Elizabeth M. Norman (36 page)

Sometime after dusk the nurses could hear the sound of gunfire to the north in the direction of San Francisco del Monte.

“The Japs ordered everyone to stay in the building,” said Dorothy Scholl. “The guards were very nervous and excited and irritable and quarrelsome with each other.”
⁸

Then without warning, the power went out, leaving the camp in darkness. Dorothy Scholl saw flares go up just outside the walls, then she heard the sound of machine-gun fire.

Minnie Breese heard the shooting too … and remembered the barrels with the kerosene-soaked wicks sitting under the stairways.

They’re going to burn us, she thought.
⁹

Bertha Dworsky was in a shanty with a friend. “We heard [more] gunfire. [The Japanese] ordered us back to our rooms and told us to stay there. We saw some searchlights at the entrance of the gate. We could smell gasoline and we thought that the Japanese were going to … destroy us all.”
¹⁰

But the fumes were not coming from under the stairs. Instead the smell seemed to emanate from just beyond the wall by the front gate. Then the nurses heard rumbling, heavy mechanical rumbling, very loud and very near.

The Japanese began to shout nervously. The rifle and machine-gun fire sounded very close now, just on the other side of the wall.

All at once there was a loud clap and shudder, like the sound of iron toppling to the ground.

“Tanks were crashing through the gates,” said Bertha Dworsky. “I happened to be in the front building with a room above the front entrance. Tanks rolled up to the front door.”
¹¹

But whose tanks? For a moment, for a long moment, no one was sure. The lead vehicle came to a stop in front of Main Building and two shadowy figures in some sort of uniform appeared in front of it. One of the figures seemed to be looking up at the windows. The figure just stood there for a moment, waiting in the darkness. Then he stepped forward and said something so unmistakably American, the crowds huddled in Main Building knew their deliverance was at hand.

“Hello, folks!” he said.
¹²

Screaming and shouting, tears rolling down their enervated faces, the crowd now burst onto the plaza, encircling the tanks and soldiers from the American 44th Tank Battalion. Many of the internees dropped to their knees in the darkness and put their hands together and prayed. Others, overcome with emotion, or just frail from famine, fainted or fell insensate in the dirt.

Then, from somewhere in the back of the throng encircling the tanks, a lone voice started to sing.

“God … bless A-mer-i-ca …”

And the crowd, swarming in the searchlights, instantly joined in.

“…  Land that I love
.
Stand beside her
,
And guide her
,
Through the night
With a light
From above.”
¹³

Some reached up and gently touched the small American flags painted on the steel shell of the vehicles or just stood there staring at the nicknames inscribed on the barrels—
BATTLIN BASIC, GEORGIA PEACH, KLANKIN KOFFIN
.
¹⁴
Almost everyone wanted to touch their liberators, these soldiers who had fought their way through a hundred miles of enemy territory to free the starving camp, touch them to make sure they were real.

“The men in the tanks looked like giants to us because we were all so emaciated and thin,” Bertha Dworsky said.
¹⁵
Someone standing next to Rose Rieper asked one of the soldiers, “My land, how come you fellows are so big?”
¹⁶

Accompanying the column of liberators was Carl Mydans of
Life
magazine, a well-known American photographer who had covered the battles of Bataan and Corregidor and had been interned in Santo Tomas as well. Mydans, repatriated in 1943 with other American correspondents, was determined to be among those first through the gates when the camp was liberated, and he dispatched the following note to his editors:

I was picked up bodily, full camera pack, canteen belt and all, and carried on the hands of the internees over their heads—nor could anyone hear me or them—except one loud din of endless voices all shouting and crying. The whole drama of entering the gate and the reception of the internees and the excitement that lasted in the camp all night, when almost no one went to bed, I was unable to photograph. I had no bulbs and it was in blackout.
¹⁷

Everybody “was laughing and crying, hanging out the windows, shouting and screaming and waving,” said Dorothy Scholl. “It was a wild scene of joy and happiness.”
¹⁸

Cassie couldn’t stop staring at her liberators. “Those troops that night were like from another planet. They were so young, healthy-looking,
pink cheeks filled out, you know, all of them. I felt as high as a kite.”
¹⁹

Eleanor Garen was exhilarated as well, but could not stay on her feet. “I got so tired that I said, ‘The heck with this,’ and I went up to my room. Soon a [soldier] woke me up and said, ‘You’re not supposed to be up here.’ And I said, ‘I’m going to sleep. I don’t care what happens!’ ”
²⁰

M
EANWHILE, ACROSS THE
plaza at the Education Building, the Americans ran into trouble. The Flying Column had come through the front gate so quickly, the Japanese had no chance to flee, and now, trapped inside the walls, some seventy officers and men were holed up in the Education Building and holding some two hundred internees hostage, men, mostly, and a handful of women and children who had been visiting them when the Americans attacked the front gate.

The Japanese were demanding safe passage out of camp and through the American lines, so they could join their own forces. The hostages, meanwhile, were yelling to be released.

“Let us out!” they hollered from the second-floor windows of the Education Building. “The Japs won’t let us out. They’re holding us in here!”
²¹

The Japanese commandant ordered five of his officers to negotiate with the American commanders, who were waiting in front of Main Building. The Japanese officers emerged slowly from the Education Building and moved warily through a large crowd of internees that had gathered on the plaza. The crowd grudgingly parted to let the enemy through; the internees were angry from three years of calculated neglect and lethal indifference. And now they were outraged at the taking of hostages.

“Kill them!” someone shouted, as the Japanese officers passed, and several others picked up the cry.
²²

When the Japanese reached Main Building, American soldiers encircled them and ordered them to hand over their weapons and swords and raise their hands. To the Japanese, of course, such submission was humiliating and dishonorable, and one of the group, a lieutenant named Akibo, was slow to comply. Well known to the internees as the officer in charge of roll calls and ritual kowtowings, Akibo was one of the most hated men in camp. Now he seemed hesitant to surrender. He lowered his hands and started to reach for a small pouch slung on his shoulder, the little sack where most Japanese carried their suicide grenades.

As Akibo’s hand reached his pouch, [a tank commander grabbed a rifle and shot him].… Groaning and writhing on the ground, he was seized by the legs and dragged to the Main Building clinic, internees kicking and spitting at him, one or two men even slashing him with knives and some women burning him with cigarettes.… As he was lifted onto a table, his hand grenade rolled out onto the floor and was carried out in a soldier’s helmet. He was then taken to a woman’s room next to the clinic and put on a bed, but when the owner of the bed came in, she rolled him off it by lifting the sheet, saying that she did not want the pig in her bed. He died about eleven o’clock.
²³

The Americans sent word to the sixty-five Japanese left in the Education Building to surrender immediately. When the enemy refused, the Americans opened fire.

After a two-minute fusillade, the Americans repeated their demand. This time, the Japanese began shooting. In the firefight that followed, one American soldier was killed and three others wounded. Some of the hostages on the upper floors were also wounded. Finally the shooting stopped and, by early morning, the two sides settled down to a standoff.

The standoff, however, blocked the way to the camp hospital, which was on the far side of the Education Building, so the Americans set up a temporary operating room and emergency ward on the first floor of Main. The Flying Columns had a number of wounded, and with other units pushing into the city, more casualties were coming into camp all the time.

Though weak and faint from hunger, the nurses rushed to their work, caring for the wounded.

“Oh God, I was happy!” said Sally Blaine. “We put the wounded men in a first-floor dormitory room, about seventeen, eighteen of them. Around three-thirty that morning, I went into the room to look at these soldiers and the first guy in bed was a great big sergeant. I looked at him and I touched him on the shoulder and I said, ‘You have no idea how good you look to me.’ He reached up and touched me on the cheek and he said, ‘You have no idea how good
you
look to
me.’
 ”
²⁴

The women worked through the night, helping the army doctors and medics who had come into camp with the relief column. As they moved from bed to bed, changing dressings and giving medications, the women drew on what they had learned in the jungles of Bataan and the laterals of Malinta Tunnel. They remembered their business, all right, but their long period of isolation had left them out of touch with the advances in
medicine developed across four years of war, and when an army doctor asked Rita Palmer to fetch some “penicillin,” she had no idea what the man was talking about.
²⁵

In fact, everything seemed to have changed, even simple things, like the way people talked. Denny Williams couldn’t figure out why a soldier was referring to himself as a “GI.”

“GI’s?” she said. “What outfit are they?”

“Government Issue.” The soldier laughed. “That’s what they call ordinary soldiers now.”

“I’m an army nurse,” Williams shot back, “and soldiers are never ordinary to me.”
²⁶

Rose Rieper noticed that each GI carried his own provisions, a kind of packaged food she had never seen before, “K-rations,” the men called them.

“Can I have those rations?” Rieper asked.

“Ma’am, if you’ll eat that,” said the soldier, “you
must
be hungry.”
²⁷

The next morning more troops and equipment arrived. It was the first morning in three years that the internees did not have to line up for roll call and bow to their keepers. MacArthur, seizing on the success of the Flying Columns, decided to step up his timetable and began a full-scale offensive to take the capital. Meanwhile, inside Santo Tomas the commander of the Flying Columns continued to talk with the Japanese holed up in the Education Building.

Many of the internees, exhausted from the excitement, tried to sleep, but the city began to echo with the sound of gunfire and the rumble of tanks, and besides, there was just too much to talk about, and eat—chocolate, bread and butter, coffee, real coffee!

Then “we were told we could send a message home to our families,” said Sallie Durrett. “We had been so intimidated by the Japs for so long, I asked the sergeant in charge, ‘How many words can we put on this message?’ And he said, ‘Hell, lady, you’re an American. Put as many words as you want.’ ”
²⁸

Early the following morning the Japanese in the Education Building were allowed to join their forces, and they marched out of the camp, carrying their wounded and dead on litters. Afterward the internees held a brief flag-raising ceremony on the balcony over the front entrance of Main Building. It was an impromptu event—the loudspeakers were broken—but somehow the word spread and soon crowds of internees and soldiers had gathered to watch. As two men pulled the Stars and Stripes up the pole, the crowd again broke into song. Carl Mydans
recorded the event with his camera, and in notes accompanying his negatives he wrote:

There are some shots of the Internees waving and singing … as the Flag went up for the first time over the main building entrance. There was much emotion shown here and more weeping by both the Internees and some of the hard bitten soldiers than at any other time since the moment of liberation.
²⁹

The weeping, however, was bittersweet. During the deliverance of the camp seven more internees had died of starvation or heart disease brought on by malnutrition. Six GI’s also had given their lives liberating Santo Tomas. Their coffins, fashioned from supply crates, rested on the east patio. On the lids a few women had carefully positioned bouquets of flowers.