Wartime Memories

[Sinjin P.]

WARTIME PHILIPPINES (Thread II)
Previous Thread(s): 1

A return to Wartime Philippines
The writer's mother and other former
prisoners confront memories as they
visit World War II sites.

THE flight from San Francisco to Manila seemed endless, even though my mother had treated us to business class and its bedlike chairs, parade of meals and free-flowing champagne.

More than 60 years ago, my mother, Leanne Blinzler Noe, had traveled the same route by ship — taking 18 days instead of 13 hours. That realization was the first of many on a two-week tour last spring to my mother's childhood home in the Philippines, a place where she had run free across the Baguio Hills, learned to speak Tagalog, eaten the world's best mangos — and where she was a prisoner during World War II.

Her best friends in the prison camp, Dorothy Mullaney Brooks of Las Vegas and Connie Ford of Grass Valley, Calif., and a group of about 50 former soldiers and other Americans who had some connection to the Philippines during the war — had joined us on this trip. Because of them, this tour of battlefields and memorials on the 60th anniversary of their liberation became indelibly intertwined with their memories, creating for me a personal sketch of the war in the Philippines.

Before we left the U.S., Mom had said she was reluctant to return. "How was my childhood so different from others?" she had asked self-effacingly.

Manila before the war

FORESTS of high-rises and smog-clouded, car-clogged streets dominate Manila, a sprawling metropolis with a population of 10.9 million. Group members said the capital looked nothing like the one they had known before the war. Then, Manila was called the Pearl of the Orient, an elegant city with broad, tree-shaded boulevards. That city was largely destroyed in World War II, changing the lives of my grandfather, mother and aunt.

On Jan. 2, 1942, the first Japanese soldiers arrived here. Thousands of civilians — executives of U.S. companies, ship passengers, diplomats, journalists and my grandfather, a mining engineer — were rounded up, told to pack food and clothes for three days, then taken to the University of Santo Tomas in the heart of Manila, where they were imprisoned for the rest of the war. My grandmother had died several years earlier, and my mother, who was then 9, and her younger sister, Ginny, lived safely for a time in a Manila boarding school run by German nuns. But in March 1944, they too were taken to Santo Tomas, each carrying a suitcase containing their sparse belongings.

For the modern-day tourist, Santo Tomas yields little about its days as a prison, aside from a brass plaque at the front entrance and a temporary exhibit. Many buildings have been added to the original layout, but the main edifice, a three-story Gothic structure where my mother, her family and friends were interned, was as Mom remembered it. She and Ginny lived in a classroom with women and other children; my grandfather was in another room with men. During the day, they could visit one another and eat meals together.

We climbed creaky mahogany stairs to the third floor, strolled down a window-lined hallway and found 55-A, their turquoise prison room, now re-numbered and again a classroom. I tried to imagine 50-odd cots, draped with mosquito nets, crammed wall to wall.

As my mother and her friends surveyed the desk-filled room, they struggled to hold back tears just as they had learned to do as girls all those years ago.

Dorothy, Connie and Mom reminisced about the 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. roll calls; of having to bow to Japanese sentries; of the unsatisfactory meals of watery lugao, or rice porridge; and the rare joy of finding a piece of water buffalo hide hidden inside the gruel.

Comforts were few, but one day my mother found a little rubber doll in the trash. "It was a little softened, sticky," she said, "but I don't know why someone threw it away. I took it and nurtured it, sewed clothes for it out of scraps."

Where it all started

THE war in the Philippines began Dec. 8, 1941, at Clark Air Base, about 40 miles northwest of Manila, the main base of the Army Air Forces in the Pacific. Japanese pilots, approaching the archipelago only eight hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, found B-17 bombers parked wingtip to wingtip on the airfield.

Within minutes after Japan's attacks, the U.S. East Asian air forces were reduced by half, such an enormous blow that Gen. Douglas MacArthur was forced into defensive positions on Bataan and Corregidor just to the west.

Nothing at Clark today resembles its wartime appearance. Since its reversion to the Philippines in 1991, the base has been transformed into a civil aviation complex with industrial properties, a trade center and luxury hotels. But the Clark Museum provides a good historical retrospective with photos, dioramas and exhibits.

Perhaps its most telling artifact is out front, a burned, melted airplane part left from the Dec. 8 assault. Inside the museum, my mother pointed out Japanese wartime currency — they called it Mickey Mouse money — 75 Mickey Mouse pesos, or $35, could buy one duck egg, she said.

Tucked in one display was a black-and-white photograph of a Japanese kamikaze pilot. He looked like a kid, with an innocent smile. On a trip devoted to uncovering my mother's past, the photo also offered a window into the enemy side.

The world's first kamikaze pilot took off from nearby Mabalacat East Air Field in October 1944. Oddly, on this soil that suffered so much destruction at Japanese hands is a statue of a pilot standing tall and proud, paying tribute to the soldiers of the kamikaze, or "divine wind."

My mother said little about the statue, but I heard plenty of grumbling from former soldiers on our tour.

to be continued...

[Sinjin P.]

We then moved from Manila to the fortress island of Corregidor, an hour by ferry across Manila Bay. Open-air jeepneys loop around the 2-square-mile tropical island, taking visitors to World War II sites. The island remains almost as it was in early 1942, when for 27 days the Japanese starved, shelled and bombed the Allied defenders into surrendering on May 6, 1942.

Like many historic battlefields, Corregidor is exceedingly peaceful, its bombed-out, vine-tangled barracks, huge cannon and mortar batteries silent now. But you can't help but believe that ghosts swirl through the trees.

At the summit, where paratroopers retook the island in 1945, a sobering museum showcases Japanese bayonets, uniforms and photos of the American surrender. Nearby, a pavilion shades an eternal flame.

But Corregidor's pièce de résistance is a sound-and-light show in Malinta Tunnel, where MacArthur directed the war before being ordered to Australia, and military nurses, soldiers and Filipino scouts holed up, caring for the wounded. Flashes of light, recorded explosions and gunfire recount the story — sometimes too realistically.

From Corregidor, our group traveled north to the mosquito-infested Bataan Peninsula, site of one of the Pacific war's worst atrocities.

After the Americans surrendered, the Japanese rounded up the defeated soldiers. They were weak and starving, but their captors gave them no food or water. Instead they force-marched 70,000 Americans and Filipinos 55 miles up the peninsula in the tropical heat. Thousands died on the way.

One in our group, Bob Wolfersberger, a spunky 86-year-old, survived. "It was a cattle drive out there," he said. "We were going up one side of the road, the Japanese coming down the other, lots of times swinging their clubs, hitting as many Americans as they could."

At the town of San Fernando at the head of the peninsula, the soldiers were packed into stifling, steamy train cars and shuttled to Capas, where they were forced to march seven more miles to Camp O'Donnell.

We walked only the last hot, dusty half a mile, arriving at the former prison's gates sheepishly thankful for the water fountain there.

At the camp, now a memorial, monuments list the names of the Filipinos and Americans who died there. In a corner, a replica of the prisoners' barracks provides a hint of their misery.

"There was no food, no medicine," Wolfersberger said. "The prisoners were left to die in this concentration camp."

About 1,600 Americans died in the first 40 days at Camp O'Donnell. Survivors were transferred several months later to Cabanatuan, a former Army supply base about 25 miles east.

The camp at Cabanatuan is another memorial, with an altar-like monument flanked by Filipino and American flags. A wall has the names of dead soldiers.

A former Marine on our tour, Warren Elder, had been captured on Corregidor and imprisoned at Cabanatuan. At one point, he had been dragged out of the camp with four other soldiers expecting to be executed because "someone had done something," he said. But when the gun was fired, it just clicked; there was no ammunition. "They were just trying to scare us," Elder said in a shaky voice.

Prison camp rescues

IN 1942, the Americans began taking back the Pacific, winning such monumental battles as Coral Sea and Midway before finally coming ashore in the Philippines in October 1944. MacArthur began staging daring rescues at the prison camps. First at Cabanatuan on Jan. 31, 1945, then at Manila's Santo Tomas.

At 9 p.m. Feb. 3, 1945, an American tank — the Georgia Peach — crashed into the front gate. "Are you Americans?" a soldier shouted to the skinny prisoners who swarmed around the infantrymen. "Yes!" they yelled back.

After liberating the camp, the Army used Santo Tomas as its headquarters. One day, as Mom was in the courtyard about to accept some chocolate from a soldier, a mortar shell exploded. Shrapnel hit her in the jaw; she still can open her mouth only partway. The soldier was killed.

My mother, aunt and grandfather — who weighed about 100 pounds at liberation — left the islands soon after, zigzagging across the Pacific to avoid detection of Japanese ships.

As our plane took off from Manila at the end of our tour, my mother gazed out the window into the night sky, lost in thought. For a few minutes the city's bright lights sparkled below, and then the blackness of the ocean fell. She absentmindedly reached out to touch my arm.

When I think of her as a little child, surrounded by the horrors of war, of all the suffering that she and her fellow prisoners endured, I am awed — at their tenacity, at their will to survive.

Somehow, the flight back to the U.S. did not seem interminable.

Article by:
The Los Angeles Times

[Sinjin P.]

Leanne Blinzler Noe, front, walks across a bridge to revisit her childhood home in Baguio with her friend Dorothy Mullaney Brooks, who was her roommate in a Manila prison camp


Flame of Freedom at the fortress island of Corregidor commemorates the sacrifices by the United States and the Philippines during World War II.

Photos and Text by:
The Los Angeles Times

[paulkrps]

a very nice read sinjin.

[Sinjin P.]

Yeah, I was glad I found that article and those photos so that I could at least give a decent introduction to a wonderful thread which was originally conceptualized by Boybaha..

[Animo]

Originally Posted by sinjin

Yeah, I was glad I found that article and those photos so that I could at least give a decent introduction to a wonderful thread which was originally conceptualized by Boybaha..

Can you put the link to the original thread in your 1st post? Iy would be alot easier for future reference.

Wartime Philippines: http://skyscrapercity.com/showthread...=109967&page=1

Thanks!

[Animo]

Originally Posted by tsinoy

Excuse me, I'm not a badmouther, please refrain from your arrogant stance of A$$ calling, it doesn't sound nice, I consider you a good natured man and still respect you views as a person -- Let's continue.

Pardon it must be the American in me.

Originally Posted by tsinoy

As I said, I always give what I read and learn a benefit of the doubt.
My views are totally different from what you have, Most historians and authors states that the outbreak or the start of the Spanish-American war could have a lot of principle sources.
A. Popular hostility to autocratic Spanish rule in Cuba that was sensationalized by the media.
B. American sympathy with demands for Cuban independence which the American desired for stability in the region, especially the central America.
C. The great start of nationalistic assertiveness by the Americans for its nation to become a world power.
D. and the the destruction of the U.S.S. Maine...
And many more..............

Yes, I remember Hearst and Pulitzer doing their sensationalism. I do not discredit the other factors that led to the war. I am saying is that it was because of the destruction of USS Maine that led to the proclamation of war by Congress (Article One, Section 8, Clause 11). Remember the popular slogan: "Remember the Maine"

Originally Posted by tsinoy

Blame that on the American media, you have no proof that the people want or do not want to be involve in a war. Most Americans during those days can be misled easily on what the media and politics who surely had blown this event out of proportion that put everyone on their heels to go after Spain. And up to this day it remains the same.

The media is a powerful tool. The common Americans did not agree with having a war, but the opportunist would surely like one if they benefit with it. Frederick Jackson Turner: "American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise."

Originally Posted by tsinoy

Sure, it is amusing, you can laugh, you can wonder what's on my mind and you can disagree on what I say, That's why it is America, it spells freedom into my heart. Whatever Americans says against their country is up to them, they have to deal with it and live with it. Everyone here has a difference in opinions.

I agree. That is why we are basing our comments on facts and not fiction.

Originally Posted by tsinoy

I would never tell you what to do and go to the Spanish Thread to post your reverance to S-Pain, kiddo.

It was a suggestion and not an order.

[bitoy]

Originally Posted by Animo

I agree. That is why we are basing our comments on facts and not fiction.

You can't be sure of all the facts unless you have a first hand account or a really reliable source.


Here's the last page of the first thread Wartime Philippine I

Too bad the original thread did not start during the first conflict of the Spaniards with the local inhabitants, then the Filipino revolution.............................. and so on...

[Lili]

Great you included that link @Animo. It's important for ease of reference and continuity.

[Sinjin P.]

@Animo: Done..

Sigh, only paulkrps cared to read the article...

[paulkrps]

Originally Posted by sinjin

@Animo: Done..

Sigh, only paulkrps cared to read the article...

reading that i remember my dad's experience during the war. my grandfather worked in antamok mines in one of those american operated mines. my dad that they were the only filipinos in the compound. when the japanese came, they fled leaving one frail granduncle with some provisions to live on. sadly when they came back after weeks (can't remember how many), he was dead. all those provisions they left were gone (stolen, by somebody i don't want to mention).

[bitoy]

Originally Posted by sinjin

@Animo: Done..

Sigh, only paulkrps cared to read the article...

Never fret Sinjin, I did and most likely a lot of people did read your article, it could be that some parts of the article were known by the readers already and just could not comment further about the article. Never expect a pat on the back all the time for a nice post that you did, but somehow people appreciate things that they learn and most Filipinos are just not that expressive about their feelings.

In the early 2001 we have a website-forum about Philippine history, lots of stories about the past have been told and argued upon because of inconsistencies about some events, but everything is worth some time to be read and reread. Just like this one, this is a wonderful thread and I hope others will contribute also. I hope I can recover that database and add some more stories here.

[bitoy]

American and Filipino solidiers liberating The Philippines.
Left to right- Lt. Hombre Bueno, Lt. William Farrell, Maj. Robert Lapham, Lt. James O. Johnson, Lt. Henry Baker, and Lt. Gofronio (Concepcion?).


A priest celebrates Mass at the open-air chapel of Lourdes in an army hospital on Bataan.


Japanese propaganda leaflet.

My parents even collected some of those leaflets dropped by the Japanese on their hiding place atop some hills in Bicol. And they said, not all Japanese soldiers, especially officers are really brutal. Most likely they are Koreans enlisted in the Japanese army that punished or killed a lot of Filipino citizens during the return of the Americans.

[rgbisaya]

Originally Posted by tsinoy

American and Filipino solidiers liberating The Philippines.
Left to right- Lt. Hombre Bueno, Lt. William Farrell, Maj. Robert Lapham, Lt. James O. Johnson, Lt. Henry Baker, and Lt. Gofronio (Concepcion?).


A priest celebrates Mass at the open-air chapel of Lourdes in an army hospital on Bataan.


Japanese propaganda leaflet.

My parents even collected some of those leaflets dropped by the Japanese on their hiding place atop some hills in Bicol. And they said, not all Japanese soldiers, especially officers are really brutal. Most likely they are Koreans enlisted in the Japanese army that punished or killed a lot of Filipino citizens during the return of the Americans.

You could be right..my father experienced such as he was one of the prisoner held in University of Santo Thomas during WW11. He mentioned the cruelty of the soldier and not the officer which he said "are more of finesse". He told me how they are being used as a punching bag when they make mistake. As a matter of fact his best friend did not recover from this cruelty and puked blood.

[bitoy]

Originally Posted by rgbisaya

You could be right..my father experienced such as he was one of the prisoner held in University of Santo Thomas during WW11. He mentioned the cruelty of the soldier and not the officer which he said "are more of finesse". He told me how they are being used as a punching bag when they make mistake. As a matter of fact his best friend did not recover from this cruelty and puked blood.

I'm glad your father survived the atrocities of WII. So many stories have been told during that war and only a few were published and those were surely exaggerated to make the contents more intense and believable.
I believe most Japanese officers were highly educated and have more dignity and respect to mankind but just in the case of who's in control, abuses by any person are often committed.
I'm glad I was told with some of those stories by those persons who were in there and actually experienced the events, even my great grandfather who passed on to his siblings his stories during the Spanish period. Sadly, those newer accounts of our history has been altered by those so called great historians who only rely on very few information and just added their skills in making their publications more profitable.

[kuyageezer]

My parents even collected some of those leaflets dropped by the Japanese on their hiding place atop some hills in Bicol. And they said, not all Japanese soldiers, especially officers are really brutal. Most likely they are Koreans enlisted in the Japanese army that punished or killed a lot of Filipino citizens during the return of the Americans.[/QUOTE]


My parents also experienced the atrocities of WWII and their comments mirror your parents', most notably the Korean conscripts. My American grandfather died also died in UST.

[Animo]

Adrian E. Cristobal

Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more properly respect it. — G. K. Chesterton

IT was only after the Middle Ages that the concept of property was codified and only in 1857 was Torrens Title introduced in Australia by Sir Robert Torrens. Since then disputes over property — real property, in a word, land — clogged the courts for years and years.

During the US occupation of the Philippines, American administrators tried to resolve the property issues bequeathed by Spanish colonization. It wasn’t an easy job, as often might ruled over right. There were successes and failures, and even when independence was achieved, the residues of illegal appropriation though extra-legal and "legal" means remained.

Then emerged what’s since been called "syndicates" which specialized in land-grabbing through coercion or through questionable "legal" means. The courts have become the battle ground, and because of the complexity of property laws, battles could last for generations.

That’s how it is with the Supreme Court’s hearing tomorrow of a dispute that sprang from a property transfer made 94 years ago on 3 December 1912. The case has gone through the then Courts of First Instance, then Regional Trial Court, the Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court. In three different cases, two in the Supreme Court and one in the Court of Appeals, the title of one claimant has been "established" as "spurious, inexistent, and of impossible origin."

But the dispute is still alive and that’s the reason the Supreme Court, to its credit, is taking a second look at its en banc session tomorrow.

It’s not, as Hamlet once put it, a case of the "law’s delay," but of the cupidity and slyness of people who try to stop the law’s progress.

This time, however, the case could be finally decided and be "final and executory" before it reaches its centenary.

But the Supreme Court only tells us what the law is, which some agencies, as in Banco Filipino case with the CB-BOL-BSP, "revise" under their own "jurisdictions."

Yet the Law is a command that must be obeyed.

http://www.mb.com.ph/OPED2006073170517.html

[Hawayano]

1945 and the smoke had cleared, but the trauma remains:

Looking from the area of Quiapo Church toward the Pasig and Quezon Bridge pylons (the steel span had been blown to bits by retreating Japanese). Quinta Market looks pretty intact (at least the roof does). The landmark smokestack of the Insular Ice Plant can be seen off in the distance as well as the proscenium of the Metropolitan Theater and the shell-pocked tower of City Hall. And if you have really keen eyes, you can spot the belfry and monastery cupola of San Agustin de Intramuros!


Military transports crossing the Pasig to accommodate the heavy military traffic. The Santa Cruz (aka Macarthur) Bridge has already been temporarily repaired with pre-fab steel trusses in the background.


The Escolta end of the Jones Bridge: look at the ornate pylons with the Tolentino statuary! They survived the war! So why is it that only one remains to be seen today, and that's the one standing in Rizal Park just behind the Rizal Monument? Where did her three other sisters go????


all three images courtesy of vendio image hosting site

[Wonderboy]

Originally Posted by Hawayano

1945 and the smoke had cleared, but the trauma remains:

Looking from the area of Quiapo Church toward the Pasig and Quezon Bridge pylons (the steel span had been blown to bits by retreating Japanese). Quinta Market looks pretty intact (at least the roof does). The landmark smokestack of the Insular Ice Plant can be seen off in the distance as well as the proscenium of the Metropolitan Theater and the shell-pocked tower of City Hall. And if you have really keen eyes, you can spot the belfry and monastery cupola of San Agustin de Intramuros!


Military transports crossing the Pasig to accommodate the heavy military traffic. The Santa Cruz (aka Macarthur) Bridge has already been temporarily repaired with pre-fab steel trusses in the background.


The Escolta end of the Jones Bridge: look at the ornate pylons with the Tolentino statuary! They survived the war! So why is it that only one remains to be seen today, and that's the one standing in Rizal Park just behind the Rizal Monument? Where did her three other sisters go????


all three images courtesy of vendio image hosting site

Excellent post Hawayano.

I'm also wondering where did those three other statues go...

Could it be that those gems are somewhere in one of those mansions in Forbes?

Okay, I'll stop before I get sued.

[Pinoy_ako]

Originally Posted by Hawayano

The Escolta end of the Jones Bridge: look at the ornate pylons with the Tolentino statuary! They survived the war! So why is it that only one remains to be seen today, and that's the one standing in Rizal Park just behind the Rizal Monument? Where did her three other sisters go????


all three images courtesy of vendio image hosting site

Hawayano, Wonderboy and the others,

Here are the other 2 statuaries. Great statuaries, but they were not by Tolentino. Martinez was commissioned by Arellano to embellish the bridge. His other known work is the former Homage to the Heroes of 1896 at Balintawak, which is now in UP.

As can be seen in the picture, two of the four statuaries now flank the steps leading to the portico of the Court of Appeals building.

<img src="http://img123.imageshack.us/img123/387/courtid7.jpg" alt="Image Hosted by ImageShack.us" />

<img src="http://img56.imageshack.us/img56/7910/jones1kr3.jpg" alt="Image Hosted by ImageShack.us" />

So this one used to guard the northern approach to the Jones bridge. In the "Then" picture, it sat at the top of the right pylon.

<img src="http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/8201/jones2zq4.jpg" alt="Image Hosted by ImageShack.us" />

It's too bad that the one at the left pylon of the "Then" picture stands directly behind the electric post. But the post behind the back of this statue ( it is visible from the Court of Appeals picture ) and the kneeling figure of the left most figure hint that this is the one atop the left pylon.

If this were the case, then "Mi Madre" and the other missing statuary once stood at the pylons guarding the southern approach of the Jones Bridge.