CHAPTER 22

“What the Japanese did not steal, the fire devoured. What the fire did not devour, the bombs pulverized.”

—JUAN LABRADOR,

DIARY ENTRY, MARCH 17, 1945

SHORTLY BEFORE EIGHT A.M. ON SEPTEMBER 2, 1945—ON A muddy hilltop outside the village of Kiangan, more than two thousand feet above sea level—American infantrymen gathered to await the arrival of a man many had come to think of as a ghost.

The Tiger of Malaya.

Barely three weeks earlier, on August 15, Emperor Hirohito in a radio broadcast to the Japanese people, had brought an end to the war that for the United States had begun 1,347 days earlier with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Those intervening years had witnessed some of the greatest destruction the world had ever seen, from the firebombing of Tokyo to the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and, of course, the leveling of Manila, MacArthur’s beloved hometown and America’s portal to Asia.

In the six months since the end of the battle for the Philippine capital, American troops had hunted Yamashita throughout the highlands of northern Luzon, forcing the Tiger to abandon Baguio and hike deeper into the Sierra Madre Mountains, at times clutching a golf club as a walking stick. His men had to grapple not only with the jungle but with dysentery, malaria, and starvation, forced to drink muddy water and eat grass, berries, and snakes. Lt. Gen. Akira Muto, Yamashita’s bespectacled chief of staff, described the hardship in his diary. “One cannot imagine the jungles during the rainy season unless one has experienced it,” he wrote. “The dampness of the putrid earth which had yet to see the rays of the sun. The odor of steaming fallen leaves. The cries of various dangerous insects at night. It was completely lacking in beauty.”

The war’s end had found Yamashita in command of 50,500 troops. He had heard via radio, albeit two days later, Hirohito’s rescript announcing the cessation of hostilities, a scene Muto captured in his diary: “Tears flowed endlessly.” The general likewise felt the agony, expressing himself in verse. “It knifed deep into my heart.”

Muto had begged to stay with him in his hut that night, afraid the general might commit suicide. “Don’t worry,” Yamashita assured his senior aide. “I won’t go alone to die. I have a great duty still to see all my troops go back to Japan.”

Junior officers, fearful the Americans would humiliate Yamashita, had implored the general to do otherwise. “If I kill myself, someone else will have to take the blame instead of me,” he countered. “I must take responsibility myself alone.”

On August 24, an American fighter pilot appeared in the skies over Yamashita’s mountain headquarters. Several weeks earlier the same airman had bailed out of a disabled P-38, only to be captured by the general’s forces. Following news of Japan’s surrender, soldiers had escorted the pilot back toward American lines, releasing him along with a letter from Yamashita, who congratulated the airman on his devotion to duty. That pilot now returned with a letter of his own sealed in a tube from Maj. Gen. William Gill of the Thirty-Second Infantry Division, opening a dialogue that led to Yamashita’s decision to walk out of the mountains.

Before he departed for the two-day hike, the Great Cedar wrote a poem:

My men have been gathered from the mountains

Like wild flowers.

Now it is my turn to go

And I go gladly.

Yamashita had done what just a year earlier he had thought was impossible: he had survived the war. But a larger question remained.

Would he survive the peace?

That Sunday, as the sun climbed in the eastern sky, twenty-four American soldiers with the Thirty-Second Infantry anxiously awaited the Japanese general on a muddy trail. Tensions everywhere remained high, including nearly two thousand miles north, where that morning General MacArthur prepared to preside over Japan’s official surrender ceremony aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

Promptly at eight a.m., Yamashita emerged on the path, walking stick in his left hand and leading a party of twenty-one senior officers, aides, and orderlies.

Lt. Russell Bauman of Wisconsin stepped forward to greet the Japanese general. “I have been charged with bringing you and your party through our lines without hindrance, delay or molestation,” he told Yamashita.

“I want to tell you how much I appreciate the courtesies and good treatment you have shown us,” Yamashita replied through an interpreter.

The group set off again, hiking the last several miles down. “General Yamashita, whose weight had dropped from 200 to 165 pounds, appeared in good condition during the walk out of the mountains,” an Associated Press reporter wrote. “He puffed only slightly, but stopped occasionally to wipe his closely shaven head.”

The party arrived at a rural schoolhouse at ten-thirty a.m., where Col. Ernest Barlow of the Thirty-Second Infantry and Lt. Col. Alex Robinet with the 128th Infantry Regiment waited. All eyes studied the once-portly commander, dressed in worn jungle fatigues that hung on his gaunt frame. Yamashita sat atop a stool and pulled off his muddy footwear and leggings, swapping them for a pair of shined shoes his orderly handed him. Someone offered him a cigarette. He nodded his appreciation, slipped it between his lips, and lit up.

News photographs snapped pictures, though the pop of the flashbulbs rattled Muto. “The war is over,” he said. “We’ve had enough of those mortars.”

One of the interpreters translated his comments, and everyone laughed, easing the tension. Yamashita feasted on army K-rations, interrupted occasionally by soldiers armed with short-snorter bills* who pressed the general for an autograph.

A convoy of trucks rolled up to the school. Yamashita climbed into the front seat of a one-and a-half-ton truck, while his aides crowded behind him in the back. The men bounced down the wrecked mountain road. “We had nothing to complain about,” Muto later wrote, “because we had ordered the destruction of this road ourselves.” At one point the truck bogged down, forcing troops to pull it free with a bulldozer. Filipinos gathered around to watch, shouting insults at the Japanese and waving stones.

Yamashita stared ahead stoically.

“That is typical,” one of the general’s interpreters scoffed, “of the weaker nations. Cruelty to the vanquished.”

“I guess Japan is one of the weaker nations,” countered one of the Americans.

When road conditions improved, the Americans transferred the prisoners to sedans for the remainder of the trip to the First Battalion Command Post of the 128th Infantry Regiment near Kiangan.

After months of living in the sweltering jungles, the Japanese were amazed at the long and orderly rows of American tents. “This is like a cinema,” one said.

Yamashita disembarked and came face to face with General Beightler, who had personally witnessed the destruction and bloodshed Yamashita’s troops had inflicted upon men, women, and children in Manila. “As he walked toward me,” Beightler wrote, “he proffered his hand. I refused to shake hands; he then stepped back, saluted, and bowed.”

The convoy continued another hour south to Bagabag, where Yamashita and his aides dined in the officers club. “We were served cold canned beer,” Muto wrote, “which tasted very good.” Afterward guards escorted the prisoners to the airstrip, where Yamashita boarded a C-47 for the flight to Luna Airport at Lingayen Gulf. A convoy of jeeps drove them to Baguio, a route lined at times by angry locals. “The insults,” Muto noted, “coming from Filipinos on the way were unbearable.”

The convoy reached the High Commissioner’s Summer Residence at two-thirty p.m., a white two-story concrete mansion often blanketed by mountain fog. Military police separated the officers and enlisted men and then searched them all. Yamashita and the other senior officers carried swords. The general presented his weapon—forged in the seventeenth century by the famous swordsmith, Kanenaga Fujiwara—to Lt. Col. Aubrey Saint Kenworthy, who commanded the military police entrusted to guard the prisoners. MacArthur would later donate the famous sword to his alma mater, West Point. Guards also relieved Yamashita of a small amount of Japanese money and a pair of U.S. Army Medical Corps scissors found among his toiletries.

Several of the Japanese officers carried American dollars, ranging from Muto who had several hundred to Maj. Gen. Naokata Utsunomiya who had a thousand. Muto likewise had eight thousand Philippine Victory one-peso notes, each in consecutive numerical order. Guards noted that all had American cigarettes.

A guard searching one of Yamashita’s orderlies discovered a live hand grenade in the upper-right-hand pocket of his coat. “It’s a heck of a thing to come to a peace conference with,” quipped the officer who removed the grenade.

The Americans could not be too careful, even though it ruffled the Japanese. “Not only was our baggage examined, but we were given physical examinations,” Muto griped. “Although we were aware that the inspections were being conducted as a precaution against suicides, we resented such a breach of etiquette.”

Afterward guards led Yamashita, Muto, and a few of the senior officers to rooms on the second floor of the residence, while the others were locked up in the Thirty-Second Infantry Division’s stockade. At seven p.m. the guards returned, escorting the officers to the auxiliary dining room for supper, where Yamashita enjoyed a bowl of vegetable soup along with mashed potatoes, peas, buttered bread, and a steak, prepared by Cpl. Edward Kapica. “He ordered it medium rare, and that’s the way he got it. I kinda hoped he’d choke on it,” Kapica later told reporters. “He asked for a beer to wash it down with and got a can of good American ale.”

Yamashita was asked at one point if he planned to kill himself.

“No,” he said jokingly. “No hara-kiri.”

The following morning, September 3, 1945, guards came for the general and his senior officers and marched them downstairs to the dining room at 11:40 a.m., where Yamashita would formally surrender his forces.

Though the High Commissioner’s Summer Residence had escaped bomb damage during the war, it had fallen prey to looters, who had stripped the elegant home of much of its fine furniture and its library. A long rectangular table stood in the center of the wood-paneled room, draped with a white cloth. The few surviving ornate wooden chairs with woven backs lined one side of the table; simple folding chairs and stools the other. A half-dozen microphones perched on the tabletop beneath bright bulbs that dangled from wires overhead. A few feet away on another table lay the swords seized the day before from the Japanese officers. Guerrilla leaders, senior officers, and news reporters crowded around the table, including one who stood atop a stepladder for a better view.

Muto stood behind the folding chair farthest from the door followed by Yamashita, Admiral Okochi, Rear Adm. Kaoru Arima, and lastly the interpreters. The Tiger of Malaya briefly sat down, before an officer reminded him to stand until the American delegation arrived. He climbed back to his feet, fidgeting with his hat. The scene this Monday morning was no doubt eerily familiar to Yamashita. Only three and a half years earlier he had sat across just such a table in the Ford Motor Company factory on the island of Singapore. That day, as he stared down Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival, Yamashita had casually kicked off his leather boots. When the buck-toothed British commander begged for more time, Yamashita had pounded the table with his open hand, demanding he surrender immediately. Percival had caved, his defeat destined to forever share the same date as his daughter’s birthday.

At this table in the mountains of Luzon, Yamashita’s war had come full circle. The victor had become the vanquished.

The American officers filed inside the room. Maj. Gen. Edmond Leavey, who would preside over Yamashita’s surrender, sat facing the center of the table. Lt. Gen. William Styer sat to his right next to Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, who had surrendered on Bataan and suffered the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Japanese, losing forty pounds. He had passed through the Philippine capital when the war ended, stunned to see the handiwork of Yamashita’s forces. “Manila was shockingly destroyed,” he wrote. “The very contour of the city seemed changed.”

To General Leavey’s left sat none other than Arthur Percival, who like Wainwright had spent the war in captivity. MacArthur had wanted the British commander to attend Yamashita’s surrender, to stand victorious across from his former adversary. Percival studied Yamashita. “I saw one eyebrow lifted and a look of surprise cross his face—but only for a moment,” he recalled. “His face quickly resumed that sphinx-like mask common to all Japanese, and he showed no further interest.” News reporters likewise were anxious to capture the dynamic between the two former foes. “Percival and Yamashita were reluctant to look at each other during the initial stages of ceremony,” wrote Rodolfo Nazareno of the Manila Star Reporter. “Finally they caught each other’s eyes and their glances seemed to reveal inward hostility.”

Leavey began the ceremony at noon. “Please be seated,” he said.

The general introduced himself and then asked Maj. Gen. Walter Wood, Jr., to read aloud in English the terms of Yamashita’s surrender.

“You have heard read the instrument of surrender,” Leavey said afterward to Yamashita. “Are you ready to sign the surrender documents?”

An interpreter leaned over Yamashita’s shoulder and whispered to him what had just been read. “I am,” Yamashita replied with a nod.

On the table sat four leather-bound copies in English and Japanese along with several fountain pens. Yamashita stepped forward at 12:04 p.m. “He was rigid,” one reporter noted, “as he signed.” Col. George Bishop then passed the surrender documents to Leavey for the Americans to sign. Afterward Leavey presented the pens to Wainwright, Percival, and Styer, slipping the last one into his own pocket.

The Japanese officers awaited the next move.

“General Yamashita, Vice Admiral Okochi and the others shall be held as prisoners of war,” Leavey announced in conclusion.

Colonel Kenworthy, head of the military police trusted to guard the Japanese prisoners, moved to take them into custody. “He walked up to Yamashita,” Wainwright noted, “punched an extended index finger into the Jap general’s shoulder, and motioned him out of the room like an umpire thumbing a player out of a ball game. He was to be taken to Bilibid Prison to await trial as a war criminal.”

Wainwright watched Yamashita weep as he left.

The former prisoner of war rose and approached Styer. “General,” he said, “this might seem a little strange, coming from me, but I hope Yamashita is shown the courtesy due his rank, in the matter of personal accommodations, housing and food.”

“He’ll be given everything he’s entitled to, under the Geneva Convention,” promised Styer, commanding general of American forces in the western Pacific. “We don’t want to be guilty of treating anyone as the Japs treated you and your men.”

At three p.m. military police loaded Yamashita and his compatriots into a convoy bound for the airport. “From our speeding jeep,” Muto said, “I could see the blurred image of the pine-clad hills where we had once lived in caves.” Guards later loaded the prisoners aboard two C-47s. The twin-engine military transports then roared down the runway and lifted off into the sky that afternoon, taking Yamashita back to Manila.

Back to the scene of the crime.

WHILE TROOPS HUNTED YAMASHITA in the mountains, an army of American investigators spent the spring and summer months preparing for the eventual war crimes trials of the general and other Japanese commanders. Investigators interviewed victims, including many still confined to hospital beds, ultimately producing thousands of pages of sworn testimony. Others photographed wounds and walked massacre sites with survivors, sketching maps and diagrams of places such as De La Salle, Fort Santiago, and San Agustin that would later help in the re-creation of the horror.

The dogged work identified twenty-seven major atrocities just in Manila and another 276 that occurred throughout the Philippine islands. The list, of course, was by no means complete, despite the diligence of investigators. In some cases, entire families had been slain, leaving no one to report the massacre. Missing, for example, was any record of the murders of Far Eastern University founder Nick Reyes and his family. Investigators dedicated a report to each atrocity, recording the details of what occurred, logging witnesses, and tallying as best as possible the names of victims. Some of the reports totaled hundreds of pages. The investigation into the rapes at the Bay View Hotel, for example, ran 781 pages and included testimony from 106 witnesses.

At the same time investigators canvassed the field hospitals and ruins of Manila, teams of analysts with the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section deciphered thousands of captured Japanese orders, letters, and diaries. Many of these records documented brutality not just in Manila but in the rural provinces as well.

“Kill American troops cruelly,” one commanding officer demanded. “Kill all those who oppose the Emperor, even women and children.”

“Four prisoners were executed,” read a Japanese soldier’s diary. “With a stroke of the sword their souls went to Hell.”

“All natives, both men and women, will be killed,” ordered another.

A few of the diaries revealed remorse. “Taking advantage of darkness, we went out to kill the natives. It was hard for me to kill them because they seem to be good people,” an infantryman wrote in March 1945. “Frightful cries of the children were horrible.” Another recorded that he spent his days hunting natives. “I have already killed well over 100,” he wrote. “Now I am a hardened killer and my sword is always stained with blood. Although it is for my country’s sake, it is sheer brutality. May God forgive me! May my mother forgive me!”

The revelations contained in such records sparked outrage in MacArthur against his former adversary Yamashita. Col. Sidney Mashbir, who oversaw the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section, showed him an order from the Battle of Manila, instructing Japanese troops how best to kill women and children.

“He’s not fit to die as a soldier,” MacArthur said of Yamashita.

“That was that,” Mashbir recalled. “He was a dead man.”

As investigators realized, victims had come from all social and economic backgrounds. Some spoke fluent English, while Spanish, Chinese, and Tagalog translators had to be enlisted to interview others. More than a few were illiterate, signing their sworn statements with the letter “X.” At times, victims broke down, which was dutifully noted in each statement. “The witness,” one investigator observed, “appeared too grief-stricken to testify at more length.”

In every interview, investigators made judgments about who might one day serve as a witness in a war crimes trial, a fact often highlighted in the reports. “They speak flawless English and have remarkably clear memories of the massacre,” one investigator noted of German Club survivors Francisco Lopez and Helena Rodriguez. Other witnesses did not make the cut. “She does not speak English, is very nervous, and appears to have been badly frightened at the time of the incidents related.”

The interviews about sexual assaults proved some of the hardest. Investigators in the Bay View case noted the “extreme reticence” of many victims to describe what happened to them. The interview with Father Belarmino de Celis, a priest in Intramuros, turned awkward when investigators pressed him to identify rape victims.

“Yes, I know their names,” he admitted. “But I will not divulge them because it would dishonor them. Some are married and still living.”

Other victims, like Remedios Huerta Beliso, who was assaulted at San Agustin, shared her story with investigators but no one else. “I didn’t tell my husband,” she said. “I never have told him.”

Investigators interviewed children, who at times were among the few survivors of a particular massacre, including eight-year-old Ismael Sedro.

“Do you know what it means to take an oath?” the investigator asked.

“It means to tell the truth,” he replied. “You get in trouble if you tell a lie.”

“Then, you will tell us the truth?” the investigator pressed.

“Yes,” the youth said. “I want to tell the truth.”

Only a few hundred Japanese had survived the battle. Those few who did were often young enlisted men, many of whom had been badly wounded and left for dead. Most denied any knowledge of the slaughter of civilians, but a few admitted it, including thirty-year-old Ichiro Sato with the 86th Air Corps. The married father of two toddlers recounted his role in killing civilians in Suloc, about forty-five miles south of Manila.

“Many people were killed—men, women, and children,” Sato said.

“Did you participate?” investigators asked.

“I furnished all the soldiers for the kills but I actually did not participate.”

“How many people were killed each time you furnished the soldiers?”

“About six hundred women and children.”

“What was the total amount killed?” investigators pressed.

“About fifteen hundred men, women and children.”

“How were they killed?”

“They were all bayonetted.”

Another soldier who confessed was Sohei Michishita, a twenty-five-year-old sergeant and assistant squad leader with a motor transportation supply company. Japanese forces rounded up about eleven hundred civilians, half of whom he estimated were women and children. At a primary school in Sulac, officers assigned Michishita and others groups of civilians to slay.

“I killed my 15 men near the school,” Michishita said.

“How did you kill the 15 men assigned to you?” investigators asked.

“I bayonetted eight and chopped the heads of seven with my sword.”

“Why did you kill those fifteen men?”

“I just took orders from the higher ups.”

In each case, investigators probed survivors for physical attributes that might help identify the perpetrators. How tall was he? What kind of uniform did he wear? Did he have gold teeth, a moustache, or glasses? In many of the sworn statements, victims fell back on the same racial stereotype that all the Japanese looked the same.

“It is hard to distinguish one from the other,” said Joaquin Maranon.

“They all look alike to me,” added Elsie Hamburger.

“He had slit eyes like all the other Japanese,” said Cayetano Lagdameo.

Page after page of testimony reveals the struggle many victims had comprehending why the Japanese had perpetrated such cruelty against them. Many who had lost loved ones proved understandably bitter and hostile.

“My future life is only for vengeance,” declared Dr. Walter Frankel, who watched the Japanese shoot his wife in the neck and kill her.

“What the Japanese have done to us was a premeditated act,” added Jose Yulo. “It is savagery and they don’t deserve to be among civilized people.”

“I honestly believe they had no reason whatever for murdering us; they just hated Filipinos,” Maranon told investigators.

Even American investigators proved at a loss to comprehend the widespread butchery, exhausting the thesaurus for adjectives like “diabolical,” “inhuman,” and “savage.” The numerous reports compiled on each atrocity often included commentary by investigators on how humans could commit such barbarities.

“This orgy of looting, raping, and murder defy credence, were it not for the mass of indisputable evidence establishing its commission,” read one report.

“Such a cruel, heartless massacre is difficult to visualize,” stated another.

“They were simply slaughtered without just cause.”

Of all the interviews with prisoners of war, investigators zeroed in on one enemy serviceman who offered a motive, an explanation that dovetailed with what many Filipinos believed. The sack of Manila was payback for Filipino loyalty to America, exemplified not only by the organized guerrilla resistance throughout the islands but also by the passive resistance of the citizenry. “It is recommended,” XIV Corps investigators wrote, “that information contained in this report which condemns the Japanese nation in their atrocious prosecution of war in the Philippines be given the widest publicity so that Japan may be properly exposed as a nation which is truly an enemy of the civilized world.”

* A short- snorter bill was a banknote often signed by people traveling together.