Until They Eat Stones E-Book

Russell Brines

• Herausgeber: The War Vault
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

During World War 2, over seven thousand American soldiers were held as prisoners of war in the Japanese-occupied Philippines. Many had survived the infamous Bataan Death March of April 1942 only to face starvation and torture in cramped cells ran by the  kempei, Japan's military police.  Until They Eat Stones is a first-hand account of life in the POW camps as the situation unfolded, offering a unique perspective on events from someone in the middle of the maelstrom.

Leseprobe

Until They Eat Stones

Russell Brines

Published by The War Vault, 2019.

Copyright

––––––––

Until They Eat Stones by Russell Brines. First published in 1944.

Revised edition published by The War Vault, 2019. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-359-94496-5.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

1 | Manila Falls

2 | Rule By Torture

3 | Hostage Army

4 | Spoils of Conquest

5 | Phony Freedom

6 | Mental Chains

7 | The Unconquered

8 | Prisoners of War

9 | “Three or Four Days”

10 | Interned But Not Interred

11 | Indochina Drama

12 | The Western Bulwark

13 | Imperial Treasure House

14 | “Repentant” Murderer

15 | Tale of Three Cities

16 | Exploitation Laboratory

17 | Until We Eat Stones

18 | Ragged Kimono

19 | Oligarchic Battles

Epilogue

Further Reading: My Fighting Congregation

Foreword

“We will fight,” the Japanese say, “until we eat stones!” The phrase is old; now revived and ground deeply into Japanese consciousness by propagandists skilled in marshaling their sheep-like people. The government radio and controlled press repeat it continually. It is echoed by both the hysterical fanatics and the subjugated masses. “Ishii wo kajiru made,” say the commoners; “Ishii ni kajiritsui te made mo,” say the educated. The phrase means they will continue the war until every man—perhaps every woman and child—lies face down on the battlefield. Thousands of Japanese, maybe hundreds of thousands, accepted it literally.

To ignore this suicide complex would be as dangerous as our prewar oversight of Japanese determination and cunning which made Pearl Harbor possible. It springs from deep racial characteristics which the militarists have cultivated for generations. It is emphasized by the unshaken hold of emperor devotion and strengthened by popular realization that defeat means loss of the empire—which has cost so much—and Japan’s reversion to a second-class power; a national humiliation so great that many Japanese would rather die than live under it.

The Japanese militarists are directing a diabolic war to advance detailed and timeless plans. They intend that their own people, whom they hold by physical and psychological chains, and the rest of their 400,000,000 subjects, dominated by force, shall fight until they eat stones.

They bluntly have voiced their current strategy—to fight as long as possible while inflicting maximum losses upon the Allies. The immediate purpose is to create sufficient war-weariness among their enemies, particularly the United States, to win a favorable compromise peace. That would be a Japanese victory, for the peace they will demand must leave them part of their empire and much of their strength—to become the foundation for their already-planned next war.

Barring that, many Japanese leaders already foresee military defeat in the Pacific. They anticipated it, in fact, before we smashed into the Marshall Islands, the outer defense arc of their first tremendous empire. Still, they insist they are ready, “to fight a hundred-year war, if necessary...” They mean it.

This is the fifth war the Japanese have entered to further imperialistic dreams, considering their ultimate motive in World War I. Those dreams began with the two-sworded samurai, the professional warriors of old Japan. Succeeding generations of militarists, united in the belief in conquest, inherited and expanded these early schemes into a craving for world rule. They have followed a consistent pattern in this drive for power; advancing until opposition became too strong, then halting and preparing for the next move.

To them, defeat in the Pacific now would mean only one setback along the pathway to world hegemony. They are confident there will be other conflicts, and they will start them. Regardless of military fortunes at the moment, the Japanese militarists will count as victory any postwar world enabling them to begin that next struggle; which is as clear in their minds as the grab for North China after Manchuria’s seizure, six years earlier.

The conquerors are busily laying the seeds of that next war throughout their vast new empire. They are indoctrinating subject peoples with a Japanism which they hope will tie them to Tokyo in the future, regardless of peace table generalities. Already they are marshaling the legions they believe will follow the Rising Sun some years hence in a new and greater conflict; maybe an uprising of the Orient against the West.

To men with such minds, a century of intermittent warfare is a small price to pay for the world. Time is plentiful. Human life is cheap.

Prolonged warfare is their big gamble for current victory. Beyond that, it will permit more time for steady indoctrination of present and future slaves. Years of fighting and huge casualty lists, they reason further, will produce renewed postwar isolationism in the United States and Great Britain, causing our vigil to relax and enabling them to re-emerge precisely as Hitler did after Versailles.

That is why American fighting men back from the front have been trying to tell America this is a war of extermination. They have seen it from foxholes and barren strips of bullet-strafed sand. I have seen it from behind the enemy’s lines. Our picture coincides. This is a war of extermination. The Japanese militarists have made it that way. Neither their abilities nor their determination should be underestimated. Heartless and single-purposed, they hold Occupied Asia in a grip so tight that, by late 1944, no important internal challenge to their power had arisen.

The militarists will employ every trick, every subterfuge, every brutality before they capitulate. They will drain conquered Asia of all its wealth and drive its millions into the battle as soldiers or workers. Without the compromise peace they want, they will not quit until their means of resistance have been smashed.

Their group character dominates the following pages. Deep and fundamental is the sense of “face,” the universal and exaggerated oriental pride. Face requires individuals and groups to emerge from any contact, however trivial, with superiority or equality equally unimpaired. With Japanese militarists, this concept is twisted often into abnormality. It is one cause of horrible brutalities. Other vital traits will emerge with the facts; from intense emperor and clan loyalty to power-lust.

Since Pearl Harbor, there has been a virtual blackout of reliable news from Occupied Asia, except for the information of repatriates on the two voyages of the exchange liner Gripsholm. I returned on that vessel in December 1943, after spending the first 21 months of the war in Manila and Shanghai; interned most of the time. Despite prison walls, we internees obtained a clear picture of events swirling around us, from our contacts with the outside world, from moments of freedom, even from a backhanded reading of the censored press.

During the voyage, I talked to reliable repatriates from Japan, Manchuria, North China, South China, Hong Kong, French Indochina and the Philippines. I checked and rechecked all vital information, to sift out uncolored data; and tried to evaluate it against the background of my ten years as a newspaperman in the Pacific area, most of them as a correspondent for The Associated Press in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines. I talked to people who had been confined in all of the twenty-eight civilian internment camps represented aboard ship.

This book is not a personal experience story. It is an attempt to cover the major wartime developments in Occupied Asia and Japan, particularly during that vital period, 1942-43, when the Japanese program was accelerated. It is manifestly impossible to avoid gaps in the story because of Japanese censorship. But the available information gives a clear picture of the conquerors’ imperialistic methods and shows trends which will continue so long as they rule.

Part of flaming Asia’s story concerns more than a hundred thousand Occidental prisoners of war and civilian internees. Their adaptation to what are, at best, disagreeable circumstances is a tale of courage and perseverance. They are at their captors’ mercy and subject to every harsh wind blowing across the empire. I want to salute them all, particularly a number of close friends. Less fortunate than I, they remained behind when the exchange ship sailed.

After serving a number of years in Hawaii with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and The Associated Press, I was transferred to Tokyo by the latter agency in 1939. There I witnessed the final consolidation of the Japanese home front for the Pacific conflict. During the bloody miniature war at Nomonhan in 1939, I lived with Japanese troops and acquired another view of their dominant characteristics.

Eight months prior to Pearl Harbor, I was transferred to Manila. There I saw the final training of boys who were to become heroes; the last days of a city which never seemed to realize fully what happened to it, or why. War prevented my departure for Bangkok on a new assignment. During the battle for Manila, I was an accredited war correspondent with the USAFFE (United States Army Forces in the Far East), commanded by General Douglas MacArthur. With my wife, Barbara, and our 12-year-old daughter, Coralie—brave ones, both—I saw the final capitulation of the Philippines capital. On January 5, 1942, we three were deposited in the Santo Tomas internment camp.

That September, I thumbed a ride to Shanghai on a Japanese transport, a “shot in the dark” attempt to better our condition. The venture was such a gamble that Barbara and Coralie remained in Santo Tomas where they then had relative security. I made the trip under cattle boat conditions with five other correspondents and one hundred and twelve other internees. Much to our surprise, we were turned loose upon arrival in Shanghai, where civilians were not interned until later.

This freedom ended abruptly for me six weeks later when I was reinterned on the clammy morning of November 5, 1942. I was among the three hundred and fifty “political prisoners” confined in Shanghai’s first civilian camp, at the former U.S. Marine barracks, Haiphong Road. My shipmates were taken to other camps when general internment began three months later. We met again aboard the Japanese exchange ship Teia Maru leaving Shanghai on September 19, 1943. My family and I were reunited aboard the Teia off northern Luzon, a year and a few days after I had left them. They had been interned continuously for 21 months, and I was imprisoned for a total of 19 months.

My own experiences seem unimportant to me, against the tremendous backdrop of Asia’s drama. If I appear hereafter in the story, it is only as part of the crowd.

To the countless sources who have supplied the necessary information for this book, I express sincere appreciation. Most repatriates requested anonymity; because, when I talked to them, the cruel spell of Japan’s military or secret police—the gendarmerie—hung over them and their friends still in Asia.

After returning to this country, I augmented my information with material from the Office of War Information, the Netherlands Information Bureau, the British Information Service, The Associated Press library and many well-informed individuals. It was woven together with my wife’s constant help, support and encouragement.

1

Manila Falls

––––––––

THE WAIT FOR JAPANESE occupation was agonizing. We civilians isolated in Manila feared another Nanking—with its raping and looting and wanton killing. There was little we could do to prevent it, if the conquerors so willed, but each man had resolved to stand with his family, defending them as best he could.

For two days, the invading forces had been in the suburbs, somewhere behind the smoke and flames of demolition fires. In hours, perhaps, the vanguard would drive unopposed into the wounded Philippine capital. Then some six hundred thousand Filipinos and over six thousand Occidentals would be at the mercy of a triumphant army whose commander, General Masaharu Homma, was one of the most sincere anti-whites in Japan’s hierarchy of fanatics.

It was a dismal New Year’s morning, 1942. American and British women remained in hotels or homes, listening anxiously for foreign sounds; fearing the arrival, yet impatient for it. Children, sensing the tension, were silently restless. The men gathered in quiet groups on street corners, never straying far from their families. They peered down empty streets toward the smoke, for a glimpse of the invaders. Cinders drifted over the city like melancholy leaves.

The southern Japanese army, which would take Manila, arrived December 30 at Paranaque, a small suburb only five miles distant. It had landed six days earlier from forty transports at Antimonan, some two hundred and fifty kilometers southeast of the capital. First units had been decimated by a relatively small defensive force; subsequently withdrawn to join the main American-Filipino troops seeping into Bataan, where the final stand would be made. The invaders then pushed steadily toward the city, meeting only rearguard action.

The larger, northern Japanese army—which made its first main landing December 22, from eighty transports in Lingayen Gulf and later was reinforced—had wheeled and headed for Bataan.

While there was still time, thousands of Filipinos had fled Manila for the country, traveling in overcrowded, horse-drawn carts which wound along jammed highways. A few Americans had slipped away to Bataan, choosing the hell of continued warfare over the threat of occupation. Those who remained were trapped between the advancing forces and the sea.

At the last moment, all felt the need for human companionship. Americans locked their comfortable homes and moved into hotels or doubled up with friends. Bathtubs became beds, and scanty food supplies were pooled. Men maintained a ceaseless, nervous vigil, never leaving their houses long, for fear they would encounter the conquerors and be cut off from their families.

This desire for companionship had packed the American-owned Bay View Hotel where most of the remaining correspondents had joined forces. We were unemployed when demolition men smashed radio facilities. American businessmen had not gone to their offices for several days. All we could do was wait.

Peculiar problems soon created a sense of unity among the Bay View’s three hundred-odd men, women and children. Food was limited to supplies in the hotel’s storeroom, and most of the Filipino help had fled to the country. The guests approved a suggestion to conserve food for a vigil we felt might be indefinite, by serving only two meals daily, eliminating lunches. At a general meeting they also authorized a governing committee of guests, which included Dr. C. N. Leach and Dr. Frank Whitacre, of the Rockefeller Foundation in China; Henry Carpenter and Henry Heesch, American business representatives in the islands; Ed and Don Kneedler, sons of the cooperative hotel owner. Dr. H. D. Kneedler.

Guests volunteered to take over the empty kitchen, evolving meals from cans and washing the dishes. Others started a library and organized games and story periods for the children. At night, the men patrolled the building to reassure women who feared wandering Japanese soldiers. Without fully realizing it, we had established our own rather elaborate internment camp days before Japanese imprisonment began.

Outside our stucco fortress, the old Manila died excitedly. The streets had been left to bands of Filipino looters who roamed downtown districts, smashing the windows of closed stores, principally those owned by Japanese and Chinese. Police, disarmed to conform with Manila’s status as an open city, made little effort to stop them.

Half a mile away, in the bomb-raked Port Area, near the piers, other Filipinos formed a fighting, clawing mob, seeking additional booty. American military authorities had authorized “legal looting” to dispose of army stores there which otherwise would be confiscated by the Japanese or destroyed. Long files of Filipinos for days had streaked across the Luneta to get these supplies, returning with everything from telephone wire and dressmakers’ dummies to cases of canned goods and clothing. The first good-natured jostling grew into intense excitement when the designated goods disappeared, and latecomers demanded their share. They broke into bonded warehouses and took personal baggage and expensive rugs. The articles themselves seemed of little value to the looters—one American bought a case of beer for fifty cents—but the frenzy of the moment possessed them. Their shouting swelled and died like a distant surf, always ominous, always sawing on our already thin nerves.

Our tensed minds saw broader implications in the looting than mere lawlessness or the possibility that it might cause Japanese viciousness. We wondered if it represented the Filipino reaction to the American defeat; if the frenzy stemmed from resentment against Americans for involving the unprepared Philippines in war. Emotions were volatile. We on the spot weren’t too sure if forty years of a lenient, if sometimes confused, colonial policy had built unshakable loyalty to the United States.

The war had been a succession of shocks. Our fear was mingled with the deep frustration of a defeat which the majority believed had been unnecessarily swift. Most Americans and many Filipinos felt we had shown only weak and confused resistance to the attackers’ hammer smashes. “Now we’re running away,” they said, “without a fight; giving up.” Bataan was yet to come.

The Japanese timed their assault with fine precision. Driblets of supplies, including a few new bombers and men, had been arriving in Manila during the weeks preceding the war. At least sixty more heavily laden transports reportedly were scheduled to reach the Philippines before February 1, 1942. Fifteen of them were en route when the attack started. They would bring some of the power that Tokyo’s politicians had warned against in repeatedly saying: “We must not let the Philippines become strong enough to threaten us.” Air and sea forces based on Luzon, the archipelago’s main island, could dominate the sea lanes running from the east to Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies. The Japanese needed the resources of these regions, particularly petroleum, to maintain their war machine. They had to strike before Philippine forces could smash their southward shipping.

At the start of the war, we had only three hundred and sixteen planes in the archipelago, most of them already outmoded. Mechanized equipment was infinitesimal; heavy artillery almost completely limited to the fixed fortifications of Cavite and Corregidor; most of the few antiaircraft guns had a range of less than ten thousand feet. Corregidor itself had retrogressed to a third-class base, the result both of observing the Washington treaty and prewar indolence. Only a handful of the one hundred thousand American and Filipino defenders were seasoned men. American forces totaled about nineteen thousand men, most of them recruits. A few thousand seasoned regulars included the 31st Infantry and the 4th Marine Regiment, transferred from Shanghai. About twelve thousand experienced Philippine Scouts were supported by some sixty thousand Filipino graduates of a six weeks’ basic training course. That was all.

Ever-present Japanese agents, operating with remarkable freedom in the islands, knew this. The civilians did not. Most Manila Americans agreed with a staunch “old-timer” who gave me a friendly tip soon after my arrival from Tokyo in March 1941. Following a luncheon with some of his friends in the Manila chamber of commerce, he turned to me and said:

“You don’t think the Japanese will attack the Philippines, do you? They’re pretty weak, aren’t they? Haven’t they used up about everything in China?”

I replied with the clear memory of forces I had seen in Japan which were driving that nation toward war in the Pacific. “I think they will attack. We can’t afford to underestimate their air force. And we can’t forget that their navy has never been tested.”

The statement met grim silence. Later my friend drew me into a corner and said, “Better be careful what you say in Manila, young fellow. These folks don’t like to hear statements like that. They’ll accuse you of being a Japanese agent.”

Even the minority who anticipated hostilities believed generally that the Philippines would remain on the sidelines. “Why,” said one young American, “our interceptor force is so strong that no Japanese bombers will get as far as Manila. We’ll be able to sit on the seawall and watch our boys knock them down, like shooting ducks in a barrel.”

Japan’s thwarted war effort in China had seduced these people, as it did the residents of other key areas soon to be under attack. Newspaper warnings that the Japanese had better equipment and better men than they had been using in China were dismissed as products of Tokyo propaganda mills. Manila, like Singapore and Hong Kong, continued its comfortable country club life until the first bomb blasts. When they came, the city had no air raid shelters and only a pitifully inadequate civilian defense system.

In the first three days of hostilities, Japanese land-based planes from Formosa, six hundred miles northward, virtually demolished our air force. They struck furiously and extremely accurately at key airbases, and after December 10, we never saw an American plane over Manila, except for a single fighter in late January.

Unanswered questions rankled, even while the city attempted to steady itself for the ground campaigns that would follow anticipated Japanese landings. Why did we lose eighteen B-17 bombers, half of our heavy force, on the ground at Clark Field at 1:30 p.m. the first day of warfare? Why were they lined up in neat rows, the pilots lunching or showering, after two previous Japanese-attacks on the same field? Why had we failed to strike a single blow at Formosa before this loss when our pilots were begging for the chance? Why did we lose virtually three-fourths of our fighters at Eba in the north, later that same afternoon? Why were most of them also aground?

There were more queries, but no one answered them. The full extent of these losses was twisted and hidden behind vague official communiques, optimistically worded to deceive the enemy agents and to quiet the city’s populace so that refugees would not stream to the countryside along narrow highways, impeding military transportation. War correspondents accredited to the USAFFE were denied permission to visit Clark Field after the attack, and were handed only a single paragraph of “information” concerning Eba. But the news of what had happened, and the questions, circulated throughout Manila. Censorship barred the story from the papers and the people at home, but it could not hide it from Manila or the enemy.

(General H. H. Arnold’s official report, issued in 1943, said fourteen B-17 bombers escaped to Australia, but hostilities destroyed the remainder of the Philippine force of thirty-five B-17’s, thirty medium and eight light bombers, two hundred and twenty fighters and twenty-three other airplanes.)

Day after day, Japanese planes lazed high over Manila like tiny silver crosses in the hot sunlight, insolently bombing at will; aloof from our feeble antiaircraft fire and unchallenged in the air. They could have destroyed the city, but generally they confined themselves to military objectives; for the Japanese knew their troops would capture Manila and they wanted it intact. Impotent rage spread through the human moles below ground, so that men often shook their fists at these planes while running for the insufficient protection of walls or doorways or the foxholes they had dug in private gardens.

Uneasiness was increased by the activities of many Filipino fifth columnists whom Japanese agents had prepared well in advance. Actual sabotage was limited, but flares and signals of all kinds directed enemy bombers to prime objectives, and information was steadily relayed. The officers of a well-hidden advance American airbase believed they were invisible from the air until a surprise attack disclosed the field was surrounded by mirrors which in the sunlight flashed a neat circular target to Japanese bombers. An American pilot who flew one night from the northwestern coast of Luzon to Manila said his entire route was illuminated by flares, accurately guiding him into the city. They were set off in succession by Filipinos upon hearing what they thought was a Japanese motor.

Civilians eagerly accepted the optimistic official statements which said “our lines are holding” even after military leaders knew the capital was doomed. Uninformed, most of them still believed Manila was safe, until a swift series of events, beginning December 24, foreshadowed the end. General MacArthur departed “for the front,” accompanied by U.S. High Commissioner Francis B. Sayre, the late President Manuel L. Quezon, Vice President Sergio Osmena, their families and principal staff assistants. Quezon appointed Jorge Vargas, his personal secretary and thereby the executive secretary of the commonwealth, as the acting head of the government remaining in the Philippines. Sayre left his executive assistant. Dr. Claude A. Buss, a State Department careerist, in charge of his office.

The city soon knew that they were bound not for the front but for Corregidor; “impregnable Corregidor” we thought then. American and Filipino civilians, awaiting an explanation which never came, were baffled and hurt by these departures. They knew nothing of the political and diplomatic factors which might have necessitated the move. They felt, and many still feel, that they were abandoned by officials seeking personal safety.

The fires began with a terrific midnight blast on Christmas that destroyed the Cavite naval base and with it, for the time being, America’s naval prestige in the Far East. No planes had been overhead for seven hours when the first explosions, from nine miles across the bay, rocked slumbering Manila. I watched in tense awe from the Manila hotel room of Clark Lee, a close personal friend and at the time an Associated Press correspondent.

We both realized the message of white-hot flames which were devouring the already bombed base. They danced hundreds of feet in the air, illuminating the entire bay as if with a gigantic searchlight. Repeated explosions rumbled in the distance. This was the prelude to defeat; destruction of the installations to render them useless to the enemy. Clark and I drank a silent toast to the men who first planted the American flag, years before, on that curving elbow of land. I don’t think either of us ever felt so completely beaten as that night.

The next day Manila was declared an open city, and preparations were made for the withdrawal of all military garrisons and equipment. This was followed by two low-flying Japanese bombing attacks which destroyed the historic Santo Domingo church and adjacent buildings at the eastern end of the Walled City. The rage swelling through Manila was greater because it sprang from a renewed realization of helplessness; a sense of being cornered without escape. The damage was done and the reaction, particularly among the religious, was bitter; even though the Japanese said they were aiming at two riverboats, anchored in the Pasig River, a few hundred yards distant.

For days the demolition fires erupted through the city, rocking houses and re-emphasizing the dolorous fact that defeat was certain. They destroyed other military installations, oil stores along the Pasig and quartermasters’ supplies in the Port Area; anything that might be of value to the enemy. Some of them were hastily started and slipped their bounds, demolishing more than a hundred houses and claiming at least eight Filipino lives. For a time, burning oil on the Pasig threatened nearby warehouses, until the tide carried the flames seaward.

The fires became personal enemies, symbolic of our hopelessness. They threw a rough arm across the city, starting from Cavite and stretching along the Pasig, which bisects Manila. There were less than a dozen of them, but their thick black smoke rolled upward and formed a continuous mountain range, hiding from us the business and residential districts which lay eastward of the river. Shreds of smoke climbed higher, darkening the sun and covering the city with perpetual gloom. The air was acrid and heavy with heat. At night the fires glowed like giant cauldrons.

Both bombs and demolition had spared most of Manila, except for houses adjacent to the destroyed military installations and the Santo Domingo church district. Most of the piers in the Port Area were whole, although some were blackened by intentional fires and surrounded by bomb-scarred buildings; and in the bay several sunken ships thrust awkward arms through the oily gray water. Utilities continued to operate; the occasional clang of a streetcar could be heard. The conquerors were acquiring a city that still functioned.

It was a bitter moment, heightened by the prevalent belief that no adequate defense had been attempted. Actually, the USAFFE command had no other choice. Overpowered, our sole chance was to withdraw into Bataan’s jungles for delaying warfare, to await reinforcements or—as happened—to slug it out alone. By a mixture of subterfuge and skillful rear-guard action, American-Filipino forces slowed the advance of numerically superior Japanese armies and made their juncture. Then came the magnificent and vital last stand on Bataan.

The Japanese vanguard roared out of the mist late the next afternoon, January 2. Forewarned by an American who had been driving through the streets, we crowded onto the sidewalk fronting the Bay View to watch. A five-car caravan of high officers shot past us down Isaac Peral, turned on whining tires to Dewey Boulevard and hurried to the Manila Hotel. We saw them for only an instant, but details stood out clearly, so sharpened were our senses. The lead car was a confiscated black sedan. Behind it was an army truck, followed by three other passenger cars.

A lone soldier stood in the truck near a machine gun mounted on its cab. He stared at us with hard, vicious eyes. As we stared back, I could not fail to notice the unusually small bore of the 25-caliber machine gun. The Japanese employed that type of gun generally in the Philippine campaign, but at the moment it seemed doubly ironic—an American city subdued by a popgun. Throughout their swift journey, the cars hugged the right of the street, another evidence of the thorough Japanese intelligence reports on American customs. Traffic is routed on the left side throughout Asia, including Manila. The next day the ever-observant Japanese put their cars back in the proper lanes.

Later, we learned that the initial group of officers had walked proudly into the Manila Hotel where the guests, as apprehensive as we were, huddled in one corner of the spacious lobby. A dapper staff officer stepped up to the desk and in quiet, precise English said: “Please have all floors above the fourth evacuated at once.”

Guests hastily removed their possessions, doubling up with friends. As soon as rooms were available, the Japanese went upstairs. During the evening, other officers walked through the lobby but ignored the guests who were still free to use the hotel’s facilities.

Dinner for us in the Bay View, a quarter of a mile away, was a quiet meal of canned corned beef and tea. Suddenly we heard the soprano whine of Japanese army motorcycles, followed by the deeper cough of heavy vehicles. Another cavalcade of Japanese jostled down Dewey Boulevard. It was formed by a number of confiscated private cars which led three large red and yellow busses, formerly used on lines running to the interior of Luzon.

The broad-seated busses were filled with soldiers, and sandwiched among them were several Japanese civilians who had been freed from the internment camps maintained by the Philippine government. All were hilarious. They waved little paper Rising Sun flags, shouted “Banzai!” in voices already hoarse and sang the “Pacific March,” the fighting song which so frankly detailed Japan’s anticipated conquests. Every drunk in Tokyo had been singing that piece for two years.

This new group disappeared somewhere in the distance. It left tenseness in the dining room, for the shouts and the singing seemed to promise the unlicensed celebrations that we had dreaded. Quickly we finished the meal and went upstairs to our rooms.

Later in the evening, we saw the sight we dreaded. Barbara and Coralie were with me when another group of Japanese officers occupied the American high commissioner’s residence, across Dewey Boulevard from the Bay View. We watched through half-curtained windows. Floodlights suddenly were turned on, illuminating the front of the building and the empty flagpole. Two soldiers marched from the darkness. Almost nonchalantly, they hoisted the Rising Sun.

Barbara turned away abruptly. In her eyes were the first tears she had shown during the war. While we sat in glum silence, the conquerors began an all-night celebration in the building that once symbolized American authority in the islands.

(The Japanese never captured the American flag which had waved over the commissioner’s building. It had been removed for the last time the previous sunset, in a quiet, sad ceremony attended by Buss and other American officials. Following military regulations, the flag was burned, carefully and thoroughly, so that not a shred remained.)

No one came to the Bay View that night. The guests tried to sleep fitfully, while cars raced through the streets and the victory celebration became raucous. The party finally adjourned in the early morning, with the last arrogant “banzai” and the roar of stolen automobiles.

In the morning, the city was quiet and still. Little traffic moved on the streets, and only a few Filipinos ventured out. Sentries in slovenly uniforms, stood on nearly every corner, with bayoneted guns. Japanese flags waved from all parts of the town. Manila had changed owners with no more fanfare than a few drunken shouts.

Late in the morning, a Japanese lieutenant, flanked by two surly sergeants, came to the hotel. They were met by a committee of Japanese-speaking guests. The officer, in order to get his bearings, pulled out a detailed map of Manila that would have covered a tabletop. I winced at its size and house-by-house detail, knowing that American officers had been forced to use road maps distributed by gasoline companies, for the lack of more suitable documents.

The lieutenant stationed a guard at the front of the hotel, politely told the interpreters to keep everyone inside, then departed after bowing formally. That was all. The letdown left us all a little giddy and quite talkative. It seemed as if we were being granted a momentary reprieve; yet some of us had become so suspicious of good news that it was several weeks before we finally accepted this renewed sense of security.

We stayed in the hotel for three days, continuing our self-imposed internment life. Officers and Japanese civilian interpreters visited the hotel several times, principally to ask for automobile keys. Americans living in private houses also were told to remain inside, by proclamations and visits of officers and men. There was some gruffness during these visits and some looting, particularly of wristwatches, which fascinated the enlisted men. As far I know, there was no serious maltreatment of Occidentals at that time in Manila. The general Japanese attitude toward Americans and British was polite, almost patient condescension.

The invaders obviously were under strict orders. Advance troops were held for two days at Paranaque while the high command came up to head the occupation. The Japanese had lost too much international “face” by the holocaust of Nanking, which portrayed their soldiers as barbarians. They wanted to gain prestige abroad by an orderly occupation of Manila. Even Japanese army leaders, in their own way, normally are sensitive to the world’s opinion, unless at the moment their judgment is warped and their control over their men loosened by the desire for vengeance following such bitter resistance as occurred in Hong Kong and later at Bataan.

Undefended Manila fell like a ripe plum into their laps. Officers could more easily restrain their men because they did not enter the city with the psychology of fighters who anticipate death at the next street corner. Moreover, the Japanese then were triumphant and confident. It pleased their sense of face and the inferiority complex dominant among them to be gracious conquerors.

That, I think, is why we Americans escaped the fate we expected.

These considerations applied only to the actual entry into the city and the general physical treatment of the majority of the Occidentals later interned in Manila. They were no restraint to the activities of the gendarmerie; nor, in the conquerors’ minds, did they apply to such policies as outright confiscation of property and business, without compensation, or their subsequent disinclination to assume adequate responsibility for the internment camps. Treatment of civilians also was generally harsher in outlying cities, such as Baguio, Cebu and Davao, where less responsible officers were in command.

Plans for the occupation had been made well in advance. The conquerors brought their own printing press currency, enforcing its use wherever they landed. They retained Philippine denominations in these plain notes, printed on paper so cheap they disintegrated when carried in a pocket for any length of time. They ranged from one centavo to one hundred pesos. The bills were unadorned, except for a bit of scrollwork and the nonexplanatory phrase: “The Japanese Government.” Serial numbers and the usual promise to repay bearer were eliminated. The Japanese posted sentries in all the major markets to make sure the new money was accepted at par value with the legal peso, temporarily allowed to circulate, which had a prewar rate of two pesos for one U.S. dollar. All foreign currency, including the dollar, was banned.

Squads of gendarmes visited American business establishments and sealed their safes, probably protecting the money for future distribution among themselves. The seals pasted across the hinges of the Bay View safe told their own story. Mimeographed and written in English, they promised dire punishment to anyone tampering with what had become property of “His Imperial Majesty.” The date, as originally typed, was “Jan. —, 1942.” These forms obviously were prepared weeks before in Japan or China. They showed that the invaders had reached Manila earlier than they anticipated; for they could easily have entered the city in late December.

Hotels, apartment houses, clubs and certain buildings had been allotted in advance to the army, navy and gendarmerie. They were occupied as soon as the Occidentals who then lived in them were interned. The navy also took over private homes along the bayfront, which had been declared a “strategic area.” But the majority of American residences were undisturbed, so long as Filipino servants remained loyal and guarded them. Unoccupied houses attracted both Japanese and Filipino looters.

Meanwhile, soldiers were scouring the town to confiscate every American-owned automobile. Often they were peasant boys who knew little about cars, and they promptly smashed most of them into uselessness. The banging of fenders could be heard regularly as these untrained drivers hit curbs, telephone poles and other machines; but they drove so slowly that there seemed to be a disappointingly small loss of life from motor accidents.

In the Bay View we prepared ourselves for inevitable internment; and, with the restlessness of close confinement and uncertainty, sometimes became impatient with what seemed an unnecessary Japanese delay in determining our status. But negotiations were going on quietly for the selection of an internment site. Dr. Buss and his American businessmen-advisers had submitted to the Japanese command a list of the most suitable establishments if general internment were decided on. Foremost on the list was the University of Santo Tomas, located on Quezon Boulevard about three miles from the heart of town. A modern institution, with a fifty-two-acre campus surrounded by walls, the university was the only place in Manila that could begin to accommodate the thousands of prisoners; and even it was woefully inadequate.

The Japanese promptly accepted this suggestion, dependent upon the approval of the Spanish Dominican Order, which owned the university. These Catholic Fathers agreed at once, without compulsion.

Finally, a Japanese civilian interpreter told us that we were going away soon, without specifying where, and that we should take enough food and clothing for “three or four days.” In the fluctuating emotions of the moment, his peculiar phrase generated great optimism among the guests. Many accepted the statement literally, assumed that we would be held only for questioning, then freed. Some even began to plan where they would live when “we’re released again.” We learned later that the same hopeful expression had been utilized by other Japanese elsewhere in the city—probably deliberately, to avoid exciting people who were still an unknown quantity to them—and was received with equal optimism.

We were advised that we could take only what we could carry, and the remainder of our luggage would be deposited in sealed storerooms in the hotel. Packing began at once, in an air of suppressed excitement. Personal property had become meaningless, and many gave away the clothing for which they had no room in their baggage. When the Japanese inspected the possessions we were taking to camp, they confiscated only cameras, binoculars and knives, of all sizes.

On the morning of January 5, a hot dusty day, we stumbled out of the hotel with suitcases, boxes, loose mosquito nets and other gear, and walked across the street to await a bus which would take us to internment. Despite our impedimenta, we made that short walk with as much dignity as possible, for behind the sentries’ bayonets we saw several score Filipinos, watching curiously with expressionless faces. None of us wanted to display his humiliation before them.

The Japanese remained indifferent, almost impersonal while we grouped ourselves on the curb and gratefully gulped the fresh air, welcome after our confinement. But this time it was a watchful indolence. Soldiers, guarding the entrance to the hotel, made no objection when a number of guests returned for forgotten articles; yet they grasped their guns tighter each time an American approached. Half a dozen sentries near the massed Filipinos constantly looked over their shoulders at them. In the center of Isaac Peral, which had been closed to traffic, several uniformed gendarmes stood with their usual arrogant slouch, one foot advanced. Their eyes were narrowed, and at first they seemed to be dozing. Actually, they were watching closely and carefully to see if we would make any move to escape or to reach the Filipinos with notes. Such an attempt would have snapped them into swift and ruthless action.

How typical, I thought, and how symbolic, that they should assume this unconcern in an effort to throw us off guard; thereby possibly making us disclose, in some rash venture, any schemes that might require close watching after we were interned. It was a similar indolent slouch in the China campaign that enabled the Japanese army to deceive the West about the strength of its first-string ground and air fighters.

Grateful for even this abbreviated freedom, several of us correspondents remained on the curb throughout most of the day, avoiding the “last ride” as long as possible. Our group included Royal Arch Gunnison of Colliers and Marjorie Gunnison of North American Newspaper Alliance, Carl and Shelley Mydans of Life Magazine, Jack Percival of the Sydney Morning Herald and his wife, and my family. Finally, in the late afternoon, we could delay no more.

We climbed into the bus—a faded blue object screened with wire, giving it the appearance of a patrol wagon—and started up Isaac Peral. Some of the fires smoldered, and smoke drifted through purpling shadows. I looked back. My last picture of “free” Manila was a gendarme, still spread-legged in the middle of the street, still watching the Filipinos through slit eyes.

Image

––––––––

––––––––

Battle of Singapore, February 1942.

Victorious Japanese troops march through the city center.

Photo: Imperial War Museum.

2

Rule By Torture

––––––––

THOSE SQUAT, VICIOUS gendarmes spread throughout the archipelago as the spearhead of Japanese military rule. Even while army officers were treating Manila’s Occidentals with astonishing politeness, the military police apprehended other Americans and British, Chinese and Filipinos against whom their agents had been collecting data for years before the war. Whisked away suddenly from their homes, and sometimes never seen again, these were the first of hundreds arrested by this nefarious power in the Philippines alone.

The gendarmerie, predecessor and counterpart of the Nazi Gestapo, is the right hand of Japanese rulers whose imperial control is based upon torture and brutality. Its thousands of officers and men stand behind every Japanese edict and every Japanese policy in Occupied Asia and the homeland. Through cultivated cruelty it attempts to throttle all active and potential opposition to the militarist masters. No resident of the new empire, including high-ranking Japanese, is too big or too unimportant to escape its constant scrutiny.

This is the formal agency behind the concentrated program of force which the militarists believe is essential to ensure obedience or “cooperation.” The Japanese soldier is subject to severe beatings or worse from his officers. In turn, he is taught as part of his basic training that he cannot expect obedience from natives without demonstrating his superiority by brutality. The result is endless viciousness, ranging from kicks and blows to murder. When disciplinary force is intensified by hysterical vengefulness over defeat—or loss of face—it erupts into the mass horrors of Bataan or the assassination of whole Chinese villages. Gendarmes usually instigate concerted atrocities.

The militarists also believe in propaganda and use it extensively. But propaganda is secondary, in their opinion, and must be coupled with ruthlessness to be effective. Cleverer or more responsible Japanese civilians have been appalled by the wastage or horror of this policy, depending upon their viewpoints. But they cannot halt it because it springs from sources too powerful for them to oppose. Consequently, directly antagonistic programs of viciousness and friendship are in effect throughout the empire.

Gendarmes have arrested hundreds of Occidentals and thousands of natives in the Occupied Areas. Specific charges seldom are made. Questioning reveals a desire to obtain information, to punish “anti-Japanese” acts, to ferret out real or imagined spies, to retaliate for complaints against internment camp treatment and to intimidate the populace through the maltreatment of hostages. Brutality is rare in civilian internment camps and, for the present, in most war prisons. Every inmate, however, can be taken without cause to a gendarmerie station for unrestrained torture.

The military police epitomize the worst in the Japanese army— from their sadism to the corruption that has made the gendarmerie a vast kidnapping and blackmail ring, auxiliary to its disciplinary duties. In outlining its methods, I shall combine incidents from the Philippines with others occurring elsewhere, purposely generalizing to protect from possible retaliation those of my sources still remaining in Asia.

The gendarmerie is an army organization, staffed with army officers and men, but its powers of investigation are so great that it can involve even the highest-ranking officer, if his conduct becomes suspicious. The gendarmerie is responsible directly to the emperor, through the anonymous militarists who actually rule. Only they would have the power to soften its barbarity if they were so minded.

The secret police were vital in maintaining Japan’s long unbroken dictatorship, beginning with the first shogunate in the twelfth century. Through the centuries they developed oppression into a fine art, and their methods were not changed when the islands threw off feudalism in 1871.

The militarists continue to rely on this superlegal force in controlling the thought of modern Japan. Today, every Japanese desperately fears and hates the gendarmerie.

Officers with particular aptitude for enforcing discipline, by any means, are given gendarmerie duty for varying periods, former Premier Hideki Tojo once was commander in chief of the Manchuria Military Police and earned the reputation as the army’s sternest disciplinarian. The most bullying, aggressive young men in each group gf conscripts are earmarked for eventual gendarmerie service. Once they are transferred to that branch, they undergo a calculated course in brutality from their superiors which includes some of the punishment they are expected to inflict upon their subsequent victims.

Uniformed gendarmes, retaining their regular army rank, accompany the troops to enforce discipline among their own soldiers in the field, captured prisoners of war and the civilian populations of occupied territories. They are distinguished by a white armband on the left arm which, curiously, bears in red the English letters “M.P.” alongside the Japanese characters for “Kenpei.” They also wear two small gold-plated chrysanthemum crests, on their coat collars, indicating their direct responsibility to the emperor. It is not uncommon to see regular army officers of superior rank treating gendarme sergeants with scrupulous courtesy.

Plainclothes gendarmes conduct the more secret investigations, which include a thorough check on the spoken thoughts of the populace. They infest every hotel, cafe, nightclub, sporting arena, train and ship, pretending to be customers in order to overhear conversations which might give them information concerning the involved political situations in occupied cities, or might point to the source of anti-Japanese activities. Like the fabled American “flatfoot” whose appendages always give him away, the eavesdropping gendarme generally is recognizable by his cruel face, his intense interest in his neighbors and the sometimes-amateurish methods he uses to appear nonchalant.

But others are more clever. Experts have studied not only the languages but the most minute habits and characteristics of other Asians. They operate in numerous disguises, especially as fishermen and coolies. They are particularly adept in passing as Chinese. In occupied Shanghai, for example, they constantly prowled around the homes of suspected foreigners. The victims, sighting what appeared to be a dirty Chinese thug, hesitated before driving him away, because they never knew whether they were being investigated or robbed. Violence against a gendarme in disguise would have given the secret police a neat excuse for doing their worst.

The Japanese have a third method of guarding the thoughts of their subjects. By bribery, brutality and threats of force, the gendarmerie have coerced thousands of people into their service as stool pigeons. Throughout Asia today, literally every man is suspicious of his neighbor. He can never be sure that by trusting even prewar friends he is not betraying himself to gendarmerie informers.

As in every country where the secret police operate, long-standing grudges, jealousies and animosities have delivered many victims to the Japanese vultures, through the false testimony of an informer. The victim’s denials are meaningless, for once the gendarme accepts a lie from whatever source, he usually supports it to save his own face.

These thousands of active gendarmes and tens of thousands of actual or potential informers are engaged in what amounts almost to a person-to-person campaign to crush opposition to the conquerors. In enforcing this program, the Japanese attempt to reach even the commonest coolie. Typically, they are not discouraged by the prospect of intimidating over 400,000,000 people, including their own. Instead, they recognize the potential value of every human and the potential dangers of the unconvinced, however insignificant they might appear on the surface.

The gendarmerie enlarges this control by requiring every subject to carry a residence certificate, issued by the regular police, which contains his picture and thumbprint.

This card, useful for prompt identification in an emergency, also helps the secret police to eliminate the subterfuge of names. Permission also must be obtained from the gendarmerie to travel, to change residences or places of business, to establish new businesses and, in some cases, to sell personal possessions.

Enforcing the numerous edicts issued by the military administration in occupied areas, the military police take charge of every disciplinary case, whether the prisoner is accused of being a guerrilla or saboteur or whether he is merely suspected of dealing in foreign currency or listening to a shortwave radio. In each case the severity of the treatment has nothing to do with the original suspicion; it depends more upon the mood of the inquisitor or the prejudices he might have against the victim’s nationality.

No specific charges are required for gendarmerie investigation and usually none are made unless sentence is passed. Dozens of Occidentals and natives have been thrown into gendarmerie stations, kept there for varying periods and often tortured, then released, all without knowing specifically why. Some have been dumped into filthy cells and ignored for months, then freed without even being questioned. Prisoners have no rights and no standing except the sufferance of their captors. Any request for rights or for specific charges is answered by instant brutality.

Most of the victims are men. But a number of women are known to have been confined in various gendarmerie stations, where they were subject to any type of treatment their captors decreed. These included Russians and French in Shanghai, as well as native women; among them a few Chinese girl guerrillas. A few cases have been reported involving American women.

In Manila, the main gendarmerie station is at Fort Santiago, an old Spanish building in the Walled City. Its long-disused dungeons were reopened by the Japanese, and many prisoners put in them. Others are kept in barren cells, sleeping on the floor, or, at best, on thin tatami matting. In Shanghai during extremely cold winters, one blanket sometimes is issued to ten men, huddled together on the concrete floor for warmth. Often their shoes are taken away while in the cell. All races are mixed together—part of the attempt to illuminate the Occidental. Most of the women who were arrested were thrown in with the men.

Food is limited to two small balls of dry rice daily, about enough to fill the palm of the hand. In time, men of all social ranks fight bitterly for even this unpalatable and unsanitary mess, standing around the door at feeding time like ravenous dogs. Drinking water is scarce; washing facilities nonexistent and sanitary facilities primitive. Permission must be obtained to use them or to get a drink. Smoking is prohibited and so are books and all forms of recreation, except an occasional short exercise period under strict guard.

Sometimes, after weeks of persistent effort, relatives obtain permission to send small amounts of food and clothing to the victims. Infrequently, guards have been known to take bribes to procure food. Otherwise, the prisoner wears his same clothes constantly, and neither they nor he is washed. Vermin of all types are prevalent. He loses weight and strength rapidly on the gnat-sized diet. If his treatment is of average viciousness, he soon becomes so weak that after each inquisition he slinks back to his cell and lies still and ignored, easing his wounds the best he can. Even the hard, concrete floor appears welcome, after a session in the torture chamber. Medical treatment is nonexistent, and doctors are summoned only for the severest cases, when the gendarmes feel that the man has a disease that threatens them or when the life of an important witness is endangered.

The strong survive; the weak die. The moans of many victims have ceased abruptly in the night, and the next morning their stiffened bodies are carted away like refuse.

Some of the tortures used by the Japanese are too vicious to be described. Others are well known through the appalling testimony of repatriated survivors. Death is not the aim, although it occurs frequently. The purpose is to break a man’s spirit, to leave him alive but permanently scarred mentally, whether the immediate intent is to extract information, to punish or to use the victim as a spiritless symbol of gendarmerie might.

The most notorious method, perhaps, is the “water cure.” The victim is stretched out on his back, often on a medieval rack which stretches his arms and legs. Then gallons of water are poured down his nostrils through thin rubber tubes. The body swells painfully, blood trickles from the mouth and nose, due to internal hemorrhages, and the prisoner goes through the first choking stages of drowning. If he loses consciousness, he is jerked to his feet and slapped back to sensibility, then the treatment is continued. Several Americans have undergone this torture, some of them many times. They describe it as a “horrible nightmare.”

The rack itself is used also, as is the lash, hanging by the wrists, electricity and chemicals which burn sensitive skin. Beatings are frequent and regular, usually with a heavily leaded club. The prisoner is often prodded with sharp bamboo spears, generally resulting in internal injury. Many are forced to sit all day, Japanese style, in a half squat, with an iron bar through their doubled legs to increase the pain. The inquisitor may add his weight to heighten the pressure on knees which seem about to burst.