“By God,” he said. “I never dreamed that Filipino women had such courage.”
She attached herself to the Thirty-Seventh and rode with the troops toward Manila in the race to be first to the city.
Other soldiers pushing north, with the help of Emmanuel de Ocampo and the Hunters, saw Manila burning from atop Tagaytay Ridge. Fires and great columns of smoke reached into the sky as the Japanese, aided by the Makapili, torched their own stores and ammo dumps. The Hunters and men from the Eleventh Airborne nonetheless pushed on before running into fierce resistance south of Nichols Field. Though they suffered some nine hundred casualties, they successfully cut the Manila Naval Defense Force’s escape and sawed off reinforcement routes.
That Saturday, February 3, 1945, the First Cavalry crossed the northern city limits at 6:35 PM, a few hours before the Thirty-Seventh Division, and spread out, following MacArthur’s orders to take Malacañang Palace and the Legislative Building.
The thin and hungry men, women, and children at Santo Tomas watched as American planes swooped in close, nearly buzzing the roof off the guard tower. The prisoners saw something the guards had not. From one plane a pilot dropped something that landed in a courtyard near the main building. One of the residents fetched the fallen object. It was a pair of goggles with a note attached. “Roll out the barrel,” it said. “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”
When darkness fell on Santo Tomas, a great cheering could be heard filling the streets of Manila, followed by the roar of internal combustion motors and the clanking sound of metal on stone. One US Army nurse at Santo Tomas lifted her nose and said, “That smells like GI gasoline.” In the confused excitement, the internees were ordered into the main building, where they listened as the rifle fire got closer and Japanese guards manned their posts. Then, a voice in the darkness:
“Where the hell is the front gate?”
Soon a tank named Battlin’ Basic, from the Forty-Fourth Tank Battalion, crashed through the gates of Santo Tomas, followed by one called Georgia Peach. Capt. Manuel Colayco, a guerrilla fighter and one of Joey’s friends who had led the cavalry through the city to Santo Tomas, was pointing out buildings to the Americans when, out of nowhere, a Japanese soldier lobbed a grenade. It exploded before the guerrilla, and he became the first guerilla casualty of the liberation of Manila.
The internees huddled inside one of the buildings were jarred when a soldier kicked in a door and pointed his carbine at the crowd.
“Are there any goddamned Japs in there?” he asked.
One elderly woman spoke up, tears in her eyes.
“Soldier, are you real?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I reckon I am.”
The soldiers were healthy white boys from places like Corning, New York, and Kerrville, Texas, and Towers Hill, Illinois, and Lewistown, Pennsylvania, and they’d all get shiny medals pinned to their uniforms for their courage and speed. The prisoners began cheering and screaming and they raced to the yard and up onto the tanks pouring in, slapping backs and crying. They sang “God Bless America” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” as soldiers cleared the buildings of the remaining Japanese guards. When one of the enemy reached for his shoulder bag, he was shot in the gut by an American major. Lieutenant Abiko, whom internees referred to as “the devil’s right hand,” fell on the lawn, writhing, and the crowd of internees attacked him, spitting at him and kicking him and stripping the medals from his uniform. Some slashed him with knives and others burned him with cigarettes. When they had taken their revenge, the medical staff took over and treated Abiko’s wounds with sulfa and bandages, then sent him to bed, where he died within a few hours.
“War makes animals of us all,” one doctor said to another.
Many Japanese soldiers had fled the city to join fighters in the mountains, but those left behind were operating under confused orders. Some holed up, prepared to fight to the death, which would prove tragic for the Filipinos and their beloved city.
General MacArthur’s intelligence units weren’t able to come up with a clear picture of Japanese intentions, but it seemed likely that General Yamashita would abandon the city, as MacArthur had done before. However, Manila was also being defended by a rear admiral in the Japanese navy whose duty was to destroy all naval installations. Rear Adm. Sanji Iwabuchi had already been embarrassed by MacArthur when he failed to stop the US advance along the northern coast in New Guinea. He didn’t want to go down again without a fight. Yamashita disagreed with Iwabuchi, but he couldn’t control the naval officer, who wanted to defend the fifteen square miles of the city to the death.
When the Thirty-Seventh entered the city, Captain Blair gave Joey permission to go anywhere, even to the front lines.
The city was in the throes of destruction. In Tondo, Japanese soldiers dragged civilians by the dozen, children included, into the Paco Lumber Yard and bayoneted them, slashed their throats, or shot them cold. The Thirty-Seventh Division found more than one hundred dead, left to rot in the heat of the sun or doused with gasoline and burned. The imperial soldiers strung dynamite in the private buildings, and as fire reached each new charge, massive explosions shook the neighborhoods and fountains of flame flicked the sky. Brick and stone rained down like a hailstorm. When the Thirty-Seventh reached the camp at Bilibid Prison, they found 1,275 prisoners of war, their dirty toes sticking out of busted shoes and their mouths gaping at how large and healthy their rescuers appeared, as though they were giants or immortals. During the assault to take the prison, some of the internees were so scared they’d be slaughtered that they had tried to dig foxholes with their fingers. When the Americans tried to escort the prisoners to safety, they ran into the sniper fire that seemed to be coming from all directions.
And there in the thick of the madness was Joey, walking through the growing inferno as Japanese soldiers blew their own munitions houses, just as the Americans had done three years before. She walked through the roar of war like an angel of mercy, unafraid, bullets biting the ground at her feet. American soldiers, huddled behind walls or crouched in foxholes, marveled as she walked upright while bombs burst around her.
“You are tired,” she would say to the soldiers. “Stay here and rest.”
At Santo Tomas, still being targeted by Japanese potshots, twenty-two people were killed and thirty-nine were wounded on the very day General MacArthur claimed that Manila had fallen like a ripe plum. Maybe strategically, but the battle was far from over.
As the fight spun on, Joey bound up the wounds of soldiers and civilians and carried frightened children to safety. She prayed for the dying and closed the eyes of the dead. Some men she buried. She worked herself to exhaustion and was thrilled the day she suffered a hemorrhage of the lungs, thinking that soon she might die and be with God. One priest who observed her work overheard a man say, “I have not seen a human being like Joey.”
Her countrymen were falling. Japanese commanders issued a special order declaring open season on Filipino civilians.
“The Americans who have penetrated into Manila have about 1,000 troops, and there are several thousand Filipino guerrillas. Even women and children have become guerrillas,” it said in Japanese. “All people on the battlefield with the exception of Japanese military personnel, Japanese civilians, Special Construction Units, will be put to death.”
All the Filipino men inside the walled city of Intramuros, some three thousand of them, were herded into a cell at Fort Santiago, doused with gasoline, then shot by a cannon placed 110 yards away. One witness said just fifty of the three thousand were able to escape. When American shells began falling on private homes in Ermita, the Japanese tricked residents into gathering in the plaza; then they sorted the young girls from the rest. Girls ages fifteen to twenty-five were taken to a café, where they were raped by marines coming off their shifts. One young girl was cut open by a bayonet. Another girl would later testify at a war crimes trial that she was raped by as many as fifteen men that first night.
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p; A radioman from CBS News sent a report back to America on February 9, a full week after he had arrived at Santo Tomas with the First Cavalry.
“The fight for the city is progressing, but that progress is slow, because it is necessary to pry these suicidal maniacs out of their every hiding place, one by one and group by group,” he said. “They are not trying to retreat, withdraw, or reinforce. They are just staying put until such time as we kill them off. And their ultimate death will have served but one purpose—the reduction of the population of an over-crowded Japan. Militarily it will have contributed absolutely nothing to the fast crumbling New Order of East Asia.”
The Japanese, or at least some rogue elements, intended to defend Manila, and they eventually withdrew to the confines of Intramuros, entirely surrounded by sixteenth-century walls as thick as they were tall. No one was sure how many Japanese troops were inside, but they were there, firing on any fraction of exposed flesh. The radioman for CBS News, William Dunn, watched Intramuros from high atop a burned-out hotel on the opposite side of the Pasig River as a full corps, the Fourteenth, under the leadership of Lt. Gen. Oscar Griswold, tried to dislodge the Japanese from the ancient district.
“I had been impressed with the naval shore bombardments at Gloucester, Leyte, and Lingayen, but none of them could compare with the artillery barrage that struck those ancient walls,” he would write. “In a shore bombardment, the shells that streak overhead burst long distances inland and the cacophony, while deafening, is somewhat muted by distance. In this bombardment the shells were bursting directly in front of us, barely three hundred yards distant. The shelling started exactly at 7:00 AM and continued without pause for 90 minutes, slowly grinding holes in the ancient, resisting walls but falling far short of destroying them. In those ninety minutes our artillery, mortars, and light guns poured more than three hundred tons of steel into their target as we watched.”
When the hellfire stopped, there was an eerie calm.
“Now there’s nothing more I can do but sweat,” Griswold told the radioman. “I’ve given them all I’ve got and they’re under a higher command.”
26
LOS BAÑOS
The gravediggers were exhausted. They were burying four, maybe five prisoners a day, death rates ridiculously higher than in Nazi prison camps. And the guards on the perimeter had swung their big guns around so they were now pointing inside, at the internees and at Father Fred Julien, who had just celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday, his fourth in a row as a prisoner of the Japanese army.
In the past two weeks, the Allies had freed inmates at Baguio and Camp John Hay and Old Bilibid. They’d rescued thirty-seven hundred civilians at Santo Tomas, the largest camp, where they had discovered documents that gave orders to the commandant at Los Baños, twenty-four miles away, to liquidate all internees if withdrawal became necessary.
The prisoners looked like scarecrows standing in front of their barracks before roll call as a saffron sun rose on the morning of February 23, 1945. From beyond the hills came a great rumbling.
“I wonder what that is,” a Dutch priest said.
“Either the Japanese up there are running or the Americans are coming,” Father Julien replied. “Whichever it is, it could be very good for us.”
The planes came in low over the hills, and white clouds exploded behind them, then descended like daffodils on the wind. A smoke grenade popped in a dry rice paddy beside the camp. A grenade exploded in a bunker near the front gate. The daffodils landed, ditching their chutes and shouldering rifles. Guerrillas poured out of hiding places in the undergrowth and charged the wire, attacking the gun house where the Japanese guards, caught doing calisthenics on the ball field, had left their weapons. Tracer bullets ripped through the camp, and the priests dove to the ground, praying the rosary on hot breath.
“Spare my life, almighty God,” prayed Father Julien, frozen facedown with fear.
In a blink, the shooting stopped and the paratroopers fanned out, barking instructions to the frail prisoners. Get up. Get your shit. Let’s move.
The barracks were burning now, the paratroopers pulling prisoners toward sixty amphibious vehicles bound for Laguna de Bay, toward American lines. Planes roared overhead, targeting gun emplacements and laying down cover.
One thousand one hundred seventy-four captive sunrises. Three hours, in and out. Freedom sounded like a cluster of men peppering the paratroopers with questions, learning about Santo Tomas and the destruction in Manila and the movements on the western front.
Father Julien stepped on a scale, figuring he’d lost 20 or 30 pounds off his prewar weight of 135 pounds. The needle stopped moving at eighty-seven.
27
DISPATCHED
The weeks and months after the battle wrecked Manila were tumultuous, with every system of government in chaotic flux. Public transportation did not exist. Water and sewer lines were wrecked. There was no electricity. Forty percent of the city’s one hundred bridges were destroyed, including the six over the Pasig River. The University of the Philippines and Philippine General Hospital, surrounding the Ateneo de Manila, were destroyed. The same for the government center. The Americans had left the Japanese stragglers with no escape route, so they simply holed up, recklessly, forcing the Americans to clear the city building by building, floor by floor, closet by closet. It was a fight of attrition; for every American killed, US soldiers killed seventeen Japanese. Filipino civilians were caught in the middle. For every dead American soldier, one hundred civilians lost their lives. Their bodies were stacked like cordwood around the city, bayonet wounds on their backs, missing arms and legs, and sometimes, oddly, with no noticeable injuries. It is commonly believed that more than one hundred thousand civilians died during the battle. When the number of claims submitted for the deaths of Filipinos at Japanese hands were tallied after nearly four years of war, it would exceed one million.
“The war has left behind it a world suffering from destitution and seething with discontent,” read the lead editorial in the Philippines Free Press of February 23, 1946, the first publication after four years of blackout. “The old standards of living have disappeared, swept away in the whirlwind of destruction.”
Destruction at Intramuros, the walled city in Manila, in May 1945, after the Battle of Manila. Wikimedia Commons
Bodies were turning up bearing signs of torture. Judges were sentencing traitors and collaborators to death. Frauds in spiffy new uniforms were filing claims for back pay with the US Army, saying they had fought for the resistance and deserved their due. Some signs of normalcy were creeping back in, too, and certain sections of the city were struggling to get their beat back. You could dine and dance to the music of Tirso Cruz and his orchestra at the world-famous Manila Hotel. You could catch a business flight on one of four routes offered by Philippine Air Lines. You could finally buy a “squeak and rattle-free” six-passenger Nash 600 from the Bachrach Motor Company. But the war had razed 70 percent of utilities, 75 percent of factories, and 100 percent of the business district. Only Warsaw compared in terms of devastation.
Joey’s life remained in flux. Her home in Ermita was lost. She didn’t own a single beautiful thing anymore. She sought refuge where she always had, with the Jesuits, who again found a way to provide. They, too, were refugees, but they found her a little room—only eight feet by six feet—in the ruined laboratories of the Ateneo. A mortar had penetrated the roof and created a gaping hole. Water poured in when it rained, which wasn’t all bad. It was all the water she could get.
The campus was full of refugees, and Joey treated them the best she knew how. She couldn’t resist their appeals. The food the priests set aside for her she gave to others. Father Monaghan became aware that she was only eating one meal per day. She did the same with donated clothing, picking out the outfits she liked best and giving them away. Since Father Monaghan was her spiritual counselor, he finally forbade her to give anything away without his permission.
One day he received an urg
ent message about Joey. Someone had informed the military police that a leper was living on the premises and the authorities thought it best that she be segregated. The priests at the Ateneo were well aware of the national embarrassment that was the state-run leprosariums in the Philippines.
Monaghan hustled to the Ateneo and listened to Joey’s story. A doctor employed in the hospital across the wall from the Ateneo had informed the police against her. He was the father of Joey’s closest friend, a girl with whom she had spoken of her affliction in confidence. The American army health authorities were planning to take swift action. Father Monaghan had an idea: to get her out of the Ateneo and try to hide her in seclusion. He hurried off to find a friendly army sergeant he knew, and the man helped get Joey out of the college and into the home of the family of her friend Lulu Reyes. Lulu and Joey’s other friends, now in on the secret, would not tell, but they all began working to find a long-term place for Joey to stay. The Reyes family’s home was ruined, and they, too, were set to move into the Ateneo in a few days.
“Is it going to be Novaliches?” Joey asked Monaghan a few days later. “I keep repeating the word to myself. At first it had a terrible sound. By forcing myself to repeat it, I am getting used to it. It is like the taste for olives—you have to cultivate it. Who knows? I may eventually come to like the thought of Novaliches.”
Meanwhile, her friends were having no luck finding a place. Monaghan told Joey that it looked as though Novaliches would be the only place she could stay if they couldn’t find other housing. The next day, he drove to the outskirts of town to see the leprosarium for himself. “Such another God-and-man-forsaken place as that Novaliches leprosarium I hope to never see,” he wrote later. “In the midst of a wilderness of high sawgrass lay a cluster of frame houses. The director, a good man, showed me about. The objects Stevenson called ‘butt-ends of humanity’ squatted on the ground or lay in bed. They were given a weekly ration of food, not half what they needed; this they cooked for themselves. They had to gather their own wood; worse than that, they had to fetch all their water—for washing, laundry, and drinking. The wards were foul; no disinfectants were provided. When the poor lepers tracked up the floor with their open sores, the filth and stench and the danger of graver contagion remained. The lepers, I learned, had become brutalized from despair and the sense of their abandonment. They stole from one another and lived in complete promiscuity. The government did not provide enough money to hire help to maintain separate establishments.”
The Leper Spy Page 10