Tribute To Isabelle: Part 7 (Epilogue)

 

And with this fellow Otaku & Metalheads, my tribute to my departed friend Isabelle is complete. This last part are the chapters she made summaries for, but never got around to finishing. Still, it would be wrong to leave it off the table, and thus here is the final part. It felt only right to cover this as well.

Summary of Chapters 6 Through the Epilogue

Chapter 6:
    - After the fall of Corregidor the Japanese had more time for the STIC people. Under the badgering of Earl Carroll and the Central Committee, they grudgingly consented to provide a per capita daily allowance of P.70, but steadfastly refused to recognize the Geneva Convention. They ordered Earl Carroll to head the Finance and Supplies Committee, to which they would turn over the cash for the purchase of food and other necessities. To do justice to his new duties, Carroll resigned as Chairman of the Central committee and persuaded the new Japanese commandant to allow the STIC people to elect a new committee. This was done and, as chairman, the commandant chose a 20 year veteran of the Orient, Carroll Grinnell. He had to cope with the influx of new prisoners from other islands, as well as the civilians and nurses captured on Bataan and Corregidor. In the scramble for accomodations, the camp interpreter, Ernest Stanley, took up residence in the commandant’s office. My father, like many others, built a shack on the campus in which to find a semblance of privacy during the day. Our neighbor in Shanty Town was Jack Percival, an Australian newsman, who was part of the group that met daily to listen to the short wave radio secreted in camp. The first good news he reported, the U.S. victory at Midway, was disputed by the STIC people, who found Japanese claims of victory more credible.

Chapter 7:
    - By June 1942 the STIC people deemed any kind of release, including virtual house arrest, preferable to being locked up with 3500 other people on 54 acres. A release committee succeeded in having many of the old, the young, and the sick taken care of outside. Two repatriation ships returned a couple of hundred internees to Shanghai. My best friend left on the second one, leaving me the only child in Room 46. The gate became the lifeline of the STIC people through which their Filipino friends could supply them. The continued loyalty of the Filipinos was a thorn in the Japanese side. When they closed the gate, Grinnell had to accept harsh conditions to have it reopened: inspection of all packages, censorship of all notes, and total absence of contact between the bearer and STIC people. To achieve the last condition, the Japanese forced the internees to build a sawali wall inside the iron railing fronting the campus. The STIC people were so angered by the sawali fence that they overwhelmingly defeated Grinnell at the next election of the Central Committee, and voted for Earl Carroll. The commandant overrode the internee vote and appointed the committee himself, retaining Grinnell as chairman. This accentuated the rift between Grinnell and Carrol, who differed about the role the STIC people should play in the war. Grinnell opted to support the guerrillas by smuggling money to them; Carroll felt this endangered the camp and refused to participate. By October it was clear that U.S. troops, rumored to be fighting in the Solomons, had no hope of freeing us for Christmas. A committee was formed to plan and execute holiday preparations, complete with a visit from Santa Claus.

Chapter 8:
    - In the first half of 1943 prisoners were constantly being brought to Santo Tomas from other islands. Crowding reacher intolerable proportions when the camp population approached 5000. The Japanese had always wanted to move the camp out of Manila, where it was a constant reminder to the Filipinos of America. Several sites had been rejected and finally the Japanese insisted that the camp be moved to the Philippine Agricultural College at Lost Banoos, sixty miles from Manila on the shores of Laguna de Bay. It was smaller than Santo Tomas, there were no buildings capable of housing prisoners, and the water supply was inadequate. The Japanese ordered 800 able bodied men to go there and build barracks for 7000, so that all civilian enemy alines could be concentrated in one place. The exodus of the 800 left Santo Tomas with a shortage of men for hard labor. In September 1943, 151 STIC people and one infant were exchanged via Goa for 150 Japanese caught in the U.S. Involuntary departures from camp occurred sporadically as the Japanese eliminated anyone who had worked for military organizations or carted off to Fort Santiago people suspected of helping the guerrillas or of having strategic information. Camp informants were suspected of tipping the Japanese off to such people, and gradually the collaborators became known, and they were shunned. The few who returned from Santiago went directly to the camp hospital and would not break the promise of silence extracted by the Japanese.

Chapter 9:
    - in the second half of 1943 Grinnell stepped up his aid to the guerrillas. Stanley strengthened his bonds with the Japanese and became particularly friendly with Tojo, a Japanese interpreter. Carroll established contact with Luis Alcuaz, secretary to the Dominican rector, who agreed to help Carroll get supplies for the camp. Deficiency conditions, childhood diseases, including polio, and an epidemic of dysentary broke out. I was hospitalized with dengue fever. The nurses of Bataan and Corregidor serve the camp well. Japanese doctors tried out an experimental plague vaccine on all the STIC people. Recipe mania swept the hungry camp. A group of prisoners arrived from Davao, including my father’s friend Umpsted, with news of that prison camp. In early November 1943 a force 8 typhoon devastated the shanty areas and flooded the city, causing much hardship.

Chapter 10:
    - In November 1943 Red Cross relief supplies arrived in Manila. STIC labor details were sent out to help men from Manila’s military prison unload the ship. We learned of the removal of most military prisoners, including Jack Littig and Harry Morton from the islands to slave labor camps in Japan and elsewhere. We also learned that the Japanese were taking what they wanted of the relief supplies for their own use. When our share of the supplies arrived in camp, it did not match the manifests which the labor detail had stolen. A near riot ensued when the Japanese began inspecting the individual comfort kits, opening perishables and ripping the labels off canned goods to see if there were messages hidden on the back. They took all cigarettes out of the comfort kits and generally ravaged them. Grinnell had his hands full negotiating a settlement. My father helped to solve the problem of distributing supplies of which there were not enough to go around. 207 STIC people are transferred to Los Banos. The children who had been released to the care of the Holy Ghost nuns were reinterned at Christmas time.

Chapter 11:
    - In January 1944 the Imperial Japanese Army took over the camp. The Central Committee was abolished and a three man Executive Committee appointed by the Japanese. Again Grinnell was chosen as chairman. Instead o a monetary allowance the army provided food, whose quality and quantity immediately degenerated. The camp labor details had to be restructured to handle the army’s food deliveries. Carroll remianed in charge of supplies and had to activate his smuggling contacts to get food. Grinnell continued to raise money for the guerrillas, be he had to reorganize his conduits, as the army systematically isolated the camp from the outside. The package line was discontinued. When all enemy aliens out on release were re-interned, accommodations had to be reorganized. Shanty owners were allowed to move into their shanties. This meant that I could live with both my parents. Stanley was forced to move out of the commandant’s office but continued to hang around the Japanese and to share any food they offered. He occasionally used his influence with the Japanese to help individual internees who appealed to him. 500 more internees were shipped to Los Banos, most volunteering because there was more food at Los Banos.

Chapter 12:
    - As the Army continued to isolate the camp from any possible contact with the outside, they forced the STIC people to build a barbed wire fence twenty feet inside the university wall. Any shacks between the fence and the wall had to be torn down. Instead of garbage being picked up inside the camp by a city truck, it had to be carted to a side gate where the city garbage men loaded it into the truck. One enterprising group of garbage men developed an ingenious smuggling operation out of this near-contact with outsiders. Unfortunately the Japanese soon caught on. Searches for the secret radio intensified. My father refused to join the group which had to resort to taking the radio apart after each use and hiding the parts with different men each night. The Japanese confiscated all cash at this time. Dad buried some in a corned beef can. Some prisoners began bribing Japanese sentries to get extra food. The Japanese counted complaints about the food with orders to do more gardening. In all areas of forced labor, Lieutenant Abiko became the commandant’s enforcer.

Chapter 13:
    - American air raids began on September 21, 1944. There was a scramble to build air raid shelters. My dad dug one under our shack at a cost of ten pounds of body weight. Food dwindled to 700 calories a day, even when the Executive Committee decided to begin using the reserves built up over the years, thanks to Carroll’s foresight. I had to quit getting my meals in the children’s kitchen where the best food was served, because the Japanese decreed that children over ten were to be treated like. Adults. Resentment against Stanley, who was now viewed as a collaborator, became widespread, as he continued to get food from the Japanese. The Japanese began storing military supplies on the campus. The Executive Committee protested that this violated the civilian status of the camp. Lieutenant Abiko continues to abuse STIC people who, he felt, were shirking. 150 more people sent to Los Banos, further reducing the labor force at Santo Tomas.

Chapter 14:
    - by Christmas 1944 there was neither energy nor matter with which to celebrate. During a search for the camp radio, the Japanese discovered evidence of Grinnell’s smuggling operations to the Guerrillas. He and three of his assistants were arrested and removed from camp bu the military police. Requests for news of them were denied. The commandant ordered Dr. Stevenson to change “starvation” as the cause of death on a death certificate. He refused and was confined in the camp jail. The food situation became critical as reserves ran out. School was discontinued. The secret radio confirmed MacArthur’s landing on Luzon, January 9, 1945. The Japanese began demolishing their military stores in greater Manila. The Japanese in camp began to slaughter their animals. The children gathered at the Japanese kitchen, drawn by the smell of roasting meat, and were forbidden to return. The garrison packed and seemed about to evacuate the camp sevel times. Stanley continued his affiliation with the Japanese, even though it was obvious that they would not be the winners. Thus he saw on the Commandant’s desk the order to vitiate MacArthur’s return to Manila by killing the STIC people en masse.

Chapter 15:
    - Stanley got the Japanese interpreter, Tojo, to help him use the radio transmitter in camp to broadcast an appeal to MacArthur to reach Manila before February 6, the date set for our execution. This broadcast was made on January 30. The same day MacArthur ordered three units to race for Manila, promising to decorate the one that liberated Santo Tomas. A First Cavalry Combat Team, with Company C of the 44th Tank Battalion–500 men–raced the seventy miles through occupied Luzon to reach the camp the night of February 3. For forty-eight hours they held the camp against 20,000 Japanese marines barricaded in Intra Muros, the old walled city of Manila. Then reinforcements began to arrive. The Japanese garrison of Santo Tomas took 200 internees hostage in the Education Building, and Japanese marines began shelling the camp from Intra Muros. Abiko was mortally wounded by American fire and badly treated by a group of STIC women. The Japanese set the city afire and began mass atrocities against the Filipino population of Manila.

Chapter 16:
    - Stanley was revealed to be a British secret service agent who had worked behind the scenes to help the camp for the whole time of internment. He negotiated the release of the hostages and helped organize the Japanese safe conduct to their lines. Tojo, with his wife and twelve children, surrendered to the Americans in camp and was rewarded for his help. The bodies of Grinnell and his three assistants were found beheaded in an empty lot in the city. Carroll was honored for his service to the camp. More STIC people were killed by Japanese shelling than died during the entire three years. Many also died of irreversible effects of starvation. Los Banos was liberated in a daring raid.  The repatriation process began with the flying home of the nurses of Bataan and Corregidor who had served heroically in the camp hospital. The rest of the STIC people were confined to Santo Tomas for a month, while U.S. troops battled the Japanese in house-to-house fighting for control of the city, thus reducing it to the second most destroyed allied city of World War II.

Epilogue:
    - My family and I were returned to the United States on the troop ship USS Admiral Eberly in 1945, crossing the Pacific unescorted at the height of the Japanese kamikaze attacks. A three week voyage brought us to Santa Barbara, where we began again to learn to be free.

I hope you didn't mind this little adventure into the past of my friend, and I hope it was illuminating. In just a few days, we're heading back to the Summer Of Sabaton, so things will perk up a bit. See you soon!

 

 

 ***

If you didn't read any of the prior chapters, here are some links to those: 

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Convention Review: Connecticon 2025

Connecticon 2024 is in the books everybody!

I may have said this in a prior review, but Connecticon & other conventions are a quasi-spiritual experience for me. For a single weekend, the horrors of the world are completely held at bay by the convention center, as well as the legion of convention goers that frequent it. This year was especially important for me, as something pretty bad took place in my life earlier this year, but I’ll get to that later in the review. Suffice it to say, I had a damn good time, so let’s get to it! Here is my review for Connecticon 2024. Let’s begin!

Good Points
The Hartford Marriot has been a perfect venue for Connecticon ever since I started going all the way back in 2009. Outside of one fault (More on that below), the entire complex is filled from top to bottom with things for any of our needs. The Starbucks in the lobby was particularly nice this year, and I don’t know if it was because of when I got there, but the baristas were exceptionally on point this year & got orders out fast. There’s also the Bar, the tiny store by the front desk, and the restaurant, which always has a nice breakfast buffet in the morning & much cheaper this year as opposed to last (22 dollars this year as opposed to 37 from last year if I recall correctly). There is also the pool on the highest floor of the hotel, but I never use it on account of not being able to swim. It’s a nice little place pack with quite a lot!

Dealer’s Room & Artist’s Alley as usual was stuffed to the brim with various vendors & artists peddling their wares. Outside of 2 shocking omissions this year (More on that in the “Bad Points” section), Connecticon 2024 might have had the most vendors and artists. So much so, that for the first time I’ve been going in 15 years, there were a few of them on the floor of the convention center on the top floor, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in the decade & a half of going. There was an absolute horde of things to purchase, but this year I didn’t because of a MTG pre-release in just a few days (Bloomburrow baby!), and yet I came home with a small but nice selection of stuff.

Panels & Events are always varied for Connecticon, and this year was no different. AMVs, Idol Groups, Cosplay Chess, and Cosplay Deathmatch (Which was incredibly on point this year) were just some of the events that took place. The guy that ate the entire Costco chicken last year came back, and this time he had an opponent to go up against. Panels were all over the place, but in a good way. From learning how to make your own Kandi bracelets, to optimism in Dr. Stone & the game Celeste, and John St. Jon’s Sexy Late Night Panel (Which is tons of fun if you’ve never gone to it), the convention continues to hold it’s motto close to it’s heart: “Everything But The Kitchen Sink”

Cosplay Championship Wrestling continues to be a highlight of Connecticon, and one that I love very much. Since their in convention debut in 2021, the various wrestlers embody the characters of comics, gaming, anime, and manga, & the end result is nothing more than a fun time. What the group lacks in spectacle, they more than gain in terms of connecting with the fans & providing an intimate experience for about an hour. 2024 was particularly a delight, as we had some new characters enter the ring, and engaged in some damn good fights. Definitely look forward to what CCW brings the convention in 2025!

And finally, I want to touch on the Food Truck festival that happens right by the convention center, and I don’t think I’ve done this in any prior review. Good on Connecticon staff to host the event just as a horde of some of the best damn street food I’ve ever had, and I think just about everyone else will agree! There’s stuff for meat eater, fish lovers, and vegans as well! Not only that, but there are also a couple other vendors as well selling some nice stuff, and some music from a live performer or two. Everything there wasn’t horrifically expensive, and the quality was fantastic, so I might go for the food trucks almost exclusively in future events.

Okay Points
So I only have one thing to place here, and that was the locked-off escalator in the main lobby of the hotel. Both ends were locked off, and at no point during the weekend did it open back up. Now, it doesn’t cover the longest distance, and as such isn’t the biggest dent in the con’s armor. On the other hand.....

Bad Points
It was incredibly frustrating that it was closed! If there was an announcement that the hotel shut it down before the convention, then I never saw it. On top of that, it made the Sunday rush to leave frustrating, as me & my group has to go around & through some groups of people. Like I said above, it doesn’t make a big dent, but it is frustrating.

The thing that did make my blood boil was near non-existent presence of manga sellers, and the non-existence of anime sellers! Camp Anime was the only stand where I understood why they didn’t have manga (One of the sellers said that it was easier to move figures than a horde of books), but the other 2 I found only had a small selection, and had nothing of what I was looking for. As for anime’s non-presence in the dealer’s room, I have no clue, and I admit I was kinda mad. If any convention goer or convention staff member has the answer, then please leave a comment, as I would genuinely like to know why.

Other
So, this section is going to be a bit personal, so bear with me.

If any of you have been paying attention to my blog since this past March, then you’ll know that my friend Isabelle passed away 6 days before her 90th birthday. I originally began working for her to get money for this very convention, and obviously that wasn’t the case this year (Technically this happened last year as well, but not as bad). For almost 15 years, she always wanted to know what it was like, as while she wasn’t a geek herself outside of liking the Harry Potter books, she was always curious about my hobbies, and I always told her what happened. The con this year was bittersweet, as it’s the first one that I can’t tell her about or show off the stuff I got in the dealer’s room. If anything, it hurts a lot that I can’t say anything or show anything to her, but that’s life sadly.

Final Thoughts & Rating
This year’s Connecticon was one of the best. Faults & annoyances not withstanding, I had a fun time with what was set up for me and all of the other con-goers. All of the panels I went to were great, all of the events I watched were great, and the food trucks this year brought their A-game. If this level of quality can be maintained, then I definitely look forward to what’s next.

Connecticon 2024 gets a 9 out of 10.

And that wraps up my review for Connecticon 2024. A damn fine Connecticon if there was one, and I can only imagine what the rest of them this decade will be like. With that said, I got 1 last tribute post about my friend Isabelle to put up, and then the Summer of Sabaton will conclude in August. See you then!

Tribute To Isabelle: Part 6 (Chapter 5)

Chapter 5

    By the end of May we knew that our status as prisoners would not soon end. Three events forced this realization on even the most optimistic, dwarfing my eighth birthday, even in my mind.
    On March 20th the Manila Tribune electrified us with the news that MacArthur had fled Corregidor. Many rejected this out of hand, saying that Mac would never abandon his troops. However, rumors, known to originate from the secret short wave radio, which daily monitored the news on KGEI in San Francisco, soon convinced us that MacArthur had indeed landed at Bachelor Field outside Darwin, Australia on St. Patrick’s Day, proclaiming, “I shall return.”
    Some felt abandoned, but most rejoiced that MacArthur was now in a position to lead the American Army back to rescue us. It remained for the pessimists to remind us that the fleet necessary to escort the troops across the Pacific had been sunk.
    In spite of the loss of MacArthur’s presence, there was still the reassuring noise of battle from Corregidor and the knowledge that Bataan still held.
    On April 10 the Tribune headlines read: “TROOPS ON EASTERN FRONT OF BATAAN OFFER SURRENDER.” “Propaganda!” responded most internees. But succeeding days brought more Tribune stories and, finally, pictures of General King surrendering and of captured Americans. We tried every possible interpretation to avoid the truth, until the secret radio reported President Roosevelt’s words, “Bataan has served it’s purpose.”
    In Room 46 I watched in awe as Eleanor and Connie Farnes wept in agony over the fate of Eleanor’s fiancé. The ladies would come to the pair, and wrap an arm about them. But no one could console them, for there was nothing consoling to say. “Maybe he escaped,” was the best anyone could do, but that was cold comfort to anyone who knew the jungles and mountains of Bataan.
    Daddy went for long walks to work off the stree of not knowing Jack Littig’s fate. Everywhere worried faces streaked with tears spoke wordlessly of anxiety for husbands, brother, fathers.
    A week after the fall of Bataan, eight civilians who had been captured there were interned in Santo Tomas. They were able to tell us that the army nurses and other key personnel had been evacuated to Corregidor, but few of the STIC people got news of loved ones from the newcomers, for there were 78,000 troops defending Bataan. We did learn “...the battling bastards of Bataan; no mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam;...no pills, no planes, no artillery pieces. ...and nobody gives a damn.”
    The STIC People began to wonder....
    Late one afternoon just as I was setting out for the supper line, an old friend we hadn’t seen for months came slowly up Duck Egg Drive where my father had constructed a shack for us to spend the day in the northwest quadrant of the Santo Tomas campus, now called Shanty Town. Alice Morton was a striking woman. Slim, of medium height, she was impeccably groomed, even in captivity. Her progress was slowed by her two-year-old son, who had to be carried. Ricky always looked badly, but his appearance now was alarming. His arms and legs were more spindly than ever, making his oversized head seem enormous. And he was absolutely white–white haired, white skinned. His blue sun suit hung on him, and his blue eyes were black rimmed. Alice’s eyes were dark-circled, too. Her husband, Harry had been on Bataan. She greeted Daddy and sat Ricky on our floor, looking beseechingly at me. I abandoned my supper plans and sat beside Ricky, putting my arm around him to support his head. Alice and Daddy spoke quietly, but I had no difficulty hearing as I rocked Ricky and hummed a nursery tune.
    “How can I find out if Harry made it?” asked Alice.
    “I’ll put out some feelers,” Daddy replied.
    They spoke for some time, Alice dabbing her eyes, Daddy sounding calm and reassuring.
    When the Loudspeaker announced that supper was being served, Alice rose, shook Daddy’s hand and carried Ricky back to the Annex where mothers with young children were now quartered.
    “Where did your Mother put that laundry bag?” asked Daddy.
    I dragged it over and Daddy up-ended it on the floor, shaking out a pile of soiled clothing. He fished in the pocket of a pair of tan trousers and retrieved a crumpled slip of paper. He could not send notes inquiring about friends through the normal censored channels and resorted to the list method of communicating with our former cook, Braulio, who had tracked us down and came to the gate twice a week to get our laundry and to bring us food and other necessities, which Dad was already systematically stockpiling. A crumpled list in a pocket could be disclaimed as communication. Dad added “Harry Morton” under “Jack Litting”, recrumpled the dirty slip of paper and replaced it in the pocket of the shorts.
    The fall of Bataan freed Japanese men and material to concentrate exclusively on Corregidor. We could hear the new artillery bombardment mounted against the Rock from Bataan. Day and night Japanese planes buzzed over Manila on their way to bomb and strafe the tiny island. Each day that U.S. forces held out heartened us. “Mac still has his foothold in the Islands,” the adults told each other with forced cheerfulness.
    On May 6 at noon the crescendo of explosions from the Bay area began to diminish. An hour later silence descended on the city. Gloom settled over the STIC people. The next day, our fears were confirmed: Corregidor had fallen.
    On may 9th General Homma formally entered Manila, signaling his conquest of the Philippines.
    Ear Carroll and the Central Committee sighed and prepared for a long siege.
    Stanley was seen conversing with the Japanese in their own language.
    Grinnell began setting up a conduit to the guerrillas.
    One enterprising STIC lady went out to her garden plot and planted some pineapple tops she had been saving. “I’ll have pineapples in two years,” she told her friends grimly.

Tribute To Isabelle: Part 5 (Chapter 4)

Chapter 4

    Santo Tomas Internment Camp was more ling a prolonged camp-out than a prison until the middle of February. By then there were over 3500 of us–Americans, British, Dutch, Burmese, Poles, Swedes, and many other Allied Nationalities–squeezed into three university buildings.
    Thursday, February 12 began like any other camp day. The Loudspeaker, recently installed by the camp engineers, woke us at 7 a.m. with a recording of a popular tune. It was cleaning day and the forty occupants of classroom 46, where Mother and I still resided, stripped bedding from cots or desks or petates in preparation for the weekly bedbug purge. Mother fetched boiling water from a huge cauldron in the new kitchen while I took the slats from our iron cots to the newly created shower room. There we douses them and a fine harvest of bed bugs evacuated their flooded homes.
    By then it was eight and, while the slats dried, Mother and I got breakfast from the kitchen shed, built by the STIC men with lumber and equipment supplied by the Red Cross. I hated the cracked corn mush that was served, but had been warned under dire penalty that I was to eat it, so I did.
    Afterwards we reported back to Room 46 to be counted by Mrs. Rimmer, our room monitor. While we waited for the totals to be tallied, we made up our cots.
    When the Loudspeaker failed to announce the end of roll call, Mrs. Farnes came over to chat. With her in room 46, were her two grown daughters, whose high heels and lipstick and tragic expressions I greatly admired. Mrs. Farnes told Mother how her older girl, Eleanor, was desperately worried about her fiancé, who was fighting on Bataan. Connie, the younger, shared her sister’s anguish, but Mrs. Farnes was more concerned about her two teenage sons, in a men’s room on the floor below.
    The usual thirty minutes for roll call turned into fifty. A man from the Executive Committee came round, asking all the room monitors to count their people again. Still the totals did not tally. Then the Japanese sent a party of their own, which ordered us out into the hallway to be counted. When they left, speculation began in earnest. “Has someone escaped?”
        Two re-counts later the Loudspeaker ordered the adults to their camp jobs and the children to school. The delay was not explained, which fueled rumors galore: there had been a mass escape from the gym; Earl Carroll had joined the guerillas in the hiss; the Executive Committee had vanished en masse.
    During siesta, screams shattered the silence in the Main Building. They emanated from the Japanese barracks room, next to the commandant’s office on the first floor. The two-foot-thick walls of the building could not contain the cries of agony. Mother tried to distract me by reading the story of the Cat That Walked by Himself, that would not be tamed, and that went his wild lone way. Still the screams made chills run up and down my spine.
    The screaming lasted for nearly three hours, generating more rumors.
    The truth circulated after supper. One Australian and two British merchant seaman had gone over the wall after roll call the previous evening. That was no great feat, for the wall was only ten feet high, lightning on the inside was nil, on the outside sporadic and dim at best. The Japanese sentries could not cover every inch of the wall, and nor could the internee night patrol, which had been set up to enforce curfew and the no-liquor, no-sex rules.
    The trio of seamen were strangers to Manila, stranded when their ship sank in the bay. Not knowing the streets and having no contacts, the sailors floundered toward the shore, where they planned to sail to Australia. Just after noon, five miles north of Santo Tomas, then ran into a patrol of Japanese M.P.’s, who returned them to camp at 2 PM.
    Earl Carroll, bolstered by his newly discovered interpreter Ernest Stanley, and the room monitors of the two men were summoned by Commandant Tomayasu.
    “How,” the Commandant wanted to know, “could three men be missing for so long without their absence being noted?”
    “They must have gone right after the evening roll call,” Carroll replied through Stanley. “Until the next roll call there is no way to know if a man is missing.”
    “You must find a way,” snapped Tomayasu. “This time I have been able to intercede with the military police to treat them leniently. Next time this will be impossible.”
    At 5 p.m. the three sailors, beaten almost insensible, were removed from camp in a police ban.
    The executive Committee composed a message read over the Loudspeaker at roll call that night, explaining what had happened and ending: “The commandant is very angry that his cooperation should have been requited in such a manner, and has stated that any recurrence will result in death for the escapeeps and very stringent restrictions for the internees. It is, therefore, very important that each person interned here take every possible precaution to prevent another escape.”
    One man was not on hand to hear this message. Goldie Goldsborough had escaped. An old Manila hand, married to a Filipina, he had sons with the guerrillas. Camp consensus was that he would join them in the hills, and that the Japanese would increase the promised punishment for everyone.
     Whether this second escape hardened the resolve of the Japanese military authorities, no one ever knew, but on February 14 Commandant Tomayasu told the Executive Committee that the three sailors had been court martialed and sentenced to death. The Executive Committee made every effort to have the verdict reconsidered, submitting a petition to the military authorities and trying to get officials of the Churches and the German community to intervene. Permission to contact friendly outsiders by telephone was refused.
    On Sunday, February 15, at 11 a.m., the Military Police sent a bus to camp to collect witnesses. Tomayasu designated Earl Carroll as Chairman of the internees’ Central Committee, Ernest Stanley as camp interpreter, Charles E. Stewart and Gerald H. Pedder as the room monitors of the escapees, and Father Griffiths, an Anglican clergyman, to attend the execution.
    A bus took the internees and the commandant’s party to Manila’s South Police Station, where the condemned men had been jailed for the past three nights. The trio, hands tied in front, were herded onto the sidewalk, then prodded aboard the bus. Their faces lit up at the sights of the five internees. It was obvious that the sailors did not know their fate.
    Speech being prohibited, the trip proceeded in silence. Blakey Laycock, the forty-three-year-old Australian, was the first to notice the white armbands worn by three of the soldiers. He paled and slumped in his seat as if the wind had been knocked out of him. He had recognized the armbands for what they were–blindfolds. Britishers Henry Weeks and Tom Fletcher, both in their late twenties, took longer to notice them, but by the time the bus reached the Chinese Cemetary, they, too, realized that they were to be executed.
    Laycock, Weeks, and Fletcher were lined up on a flat spot in the cemetary. Commandant Tomayasu read their sentence, which a Japanese interpreter translated. Father Griffiths calmed his own distress enough to speak to the men of the life of the spirits, and the efforts of the Committee to save them. Finally, he offered to take messages to their families after the war.
    “My wife,” gulped Weeks, “we’d only been married a month when I left London. She may have had our child by now. Couldn’t that be considered?”
    Without waiting for the formality of Stanley’s translation, Tomayasu, palms upraised, shrugged impotently.
    Weeks, his hands still tied, groped for his hip pocket. Tugging awkwardly, he extracted his wallet.
    “Her address’s there,” he mubled, as a soldier took the wallet and handed it to Griffiths.
    Fletcher was too distraught to speak intelligibly, but Laycock was not.
    “On what grounds are we being executed?” he demanded.
    Stanley translated this time, and the Commandant replied, “For trying to escape.”
    “Well then, how about a cigarette?” said the Australian.
    Tomayasu acquiesced. Carroll produced a pack of Lucky Strikes and put one in each man’s mouth. As he was lighting Laycock’s, a Japanese guard stepped forward and lit the other two.
    The condemned men smoke in silence. Aside, to Carroll, the Commandant expressed his dismay over the whole episode, which blemished the record of his exemplary, cooperative camp. He reiterated his hope that there would be no more escapes for the good of the whole camp.
    Too soon the cigarettes were smoked. Guards shoved the trio toward their common grave, a ten-by-four foot hole about four feet deep. Laycock, Fletcher, and Weeks sat on it’s edge, dangling their feet. Soldiers blindfolded them, Laycock’s protests not withstanding.
    Three soldiers took up positions on the opposite edge of the hole and from four feet aimed 25-caliber automatic pistols. On the first round Fletcher and Laycock fell on their faces. Weeks followed on the second volley. Groans rose from the grave. The soldiers emptied their pistols into the tangle of bodies. Still the groans came. Carroll started for the grave but Stanley restrained him, whispering, “You will lose face.”
    Tomayasu sighed and said, “It is a shame my men did not have rifles.”
    The soldiers half covered the moaning men with dirt, then waved over the Filipino grave diggers. Whether the groans ceased or were merely muffled by the earth Carroll could never say.
    Father Griffiths performed the last rites, while the Japanese stood at a distance. Then the party withdrew. Just before he boarded the bus, Carroll looked back. Two soldiers where laying branches of bougainvilles on the grave.
    The story of the execution spread like a rip tide through Santo Tomas. The children turned the trio into heroes, but the adults speculated on the consequences. They were not long in coming. Commandant Tomayasu ordered camp rules to be strictly enforced, and he cancelled all passes for internees with personal business in the city. He promised that the next time anyone escaped, his room monitor would be executed. Strangely, no mention was ever made of Goldsborough’s escape.
    In public the Central Committee charged the men of the night patrol with escape prevention as their top priority. In private Earl Carroll questioned the reversal of Tomayasu’s promise of clemency. Obviously the commandant did not have the last word; the military was all-powerful in Manila now.
    The execution belied Japanese assurances that we were being held in protective custody. STIC ceased to be a lark and became a life and death game to be played, not only against the Japanese, but also against one’s fellow prisoners, who were now perceived as having the power to imperil others.

Tribute To Isabelle: Part 4 (Chapter 3)

 

Chapter 3

    “Suicide!”
    The word, though whispered, woke me. Startled, I propped myself up on my elbows and peered through the haze of mosquito netting, unnoticed by the trio of strangers talking with my father.
    “Damn fool jumped off the roof!” sputtered a short, red-faced man.
    “Does anyone know why?” my father asked.
    “Drunk, more than likely,” replied the second strangers, “and landed us in a worse pickle than himself. Now the Japs have forbidden us to go above the second floor. We’ll be packed like sardines before they get half of us in here.”
    “Enough to make me jump, too, if I didn’t know the Yanks’d be here in a week or two!” the sputterer exclaimed.
    At this point Mother and Emily stepped into the room, fresh from a trip to the bathroom.
    The third man, who up to now had been chewing silently on an empty pipe, spoke, “Better get your family squared away on the second floor–that’s still the only space the Dominicans have released for our use. There’ll be more people arriving today, and space is at a premium.”
    Dad nodded and shook hands with the pipe-smoker, who turned and led his companions away.
    “Who was that?” asked Mother.
    “Chap by the name of Earl Carroll,” Dad replied. “Apparently he’s in charge on our side.”
    “Do you think we ought to follow his advice?” Mother asked.
    “Yes I do,” Dad’s answer was unhesitating. “In view of all those Jap visitors we had last night, it would be prudent to go. Why don’t you pack while I hunt up some breakfast.”
    Dad was a long time finding food. When he arrived with sticky buns and café au lait, Van was with him. While we breakfasted, Dad reported that Filipino vendors were patrolling the wrought-iron fence that fronted the University, selling all manner of things.
    “And,” finished Dad, “I ordered for three cots, three mattresses, and a mosquito net for me. The Bay View one will do for you and Isabel.”
    “Is that really necessary?” questioned Emily. “I mean, do you think we’ll be here long enough to need cots?”
    “It can’t hurt to be comfortable while we’re here,” answered my father, avoiding Emily’s gaze.
    “I suppose you’re right,” sighed Van. “We may as well be comfortable, too. I’ll order a couple for us.”
    The sticky buns were gone by this time, and so was most of the coffee.
    “Let’s get this show on the road,” said Van, rising.
    “O.K.,” agreed Dad. “Why don’t I take the girls off to find a room, while you find space somewhere for us?”
    “Can’t be done. Haven’t you heard? The Japs want the British and the Americans separated.”
    “Whatever for?” gasped Mother.
    Van and Daddy shrugged and gathered their respective goods together. I picked up my pillowcase and Teddy and followed the adults downstairs.
    On the second floor, Van indicated that the rooms assigned to British women were to the right. We peeked into the first one. Bedlam reigned. Mounds of baggage were guarded by their owners, most of whom were shouting at the guardian of a neighboring mound. A variety of sleeping arrangements had been concocted; the lucky few had folding canvas cots; some had commandeered desks; still others had settled for the floor, where they had laid a petate or blankets. Several crying children, perched on suitcases, added to the din.
    “No good trying to squeeze in here,” muttered Dad, motioning us on.
    Each room we looked into duplicated the first, until we got to room 46 at the end of the corridor. Here a group of young women were arranging their things by the windows. Several big tables, made up as beds, had been grouped in the middle of the room under the light. The whole back wall was unoccupied. Dad darted in, ignoring glares from the residents, and put out things in the corner.
    An elderly lady who looked vaguely familiar walked over.
    “I’m Mrs. Rimmer.” she introduced herself. “Earl Carroll has asked me to monitor this room for the time being. Don’t I know you?”
    “We’re the Cogans,” said Dad. “I believe we’ve met at the Manila Club. Isn’t your husband in the import/export trade?”
    “You’re right on both counts. I just wanted to be sure you’re British, as this is a British room.”
    “That we are,” Dad replied. “And of course, I’m leaving to find my own room. Stay put in this corner, Helen, till I get back with the cots.”
    Mother and I marked off a space in the corner for two cots, using our suitcases and the cases of food to define our perimeted. Then we settled down to guard our belongings and wait for Dad to come with the cots.
    When I got restless, Mother let me go over to one of the two big windows in the room. The back of the campus lay below me. A driveway stretched from the Main Building to a gate, which was shut and guarded by a Japanese soldier with a rifle on his shoulder. On both sides of the drive, high grass almost hid the trenches which had been dug beside it. A low building shaped like a fancy “H” was on the west side of the drive, while a small rectangular building lay on the east side. Enclosing everything was a ten-foot-high concrete wall, above which poked the roofs of the houses across the street.
    Meanwhile, other newcomers were taking up residence in room 46, and the back wall was filling up fast. Finally, when only the space closest to the door was left, a fat lady with a suitcase in one hand, innumerable string bags in the other, and two bundles under each arm, staggered in. Seeing the space by the door, she heaved a huge sigh and plopped everything down with a clatter.
    By mid-afternoon Dad had brought our folding iron cots, with wooden slats to support thin mattresses. We made the pair up like one double bed, with Bay View Sheets, a Bay View blanket, and the Bay View mosquito net over all.
    We were chatting with Mrs. Rimmer when Auntie Emily called us into the corridor. There we foudn Van bearing a piece of meat wrapped in a palm leaf, and Dad carrying an empty gallon oil can, a chair leg, and a copy of the Manila Tribune.
    “Is there anyone in your room with a frying pan?” asked Dad.
    “Yes,” replied Mother, “the fat lady has one in a string bag. Why?”
    “We need one right away. See if she’ll lend it to us for a share of Van’s meat.”
    Mother reentered the room and soon emerged with the fat lady, gally brandishing her frying pan. Miss Allen, an Australian nurse, was delighted with the bargain.
    The six of us traipsed down to one of the two patios around which the Main Building was constructed. Dad pulled a can opener out of his back pocket and began hacking a hole in the side pf the oil can. Van went to work on the chair leg with a pocket knife and his shoe, splintering the wood into bits that would fit in the oil can, soon-to-be-a-stove. By the time we ladies has looted half a dozen desk-chairs from first floor classrooms, the stove and fuel were ready.
    Dad, who was the only one with any idea of how to cook on such a primitive contrivance, took charge. He stuffed a generous wad of the Manila Tribune into the bottom of the stove, overlaid it with slivers of chair leg, and topped it with two substantial “logs.” the paper lit easily, but went out just as easily. Innumerable matches later, amid much smoke, small flames appeared, and the wood slivers caught and lit the chair-leg-logs. Miss Allen, who had thoughtfully brought along her cooking fork, transferred the meat to her frying pan.
    Van had procured the meat through the fence from an old Spanish friend. He had not liked to ask what kind of met it was, but he was sure it was beef, and he liked his beef rare. Dad was equally sure that meat of such a pale pink hue must be pork and ought to be well done. The argument was resolved by the meat itself, as it whitened and gave off a porky odor. Dad lidded the pan with a thick section of the Tribune, and we waited for the pork be thoroughly roasted, taking turns at fanning the fire with Aunty Emily’s Chinese fan.
    People began filling up the patio, many showing great interest in our stove, asking about it’s manufacturer, care, and feeding. Several scurried off in search of an oil can, and trhee successful finders returned to borrow our can opener.
    Over dinner Van brought up the suicide. “Guy named Weaver jumped over the room,” he began. “I’d have thought you’d hear it where you were last night.”
    “We did,”  replied Dad. “But I understand the Japs want the whole episode hushed up, and they’ve forbidden us to talk about it.”
    “That’s right! It caused them to lose face–having an unhappy captive.”
    By this time Mother had succeeded in catching Van’s eye and was nodding in my direction.
    Van quickly changed the subject. “Anyone hear how many fellow guests arrived today?”
    “No firm numbers, but enough to make them open up the third floor this afternoon,” replied my father.
    “How inconsistent!” exclaimed Emily. “Just this morning they made us get off the third floor.”
    “It seems that Earl Carroll persuaded the university authorities that the building would suffer less with less crowding, so they agreed to allot us more space, and the commandant went along with the idea,” explained Van.
    “The Japs picked an ideal spot to keep us,” commented Dad. “That wall makes it seem like a real prison. Thank god for the front rail fence where we can communicate with the outside.”
    “The Japs didn’t pick out this place,” Van contradicted. “The High Commissioner’s office cleared it with the Dominicans as soon as it became obvious the city would be occupied. When the Japs arrived and said they were going to round us up, we suggested this place as convenient for them and safe for us. Those walls keep trouble out, as well as us in.”
    “What do you know about the chap who’s taken over for our side?” asked my father.
    “Earl Carroll? He’s an Alabaman with the drawl to prove it,” chuckled Van. “He’s spent some time here in the early thirties–selling insurance, I think. He spent the rest of the thirties in Hawaii and got back here just in time for the war.”
    “Well, he seems to be taking hold. He’s established some semblance of order among us with the room monitors, and has a committee or two functioning. How did he come to take charge?” queried Dad.
    “Apparently the Japs picked him out of the blue,” Van replied. “The first night an officer came up to someone and said ‘Who’s your leader?’ The guy pointed at Carroll, and the Jap put him in charge, telling him to appoint one person to monitor each room, and to see that everyone was here in the morning, or else.”
    “The grape vine says the commandant is please with the setup so far. But I hear Carroll is looking for a chap who speaks Japanese to interpret for our side. Seems the commandant knows no English. Have you seen him yet?”
    “No I haven’t laid eyes on him,” answered Van “but I hear his name’s Hitoshi Tomayasu, he’s a Tokyo policeman, fiftyish, and balding.”
    At this point a stranger strolled over to our group, introducing himself as Dan Raleigh. His accent proclaimed him an American as soon as he opened his mouth to tell Carroll had asked him to attend to discipline for a while.
    “The Japs want us in bed by ten, and with nearly twelve hundred of us, we’ll need to get started early to get a turn in the bathrooms. That’s why I’m suggesting that you all drift up to your rooms now.”
    Docilely, we gathered our belongings, returned the chairs, and went our separate ways.
    Mother unpacked our night things, and we went to brush our teeth and wash up.
    “How I wish we could have a shower,” Mother commented, as we joined the line outside the bathroom.
    “Why can’t we?” I demanded.
    “There aren’t any.”
    Santo Tomas University, the oldest in the Eastern Hemisphere, was not residential. It’s usual complement of 6000 students had to find lodging at pensions in the city. To be sure there were a few showers in the gym and monastery where the Fatheres lived; however, in the three large classroom buildings there were no showers at all.
    It took us half an hour to get our turn at the facilities, which bu then were filthy, with soap scum lining the basins, and waste remaining in the toilets, which could not keep up with the demands of constant flushing.
    When we got back to Room 46, Mother read me a Just So Story–how the mariner of infinite-resource-and-sagacity had not only escaped the belly of the whale, but had insured that whales would henceforth be incapable of swallowing people.
    “Go to sleep, now,” murmured Mother when she finished reading. “I’ll be out in the hall talking to the other ladies, if you need me.”
    Even the wailing of other children and the bustle and talk around me could not keep me awake. Nor did I waken when Mother got into bed beside me for her first night away from Daddy.

Tribute To Isabelle: Part 3 (Chapter 2)

Chapter 2

The new Year dawned. Pale, smokey sunshine drifted through the window of Room 306.
    “Put on your blue gingham dress,” Mother said when she woke me.
    I had hoped to greet 1942 in my new blue party dress, but Mother’s tone did not invite discussion, so, fuming silently, I put on the blue gingham.
    When we went downstairs to breakfast, the atmosphere in the dining room was hushed, like that at the bedside of a dying person. No one said, “Happy New Year!” No one voiced any kind of greeting. Everyone attended to the business of breakfasting, then slunk back to his room.
    When we got back to Room 306, I exploded with questions.
    “Why was everybody so quiet? Don’t they know it’s New Year’s?”
    “Don’t you know there’s a war going on?” snapped Dad, turning to glare at me from his station by the window.
    “Everybody knows what day it is, darling,” soothed Mother. “But they’re worried about the Japs capturing us.”
    “Will they capture us today, Mummy?” I was careful to direct my question to my mother.
    She looked at Dad, who sighed and replied evenly, “If not today, tomorrow.”
    “What will they do to us?”
    “We’ll probably be rounded up and separated from the Filipinos. You see, Isabel, the Japanese want Asia for the Asians. They’re telling the Filipinos they’ve come to liberate them from America.”
    “How can they keep us away from the Filipinos? Will they send us home to England?”
    “Not bloody likely,” Dad growled. “Getting to England these days would be more difficult and dangerous. I doubt if it could be done. More likely we would be exchanged for Japanese prisoners in Australia or America. It’s a way of getting ride of war prisoners and getting your own people back.”
    “You mean we might go to Australia or America?” I asked excitedly.
    “It’s possible.”
    “That would be nice,” I said, satisfied. I crawled under the knee-hole desk to comfort Teddy and Gwen with the hopeful news.
    We continued to wait in Room 306. Daddy chain smoked. Mother knitted. I played house.
    At lunch time, Van and Emily came down for a snack of Vienna sausage and crackers, washed down with Scotch-and-water. Van brought me a Coke. Together the grown-ups marveled at the rumors of store owners opening their doors to Filipino looters, rather than have their goods fall into Japanese hands. Van and Dad argued about whether Japanese General Homma would follow the American Army to Bataan and let his southern force take Manila, or whether Homma would choose to take the city himself, from the north.
    “I’ll bet you a bottle of Scotch,” said Dad, “that Homma decides to take Manila himself. He won’t want anyone else to get that headline at home.”
    “He’d be a fool to give MacArthur time to dig in on Bataan,” replied Van. “With Bataan in his hands, Corregidor is safe, and the Japs can’t use the bay. They need it to get their co-prosperity sphere going in the islands. No, Edwin, diverting men from Bataan to take an open city that any general could occupy doesn’t make sense.”
    “Oh, I agree with you–it doesn’t make sense–but I don;t think Homma knows that. Look at the easy time he’s had reaching Manila. No U.S. unit has stood to fight. Mac’s been pulling them all back onto Bataan. Homma has no idea what he’ll be up against when the U.S. Army does turn to fight. He thinks he’ll walk the length of Bataan the way he’s walked down to Manila. I’m betting Homma takes the city first.”
    “I hope you’re right,” sighed Van. “Mac needs a break in this war.”
    New Year’s night was quiet. There was still no sign of Japanese troops.
    As we slept we had no way of knowing that General Homma had indeed opted for the headlines at home. On New Year’s Day, he halted the main body of his troops seventeen miles north of Manilla, then ordered them to get cleaned up. In an attempt to curb any tendency among his soldiers to rape and loot once they reached the city, he ordered his officers to tighten discipline among their men. On January 2, Homma ordered the advance into Manila.
    We spent the day watching the 14th army arrive. The first group of soldiers put-putted below our window on little one cylinder motor bikes. Their mud-brown uniforms and the rifles slung over their shoulders were caked with oily dust. Next to appear were the bicyclists, peddling along on battered machines, clearly commandeered on the march to Manilla.
    After lunch it began to drizzle, and just before siesta, the first foot-soldiers straggled by, rifles at the ready, bayonets fixed, peering nervously from under their peaked caps at the silent Filipinos who dared to peer out of doorways or windows or around corners. The only cheering came from a distance, and we surmised that the Japanese who had been interned in Manila were being freed by their victorious countrymen.
    After siesta, during which no one slept, we returned to our window to stare at empty, damp streets. An ominous silence hung over the city. The smell of burnt petroleum permeated everything.
    Mother agreed to play Chinese checkers with me, and after that I prevailed on Daddy to read me “How the Elephant God his Trunk” from the Just So Stories. As the crocodile caught the Elephant’s child bu the nose, marching feet and guttural shouts broke the silence in the street.
    It was 5:30, but not yet dusk. We rushed to our window and saw three companies of Japanese soldiers and sailors marching along Dewey Boulevard. They stopped in front of the High Commissioner’s office across the street from the hotel. Three sailors strutted up to the flagpole on the wide front lawn. Behind them, sweating sailors and soldiers dragged three little cannons onto the grass. With short jerks, a sailor lowered the Stars and Stripes, detached the flag, threw it to the ground, and stamped on it. Another sailor handed over a folded cloth which the first sailor attached to the rope and raised to reveal the Rising Sun.
    “Fried egg,” muttered Dad. As we turned away from the scene, the three little cannons popped in salute.
    There was nothing to do but carry on, so we went back to reading about the Elephant Child’s struggle with the crocodile and his discovery of the usefulness of his painfully bought new trunk.
    When we went down to the dining room for dinner, we found every chair and sofa in the lobby occupied by a snoring Japanese soldier, we tiptoed past our conquerors, swallowed a skimpy meal, then hastened back to Room 306.
    Just before my bedtime, there was a polite knock on our door. Two Japanese soldiers with a civilian interpreter stood there.
    “Nationality?” inquired the interpreter.
    “British,” replied Daddy.
    “You are ordered to remain in hotel. Do not leave outside. Understand?”
    “Yes,” said Dad.
    The three Japanese moved down the hall, and Dad shut the door.
    “At least they’re not turning us out onto the street,” commented Mother.
    “Not yet, anyway,” murmured my father.
    “Are we captured now?” I asked.
    Mother and Dad exchanged startled looks.
    “I’m afraid so,” said Daddy, “but that doesn’t change your bedtime, young lady.”
    Mother tucked Gwen and Teddy into bed with me. I lay awake, thinking about being turned into the street versus being cooped up in the hotel. Neither alternative seemed very attractive.
    Next morning, when we looked out our window, we found the landscape dotted with Japanese flag, and the intersections manned by Military Police, directing an occasional military truck. When we went down to breakfast, the lobby was deserted, but there were two sentries guarding the street door.
    After a hurried meal, we went straight back to Room 306 without so much as a glance through the lobby windows. Once upstairs, Mother and I made a beeline for our window, which had become our chief source of distraction as well as news.
    “Get away from that window,” warned Dad. “I don’t want to risk any zealous soldiers taking pot shots at us.”
    We retreated.
    “We’ll be safer if we confine ourselves to what we can see through the vent,” said Dad, as he drew the drapes.
    In the days before air conditioning became common in Manila, windows were built to catch every breath of air. To allow privacy and air at the same time, there was, below the usual glass window, and opaque panel which opened out from a horizontal hinge, like the flap of a tent.
    We drew chairs over to our vent and peered down. We could see the parking lot and part of the street without being seen by our captors. A band of eight soldiers were roaming round the parking lot trying cat doors. With a whoop, one soldier jerked open the door of a grey Ford. Beckoning a comrade, he slid behind the steering wheel. The whole group hurried over and watched while one of their number raised the side-opening hood and tinkered for a minute. The engine sputtered to life, and there were wide grins all around. With a flourish, the victorious mechanic unfolded the hood, secured it, and waved the car away.
    “One down and forty to go,” said Daddy grimly.
    This was the only successful theft for the next half-hour. Then an officer appeared, and there was a lively discussion, which we could hear but did not understand. Finally the officer disappeared, and the men squatted in a patch of shade.
    Soon our phone rang. We rose and went to the bedside table where it was jangling.
    “Hello?” Dad’s voice sounded absolutely neutral, neither welcoming nor hostile.
    Silence.
    “I can’t give you the keys to my car because I don’t have a car,” lied Daddy.
    More silence.
    “You’re welcome, I’m sure.”
    Dad put down the phone with a scowl.
    “They want my car keys!” he snorted, jingling them in his pocket.
    “Well, if they want the Hudson, there’s nothing I can do to stop them from taking it, but I’m certainly not going to help them.”
    We went back to the vent. Soon the officer re-appeared with a civilian and a sack. From the sack he distributed tagged keys to each soldier. The civilian tried to translate the tags, and we took some measure of comfort in the resulting confusion. Once or twice Daddy even chuckled at the frustration of our conquerors.
    By midafternoon, the Japanese had run out of keys and a dozen cars remained. Another animated conference ensued, beside a dusty black Studebaker. Finally one soldier was drawing his pistol, and the others were backing off. With his gun butt, the soldier smashed the Studebaker’s window. A cheer went up from his comrades, who descended on the car, brushed away the broken glass, jimmied the ignition, and waved the car on it’s way.
    This procedure was repeated on the remaining cars, until they got to our Hudson. They had no trouble breaking in, but the good foiled them. It was the first of the front-opening kind, and apparently the Japanese were unaware of the Detroit innovation. They fretted and fumed and cursed, to no avail.
    There was another group discussion, accompanied by much arm waiving. Finally the officer was fetched. He studied the hood earnestly, first from one side, then from the other. He ignored the front, as had his subordinates. In the end, the Hudson defeated them, and they all went away. At dusk, however, a tow truck came, and a pair of soldiers hooked up our car and dragged it off.
    “That’s the end of a good car,” sighed Daddy, jingling it’s keys again.
    January 4 was uneventful, until late afternoon when there was a booming knock on the door. Mother dropped her knitting and grabbed me. We stood behind Daddy as he opened the door. A full Japanese Colonel, half a foot shorter than Daddy, grinned at us, his hand on the hilt of a long sword that barely cleared the floor.
    He pushed his way in, followed by his interpreter and a trio of soldiers, whose alert eyes scanned us, their hands hovering near their holsters. The soldiers moved around the room, fingering our belongings, checking under the bed, opening the closet, and snooping in the bathroom.
    The colonel and his interpreter faced Dad.
    “Nationality?”
    “British.” the interpreter noted this on his pad.
    “Number of people?”
    “Three.” more notation.
    “Firearms?”
    “None.” Duly noted.
    “You pack food and clothing for three days–what you are able to carry only. Ready tomorrow morning.”
    The interpreter wheeled toward the door. The colonel stepped toward me, and I shrank closer to Mother. The Japanese took his hand off his sword and stroked my reddish blond hair.
    The colonel’s hand returned to his sword, and he barked an order whcih catapulted the soldiers through through the door by which the interpreter had already left. The colonel followed, grinning.
    Mother collapsed into a chair, and I crawled onto her lap and hid my face in her shoulder.
    “Well, that’s that,” said Dad. “We’d better start packing.”
    Out came the four suitcases from under the bed–big ones, designed for sea travel and meant to be moved by stevedores or red caps. Dad surveyed them critically.
    “Can you carry that one, Helen?” he asked tapping the smallest.
    “Yes,” said Mother.
    “I’ll take this one and a case of corned beef, if you can manage a roll of bedding, too.”
    Mother nodded.
    “What do we have that Isabel can carry?”
    Mother surveyed the room. “A pillow case?”
    “Just the thing!”
    Dad came to me in Mother’s lap and bent to my eye level. “We’re going to have to make some difficult choices about what to take,” he said. “I’m afraid we can only take essentials, but you may choose one toy that you can carry with the pillow case.”
    I stared at my doll, Gwen, and Teddy.
    Mother and Dad set about packing. Mother was an expert. She smoothed out underwear, serviceable dresses, shirts, and slacks into the two suitcases. She filled an extra pair of shoes for each of us with toothpaste, face creams, and a small clock. Daddy opened the case of Vienna sausage, and Mother fill every nook with a can. He got one case of corned beef out, and secreted another with a case of Scotch in the depths of the closet, hoping against hope we would return after the three days mentioned by the Japanese.
    Gwen, I concluded reluctantly, was too big to carry comfortably for any length of time, but Teddy was only eight inches high and fit easily under my arm. I piled my Chinese checkers, the Just So Stories, and my army trucks on the desk. I sat Gwen in the desk chair. Then I put Teddy beside my pillow case and volunteered to help. I was told I would be most help by staying out of the way.
    Mother and Dad went through all the things we had brought to the hotel, fitting in a sweater for everyone, discarding books, and sorting the important documents from the old letters. Mother sent me to the bathroom to fetch the Mercurochrome, alcohol, and aspirin. She wrapped each bottle in a pair of socks and buried it in the Kotex supply. Mother shut the closet door sadly on my unworn party dress, her own pretty clothes, and Dad’s sharkskin suits.
    Then she toured the room and saw my pile of toys. She slipped the Just So Stories out from under the army trucks and took one of her dresses out of the suitcase so the book would fit.
    Supper time found us among a glum group in the dining room.. Everyone had questions. “Where will they take us?” “How long will they keep us?” “What will they do with us?”
    No one had any answers. The only rumor was not comforting: the enemy alines from the Malate district were said to have been concentrated at Rizal Stadium. No one liked the idea of spending three days in a stadium.
    We returned to Room 306 for the last time and went to bed, wanting to be ready in case the Japanese came for us early.
    They came at 7 AM. The soldiers pawed through our carefully packed suitcases, unwrapping the medicine and yanking the toothpaste tubes out of Daddy’s shoes . They poked through the case of corned beef and shook out my pillow case, spilling underwear, cans of Vienna sausage, and a box of raisins. They unrolled the Bay View Hotel sheets, blankets, and mosquito net we has trussed up so carefully.
    The interpreter then ordered us onto the street immediately to await transport. Hastily we repacked and left. The elevators took forever as everyone was being ousted at once. By 8:30 we were on the sidewalk, sitting on our suitcases in the blazing sun. Uncle Van and Auntie Emily emerged from the hotel with a suitcase apiece, looking as though they were going away for the week-end. Daddy waved to them, and they came over and sat on their suitcases beside us.
    There was no shade, and sentries patrolled, keeping us more or less in line. Shortly after 9 o’clock, two trucks drove up in front of a group of former hotel occupants. Soldiers jumped out and indicated by gestures that people should put their baggage in one truck, and climb into the other. The soldiers leaned on their rifles while the captives helped each other heave their belongings into the first truck. They then boosted one another onto the second truck, the last few men pulling themselves up unaided. The drivers and guards climbed into the cabs, and the first load pulled away.
    “I hope they don’t separate us from our luggage,” whispered Mother to Dad.
    After a while, a couple of old school busses arrived. People jammed the doors trying to get on with suitcase and bundles bulging under their arms. In due course, they sorted themselves out, while the lounging guards looked on unconcerned. When the bus could hold no more, the driver and a guard squeezed in and drove off.
    This process was repeated until noon, wjen everything ceased for lunch and siesta. The guard thinned, and Uncle Van and Dad had whispered conference which ended with Uncle Van shaking his head decisively in the negative.
    Dad began to pace up and down the sidewalk in ever lengthening laps until he finally reached the hotel door and slipped inside.
    “Where did Daddy go?” I asked Mother.
    “Shhh!” This was accompanied by Mother’s ask-no-more look, which always silenced me.
    Soon Dad was back with the case of corned beef he had left in the closet of Room 306. He sad on it and shared some sticky raisins with us by way of lunch.  We each had a ration of Lemonade from out thermos.
    After lunch, Dad began pacing again. Van frowned at him wordlessly, but Dad paid no heed. He lengthened his pacing until he was at the hotel entrance, and again he slipped inside. This time he returned in triumph with the cash of Scotch. Even Van had to smile at this feat.
    About 3 o’clock, busses and trucks started arriving again. People jockeyed for position to get a bus, but had to be urged by the guards to board the trucks. We hung back, hoping for a bus. Uncle Van got increasingly nervous, wanting to get aboard something before dark. Finally, at 5 o’clock, a bus pulled up right in front of us. Dad grabbed the cases of corned beef and was first aboard. He dumped them on two seats in the back of the bus and pushed his way out, to the annoyance of those boarding. The driver and sentries, bored with the whole business, ignored Dad’s breech of the rules. He picked up his legitimate load and herded Mother and me onto the bus and back to our reserved seats.
    Uncle Van and Auntie were already aboard, and I waved Teddy as I passed their seats in the middle of the bus. Daddy shoved the cases of food and scotch under our seats. Out suitcases extended into the aisle, but so did everybody else’s, as people stowed their loads every which way, until there was no room to move.
    I sat on Mother’s lap with Teddy, and Daddy nursed the pillow case. No sooner were we settled, then we were off, waving at the few remaining people on the sidewalk.
    The bus headed east, and Uncle Van heaved a sigh of relief, commenting for all to hear, “At least we’re not going to Rizal Stadium for a night in the bleachers!” No laugh greeted this sally, and soon the bus turned left onto Quezon Boulevard and rolled north for several blocks, till it reached Calle Espana, where it turned right.
    In front of the Dominican University of Santo Tomas it slowed and turned left through high wrought iron gates, guarded by sentries with fixed bayonets.
    Just inside the gate the driver stopped, got out with the guards, and indicated that we were to do likewise.
    Being wedged in the back, we had to wait while those in front of us got off, Dad dropped the cases of corner beef out the window, and we each picked up our load and staggered off. The driver hopped back in with the guards, drove up the long driveway, turned around in the spacious plaza in front of a large university building, and sped past us out the gate.
    In the absense of instructions, the only thing to do was head for the bulky building straight ahead. Dad hid the cases of corned beef in a patch of high weeds and led Mother, me, and the Van Sickles up the drive, which traversed half the width of the sixty acre campus.
    At the end of the driveway, the square, stone facade of the Main Building confronted us. Near the entrance a bronze plaque gave the highlights of the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas, dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas in 1611. The cornerstone of this building was laid in 1911. Entering through it’s wide doors, guarded only by impassive gargoyles, we found a broad foyer and wide staircase, peopled with scurrying men and women, many dragging whimpering children hither and yon. No one paid any attention to the trickle of newcomers. Dad parked Mother, me, and Emily in a corner, while he and Van went to retrieve the corner beef. It was almost dark when the men returned, each bearing a case of corned beef. We women were left again while the men went to find a place for us to spend the night. The best space was on the third floor, which was deserted. We clambered up three long flights of stairs with the baggage, resting at each landing.
    By the time we reached an empty classroom, our chief concern was food and drink. Mother dug out cans of Vienna sausage, Emily produced a box of soda crackers, and we ate hungrily, sitting around a plain wooden table on hard schoolroom chairs. We washed down our meal with the remnants of cool coffee and warm lemonade left in our thermoses, then we took turns going to the bathroom, where the toilets were already stopped-up and the water trickled from the taps.
    Sleeping arrangements had to be improvised. Daddy shoved a huge old fashioned desk under the one bare light bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. Mother unrolled a blankly on top of the desk, and Daddy suspended our only mosquito net from the wire. I stretched it out to cover the desk. Three other desks were blanketed by the time Emily returned from the bathroom, clad in a while silk kimono, bordered in black, with a profusion of flowers, embroidered in green and gold and scarlet.
    She settled onto the desk next to Van’s and went to sleep. Uncle Van and Dad took off their shoes and agree it was time to turn out the light. In the darkness, they tossed restlessly on the hard desk tops, while under the mosquito net Mother pillowed my head on her arm, and soon I slept, but not for long.
    The light snapped on, and voices barked incomprehensible commands. Mother and I crawled out from under the net to find Dad and Van standing at attention in front of an angry Japanese officer, complete with dangling sword. Two armed guards were leering at Auntie Emily, who ay on the edge of her desk, wrapped in her kimono.
    The officer spoke at length with much gesticulation until he realized we did not understand Japanese. Abruptly he wheeled and departed, taking the guards with him. Dad and Van discussed the wisdom of obeying his order, which was clearly for the men to leave. Dad glanced several times at Mother, reading the fear on her face. He decided to risk staying.
    Van opted to obey. He rolled up his blanket, grabbed his suitcase, and with a wave at Emily, disappeared. Dad turned out the light, and we tried to get some sleep.
    An hour later, the officer and guards reappeared with an interpreter, whose pidgin English was so poor I failed to follow what he was trying to say. He repeated the officer’s order several times. After each repetition, Dad shrugged and bowed politely. Finally, in desperation, the officer wrote his orders on the black board in flowing, picturesque characters. Daddy shrugged and bowed again. Convinced that he was dealing with a total ingnoramus, the officer threw up his hands, bowed, and left. Daddy stayed.
    The third time they came, it was past midnight. Daddy stuck to shrugs and polite bows and continued to feign total incomprehension. An impasse threatened, when a piercing scream interrupted Dad’s charade. It came from outside the building and was greeted by running feet and muffled shouts. The officer left on the run, trailed by his companions.
    We spent the rest of the night undisturbed in the glow of our third small victory over our captors, a more personal one that the thwarting of the Hudson’s theft or the return to the hotel for the cases of food and drink–a satisfying way to begin captivity.

Tribute To Isabelle: Part 2 (Chapter 1)

Chapter 1

    Actually, we were prisoners before the Japanese captured us–Mother, Dad, and I. Our prison was Room 306 of the Bay View Hotel in Manila. Our Jailor was our fear of the Filipino and Chinese looters roaming the port area.
    Room 306 was our third war-time home in as many weeks. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we had been asleep in our rented house in Pasay, on Manila’s southern outskirts.
    That Monday, December 8, 1941, the phone in my parent’s bedroom woke me at 7 AM. It was a friend with the news of Pearl Harbor.
    The Japanese lost no time in attacking the Philippines, bombing Clark Airfield at noon Philippine time, that same day. On December 10 they raided Nichols Field, the fighter base just two miles from our home. That raid decided my parents that we must move to safer quarters.
    My father rented a house in New Manila, where we fled with my amah, Lena, and our cook, Braulio. I had to give my pet rabbits to the lavendara, and was allowed to choose one game, one book, and one doll to take with me, agonizing decisions all, as I had a whole family of dolls and stuffed animals.
    Our first day in the new house Dad stayed home from his job with International Harvester and enlisted Braulio to help dig an air raid shelter. Digging had hardly begun when the air raid siren swooped up and down it’s jarring scale. We assembled in the safest place available, under the double bed in the downstairs bedroom. The five of us just fitted under it, flat on our stomachs. It was the closest to the servants we had ever been.
    We followed the sounds of the bombing around the city, trying to guess the targets. After nearly two hours, the planes seemed to settle right over us. A bullet–whether Japanese or American we never discovered–twanged through our galvanized iron roof, which whined with vibrations for almost a minute. Instinctively we covered our heads with our arms. That seemed to cap the raid. The aircraft engine noises began to fade, and soon the all-clear whistled us out from under the bed.
    The first order of business was to vacate the upstairs bedrooms, which were obviously vulnerable to stray bullets. Mother and Dad took the downstairs bedroom, Lena and I were assigned the dining room, and Braulio set up his cot in the kitchen.
    In the evening, when Mother and Dad thought I was asleep, they discussed the situation. They no longer talked of getting a boat or plane for Australia–there simply were none. They spoke instead of food and money and surviving a Japanese occupation. I lay on my back listening to these matter-of-fact conversations until I fell asleep, secure in my parents’ business-like approach to the war.
    On December 22, the Japanese 14th Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, landed in force at Lingayen Gulf, just over 100 miles from Manila. First reports spoke of stiff resistance at the beaches.
    Jack Littig, Dad’s best friend, who had been called out of naval reserve, phone with the truth: MacArthur had miscalculated the landing site, and the bulk of his tanks, troops, and artillery were forty miles from the assault beaches. The solitary Filipino Battalion on the scene was forced to retreat, and many of it’s untrained recruits fled. There were no planes to oppose the landing. The twenty-nine submarines MacArthur had counted on to sink the troop carriers sank only one.
    On Christmas Eve, with a tall red poinsettia set up as a Christmas tree, my excitement was undimmed by war. I went to bed tingling with anticipation.
    Later the phone woke me. Dad answered, and from his tone of voice I knew something was wrong. He rang off without revealing anything, and after a moment dialed a number.
    “Hello, Van?”
    I listened carefully, for Uncle Van was one of my favorite grown-ups. To my amazement, Dad asked him to get us a room at the Bay View Hotel, where Uncle Van lived with Auntie Emily. There was some incomprehensible discussion about getting out of the way of the invading army, but I went back to sleep, dreaming happily of a Christmas visit to Uncle Van.
    Although I got up at the crack of dawn on Christmas morning, Mother and Dad were up before me. By the front door stood four suitcases, two cases of corned beef, a sack of rice, and a case of Scotch. Daddy was phoning Uncle Van, and I was instructed to dress and open my presents quickly.
    Puzzled and a bit let-down, I complied. The first gift I opened was a small brown and white teddy bear with one leg shorter than the other. I fell in love with him on the spot. Next I opened a beautifully illustrated edition of Kipling’s Just So Stories, and, finally, a pale blue party dress, all frills and ruffles and delicate Filipina embroidery.
    After breakfast, we said goodbye to Lena nad Braulio. “The Japanese won’t hurt you,” Daddy told them. “They think they’re liberating you from us. You’ll be safe here , but we’ll be safter in Manila, where all the British and Americans are. Stay here and use our things until it’s clear what’s going to happen. I’ll pay your wages as long as I can. The rent is paid to the end of January. If we don’t come back, use the time to decide where to go and what to do.”
    Lena nodded dumbly, tears spilling. I hugged her. Dad shook hands with Braulio. We climbed into the Hudson and headed for the city. Braulio was to be our salvation in the coming years, but Lena we never saw again.
    I sat in Mother’s lap, clutching my new Teddy. Along the roadway, people were sorting through the rubble of nipa shacks or charred frame houses. Most of the way I held my nose to block the stench. I did not then recognize it as the stench of death. Progress was slow because the roads were clogged with trucks and busses loaded with soldiers, as well as private cars and horse-drawn carts carrying fleeing Europeans and Chinese. On foot, Filipinos, their bundles on their backs, streamed out of the city on their way back to their barrios, where they hoped they would be safe.
    As we approached the port area, bodegas, crumbled like cookie houses, spilled into the roadway. Blackened billboards glowered down at us, and shattered windows stared emptily. Daddy had to zig-zag continually to avoid bomb craters on the street.
    When we reached the Bay View Hotel, Dad left his car in the parking lot, and we entered the building, which, so far, had escaped serious damage.
    In the nexy week the Bay View Hotel continued to stand unscathed as we watching the Japanese bomb and strafe the city all around it. In the lulls between air raids, we watched MacArthur’s retreat. A steady stream of small craft plied the harbor, threading their way through the mine field and dodging wrecks, some heading for Corregidor, some for Bataan.
    The day after Christmas, we had one last glimpse of Jack Littig. He turned up at the hotel just after siesta. I had never seen him in his officer’s uniform before, and found him impressive in his navy whites.
    I sat, awed, while he had a hasty Scotch-and-water, and talked to Mother and Dad about the progress of the invasion. “We’re retreating, as you know,” Jack said, “but oof the record, it’s touch and go whether we get to Batann before the Japs cut us off at Calumpit Bridge. Wainwright’s supposed to be holding up Homma, so we can beat it to Bataan, but Mac may have waited too long before ordering retreat.”        
    Uncle Jack took a final gulp of his highball, the ice clinking in the silence “I get to go the easy way, by boat to Bataan’s back door. The army have have to fight their way in. Well, I have to go, but I feel better knowing you’re here. Safety in numbers, you know.”
    With a wave he was off.
    During the week we visited often with Uncle Van, who spoke bitterly of the way we were being fooled. “Those supplies MacArthur says are on the way can’t possibly cross this blasted Jap lake of the Pacific. As for our winning the Battle of Lingayen Gulf, back on the 11th, wasn’t it?” He paused to gulp his Scotch. “You should hear Carl Mydans on the subject–he’s here in the hotel, you know. He says he went out there to get some pictures for LIFE, and there wasn’t a sign of a battle.”
    The night of the 26th, without warning, a series of explosions rocked the hotel. Flasjes lit up our room, and a sustained rear deafened us. Unsure whether it was an air raid or not, Dad stood by the window, alternately scanning the horizon and cocking his head to listen for air craft.
    No planes were visible in the now glowing sky, and nothing was audible save thunderous detonations. “MacArthur must be blowing the tanks at Oandacan,” mused Dad. “There’s supposed to be enough oil there to run the Pacific Fleet for two years. It would fuel quite a fire.”
    We gathered at the window, watching the sky redden. Uncle Van phoned then, inviting us up to view the fire. Wrapped in robes, we climbed the stairs to the top floor, for the elevators were off for the night.
    From Van’s suite we saw the blaze at Pandacan, less than two miles away. Flames boiled into the night, overpowering the stars. On the southern and eastern horizons, dimmer fires told of demolition teams at work at Cavite Naval Station, at the army base at Fort McKinley, and at air force headquarters at Neilson Field. MacArthur was keeping his promise to demilitarize Manila.
    Later that night, back in Room 306, after I was supposed to be asleep, Mother and Dad conferred in whispers about getting ready for the occupation and setting their affairs in order, especially paying Lena and Braulio and beefing up our food stocks. Dad said there should be a few days of relative calm now that Manila was an open city–plenty of time for final preparations.
    The declaration of Manila as an open city had no effect on the Japanese conduct of the war, however. We spent most of the 27th trapped in our room, watching Betties bomb and Zeros strafe the port area. Between raids, Daddy disappeared in pursuit of food. Once he returned with a case of canned salmon, then with a sack of rice, and finally with a case of Vienna sausage and a big box of raisins. Throughout the day, raids and demolition alternated. There was din enough to approximate an all-out battle for the city.
    The 28th day was the twin of the 27th, except that Daddy decided it was now or never to pay Lena and Braulio, who, he hoped, were still taking care of our house in New Manila.
    When he announced his intentions, Mother broke down. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry. Fear knotted my stomach.
    Straining to control her tears, Mother argued that even if Daddy got through the raids and the demolition, there was no way to tell whether Lena and Braulio were still at the house. Dad would be going towards the Japanese lines, and who knew but that advance elements hadn’t already reached the suburbs. I shrank into a corner of my chair.
    “You’re exaggerating the danger,” Daddy replied, remaining outwardly calm. “But danger or no, I’ve got to pay Lena and Braulio. They need money and food, and they’ll never leave our things without my say-so. Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”
    Daddy left with a case of Salmon and the wages, then returned for a sack of rice. Mother and I waited. Mother paced, wiping her eyes. I sat hugging Teddy and my doll, Gwen. Mother said it should take two hours.
    Two hours crept by. Then another. And another. Mother began wringing her hands. I clutched Teddy.
    Toward the end of the fifth hour, Daddy burst into the room, calling for Scotch. The knot in my stomach dissolved and I relaxed my grip on Teddy.
    Over his drink Dad recounted his adventures. When he was going through the lobby with the rice, he had been accosted by Mr. Burns, a newspaper man whom Dad disliked. Burns had inquired what Daddy was up to. On learning he was going out to New Manila, the journalist had demanded a ride.
    “I had to take the blister,” said Daddy, “and not only him–but his wife. I dropped them at their house and promised to pick them up on my way back.”
    All had gone smoothly at our house. Lena and Braulio were pleased to have their pay, grateful for the food, and were reassured by Daddy’s advice to return to their families, taking ant of our things they wanted.
    “Better you than looters,” Dad had told them, when they demurred.
    On his way back, Daddy stopped for the Burns. They had heaped a mountain of stuff in front of the Bennet’s house, “Enough for a truck or two, let alone one car,” said Dad. “So they began their decision-making all over again.‘We must have this. Maybe we can do without that,’” mimicked Dad.
    “To make a long story short,” concluded my father “when the car could hold no more, and the three of us were crammed into the front seat, I was just about to shift into first, when the Mrs. Yelps, ‘The parrot!’ So out climbs Burns and fetches the wretched bird. Finally, with the parrot added to the front seat, off I drove...and here I am.” He drained his glass.
    The last three days of December marked the beginning of our incarceration. It was too dangerous to go out. Air attack was always a possibility, and so was being caught in a demolition operation. The thumping of advancing artillery grew ever louder, and no one knew when Japanese shells or soldiers might arrive. Above all, looters posed a threat. Emboldened by the absence of any authority, civil or military, they swarmed everywhere, their frantic greed making violence likely.
    On the 29th we sat beside the window of Room 306 watching the looting of Pier 7. Men, women, and children, singly or in teams, were carrying off anything and everything portable, which the ships had disgorged on the docks before making a run for the relative safety of the open sea in the early days of the war.
    Looters jostled one another, cursing and fighting over choice crates of food or appliances or spare parts. One enterprising group of youths pried open a huge crate and found a mildewed grand piano. The three of them tried to life it, but it wouldn’t budge. They tried pushing it, but it’s legs caught fast in the dock’s rough planking.
    The trio stood around their prize, “Arguing strategy,” Dad decided. Finally the leade trotted away, leaving the two to guard the Steinway from other looters scurrying past with lesser burdens. Within thirty minutes the leader returned with reinforcements in the form of seven more youths. He assigned the smallest to carry the piano bench, the positioned himself and his cohorts around the piano. On signal, they all crouched and angled a shoulder under the instrument, lifted as one, and staggered perhaps ten yards before collapsing to rest. They repeated this process again and again until they were out of sight, and we turned our attention to the more conventional looters.
     On the thirtieth, we listened to the demolition of the four bridges over the Pasig River, which flows through the heart of the city into Manila Bay, and divides the North from the South Port Area. That night we watched the flames spawned by the demolition licking up the oil spilled on the river from the ruptured tanks at Pandacan.
    On the thirty-first, local radio stations went off the air, and so we had no word of what was happening or what to expect. San Francisco, which we still got on short wave, was hopelessly out of touch with the situation in Manila. One thing we could tell from the ever louder artillery barrage: the fall of Manila was immanent.
    We spent much of New Year’s Eve day staring over the deserted bay who calm waters were cluttered with the masts and superstructures of sunken ships. That even the flickering flame-light of still-burning fires cast ominous shadows over the shoreline. We went to bed early with no toasts to 1942.