by Peter Eisner
On January 2, 1942, Bennett managed a final four-page edition with a front-page banner: CITY AWAITS OCCUPATION. There was nothing left to be said. “Be calm,” Bennett wrote as Japanese troops prepared to march triumphantly into Manila. “We know that it is much easier said than done when it comes to the business of being calm under stress, but there are those who demonstrate their ability to do just that.”
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Japanese military authorities and their agents in Manila had been monitoring the Bulletin for months and despised Roy C. Bennett’s editorial position against the Rising Sun. There were three English-language dailies in the city, Bennett’s Bulletin, the oldest in the city; the Herald, which also was anti-Axis and opposed Japanese warmongering; and the Tribune, which had been noncommittal but would quickly become the Japanese occupation mouthpiece. In contrast, so hated was the Bulletin that early in the campaign against the Americans, the Japanese commander ordered a special bombing run aimed at blowing up the Bulletin offices. The attack missed and wrecked adjoining buildings instead.
The Japanese occupation team, with General Homma as commander, moved to set up control. Tokyo chose Homma for this assignment in part for his knowledge of the West. He not only spoke English but even had served with the British Army in France in World War I. One immediate move was a clampdown on news media. On January 3, 1942, the Japanese arrested Roy C. Bennett, an obvious target and one of the first people seized by the new occupation army. They took him to Villamor Hall at the University of the Philippines for what they called “preliminary investigation,” then tossed him into a twelve-by-fifteen-foot cage at Fort Santiago. The Spanish citadel was built on the Pasig River to protect Intramuros from invaders by sea in the sixteenth century. The fort was now the Japanese military’s headquarters and its prison and torture chamber. Bennett’s wife, Margaret, tried but failed for months to contact him or even confirm that he was alive. The Japanese Kempeitai—military police—had taken a page from the Gestapo method of Nacht und Nebel—night and fog; once seized, a prisoner would disappear behind the haze of a security state, into the bowels of a prison system in which torture was institutionalized and in many cases ended in death.
The Conversion of Santo Tomas
Manila, January 2, 1942
WITHIN HOURS OF their arrival, Japanese occupation officials ordered that Americans and nationals of other countries at war with Germany and Japan report to the University of Santo Tomas, converted quickly and haphazardly into a civilian detention center. Meanwhile, they quickly set free 25,000 Japanese and Japanese Filipino residents who had been detained in the early days of the war. A month later President Roosevelt ordered the internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans in the United States.
Throughout the first days of occupation, the foreign nationals slowly did as they were told. Some walked to the gates of the university on their own; some even rode in limousines, dropped off by servants and chauffeurs and carrying much more than the three days’ worth of food and clothing they had been told to bring with them. Squads of soldiers went neighborhood by neighborhood to make sure the foreigners complied. Filipinos and foreigners were taught to bow respectfully from the waist before every Japanese soldier or official they encountered. Failure to comply could mean a slap in the face, a rifle butt in the stomach, or both.
Within a week or two, the Japanese herded more than three thousand foreigners, mostly Americans, along with British subjects and others, onto the campus not far from the center of town. If Claire had stayed in Manila, she certainly would have been among them.
Other than the presence of Japanese guards and their bayonets, the streets around the university almost appeared as if it were simply moving day for a new school term. People could still come and go without a problem; Filipino servants came and went with supplies, and detainees went out into the city in search of pillows and mattresses and cooking utensils. Trucks loaded with detainees pulled up at the front gate every day, entire families all at once, men and women segregated. People noticed soon that the Japanese were exempting the elderly from reporting requirements, though they sometimes came anyway to stay with their families.
Officials divided the fifty-acre university grounds into separate living quarters for families, men, women, and children. Some lived in converted classrooms in the modern four-story administration building; in the courtyards and on the periphery people built open-walled lean-tos and huts of rough-hewn wood and bamboo covered with palm leaves and thatch. Soon the stately old university had become a muddy shantytown for almost five thousand people.
For six months at least, occupation officials provided no food for the detainees. With permission from Japanese authorities, the Red Cross sent in as much food and supplies as it could. Some of the detainees arrived with their own stores and shared with the less fortunate; others used what money they had to trade and purchase food from the outside.
The authorities allowed the internees to designate their own leaders, who would in turn liaise with occupation officials. They formed an internee executive committee that functioned much like a village council.
Before long, Santo Tomas was crammed and uncomfortable, but the detainees policed themselves, generally were not mistreated, and fared far better than Roy C. Bennett and the prisoners at Fort Santiago. An American banker, Fay Bailey, became one of the camp leaders and a liaison for the Red Cross to bring goods and services inside the gates. “The Japs were very lenient at first about letting supplies into camp for individuals and even in allowing personal contacts between Ins and Outs.” Despite the crowding and the lack of food and medical supplies, the Japanese did not bother the prisoners as long as the prisoner-chosen internment authorities obeyed the rules. One exception came on February 11, 1942, little more than a month after the Japanese marched into town. Three men, Blakey Laycock, forty-three, an Australian engineer, and two British merchant marine sailors in their twenties, Thomas Fletcher and Henry Weeks, climbed over the fence and escaped. Japanese guards recaptured them and beat them up. The Japanese commandant, Hitoshi Tomayasu, seemed to accept the apology and a promise from American internee monitors that it would never happen again. Suddenly, though, he changed his mind, raging about the escape attempt, and ordered that the men be seized and punished to set an example. The three were taken away and executed by a firing squad on February 15. Tomayasu ordered that internee representatives witness the executions; they reported that at least one of the men was still alive when Filipino workers were forced to bury him and the others in a common grave. The execution achieved what the commandant had intended—he received no further word of escape attempts.
Some of the detainees eventually were released, however, for various reasons. Among them was Carl Mydans, a famed Life magazine photographer who had been reporting from Manila when war broke out. He and his wife, Shelley, were rounded up with the rest of the foreigners in January. Mydans was summoned to the commandant’s office in June 1942. Colonel Tomayasu had been replaced by a civilian administrator, an ex-diplomat named R. Tsurumi. “The colonel has just had a report about you,” Tsurumi said. “He says you are a famous photographer. He has seen your pictures of China in Life.” He then proceeded to ask Mydans to photograph a military parade celebrating the Japanese victory in Bataan and Corregidor. Mydans refused on the ground that it would be treason; he was dismissed and did not suffer the consequences. More than two months later, Mydans and his wife were released, were given passage on the Maya Maru, a Japanese transport to Shanghai as part of a prisoner exchange, and then traveled onward to photograph the war in Europe and elsewhere in the Pacific.
Another internee got a furlough from Santo Tomas those early months of the occupation. Charles “Chick” Parsons was a longtime Manila resident well known as among the best polo players in the Philippines. Though he carried documents that showed he was a diplomat from Panama, Japanese soldiers detained Parsons more than once just because he looked like an American�
��which, in fact, he was.
Diplomatic Immunity
Manila, January 2, 1942
CHICK PARSONS WAS about to pull off one of the greatest scams of the Philippines war. His children were there to record the action. “It still runs before my eyes like a movie,” said Chick’s son Peter Parsons. Four years old at the time (“I was almost five”), he was swimming with friends in the pool of the family house on Dewey Boulevard on January 2, 1942, as he often did when a parade of Japanese soldiers marched past. “As the soldiers turned East down Santa Scholastica Street they raised their arms to us and shouted, ‘Banzai!’ We raised our arms and Banzai’d them back.” Japanese military police came around to the house a little while later looking for Peter’s father. They ordered Chick, his wife, and their three children to put their things together and leave for Santo Tomas. Luckily, Parsons had anticipated this eventuality and had fashioned a crude sign that read CONSULADO DE PANAMA and tacked it to the front gate. He rummaged in his drawers for the paperwork and consular materials he had wangled from the consulate—the designation was official as far as the Philippine government was concerned, and Chick’s status as consul had even been listed in the newspaper.
It was a stroke of luck. Countries with small staffs abroad sometimes designate foreign nationals as their diplomatic representatives. Parsons had been given the job temporarily until a Panamanian could be sent to represent the country. The Japanese assumed he was Panamanian, which he was not, and had no way of knowing who he really was. His designation as a diplomat gave Parsons time to come up with a better alternative than to sit out the war in Manila.
Fortunately, the Japanese sentries who came to the house that day did not understand when Michael, the oldest of his three sons, came running out of the house to protest, shouting in Spanish: “No pueden llevarnos a un campo cualquiera. Mi papá es un oficial de la marina.” (“You can’t take us to any old camp. My father is an officer in the navy.”) It was true. The man claiming diplomatic status as a Panamanian was a U.S. Navy lieutenant assigned to the submarine service.
Parsons, forty-one, had lived in Manila for years. He was a handsome fellow, not tall, a robust fireplug of a man with piercing eyes and a broad, easy smile. He was born in Shelbyville, Tennessee, on April 22, 1900, but first came to Manila with an uncle in 1905 when he was five years old, and attended the Santa Potenciana School in Intramuros. He went back to the States, graduated from Chattanooga High School, then traveled once more to the Philippines in the early 1920s as a merchant marine seaman. Soon after returning, he was hired as stenographer to U.S. governor General Leonard Wood, a famous former U.S. military officer who had climbed San Juan Hill in Cuba with his friend Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. On frequent trips around the islands with Wood, Parsons made friends and contacts that would serve him well and learned the geography of the Philippines, as few others did. While living several years later in Zamboanga on Mindanao Island, he met and married Katrushka Jurika, known to everyone as Katsy. Her father, Stephen Jurika, was born in Austria-Hungary (which would later become Czechoslovakia); her mother, Blanche, was from California. Chick had a knack for language, spoke Spanish fluently, and quickly mastered the Philippine national language, Tagalog. Ironically, he was now the president of Manila’s Luzon Stevedoring Company, a subsidiary of a Japanese mining concern. Everyone in the Philippines knew Chick for his exploits on the polo field. “To watch the sun-bronzed Chick at play, as if his entire soul were tied to the game, was to observe an American who had in every way fitted into our easy Philippine manner of living,” said his friend Carlos P. Romulo, himself a prominent diplomat and statesman. “Chick was ‘one of us’ in Manila before the war.” However, Chick had another dimension unknown to most people. He was not only a veteran officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, attached to the submarine service since 1932; he was also a spy.
Parsons had been recalled to active duty on December 8, 1941, and quickly assigned to the district intelligence office at the Port of Manila. On New Year’s Day 1942, the day before the Japanese marched into Manila, he deputized Katsy, who insisted on coming along on an odd mission. Along the way to the Port of Manila, looters roamed the street, unimpeded by the police. At the Manila Hotel, not far from the waterfront, people dressed in formal attire, clung to one another, and drank profusely as the band played on; throughout Manila people were staging last-minute holiday parties, something like dancing in the ballroom of the Titanic after the last life raft was gone.
Meanwhile, under Chick’s command, a group of men moved with him from dock to dock and set fire to military warehouses to destroy weapons and other supplies that otherwise would fall into the hands of the enemy. At one final stop on the piers, Chick bade farewell to American servicemen who were sailing across the bay to Corregidor, where they would take refuge with General MacArthur. Parsons had decided not to leave with them. He and Katsy returned home and waited for the imminent arrival of the Japanese.
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The next morning, squads of Japanese soldiers patrolled Dewey Boulevard to check houses one by one in search of U.S. officials and other Americans. They had no idea who Chick Parsons was, and he quickly informed them he was a diplomat from Panama, which had not sided with the Americans or the Axis powers. Therefore, Parsons said, as neutrals he and his family should be left alone. Within an hour, consular officials appeared from the Japanese embassy, “hissing like radiators” and asking to see the honorable credentials of the honorable consul from Panama. Everything appeared to be in order, Chick’s name was actually on record at Malacañang Palace (the office of the Philippine president) as consul for Panama, and the officials withdrew, with many bows.
For the next three months Parsons used his diplomatic status to conduct covert activities and gather information about the locations of Japanese installations and bases, along with all the intelligence he could scoop up. Fearless, suntanned, and disguised as a peasant, Chick could just blend in if he had to. He traveled into the hills of Bataan and saw signs of American and Filipino soldiers evading capture, willing and still able to fight. If Japanese patrols stopped him along the way, he showed Philippine documents, spoke Tagalog and Spanish, blended in, and gave no hint that he was an American, much less a spy.
Nurse and Midwife
Mount Malasimbo, Bataan, January 1942
CLAIRE LIVED AMONG desperate people these days, trapped and isolated in the jungle, left without food or the drugs to combat disease in their little settlement on the slopes of a volcano. When the doctors and nurses went away to treat the war victims, villagers turned to Claire, who had no medical training, as their nurse. Suddenly she was treating wounds, caring for children, and delivering babies. For the first time in her life, she was serving others; this became the new reality. Here the growing problem of sanitation became more dangerous than the threat of war. Children and adults fell to diseases of the jungle, contaminated water, swarms of mosquitoes, rat bites, high fevers. Little Dian soon developed diarrhea and dysentery. Even in the shade of the jungle canopy, the heat was wilting; it was ninety degrees every day. Unable to escape the smell of open sewage, flies, and insects, people fell victim to malaria, cholera, and diseases they could not identify. Stores of quinine to fight off malaria were gone; people began to use herbs and home remedies that did not work well enough.
Claire, Dian, and Lolita moved more than once among settlements of people who had fled the larger towns of Bataan, hiding in the foothills and mountains inland. Not everyone was willing to shelter a light-skinned woman; Japanese planes were dropping leaflets calling on the Filipinos to fight the Americans alongside them. Harboring an American from the city was dangerous. During the day Claire sometimes lay down in the sun to tan her skin in hopes she would be less conspicuous. After a week or two, Claire met Carlos Sobreviñas, a well-to-do haciendero who was willing to risk taking in an American woman—there was no danger for Dian or for Lolita, as both of them had black hair a
nd dark complexions. Carling, as Sobreviñas was called, had brought workers to set up several dozen huts for his wife, infant child, brothers, and extended family up in the hills to avoid the fighting below. Carling was “a tall, wavy-haired man of about twenty-five years, very good-looking . . . clean, neat and spoke excellent English.” The Sobreviñas family welcomed them, but life was increasingly difficult; rains pelted them, bombs in the distance kept them awake; despite the heat and misery during the day, it grew cold overnight. Cooler nights did not drive away the insects. Without mosquito netting and unable to light fires, which might draw the attention of the Japanese, Claire tended to Dian and then put on extra clothing at night, covering her arms and legs to avoid mosquitoes and other vermin.
