CHAPTER 21

“It may never be possible to determine the complete human toll of the sack of Manila.”

—WAR DEPARTMENT RELEASE,

APRIL 17, 1945

WITH THE GUNS FINALLY SILENT, SURVIVORS CRAWLED out of the rubble, seeking loved ones amid the city’s wreckage. The twenty-nine-day Battle of Manila had claimed the lives of old and young, rich and poor. Artillery had vaporized many, while others died at the steel tip of a bayonet. Alongside thousands of Filipinos, the Japanese had slaughtered Russians, Spaniards, Germans, and Indians, as well as two Supreme Court justices, the family of a senator, and scores of priests. “The list of known dead that has come to my attention sounds like a Who’s Who of the Philippines,” Lichauco wrote in his diary. “Judges, lawyers, bank directors, doctors, engineers and many other well-known figures in public life now lie rotting in the ruins and ashes of what was once the exclusive residential districts of Malate and Ermita.”

Survivors hunted through the debris for husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters. For some, like Jose Herman, that meant returning to the spot where the Japanese had tried to kill him. Marines had pulled the police lieutenant from his home on February 7 along with his son and nephew. Herman had survived only because he slipped off a bridge into the water seconds before a Japanese sword would have sliced through the bone in his neck. His son and nephew were not so fortunate. “My son’s body had a watch in a pocket that I gave him,” Herman recalled. “His watch stopped at 11:25.” Others had to dig through mass graves, where starved dogs had often feasted on the top layer of bodies. That was the case for Juan Gonzalez, the godson of former Col. Jose Guido, who was killed along with his three teenage sons. “I just dug down,” Gonzalez said, “and every body that I could not recognize I left it there.”

Many had lost their entire families. Fred Canillas visited his family’s home on Leveriza Street in Malate, where the Japanese had butchered his parents, five sisters, and two brothers. Amid the scorched ruins he found only a vertebra and a few other charred leg and finger bones—his entire family reduced to the contents of a small box. Prudencio Chicote Lalana, who survived the massacre at the Moreta home, returned after he was released from the hospital. He, too, found only a handful of small bones, so burnt that when he reached for them, the pieces crumbled to dust in his hands. Near the iron frame of a piano, he found his spouse’s remains. “My wife was wearing a rosary around her neck,” he said, “and some of the beads I found embedded in the collarbone.”

Some survivors found loved ones whose bodies bore testimony to the torture endured in their final moments, victims with swollen and bruised faces or missing ears, noses, and eyes. The Japanese had gone so far as to pull out Eugene Kremleff’s fingernails and burn his buttocks. “The skin was badly blistered,” testified an American officer, “but had not fallen from his body.” The horrific ways people died coupled with decomposition forced relatives in some cases to identify loved ones by clothes, cigarette cases, and key chains. That was true of the murders of former constable Col. Alejo Valdes and his son. “I was able to identify my brother Ramon’s body by his belt buckle,” recalled Armando Valdes, “and the body of my father by the cloth of his shirt and also by the hair left in the front part of his skull.”

Those who found remains were the lucky ones. Others would have no resolution. Eva Gurevich searched in vain for her husband and son, who were grabbed by the Japanese. “There was no trace of them,” she said. “They just vanished.” Rita Losinas was so desperate that she hired a fortune-teller for help finding her husband, who was killed at De La Salle. “With a heavy heart full of pity, I have, during these recent days and weeks, observed the searchers—the seekers after lost loved ones,” Santo Tomas internee John Osborn wrote in a letter. “Daily have they gone out the España Gate hoping to find some trace of relative or friend—to change the dreadful uncertainty to certainty, though it be the certainty of death. First they visit the site of the old home, now probably but a heap of ashes and broken walls. Then to the homes of relatives and friends for news of the lost. Finally they just walk the streets looking at the dead, who are today numerous on Isaac Peral and other thoroughfares in the Ermita and Malate districts.”

Every day the thirty-thousand-circulation Free Philippines newspaper—published by the U.S. Army and distributed out of the back of an old Ford pickup truck—ran notices of missing persons, many of them children and even toddlers.

“Ana Mari Gomez, age 2. Jose del Prado, Age 9. Send information to Jose Gomez, 2158 Azcarraga.”

“Isabelo de los Reyes, Jr., 7 yrs. Head wounded, Singalong Church of Malate District. Inform 1009 O’Donnell. Reward.”

“Victor Vantchurin, 19, missing since February 10, 1945. Send information to his family at Santo Tomas.”

Manila had become a city of the dead.

The fight to retake the Philippine capital had resulted in the deaths of 16,665 Japanese, the near total destruction of Admiral Iwabuchi’s forces. In contrast, MacArthur’s men suffered 1,010 killed and another 5,565 wounded. Filipino civilians, however, paid the largest price. An estimated 100,000 men, women, and children died either at the hands of the barbarous Japanese or under the rain of American shellfire. “There were graves everywhere,” Hartendorp wrote, “bodies being buried where they had fallen; mounds large and small, rudely marked with crossed sticks or entirely unmarked, in the yards of what had once been homes or along the cracked sidewalks. For survivors to obtain death certificates and burial permits or to arrange the barest of funerals was impossible.”

Families and neighbors often interred relatives in backyards. George Simmie, the business partner of Carlos Perez-Rubio, helped bury the bodies of his friend and his family in the garden of the home where the massacre occurred. The job proved arduous because of the hard soil and the advanced state of decomposition. “When we grabbed hold of a leg in an effort to pull them,” Simmie testified, “the leg would come off and the body would disintegrate.” Jose Guido’s family chose to cremate the remains of the colonel and his three sons. “We used a spading fork to put the bones on a galvanized iron sheet,” recalled Faustino Gonzalez, “then we placed gasoline on them and burned them.” Hashmatrai Hotchand, who helped bury four fellow British Indians, followed his family’s tradition. “As is our village custom,” he said, “we threw them in the sea.”

Like hundreds of others, Paciencia Montano in contrast had no money or help to bury her husband Manuel and her twenty-two-year-old son, Artemio, whose remains she found on the bank of the Estero Tripa de Gallina in Paco. “I left the bodies where they were,” she said. “They were later burned by the American soldiers.”

Few witnessed the full scope of the horror like Mariano del Rosario, the city’s thirty-eight-year-old undertaker who was hired by the army to help dispose of the dead. It was a job that paid by the body. From February 3 until March 31, Rosario testified that his burial squads collected some eight thousand corpses, averaging at one point 150 a day. Workers buried some of the deceased in large shell holes. Others wound up in several mass graves dug with army bulldozers, including one in front of San Juan de Letran College in Intramuros and another in front of Jefferson Elementary School on Canonigo Street. One of the worst jobs was clearing the dead from the bowels of Fort Santiago, a job accomplished with a flamethrower. “Those in the dungeon,” recalled Captain Conner, “we destroyed by pouring gasoline on them and burning them.”

In contrast, few bothered to dispose of the enemy dead, whose bloated bodies littered the streets beneath swarms of fat bluebottle flies. Desperate residents had stripped such corpses of precious boots and even plundered valuable gold teeth. The family of twelve-year-old Rod Hall proved one of the exceptions, deciding to bury a dead Japanese soldier in a shallow grave in the family’s garden on Dakota Street, though Hall’s brother and a friend would later exhume the skeleton for use as a school biology project. “In the night,” Bilibid internee Natalie Crouter wrote in her diary, “when the wind is from a certain direction over the Walled City, the air is laden with smell of charred wood, wet cement, gun powder, pungent chemicals, and over all that sickish sweetish odor which is rotting flesh and blood. Once in the nostrils, it is never forgotten.” Headquarters staffer Paul Rogers noted the same. “There was an overpowering stench of death and decay. It pervaded the air, and there was no escape,” he wrote. “This was not Manila. It was simply hell.”

Ethel Herold stopped two military police one day, asking how the officers endured the fetor she described in her diary as “holy godawful.”

“You get used to it,” one replied.

Worse than the stench of death was its taste, which settled on the tongue. “No amount of spitting,” recalled Major Henne, “could clear it away.”

The city, meanwhile, overflowed with the wounded, who filled thirty-two hospitals, many of them little more than primitive aid stations set up in filthy schools, churches, and even race clubs. “I didn’t sweep it out,” one American medical officer complained, “I shoveled it out.” Exhausted doctors and nurses struggled to treat 23,457 patients, while public dispensaries tended to an average of 87,540 people per day. The carnage shocked even battle veterans, like Maj. John Carlisle, who led a civil affairs unit tasked with rounding up medical supplies and food. “If I told you some of the things I have done and seen here in the last few days,” Carlisle said to New York Times reporter George Jones, “you wouldn’t believe me.” Jones toured hospitals where doctors performed surgery by lamplight. He met the wounded wife of French consul Louis Rocque. A doctor’s exam showed that her husband had died from two saber cuts to the head, one of which had penetrated his brain, while the other nearly decapitated the diplomat. “We never believed,” she said, “people could be so cruel.” Such viciousness was not lost on MacArthur’s senior aides, including General Fellers, who summed up the enemy’s behavior in three words: “It is beastly.”

Overburdened physicians battled a scarcity of basic supplies. “Not only beds, but pallets and bare floors were used to make places for the civilian wounded,” wrote Col. Maurice Pincoffs, who was to serve as the city’s new health director. “They lacked instruments, dressings, drugs, linen, food, water and light and, since there was no transportation to carry away the dead, in the morgues the naked bodies were stacked like cordwood and filled the air with stench.” Many suffered horrific injuries, from gunshot and shrapnel wounds to compound fractures. Others had survived bayonet attacks and even failed decapitations. Many more had endured sexual assaults and would later battle venereal diseases. “There are hideous wounds among innocent civilians,” Crouter wrote in her diary. “It is a nightmare peopled with those we used to know, every name familiar. Total war spares no one, crushes all.” Spanish priest Juan Labrador echoed her in his diary. “So many families of acquaintances and friends exterminated. So many mutilated,” he wrote. “Manila is a picture of sadness impossible to describe.” As heinous as the stories were, survivors couldn’t help but note the redundancy of the Japanese barbarity. “The tales told by refugees are horrible and monotonously similar,” James Halsema observed in his diary. “If you’ve heard one, you’ve heard all.”

The wounds went beyond just physical. Starved, exhausted, and overwhelmed, Hartendorp had suffered a nervous breakdown soon after American tanks knocked down the gates of Santo Tomas. Throughout his years in captivity, he had missed the weddings of his children and the births of his grandchildren, losses that crystallized for him when he looked up one day to find a young man standing before him in the battledress of a Philippine Scout, a helmet atop his head and a rifle in his hands.

“Eddy!” Hartendorp cried, referring to his oldest son.

“I’m not Eddy, papa!” the young man replied.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“I’m Henry, papa.”

Hartendorp had been locked up so long he had failed to recognize his youngest son, who had been only fourteen years old when the Japanese interned him. Over the course of the war—and in his absence—his son had become a man and a soldier. “I took him in my arms,” Hartendorp wrote. “He had grown to be a very husky fellow.”

Lourdes Reyes returned home to find few remains of her family life. All that had survived, she noted, was her playhouse with its red Spanish roof tiles, where she and her sister used to compete to be the first one to see the stars in the evening sky. “That night, I wished hard by the stars, that it was Ching, standing there, instead of our playhouse or me,” Lourdes later wrote, using her sister’s nickname. “I wished and wished many nights afterwards, but Ching and my family, and my happy childhood days never came back again.”

The damage extended far beyond human casualties. The combination of Japanese demolitions and burnings coupled with American artillery had flattened 613 city blocks, an area containing eleven thousand buildings, ranging from banks and schools to churches and houses. There was no electricity, no running water, and no sewage. At night the entire city was dark. The battle had left an estimated two hundred thousand homeless, dependent upon army civil affairs units for everything from rice, canned meats, and vegetables to soap, shoes, frying pans, and mosquito nets, all of which had to be trucked in from Lingayen Gulf. Desperate residents lined up daily starting at three a.m. outside army aid stations. “Men, women and children hold baskets or hats for their supplies,” Jones wrote in the Times. “There are just as many inside the doors at 5 p.m. as at 5 a.m.”

Sanitation proved an immediate concern, particularly as the rat population exploded. Some eight hundred thousand people depended on artesian wells for drinking water. Workers hustled to build hundreds of public pit latrines and haul away tens of thousands of pails of so-called night soil. There was no city garbage service so laborers put out 4,500 oil drums to serve as trash cans. “Sanitation had broken down to the point that it was miraculous that we hadn’t seen epidemics of cholera ravaging the population,” recalled army doctor George Sharpe. The battle likewise had robbed the city of streetcars, motor vehicles, and many horse-drawn carriages. Residents resorted to baby strollers to push goods. Gone, too, were the telephone system and the postal service, reducing communication to foot and bike messengers. “The morale of the firemen, which had dropped steadily during the underfed and underpaid days of Jap occupation, hit rock bottom when their engines were machine-gunned during the battle of Manila,” one civil affairs report noted.

A postwar American survey by the War Damage Corporation—a government financial agency designed to handle losses not covered under regular insurance policies—calculated the damages to public, private, and church properties at $800 million, a figure that in contemporary dollars would run to more than $10 billion. In a city as old as Manila, questions arose over values, particularly relating to church possessions, whose library shelves once housed centuries-old texts and whose convents and cathedrals dated back three hundred and four hundred years. “There is some damage in all districts in Manila but the most valuable sections have been practically destroyed,” the report stated. “The port area and the Santa Cruz district have suffered a 90-percent loss; Malate and Intramuros, 93 percent; Paco, Ermita, and Binondo, from 68 to 85 percent.”

The total lack of transportation, homes, apartments, and hotels was reflected in the advertisements that appeared each day in the Free Philippines.

“Houses wanted,” one notice stated.

“Wanted to buy ten good bicycles,” read another.

“Loan wanted,” pleaded another.

Many of the losses proved priceless. The battle had destroyed the Philippine National Library and Museum’s collection of 550,000 books and pamphlets along with 2,500 paintings, carvings, and sculptures. Gone, too, were the Scientific Library’s 320,000 texts and the 20,000 volumes in the Supreme Court Library. The battle had destroyed not only the Manila Observatory’s collection of rare barometers and seismographs, but also its extensive historical records of typhoons and earthquakes that dated back to the early time of the Jesuits. The Philippine General Hospital had lost 12,500 volumes of clinical histories comprised of the records of almost three million patients. The city’s once-lush botanical gardens, which had boasted Indian tigers and Russian bears, were scorched ruins. “Nothing is standing but the burnt stumps of century-old trees,” one article noted. “Gone also are the birds and animals, their cages nothing but twisted steel.”

Beyond municipal and cultural losses were those suffered by the business community, which was vital to jump-starting Manila’s economy. In the short term, American civil affairs units put 27,239 people on the payroll at wages from 1.25 pesos to five pesos a day. The battle had wrecked Manila’s piers and crowded the harbor with an estimated three hundred sunken ships. Warehouses had been looted and burned, equipment and machinery destroyed or shipped to Japan, crops laid barren, and soil depleted. “War damage to coconut trees alone is estimated at $15,200,000, which will require years to rehabilitate,” noted a report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The American Chamber of Commerce offered a reward for ledgers, books, and stock cards seized by the Japanese from all American and European firms. The lack of raw materials promised to make it hard even for companies that survived the battle. “The manager of one of the Manila oil companies,” Hartendorp wrote, “in speaking of the rebuilding of his plant, stated that he would have to begin again at the beginning—with a land survey.”

Amid the smoldering ruins, it was hard to tell who had done more damage—the Japanese defenders or the American liberators. Some of MacArthur’s commanders made clear afterward that protecting the city was not their priority. “To me the loss of a single American life to save a building was unthinkable,” wrote General Beightler. “If I could have had those dive-bombers too, I might have made the big rubble into little rubble.” As a result, American forces at times found themselves the subject of scorn as survivors emerged from the ruins and began to tally lost loved ones and property. “I spat on the very first American soldier I saw that unspeakable day in February 1945,” recalled journalist Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, who saw her husband shot, home burned, and childhood friends raped. “Damn you!” she later wrote. “You did your best to kill us.”

So vast was the destruction that it proved difficult to comprehend.

“I had no conception of it, could not picture it, until I saw it,” Natalie Crouter wrote in her diary.

“For one who had not seen this,” added Spanish priest Juan Labrador, “it is impossible to believe or imagine it.”

The destruction prompted even larger questions for others, including former Bilibid internee Ethel Herold. “All this ruin, all this misery, all this death,” she wrote in her diary. “Oh, God! I wonder is there a God?”

There was a realization expressed over and over again among those who wandered through the miles of wreckage, the smell of death heavy in the air, that even though the city could be rebuilt, it would never be the same. The destruction was simply too much, too complete. “I have seen the death of a whole city,” Santo Tomas internee Robert Wygle wrote in his diary. “A new city may stand in its place some years from now, but it will bear little resemblance to its predecessor.”

“There seemed nothing left even to mourn,” Hartendorp wrote. “Manila was gone. It remained a name only.”

Some of MacArthur’s aides and commanders, who had expected the Japanese to abandon the capital and spare the Pearl of the Orient, felt the loss keenly. General Beightler was more callous than his colleagues. “So much for Manila. It is a ruined city,” he wrote. “Let us thank God our cities have been spared such a fate.”

MacArthur, who had once envisioned a grand entry parade into Manila, experienced an entirely different reception when he moved his headquarters to the Wilson Building, which was filled with debris, garbage, and dust. “There was no joy in our entrance,” recalled headquarters staffer Paul Rogers. “I do not remember seeing a Filipino smile during the entire duration of our stay there.” For the first meal in the city, the headquarters staff set up outdoors under a canvas roof. “The tables were covered with huge black flies which clung to everything and everybody. Half a dozen Filipino mess boys wielded paper fly whisks, in our faces and touching our faces, to drive off the pernicious pests. We all knew where they had bred and were breeding, but did not care to discuss the matter. We had brought death to the city, and perhaps we deserved to eat it.”

Looters stole his jeep that night.

Santo Tomas internees who had sat ringside for the battle ventured south of the Pasig to check on old homes, family, and friends, greeted by a towering sign erected by American soldiers: “Warning: Mines & Booby Traps. Stay Out of Buildings and On Main Traveled Routes.” Tressa Roka explored Malate and Ermita, two of the hardest-hit areas. “I wandered through rubble-torn streets that I could not recognize, as there were no landmarks, no trees, no buildings, houses, or signs to guide me,” she wrote. “Yet I had lived in this section for four years.” Natalie Crouter found the experience emotionally overwhelming. “I am appalled and feel beaten by all I have seen,” she wrote. “I listened all those weeks to the guns. Now I see what they did. Everyone should see it and learn one lesson forever.”

Like others, eleven-year-old Robin Prising could not resist surveying the damage, jumping in a jeep for a tour. He noted that bulldozers were already at work, clearing roads so that American trucks could pass. The half-naked survivors horrified him more than the destruction. “Manila had become a no-man’s land of cripples crutching about on laths salvaged from tottering homes. A blinded man with a hideously disfigured face begged us for food. Stunted children raised fingers in V for Victory as we passed,” he wrote. “Gouged with wounds, blistered by burns, everyone went scavenging in and out of the carcasses of houses for anything they could eat or sell or save.”

At one point the troops stopped and began kicking a rusty can. “Suddenly someone shouted,” Prising recalled. “A Yank had kicked the can into the severed arm and outstretched hand of a child that lay rotting in a ditch.” Elsewhere the boy ran across the body of a dead Japanese soldier. “Flies swarmed the corpse, an enemy corpse which no one would bury,” he said. “The eye sockets were alive, wriggling with maggots, and the mouth of the corpse, rigidly open, exposed a row of perfect teeth.”

Despite the constant presence of death, there, too, returned the urgency of life. At Santo Tomas, female internees began relationships with American soldiers. “Sex, which I had known about only theoretically, took place behind every bush and tree,” Prising recalled. “In the mornings, when the little tots came out to play, they found the ground littered with condoms and blew them up like balloons.”

Brothels popped up across the street from the university. “Hey, you, Big Boy!” women called out. “You want to make pam-pam?”

Internees weren’t the only ones interested in sex. American troops, who were exposed to urban civilization for the first time in two years, frequently visited Filipino prostitutes, sending the venereal disease rates, as noted in the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division’s report, soaring. Medical officers and chaplains gave morality talks, while the army began checking and treating known prostitutes. Doctors examined 105 prostitutes, of whom 25 percent tested positive for gonorrhea. Physicians administered syphilis tests to eighty, only to discover three out of every four were infected. During February, 254 soldiers tested positive for venereal disease, most for gonorrhea. “It is anticipated,” one report noted, “that the syphilis rate will increase sharply as the incubation period of the disease is reached.”

The problem proved so widespread that MacArthur’s physician Roger Egeberg suggested that the general bar troops from going out inside the city.

“What?” MacArthur asked incredulously.

“There isn’t very much V.D. in those troops that are stationed far away from Manila,” he replied. “It’s among those stationed in Manila or who come here when they have a day or two of furlough. You know, all those engaging kids who want you to have pom-pom with their big sister. Well, both syphilis and gonorrhea are way up.”

“Declare Manila out of bounds to our troops?” the general countered. “Why, Doc, do you know what you’re asking me to do?”

MacArthur told his physician that American forces provided one of Manila’s few economic generators, propping up the handful of bars, restaurants, and shops.

“No, Doc, that’s an insult to the soldiers and hard on the disrupted economy of this war-torn city,” he declared. “You’ve got some pretty good medicines for those diseases now, haven’t you?”

MacArthur’s lax attitude differed from many of the frontline medical officers, who saw up close the awful reality of life on the streets of Manila. The city’s social fabric had begun to unravel during the latter stages of the Japanese occupation, but post-battle it totally disintegrated. “Morals and convention had been completely set aside,” recalled George Sharpe, a doctor. “When we drove through the streets, children of six and seven ran up to soldiers and openly pandered for prostitutes. They carried sacks of bootleg whiskey asking outlandish prices from many of our men. It was really appalling to even the most unthinking person as to what the effect of war had on these people.”

THOUGH THE BATTLE OF MANILA was over, the army’s work was far from finished. General Yamashita remained elusive. Just as he had done after the seizure of Singapore, the Tiger of Malaya had seemingly vanished, his whereabouts unknown. “Yamashita is finished,” Fellers wrote his wife. “Probably gone to Japan or dead.” Some of MacArthur’s top aides couldn’t resist taking a swipe at the Japanese general, even though Yamashita’s forces had executed what Robert Ross Smith later characterized as “a most effective delaying action.” General Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, crowed: “The arrogant conqueror of Singapore, Yamashita, suffered the most humiliating defeat in the annals of Japanese history; his conduct of operations from Leyte to Luzon was inept, hysterical, second-rate.”

The Japanese general remained in the mountains near Baguio, waiting for MacArthur’s troops to come find him. Enough U.S. soldiers were left in Manila to maintain order and hunt down stray Japanese troops, but the remainder would require rest and relaxation before continuing the fight. Some of the troops savored a brief reprieve at the Wack Wack Golf and Country Club. “To breathe clean air again, air free of the stench of dead and burnt buildings, to swim in the club pool and relax were only a few of the many pleasures we were to enjoy,” one report noted. “All men were free of the worry that had been companions with each and every one for over a month.”

For weeks American patrols continued to discover rogue Japanese soldiers and marines hiding in the rubble, performing an exercise troops called “beating the tin,” a reference to the sheets of metal roofing that littered the city. “It was not unusual to spot a Jap by seeing soles of the man’s boots under the sheets of iron,” Major Henne recalled. “Prisoners were taken in increasing numbers but a high proportion of the Japs clutched their weapons or a grenade inviting quick dispatch.” The Americans killed seven on March 5, most near the intersection of Isaac Peral and Taft Avenue. Two days later troops found a wounded Japanese merchant marine—weak and hard of hearing—in the ruins of the Finance Building. The following day soldiers caught five more Japanese on a raft in Manila Bay.

Others worked to clear thousands of enemy land mines in what proved a race against time as booby traps claimed the lives of residents, including one killed inside the chapel at La Loma Cemetery. Troops collected thousands of artillery duds and hundreds of mines, piling more than fifty tons of unexploded ordnance in Burnham Green in front of the Manila Hotel. Army officials debated how best to dispose of it all when the heat from the sun prompted one of the bombs to detonate, which triggered a massive reaction. “This explosion, which caused no damage other than a large crater in the ground,” noted the Thirty-Seventh Infantry’s report, “relieved the battalion of the responsibility of moving the duds and mines from the city.”

Bulldozers helped clear 2,038 city blocks and then came back and cleared more, upping that figure to 3,904. The city’s sanitation section, along with malarial control units and the army and navy, hauled away 30,938 truckloads of debris, while planes in the skies overhead sprayed for mosquitos and flies. The army also looked for ways to entertain the troops, taking over a thousand-seat theater in Manila which after reconditioning was used to stage evening performances, often using professional Filipino entertainers. The premiere show after the city’s liberation was Fernando Poe’s South Seas Caper. “The theater,” one infantry report noted, “was always packed to capacity.”

The army likewise organized volleyball, basketball, and softball leagues, hosting the first baseball game at two p.m. on March 31 at Rizal Memorial Stadium, with General Beightler throwing out the first pitch. Famed composer Irving Berlin arrived in Manila, visiting Malacañan Palace to perform a new song he dedicated to General MacArthur titled “Heaven Watch the Philippines.”

THE BATTLE HAD BARELY ENDED before Jean MacArthur returned, like so many others, anxious to see Manila and visit the ruins of her home. She had spent the entire war in Australia with the couple’s young son, Arthur, never once leaving Brisbane. On hearing the news that American forces had reached Santo Tomas, she dashed off a letter to a friend on February 5. “Manila is free,” she exclaimed. “Oh you can’t imagine what this means to me, I can’t find words to express it—I am so thankful.”

General MacArthur had sent for her as soon as the fighting slowed, preferring, just as he had done on Corregidor, to have his wife and closest confidante by his side, regardless of the danger and the private scorn it generated from officers who had to leave spouses behind. The sixty-four-year-old MacArthur justified it by telling his married aides that unlike them he had only a few years left to share with his wife and son.

“Doc,” he once told Roger Egeberg, “you have a long life ahead of you, time to enjoy and appreciate each other. I can’t count too many years.”

Bonner Fellers flew to Australia to escort Jean and Arthur back to Manila aboard the refrigerator ship Columbia Express, which throughout the two-week journey observed strict blackout precautions for fear of enemy submarines. The ship steamed past Corregidor and into Manila Bay on the Tuesday morning of March 6, 1945. In the distance, Jean could see the outline of the Manila Hotel. “Now,” she thought to herself, “that doesn’t look so destroyed.”

The freighter anchored in the bay surrounded by the wreckage of hundreds of sunken ships. General MacArthur had not seen his wife and son for five months, since he had departed Australia in October for the Leyte invasion. He climbed aboard a tender at eleven-thirty a.m. for the trip out, joined by his senior aides Egeberg, Lloyd Lehrbas, and Andres Soriano.

On deck, Jean held a borrowed set of navy bedsheets, unsure if she would find any in the wrecked city. Seven-year-old Arthur stood by her side.

MacArthur boarded the ship and grabbed them both, holding tight. His family had returned. Overhead flew a formation of fighters and bombers.

“Isn’t it wonderful to see our planes?” Jean said to General Kenney. “The last time I was here, they were all Japs and instead of watching them we were running for cover. George, what have you done to Corregidor? I could hardly recognize it when we passed it this morning. It looks as though you had lowered it at least forty feet.”

Kenney and MacArthur laughed.

With the couple’s home destroyed, MacArthur had moved into an elegant two-story mansion in the Santa Mesa district not far from Malacañan Palace. The home, known locally as the Casa Blanca or White House, included a swimming pool and immaculate gardens. The property had belonged to Russian native Emil Bachrach, a wealthy car distributor who died before the war. His wife Mary had kept the residence, which the Japanese had seized. General Kenney originally claimed the home for himself but made the mistake of describing it to MacArthur. The next morning MacArthur skipped his normal breakfast with his air officer, returning later. “George, I did a kind of dirty trick on you,” he confessed. “I stole your house.”

Throughout the capital, lodging was at a premium as landlords demanded exorbitant rents, forcing families to double and triple up. While MacArthur lived in luxury, many of his aides bounced around between battered apartments and homes. General Fellers described the situation best in his response to a journalist who inquired about visiting. “Manila was practically destroyed,” Fellers wrote. “There are absolutely no accommodations for the people here much less for an increase.”

No sooner had Jean arrived than she went on a tour of Manila, paying a visit to former friends at Santo Tomas. The jeep rolled through the gates of the university where she was immediately struck by the emaciated internees. “Lord,” she thought.

She had dressed that day in a hat and gloves, yet through her window she saw men and women shuffling around in rags, the remnants of shirts, trousers, and dresses many had worn for three years. “I had a horrible feeling about my own clothes. It just didn’t seem right. I felt that I was embarrassingly overdressed,” she said. “So I had the driver stop, and I quickly took off my hat and gloves, but there wasn’t much else I could do about it.” She exited the jeep and greeted old friends she had known before the war, some of whom had lost all their teeth. Jean saw the pathetic shanties many of them had lived in throughout the war and paused at the graves of those who died.

Her friends appreciated the visit, including Mary Fairchild, who dashed off a note to her afterward. “Your coming to Manila was the crowning touch to our miraculous deliverance.” But the visit pained Jean. “It was just heartbreaking,” she said. “These were people that I had known that had lived in the lap of luxury in the Philippines.”

Jean likewise visited the internees still recovering a few blocks away at Bilibid, though her reception there was not as generous. “Well,” Natalie Crouter wrote in her diary, “she looks as though she had her feet up in front of a fireplace for three years, keeping nice and warm.” Many resented her visit, considering how bad most still felt and looked. “It may be a good thing for her to see our condition, the devastation, get a taste and smell and touch of it, closely.”

The MacArthurs called on President Sergio Osmeña and the first lady at five-fifteen p.m. before returning to the Casa Blanca. The couple shared a bedroom on the second floor of the grand home, while downstairs Arthur slept in a room with his Chinese nanny, Ah Cheu, who had escaped from Corregidor with the family.

As she lay in bed, Jean heard the distant rattle of small arms followed by the roar of American artillery. “I think I’d better go down and check on Arthur,” she said.

She slipped downstairs to his bedroom, finding her son sitting up in the middle of his bed, his nanny asleep a few feet away. “Do you hear those guns?” she asked.

“Yes, Mommy,” he said. “I hear those guns.”

“I just want you to know that they’re our guns.”

“Oh,” he said, “that’s all right.”

Arthur lay back down and soon fell asleep. Jean returned to her husband’s side. “He remembers,” she told him, “when we were shelled on Corregidor.”

A few days later General MacArthur took Jean to visit the couple’s old home atop the Manila Hotel. The structure still stood, as she had seen from the deck of the Columbia Express, but the artillery and subsequent fires had gutted the insides of the once-luxurious hotel. The couple climbed the stairs around two p.m. on the afternoon of March 17 to the fifth-floor penthouse that had served as the family’s first married home. It was here that they had brought young Arthur home after his birth at Sternberg Hospital near Intramuros and here where the family had christened him.

The roof was gone; so, too, were most of the walls, making it impossible for Jean to tell where one room ended and another began. Five inches of ashes blanketed the floor of the general’s study, all that was left of his fine library. She paused to look at the remains of her baby grand piano, which the Japanese had destroyed with a bomb. Under her feet crunched the shards of her crystal glassware and china. The wrecked home appeared symbolic of what MacArthur once wrote: “I had learned a bitter lesson of life, never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.”

The total destruction of all her possessions, including Arthur’s baby book, crushed Jean, who described it in a letter to a friend. “You wanted to know about my apartment at the hotel. Of that, as well as everything else almost that I know in Manila is gone,” she wrote. “You can’t possibly conceive of the destruction wrought by the enemy here. His brutality is something that, to me, isn’t even paralleled in the darkest ages. He destroyed, killed, burned, massacred and looted. Entire families that I knew here were murdered. Others have completely disappeared from the face of the globe. Even as much as I had been told before I arrived, I couldn’t grasp it until I got here.”