only to be sliced in half by a sword.
The Japanese then split up. Two moved down each of the outer aisles, while a single marine walked down the center of the chapel. Amid the pews in the middle of the sanctuary, the Japanese slashed brothers Adolf Gebhard and Paternus Paul. Next to fall were brothers Victor Konrad and Mutwald William, crouched on the right side in front of the first pew. Troops then discovered seventeen-year-old Regina Acuna, a servant for the Uychuico family, bayoneting her nine times, including stabs through the right cheek and two through her throat. Six-year-old Tony Carlos, who had hidden in the confessional, burst out and ran toward the brothers. One of the marines drove his bayonet in the boy’s back, raised him in the air, and hurled him to the floor dead.
The Japanese closed in on the last two missionaries, Brother Antonius von Jesus and Brother Maximin Maria. When the massacre began, Brother Antonius had heard the gunshots and started for the stairs to investigate. En route he ran into Brother Maximin, bloodied from a bayonet wound and fleeing the Japanese.
“It is all over,” Brother Maximin had cried. “They are going to kill us all!”
The two had retreated to the front left of the chapel, where Brother Antonius had tried to tend to his fellow missionary’s wounds until the marines found them.
“I am a German,” Antonius pleaded. “You can’t kill me.”
The Japanese ignored his protest. One of the marines drove his blade into Antonius’s chest, piercing his lung. The missionary fell back against the wall. The marine put his boot on his chest to make it easier to pull out the blade. The other marine meanwhile rammed him twice in the belly with his bayonet. The two then stuck him five more times in the arm, before finishing off Brother Maximin.
The slaughter ended.
The assault on the brothers and refugees at De La Salle had lasted barely twenty minutes yet in that time Japanese marines had killed or mortally wounded forty-one men, women, and children, turning this once holy place into a hellhole. Blood not only stained the green-and-white-tiled floors of the chapel but splattered the walls. The dead littered the pews and corridor outside, while a heap of bodies lay at the bottom of the stairs. The Japanese had to step over and around them to ransack the premises, opening cupboards and trunks, stealing food, medicine, and personal belongings off the dead and dying. Troops retreated outside to drink, returning at times to laugh and mock the suffering of their victims. “We remained there all the afternoon,” Cosgrave recalled, “during which time many who had been wounded had already died.”
For the survivors, the misery had only begun. With the Japanese encamped around the building, no one dared leave in search of help. The only option was to pretend to be dead and wait for the Americans to arrive, which could be days or even a week. The Japanese knew that some of the victims feigned death, going so far as to place a glass of water beside each body so that the troops could check if the person had sipped it.
“Don’t drink from your glass,” Fernando Vasquez-Prada’s father warned him. “Drink from someone else’s whom you are sure is dead.”
The shelling and machine-gun fire outside continued as the afternoon gave way to dusk and then evening. Helen Vasquez-Prada, surrounded by the bodies of three of her four children, howled in pain. “My father and I had to crawl to the chapel to get her some water,” recalled Fernando, who was careful each time to return to his original position, where coagulated blood left an outline of his tiny body. “She felt cold and asked for some blankets, saying she could feel my brother’s cold head underneath her body.”
Brother Antonius climbed to his feet and staggered downstairs begging for anyone who could provide first aid, but the few survivors proved too weak. He found a bottle of whiskey in the rector’s room, downed the brown liquor, and stumbled to his bed, where he attempted to dress his wounds with iodine before he passed out. Cosgrave wriggled out of a pile of bodies around ten p.m. to find he was soaked in blood. He spotted Brother Arcadius Maria. The bespectacled missionary vomited blood, while a hole in his head leaked brain matter. Cosgrave administered last rites to him and the few others he found alive. “I was more than edified to see the patience and the resignation with which these people met their death,” the priest testified, “some of them actually praying to God to forgive those who had put them to death.”
Cosgrave climbed the stairs and crept through the chapel, inventorying the bodies of the brothers and refugees. The priest made his way into the sacristy and collapsed. “As far as I could see,” Cosgrave noted, “everyone was dead.”
Servillano Aquino awoke to find it dark in the hallway outside the chapel. He was exhausted and in pain from being swept across the floor at the point of a bayonet. He called out to his wife Trinidad, but she did not respond. “I could not lift my body up,” he said, “so I crawled instead inch by inch to my wife and I found out she was dead.” Rosario Carlos had heard him cry out and spoke up, confessing she was in such agony that she wished she were dead. Her sister Asela Carlos likewise clung to life, though neither could understand her murmuring.
Aquino’s voice had rallied his father-in-law Dr. Antonio Cojuangco, who now stirred in the dark. “I am here,” the doctor said. “Please send somebody here.”
Juanita Tamayo, whose finger was blown off, responded. She climbed up from the stairwell landing and pulled Cojuangco closer to his son-in-law. Aquino begged for water, and she gave him some, which he gulped despite his father-in-law’s warning that it was dangerous to do so with chest wounds. “I preferred death,” Aquino later said, “rather than suffer thirst.” Asela asked for water, which she drank, and soon thereafter she died; so, too, did Aquino’s maid, Fortunata. Aquino tried to sit up but fainted. He tried two more times and each time passed out. “I wanted to faint because I found out that one does not feel any pain when he faints,” he said. “It was easier to die this way.”
The Japanese returned the following morning. Those still alive pretended to be dead as troops moved through the first and second floors, kicking the bodies to see if anyone stirred. To Aquino’s horror, the Japanese tried to rape his fourteen-year-old maid, who at this point had been dead for almost ten hours. Troops tore the dead teen’s panties off but found rigor mortis prevented them from parting her legs. “She was dead. She was cold,” Aquino later testified. “No sane man would do that.”
The Japanese then tried to rape Rosario Carlos, who pretended to be dead. Marines moved her hands and then spread the twenty-one-year-old’s legs. “I heard them talk and laugh,” she said. “I felt them tearing the lower part of my underclothing, but I didn’t move.” Suddenly she heard a voice bark an order in Japanese. “I felt my dress pulled down, and a little while later I felt somebody step on my stomach.”
Departing troops slipped off Aquino’s ring, watch, and even shoes. Afterward Aquino tore the shirt off one of the brothers and plugged his wounds. His father-in-law’s health declined throughout the day. Blood continued to seep out of his body, and his belly swelled like a balloon, forcing Tamayo to have to press on his stomach to force the air out until he finally died that night. “He was,” Aquino reflected, “in agony.”
Many of the wounded brothers scattered throughout the chapel died that day. Outside in the hallway, Aquino listened one by one as the groans fell silent. Each time a missionary expired, one of the others would call out his name.
“Let us pray for him,” someone would announce.
Fernando Vasquez-Prada tried to comfort his mother but with little success. Her wounds proved too much, both physical and emotional. “As the hours passed my poor mother lay agonizing, her entire body mutilated, the cadavers of my brothers surrounding her,” Fernando said. “I gave her water and tried to clean her wounds.” Enrique Vasquez-Prada busied himself trying to care for Fernando, the lone survivor of his four sons. He escorted the five-year-old up to the second floor where he found a tin of adobo. Enrique opened it and fed the canned meat to his hungry son. No sooner had he pried open the top than Japanese troops returned. The youth watched one of the marines drive his bayonet into the top of his father’s head. The steel blade popped out under his chin. “My father was killed in front of my eyes,” Fernando recalled. “I crept back to my mother’s side to perhaps seek warmth. She knew my father had died.”
Helen Vasquez-Prada, who had long feared she would die by the sword, began to slip into madness, cursing the troops who had wiped out most of her family. “Bastards!” she wailed. “Son-of-a-bitch!”
Her painful cries carried all the way upstairs, where even Aquino could hear them on the ground just outside the chapel. Japanese troops, no doubt tired of her howls, finally silenced her with a bayonet. “My mother lasted three agonizing days,” Fernando later said. “She screamed day and night from the pain of her wounds.”
The survivors prayed that the increased shelling and machine-gun fire outside heralded the arrival of American troops. Shells at times struck the school. A piece of stone fell at one point and hit Aquino. The Japanese meanwhile attempted to set fire to the building but succeeded only in destroying the books and furniture inside the church gallery. For much of the time, Cosgrave hid behind the altar, subsisting on communion wafers and the water he found in the altar vases. Those refugees who were able to, joined him there or in the small room above the sacristy. Despite his own injuries, the priest continued to administer to those around him, making rounds among the wounded. “Father Cosgrave would come to us day and night to give us our last extreme-unction,” Aquino said. “He gave us consolation that if we should also die, we would go to heaven. He came every day—sometimes twice.”
The health of the survivors deteriorated as the days passed. “I had difficulty in breathing because my lungs were punctured by the bayonet,” recalled Aquino. “We wished we were dead.” Out on the street, survivors listened to the clatter of trucks rolling through the rubble. “Every minute we were expecting the Americans to come up,” Aquino testified. “We could hear voices and then they would vanish. We did not know whether it was the Japanese, Americans or Filipinos.”
Around noon on February 15—seventy-two hours after the massacre—the survivors heard voices outside of the school, this time speaking English.
“Father,” Aquino said to Cosgrave, “I think they have come.”
“When I see Americans, I will go out and wave at them,” replied the priest, who kept watch out the windows. “But the Japs are still around.”
The survivors had endured too much to risk being killed now. Rather than dart out, the refugees huddled and waited as minutes turned to hours. Around five p.m. that afternoon, American soldiers entered the bloodied downstairs of De La Salle.
“Anybody alive?” one shouted.
Up the same staircase where Helen Vasquez-Prada’s painful cries had once echoed, now came the familiar twang of an American accent. For the exhausted survivors crouched behind the chapel altar, liberation had at long last arrived.
“Yes,” Cosgrave shouted. “We are alive. We are here.”
MAJOR HENNE and his fellow troops with the Third Battalion, 148th Infantry Regiment, closed in on Taft Avenue on February 12, the prominent north-south boulevard about ten blocks inland from the bay. The soldiers formed the tip of the spear as the Thirty-Seventh Infantry and First Cavalry divisions continued the western drive across Manila, constricting the Japanese each day between America’s advancing front line and the waterfront. In that time the infantrymen had watched the battlefield evolve. The more residential areas of Pandacan and Paco, where fortifications consisted of mined streets and pillboxes, had morphed into the populous and commercial district of Ermita, crowded with multistory hotels, apartments, and government buildings.
Iwabuchi’s Central Force had proven adept at using this vertical landscape against them, targeting the infantrymen from above. “The high buildings gave the Japs a bird’s eye view of a wide area and coverage of the street grid for blocks so that on most streets no one moved without drawing fire,” Major Henne recalled. “Screening smoke was used but even so the men were exposed and when exposed the Japs connected.” The infantrymen had no choice but to hold up the advance and eliminate the threat. “The preferred solution was to use cannon to blast the upper floors to rubble and then move in,” he said. “An equally favored alternative was to burn the building. When these alternatives wouldn’t work riflemen moved in to take the building floor by floor.”
The job had led to high numbers of Japanese dead, whose remains littered the streets, buildings, and pillboxes.
“Based on reports from the line companies, the numbers of Jap dead in positions being overrun were the highest of any count since crossing the Pasig River,” announced Lt. Jimmy Falls, the battalion’s intelligence officer.
To help the infantry this Monday morning, American artillery and mortars zeroed on the prominent buildings along Kansas, Marcelino, and Colorado streets. Sherman tanks and self-propelled 105 mm howitzers took over the fight.
The first of the infantrymen reached Taft Avenue that afternoon, a major milestone in the advance on Manila Bay. The troops stopped, waiting for the other companies and battalions to the north and south to catch up. The area remained dangerous. Japanese snipers still lurked, and scores of enemy land mines lay buried in the roadway. Despite that, throngs of civilians emerged, apparently anxious for life to return to normal. “It was astonishing,” Henne recalled. “From out of nowhere they came and in minutes Taft Avenue south of Herran became a busy thoroughfare. The Filipinos using the street showed no concern about the noisy battle still going on in the area.”
A reminder of that danger occurred the following afternoon when an explosion shook several blocks of the capital. “A Filipino and his donkey-drawn caretela hit a mine and in the blink of an eye, the man, his donkey, his cart and pedestrians within a wide area were atomized,” Henne remembered. “A freakish feature of the incident was a caretela wheel left lying at the edge of the deep crater.”
The explosion drew Henne out onto the sidewalk of Taft Avenue along with a guerrilla captain attached to the battalion. The men watched the flow of people, many of whom appeared oblivious to the explosion, before the guerrilla stepped out into the street to stop and question a passerby. The guerrilla allowed the man to continue.
The individual took only a few steps before the guerrilla raised his gun and shot him. Henne watched in astonishment as the man crumpled to the street, dead.
“Jap,” the guerrilla announced.
The infantrymen began the push toward Manila Bay the afternoon of February 13. The final blocks promised to be a perilous battle as the soldiers drove west toward Dewey Boulevard, the wide bayfront parkway Daniel Burnham had envisioned almost a half-century earlier. Lined with tall hotels and apartments, the boulevard offered the enemy plenty of tactical advantages over the Americans. Mortarmen set out to clear a path. One platoon comprised of twelve 81 mm mortars set a record that night, firing more than four thousand rounds. To increase the punch, mortar teams used both high-explosive rounds with delayed fuses, so as to penetrate roofs and detonate on lower floors, and white phosphorous rounds, designed to start fires and raze buildings. Bazooka teams joined the fight, blasting buildings. The sky glowed from the fires that night. Sunrise revealed the extent of the damage as infantrymen navigated through a maze of debris. “Picking their way down narrow confined streets through the heaps of galvanized steel roofing and masonry they endured the peculiar, sickening odor of burned flash coming from the countless corpses strewn throughout the area,” Henne recalled. “The fires which had swept the area made it difficult to distinguish the dead Filipino civilians from the Japanese.”