3. Anyone who falls under the any of the followings will be considered as the interfering of the well-beings of the native peoples, and therefore be subject to the death penalty. Be aware of not commiting any of said crime.
(1) Those who show hostility against the Japanese Armed Forces.
(2) Those who jeopardize or break any existing means in politics, economics, industry, transportation, communication, financials, and etc.
(3) Those who disturb the thoughts of the officials and peoples.
(4) Any actions disturbing the economic and financial status.
Those who report to the Japanese Forces any flagrant offence or preventing of any said crime will be rewarded by the Japanese Armed Forces.
COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF
THE JAPANESE ARMED FORCE
7
ENVELOPE
The woman in the black dress called out to the young priest as he strolled around the Ateneo de Manila compound. He turned to see a diminished human being, her head and arms covered by a veil. She waved. He waved back and kept walking.
She called out once more, and he spun around. He’d given his last peso to a beggar at the Ateneo gates the day before, and there was little hope of getting any more. He hesitated. She beckoned him to come closer. When he did, he could see that the veil covered open sores on her arms, face, and legs.
“Are you Padre Hulian?” she asked.
“I’m Father Fred Julien,” he replied. “Possibly you are looking for a Jesuit priest of the same or a similar name.”
Father Julien hadn’t been in Manila long, certainly not long enough to be recognized on the street. He wasn’t supposed to be in the Philippines. Newly ordained, he had taken a train from his hometown of Albany, New York, across the country to San Francisco, and then boarded the SS President Grant, bound for Burma, where his band of La Salette fathers were starting a mission. They’d brought along six packing crates full of provisions—enough, they hoped, to last ten years in Burma. But the fathers noticed something strange after a short stop in Hawaii. The Grant was suddenly part of a five-ship convoy that was entirely blacked out at night, and a spotter plane came and went from a cruiser escort each day. Close to Guam, the entire convoy made a sharp turn for Manila, where it arrived on December 7, which was December 6 in Hawaii. The next day, after Father Julien said Mass, the captain of the Grant announced that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. He told his passengers to sleep ashore in Manila that night because the Japanese might try to bomb the ships in the harbor. He told them the Grant would leave for Australia the next morning. If only. The La Salette fathers left their luggage and provisions aboard the ship and went in search of a place to stay at one of Manila’s religious communities. The Jesuit priests at Ateneo de Manila, six blocks from the piers, invited them to stay. The students had been sent home when war broke out, so there were plenty of beds. But when the fathers returned to the pier the next morning, the Grant was gone, along with their luggage and provisions and a four-hundred-pound church bell for the mission in Burma. What little money the fathers had they soon handed over to the Jesuits at the Ateneo for room and board. Father Julien was very aware that he was penniless and stuck in a foreign country now engaged in war.
The mysterious lady in black asked him once more if he was Padre Hulian, a La Salette priest.
“Are not there three of you stranded in my country?” she asked.
“That is correct,” Father Julien answered.
She reached inside the folds of her dress and fished out an envelope and handed it to the priest. She told him that someone had asked her to give it to him. Then she turned and walked away.
Father Julien opened the envelope and gasped. He counted the money. One hundred pesos.
He began asking the Jesuits about the lady in black. One of them told him her name. Josefina Guerrero. He’d see her again.
8
BOYS
The convoy entered Lingayen Gulf after nightfall on December 22—eighty Japanese ships carrying Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma and his Fourteenth Army of forty-three thousand soldiers who disembarked and fought ashore. The only challenge to the massive fleet was from a few 155-millimeter guns. On land, it quickly seemed like they knew exactly what they were doing. More and more it seemed as though the enemy had been living among the unsuspecting Filipinos, watching, waiting. The Japanese fishing fleets, friendly before the outbreak, knew every landing. The kindly Japanese photographer, who owned a legitimate business, had been taking pictures of the rapidly built fortifications. The laborers and farmers and merchants, it would be learned, were part of a patchwork of thousands of spies who for years had been turning over information to the empire in preparation for this day of conquest.
Maybe if the Filipino fighters were better trained or weren’t fighting with World War I-era rifles, they could have driven back the attacking force. There was no choice but to retreat, lest they be easily overrun and slaughtered. And when Japanese troops landed at Lamon Bay on the east coast of Luzon, forty miles south of Manila, General MacArthur saw a nightmare coming: two forces working toward each other like the jaws of a “great military pincer,” he later wrote.
MacArthur was shocked, according to those around him. He was unable to give commands to his staff officers. When he finally got his bearings, he ordered troops from all over South Luzon to withdraw to Bataan, where the US and Philippine soldiers would make a final stand, side by side. They streamed through Manila, saying good-bye and “It’ll be a long time before you see us again,” then rushed toward the peninsula, calling home one last time along the way, blowing up bridges behind them. He ordered the units fighting the Japanese in the north to “stand and fight, slip back and dynamite,” a delay-action retrograde maneuver that would give troops from the south time to get to Bataan.
The ROTC boys from the Ateneo and cadets from the Philippine Military Academy—the young ones who weren’t commissioned but refused to go home—began trying to organize. They wanted to fight. They wanted to go to Bataan. There were about forty-three boys from the Ateneo alone, and they joined together with the military academy cadets and University of Santo Tomas students who couldn’t return to their home islands, forming what they called the Second Regular Division. Some of them were fourteen and fifteen years old. Their elders were nineteen. They had courage but no weapons. They went to the Ateneo, to the Jesuit fathers, and asked if they could use the ROTC weapons.
“If you have authority, we will give you the guns,” one of the fathers said. “Anyway, if the Japanese get these, they’ll use them against us.”
Father Monaghan, who had taught many of the boys, felt the two-way pull of pity and pride. They were all so eager, and so naive.
“Wherever you are, know that back here we will be praying for you every day,” he told them.
“Yes, father,” one said. “We know you will.”
And with that, a bunch of Catholic boys who had lied about their ages, who had left notes informing their mothers and fathers, boarded buses with rifles on their shoulders and began the long trip to Bataan to fight. As they left Manila, some of the boys began to cry. They were men enough to go to war, but they wept openly as their city burned in a blur outside the window.
The Japanese warplanes continued screaming overhead, shelling the riverfront district and Intramuros, despite the surrender of the beautiful city. Convents and colleges erupted into rubble. Turned-up ships dotted the bay like tombstones. Knives of black smoke stabbed skyward. Everything burned. The piers, the oil depots of Pandacan, the port area. Those who could fled for the countryside. Those who couldn’t stayed inside, doors locked. The areas not blazing were deserted, empty black curtains drawn over the windows.
When the sun slid down and the sky turned red, the casualties of the day’s raids began to arrive at the Ateneo, a trickle at first, then a flood. Father Monaghan saw men running and an ambulance with a busted windshield trailing behind them. He ran to help the driver, who jumped out and threw open the rear doors. Insi
de lay the wounded, covered in blood. Some were naked, for their clothing had been blown clean off their bodies. When the fathers had emptied the ambulance, the driver shouted, “The port area is filled with others like these and no one is there to pick them up.”
“Let’s go,” Monaghan told him, climbing in.
They raced to the Bureau of Printing, near the port, a temporary shelter that had taken a direct hit and was now ablaze. The priest found a pile of bodies at the door and a fire raging beyond. He snatched his sacred oils from his pocket and began anointing the dead.
Placards rose in a place now shocked by abandonment. OPEN CITY, the signs over Taft and Rizal Avenues declared. Manila’s gates were wide. The feared “yellow menace” would arrive any day. The men of Manila wondered how they’d be treated. The thought of how their wives and daughters would be treated brought them to tears. There were already whispers of the Rape of Nanking, in which brutal Japanese troops massacred and raped as many as three hundred thousand noncombatants during the country’s war with China. What would happen to the citizens of Manila?
Looting broke out at the piers first, then moved uptown to the grocery stores. Anything of value—bread, sugar, rice, cracked wheat—disappeared from shelves. Pharmacies were hit, too, and medicine grew scarce.
Carlos Romulo, a colonel on MacArthur’s staff, had been left behind to see that all of the headquarters’ personnel made the move to Corregidor. On New Year’s Eve, he drove down Dewey Boulevard to say good-bye to his wife, then headed for the pier to catch a boat for Corregidor. He stopped at the Manila Hotel, where MacArthur had enjoyed the penthouse in peacetime. As the city outside burned, a band played in the lobby and well-dressed guests slow danced into the last American morning.
9
HOBNAILED BOOTS
The first sound they heard in Manila was a chorus of hobnailed boots on stone like some sort of faint hymn carried on the January wind, getting closer, closer. The Japanese soldiers had moved so quickly on the city that the rumor spread that they’d been seen swinging limb to limb through the jungle like monkeys. There was no challenge when they arrived at the ancient city.
Manila had a new regime by January 3, 1942.
Around the city the Japanese soldiers marched, rounding up some five thousand British and American civilians, then the Dutch, Australians, and Canadians, pulling them from their homes and businesses and shuffling them off to Rizal Stadium, where they were sorted and sent to the harsh Bilibid Prison or the University of Santo Tomas, which was quickly converted into a prison camp and filled to capacity with men, women, and children. Fear caught in the throats of wives stripped from husbands, children snatched from mothers.
On January 4, soldiers showed up at the Ateneo to round up American civilians for internment. The priests were told to pack their bags because they were next. Businessmen who saw what was coming had opened up their warehouses and invited citizens to take what they could before the Japanese did. The Jesuits, sensing the war could last a long while, claimed wine in barrels and all the flour they could carry so Mass could be administered daily. And it did go on as planned, but it was rationed from the first day. Priests prepared a small host and put wine into the chalice with an eyedropper.
Confusion reigned in those early days, exacerbated by a curious custom among the Japanese soldiers that drove the Filipinos mad. It was common practice for the soldiers to slap citizens who wouldn’t or couldn’t follow directions or didn’t show proper respect. If a Filipino did not bow to a Japanese soldier, or did not bow low enough for his satisfaction, the citizen could expect a hard slap across the face. What was customary in Japan was incredibly insulting to the Filipinos. And while Japanese propaganda posters were being plastered across the city, promising they came as friends to assist the Asiatic people, assaults on citizens solidified Philippine loyalty to America.
Alejandro Roces, a young man educated at the Ateneo, saw his fellow countrymen beaten in the streets, their hands tied behind their backs, chained to posts. He felt as though the Japanese were trying to break the spirits of Filipinos. Rather than growing scared, anger prompted Roces to join the resistance. Gustavo Ingles witnessed Japanese soldiers drive through his hometown, and when they saw young girls, stop the trucks and chase the girls down. The first-year Philippine Military Academy cadet was hurt and sad. The soldiers thought they could take whatever they wanted. Ingles felt he had to do something, so he began conspiring with his friends in San Juan. What are we going to do about this?
10
BASTARDS
The boys on Bataan surged and retreated, advanced and fell back, making the enemy earn every square inch of the hellish Florida-shaped peninsula, every cliff and mangled banyan tree, every bamboo thicket and tangle of wait-a-minute vines. They lost weight and sleep and caught malaria, dengue fever, hookworm, and beriberi, which caused the men to vomit and slur their speech and made their eyes flick around in their heads unnaturally. They carried guns that failed to fire and grenades that did not explode and letters that began “Dear Mama.” They heard regularly that a mile-long convoy of supplies was steaming toward the island, that B-17s and P-40s would soon appear in the sky, that relief was coming. General MacArthur was party to the lie, though he was unaware of it. He crossed to the peninsula from Corregidor to help boost morale. He talked to the rawboned Gen. Jonathan Wainwright and his junior officers and toured the peninsula, talking to his boys, encouraging them to keep up the fight.
“Help is definitely on the way,” he told the ragged soldiers. “We must hold out until it comes.”
It did not come, not that day nor any day thereafter. There were now more than one hundred thousand soldiers and civilians crowded onto Bataan, and supplies were lower than ever. The men kept fighting, though, and through gritted teeth they sang made-up songs that captured the dire frustration of their lost cause:
We’re the battling bastards of Bataan:
No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces,
No rifles, no planes, or artillery pieces,
And nobody gives a damn.
The simple fact that the men had held off Japan from conquering the peninsula as December turned to January and January encroached on February, despite the empire’s continuous supply of fresh troops and despite the fact that the Filipino soldiers were wearing coconut hulls for helmets, was noteworthy. Bataan was virtually the only spot in the Pacific where Japanese advancement had been stymied. They had found success everywhere else they had invaded: Singapore, Burma, Siam, Sumatra, Borneo, Wake, Guam, the Bismarks, the Gilberts. War planners knew Australia would be next. Japanese bombers had already made runs against the key port of Darwin. In less than two months, the Japanese Empire had grown to cover almost a seventh of the globe. The only real resistance was on the Bataan Peninsula, where American and Filipino troops had dug in to fight.
Henry Stimson, the US secretary of war, told Philippines president Manuel Quezon, “Your gallant defense is thrilling the American people. As soon as our power is organized we shall come in force and drive the invader from your soil.”
In the middle of December, Maj. Gen. George Moore, still on Corregidor, learned that Germany and Italy had also declared war on the United States, and each day that ticked past brought news that suggested the Axis powers, advancing across Europe and Africa and now the Pacific, had the war in hand.
But by the end of the month, most of the US and Filipino forces had retreated to Bataan, and they were proving hard to dislodge. “A final stand,” is what Moore called it.
President Roosevelt promised the full support of the United States in a special address to the people of the Philippines on December 28, 1941. He cabled Manuel Quezon after. “The people of the United States will never forget what the people of the Philippines are doing these days and will do in the days to come,” he wrote. “I give to the people of the Philippines my solemn pledge that their freedom will be retained and their independence established
and redeemed. The entire resources in men and materials of the United States stands behind that pledge.”
On December 29, just before noon, Japan rocked the fortified Corregidor in its first aerial attack, with eighty-one medium bombers and ten dive-bombers dropping three-hundred-pound bombs. There were no friendly planes in the air, and there wouldn’t be for the entire operation.
The medium bombers came first in formations of twenty-seven; then those broke into three formations of nine planes each, all of them below twenty thousand feet, crossing the island lengthwise. The first bombs fell on the hospital, the antiaircraft gun batteries, the officers’ club, the Topside and Middleside barracks, the Topside water tank, the officers’ quarters, the garage, ships in Corregidor Bay, and the navy gasoline storage dump at the tail of the island. Fires broke out as wooden structures and gas depots burst toward the sky. Power went out. Communication lines were disrupted. The antiaircraft firing batteries on the islands thwacked all afternoon, bringing down thirteen enemy planes, until the bombers nosed up to higher altitudes, outside of the guns’ reach. The smaller strafing planes followed the bombers, hammering the antiaircraft gun batteries. Twenty men were killed and eighty wounded.
The following afternoon, outside the east portal to Malinta Tunnel, Manuel Quezon was sworn in as the first president of the new Philippine Commonwealth. In his short inaugural address, he spoke of air raids and of bombs falling on women and children and of Japan’s superiority on air, land, and sea. Then he called for unity in the new fight.
“To all Americans in the Philippines, soldiers and civilians alike, I want to say that our common ordeal has fused our hearts in a single purpose and an everlasting affection,” he said. “My fellow countrymen, this is the most momentous period of our history. As we face the grim realities of war, let us rededicate ourselves to the great principles of freedom and democracy for which our forefathers fought and died. The present war is being fought for these same principles.”
The Leper Spy Page 4