by Peter Eisner
CARL MYDANS, the Life magazine photographer, had seen the war from many sides in the two and a half years since he had left Santo Tomas for the Asian mainland. After Manila he had been held as a prisoner of the Japanese outside Shanghai until the fall of 1943. He and his wife, Shelley, got back to the United States in December 1943 via the SS Gripsholm, about sixteen months after the Swedish ship had participated in the first prisoner exchange from the Philippines, when Chick Parsons and his family had taken the same route from Manila to China and onward around the Horn of Africa to New York. Only weeks after his return to the United States, Life magazine sent Mydans to the European theater. He went along on the Allied march northward from Sicily to retake Italy, then to Marseille in August 1944, two months after the D-Day invasion. However, when his editors in New York heard in September about the imminent return of General MacArthur to the Philippines, they told Mydans to make his way back to Asia.
Mydans caught airplanes westward to Pearl Harbor, from Kwajalein to Saipan, and then to Tacloban, the capital of Leyte, arriving days after MacArthur waded ashore. After experiencing the first tentative scent of victory along with the men of Krueger’s Sixth Army, he knew the road north to Manila was for the taking. “As the year closed, our forces drove up the steaming valleys of Leyte and converged on the last strongholds of the enemy,” he wrote. “The Japanese had thrown one-fifth of their total Philippines forces and the last of their great fleet into the fight for Leyte—and they had lost.”
He went north to Lingayen for the Sixth Army landing there, then doubled back with other correspondents in a jeep past Camp O’Donnell and Cabanatuan just days after Lieutenant Colonel Mucci and his men rescued the remaining prisoners. From there he signed on with the mission that meant most to him—the liberation of Santo Tomas.
Mydans rolled with the 8th Cavalry as they raced in from Cabanatuan, skirting past Bataan on the route that Peggy and her helpers had taken, along the path Claire had followed from the hills in the early days of the Japanese occupation. Guided by Filipino guerrillas, the American troops drove through enemy territory and reached Santo Tomas on the evening of February 3. About four dozen Japanese guards had barricaded themselves in the education building with about two hundred internees. After an overnight stalemate, U.S. officers negotiated a deal in which the hostages would be released in return for safe passage for the still-armed Japanese guards away from the university in the direction of their own lines. As agreed, the prisoners were released and the Japanese soldiers marched out the front gate while American soldiers stood by. The Americans met their part of the bargain, but Filipino guerrillas lay in wait several blocks away; they blasted and wiped out the Japanese contingent when it turned the corner.
Mydans had an emotional reunion with his old cell mates and called together many of the prisoners before the university administration building for a group photograph. When the photograph was published in Life magazine, a ten-year-old girl saw her own picture. She recalled that a white flag had been raised on the flagpole to replace the Rising Sun. By now the prisoners were standing beneath the Stars and Stripes. The ten-year-old was Joan Bennett. Her father, Roy C. Bennett, her mother, and her sister were nearby.
The detainees were overjoyed and the soldiers were delighted, but they were horrified to see the skeletal figures who had been starving to death inside the Santo Tomas gates. In three years of detention an estimated 10 percent of the four thousand internees at Santo Tomas had died.
The Battle of Manila raged for another month, though life at Santo Tomas had changed. The U.S. troops set up a row of howitzers and machine-gun emplacements looking outward, ready to protect the former detainees against Japanese attack. The university kitchen was still turning out food, but the fare was quite different. Army rations became gourmet dining: The detainees gorged on reconstituted potatoes, canned beef, tasty bread baked fresh by army cooks, cans of fruit, and real coffee. Medics and nurses were warning people to adapt slowly to normal quantities of food, but people made themselves sick by overeating. Others still died from malnutrition and diseases contracted over the months of imprisonment.
• • •
General MacArthur delighted in the success of the flying squads. He stopped at Guimba as he moved with his forces south from Lingayen Gulf and met up with the survivors of Cabanatuan, who were now resting and slowly recovering. Days later he entered Manila and showed up at Santo Tomas on Wednesday, February 7, accompanied by top commanders. He moved so quickly that Carl Mydans was himself photographed in the early arrival picture before he could grab his own cameras. MacArthur was inspired by the outpouring from the former internees as soon as he walked through the gate. “In their ragged, filthy clothes, with tears streaming down their faces they seemed to be using their last strength to fight their way close enough to grasp my hand.” People alternately wept and laughed and reached toward the center of the circle to touch his jacket, shake his hand, kiss his cheek, and embrace him. “It was a wonderful and never-to-be-forgotten moment—to be a life-saver, not a life-taker.”
In typical fashion, MacArthur had led his aides into an active conflict zone with shells exploding and rifle fire heard not far away. Within hours of his visit, Japanese guns lobbed in shells and mortars at the start of four days of battle, damaging the administration and education buildings and the gymnasium. At least seventeen internees died and nine Filipino workers contracted by the army also were killed. Dozens of people were hurt, some gravely. “Dorm rooms became a mass of debris and severed limbs before army squads swiftly came in to rescue and clean up,” recalled Rupert Wilkinson, the eight-year-old internee who wrote about his experiences years afterward. Hours after being bold enough to crawl through the crowd and touch MacArthur’s sleeve, he witnessed horrifying scenes, people with mortal wounds and gashes lying on bloody stretchers.
A Few More Hours
Mandaluyong Prison, Manila, February 10, 1945
HUDDLED AND STARVED those first days of February, Claire and the other women at the women’s prison realized that the Americans were advancing toward them and feared they might end up in the middle of a firefight. They were isolated: They did not see any Japanese soldiers in those final days of imprisonment and could sometimes hear explosions but heard rumors rather than news.
In November 1944 Claire and Maria Martinez had been sentenced to death and had assumed that they would be executed immediately. Instead, Japanese guards had driven them here—the Correctional Institution for Women at Mandaluyong, where they were ordered before a Japanese officer, who said:
Because of the mercy of His Imperial Highness, the emperor of Japan, your sentence has been commuted to twelve years confinement at hard labor. If you try to escape, your time will be doubled and you will be taken to Japan to finish your sentence. If at any time you wish to retract your lies, send for a Japanese official. In such event, you may have a new trial, and if the court sees fit, you may be released or pardoned. You are to have no outside contacts. No mail. No visitors. No food sent to you.
Treatment improved immediately—the prison was under the jurisdiction of the Philippine civilian government, although Mrs. Garcia, the warden, said she had no leeway in dealing with Japanese regulations. “I am sorry that you are here, but I’m compelled by the Japanese to treat you military prisoners exactly as they say. You will be treated the same as the rest of the other prisoners. You will receive no special privileges, so don’t ask for any.” They were assigned to a cell with ten other women, but neither Claire nor Maria complained about physical abuse after that. The sentence of forced labor consisted of clearing stones and weeds in the prison courtyard, and the grounds were subject to inspection by Japanese officials to make sure the women were doing their work. The main problem was food—they were hungry. At first they received the kind of gruel they were accustomed to—“three tablespoonfuls of boiled, dried corn for breakfast. Lunch consisted of thin, soupy rice and half a tin of boiled weeds and then a
t five p.m. a cup of thin boiled rice.”
Then, despite the Japanese prohibition, the women were able to receive food from the outside—Maria, apparently with the help of bribes, had been able to get messages to her mother and sister. Claire contacted Fely and Judge Roxas, who used contacts inside the prison and were able to smuggle in food as well. However, both Maria and Claire sniped, each claiming that the other was hoarding food and not giving it to anyone else. The women were arguing and grating on each other. Everything seemed to center on food supplies. Claire called one of the women in her cell a kleptomaniac who stole food from her neighbor’s plate if she wasn’t watching.
Maria said she herself did share with Claire but that Claire would not share. “Many times we would find food under her bed,” Maria complained. For her part, Claire claimed that she received little of the food that the judge and her other friends were trying to send in. Maria agreed with her on that. “The guards practically stole two thirds of what was supposed to be brought in.”
Once, when Claire was able to get a little package from Fely, she opened it to find one thousand pesos, which were not worth very much because of rampant inflation, and cigarettes, but no food. Fely wrote that the people of Manila were also starving. “We are subsisting on coconuts and boiled talinum [a green leafy tropical vegetable] ourselves.”
Claire, Maria, and the others at the women’s prison were hungry too, but they also were relieved that the worst of their imprisonment seemed to be over. The Filipino prison guards were kindly and no Japanese had shown up for some time. The prisoners at Mandaluyong could feel that liberation was near. Once they realized they had survived, Maria complained that Claire was starting to brag as if she were a big shot. “She had convinced a number of the other prisoners that she was going to do great things for them in the future and they fawned on her.”
Those petty rivalries were pushed aside in anticipation of freedom. Japanese troops had withdrawn from some parts of the city, but others fought on. Japanese artillery units were firing from the southwest bank of the Pasig River in the Santa Ana district, less than a mile from the women’s prison. Explosions and gunfire reverberated almost nonstop. The U.S. Army was fighting its way north toward Mandaluyong; the prison was not far from where Claire had once shared a house with her husband Manuel L. Fuentes. Other American units were encountering heavy fighting in the direction of Los Baños, where remaining detainees had been sent from Santo Tomas more than a year earlier.
On Saturday, February 10, a unit of the 1st Cavalry, nicknamed the Texas Rangers and led by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Young, made it to the prison gates without enemy resistance. The priest who ministered to the inmates ran into the courtyard, shouting: “I have seen the americanos with my own eyes. . . . They are here!” Claire and Maria and the others decided to wait in their cells rather than risk gun battles. Claire said she hid under the bed for a while and tore her prison dress in the process. Within minutes, American soldiers were standing in the courtyard. She wrapped herself in a blanket and ran outside. “There stood ten of the tallest Yanks I had ever seen! I rushed up to the nearest soldier and timidly touched his arm.” When the soldier smiled, she planted a kiss right on his lips.
“Yes, I’m real,” he said.
Colonel Young and his men carried Claire and the others to their jeeps and drove to Santo Tomas, which was still in a battle zone, but now guarded and safer than it had been in the first days after liberation. “We drove along the smoke-clouded, traffic-infested highways threading our way through a maze of tanks, trucks, and military vehicles on their way to the rapidly changing front. It was not a tranquil ride for the ping of sniper bullets, the staccato chatter of machine guns, and the burping of mortars came from all directions.”
• • •
American units encountered an outpouring of spontaneous celebration as they headed across the Pasig River. Residents in the Santa Ana neighborhood across the river ran out to the street, cheering. A priest at the Santa Ana parish church climbed the church tower and rang the church bells for the first time in seven months. “People on the streets cheered when they heard the familiar chimes once more,” said Marcial Lichauco, who lived in the neighborhood. “Those who went inside . . . to say a prayer of thanksgiving wept copiously as they knelt before the high altar.”
“Manila Is Finished, Completely Demolished”
Manila, February 12, 1945
PRAYERS OF THANKSGIVING became entreaties for survival. Fires roared across the bay front along the Port of Manila, and mortars blasted the battlements of old Intramuros. After the brief, teasing notion that Manila had survived, the city collapsed into suicidal chaos. The Japanese Fourteenth Army commander, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, had ordered withdrawal from the city, but he could not control other commands, notably the Japanese Navy, which decided to defend the city with more than sixteen thousand ill-trained fighters.
U.S. troops could not force the surrender of several thousand of the Japanese troops, who were holed up at Intramuros. U.S. commanders set up loudspeakers and blasted demands that the enemy soldiers give up. When that failed, the U.S. commanders ordered a massive artillery attack on the old city. Japanese units had also set up positions behind the Philippine General Hospital and lobbed shells from behind the hospital toward American positions. “For five days seven thousand civilians and several hundred patients were thus isolated within the walls.” Survivors testified that some Japanese soldiers executed civilians, raped women, and burned people alive.
In the two weeks after the liberation of Santo Tomas, the Americans fought the Japanese street by street, building by building. They drove the Japanese out of Malacañang Palace, fought them at the Manila Hotel and in downtown business districts. Sometimes the fighting was floor to floor. For a time U.S. troops held the main floor of the Manila Hotel but the Japanese launched sniper fire from the upper floors. Japanese and U.S. troops fought back and forth to retake city hall four separate times.
Remaining Japanese troops huddled in Intramuros and other pockets of hopeless resistance. Desperate and unyielding, they began demolition of military facilities that devolved into wider destruction. They committed reprisals and random executions of civilians in Intramuros and elsewhere downtown. There were deaths even among the former detainees at Santo Tomas in the days after the cavalry ousted their Japanese guards. The Japanese standoff against 35,000 well-equipped U.S. soldiers and 3,000 guerrillas devolved into a month of unimaginable carnage. When it was over, most of the Japanese troops had died and more than 1,000 U.S. troops had been killed. An estimated 100,000 Filipinos were dead. Manila, the Pearl of the Orient, had steadily been stripped of its remaining glory—three years of occupation, hunger, dehumanization, decay, and the underlying horror of the conflagration to come. By March 3, 1945, the city had been flattened and the Pearl was gone.
The business district was dust and cinders, and the smell of rotting flesh permeated the streets. The Malate and Ermita districts, where the Japanese had set up barriers, were hard hit—they torched buildings as they retreated. Father John Lalor, who had worked with Claire, Peggy, and Ramón, had been killed during a shelling on February 13. As they destroyed local infrastructure, Japanese troops left whole neighborhoods without water, food, or housing. The two-story Tsubaki Club building on Mabini Street was gone; all that remained was rubble behind a rough-hewn fence.
On February 22, 1945, even as fighting raged elsewhere, General Douglas MacArthur raised the American flag over the U.S. embassy on Manila Bay, recovered after a two-day battle with the Japanese. Fires smoldered, battles still raged, and the U.S. forces faced no alternative but to answer the Japanese gunfire with howitzers.
In one of the final entries of his war diary, Marcial Lichauco described the drive from his home in Santa Ana to survey the damage. “As far as they could see every direction nothing was visible except the remains of what had once been thousands of residential houses. Here and the
re were reinforced concrete buildings which had not collapsed but their interiors were so gutted by fire that they were no longer habitable. Most of the time I had to hold a handkerchief to my nose for the stench of the dead, soldier and civilian, was unbearable. Driving along Tennessee Street our chauffeur had to maneuver his way around to avoid running over dismembered pieces of a human body which lay scattered in the middle of the street.”
MacArthur called it all a waste of humanity with no purpose: “a desperate element of the enemy entrapped by our encirclement [that] fought to the death.” The scale of urban destruction in the capital of the Philippines was a singular horror, rivaling the lethal battle for Warsaw, comparable to the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo. Buildings that had not been bombed in the U.S. assault to retake the islands were destroyed by the Japanese as they often fought to the death. The Sixth U.S. Army continued sweep-up operations on Japanese holdouts throughout February. The port area was secured by the end of the month. Finally the bloody siege of Manila was declared over on March 3.
• • •
Chick Parsons stood silent sentinel in the remains of the city. Parsons, suffering from the effects of malaria and from general exhaustion, had been rotated out of the Philippines after conducting his ground operation in advance of the October 20 landing at Leyte Gulf. After two months with his family in the United States, he was back in the Philippines by January, conducting raids with guerrilla groups to root out remaining Japanese strongholds. In February he returned to Manila and set out in search of clues to the whereabouts of his mother-in-law, Blanche Jurika. It was hard to find clues or even gather information amid the devastation.
“Manila is finished, completely demolished,” he wrote in a letter from those days.
I have seen sights that I shall remember a long time. I arrived on the heels of the Yanks as they pushed the enemy down the Boulevard toward the Luneta, and visited the house of a good friend, Don Carlos Perez Rubio, a wealthy Spanish-Filipino. In the garden of the house, I counted twenty-two bodies—the entire family including women and children, three people who were visiting at the time, and servants—liquidated in a most brutal fashion. Bayonets mostly. A number of my other friends have suffered a like fate. Such sights give me a feeling of satisfaction at having been in a small part connected with the elimination of a few Nips here and there. I could never feel conscience-stricken after viewing some of the results of Jap atrocities in Manila.
