The Leper Spy (5 page)

The days ticked by, and the bombs fell like clockwork on the airfield in Zambales Province, on Fort Wint, on Cabcaban airfield on Bataan.

On December 22, Maj. Gen. George Moore, holding the fort on Corregidor, received word that the enemy was near. Japan had made landings to the north and south, and foot soldiers were pushing southward in the central plain of Luzon toward Manila.

On December 23, an army officer told an assembly of ROTC boys at the Ateneo that they were to go home, to help their families and save themselves. En masse the boys objected, begging to be allowed to go to the front and fight as a united battalion. But the officer insisted, and slowly, grudgingly, the boys dispersed. Their day was to come, fighting as guerrillas in the hills and city streets, but many cried in that somber moment.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, Moore learned that MacArthur and his family, USAFFE headquarters staff, and Philippine president Manuel Quezon and his family would all be on Corregidor by nightfall. The newspapers and radio stations were declaring Manila an “open city,” suggesting US and Filipino troops would not try to defend it against attack. The Filipinos wondered what had happened to their great American military leader.

If this wasn't retreat, what was it?

The commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Expeditionary Forces to the Philippines would issue the first of several draconian warnings, sending fear pulsing through Filipino society.

Notice

1. The Japanese Armed Forces wishes to share the well-beings with the officials and people of the native land.

Wait the arrivals of the Japanese troops with confidence and ease. Regardless of the nationality, no one is necessary to flee.

2. Making resistance or taking the hostile actions against the Japanese Armed Forces, in any manner, leads the whole native land into the ashes. Therefore everyone should come under the protection of the Japanese Armed Forces without seeing even one drop of blood, and should continue daily business as usual.

3. Anyone who falls under the any of the followings will be considered as the interfering of the well-beings of the native peoples, and therefore be subject to the death penalty. Be aware of not commiting any of said crime.

(1) Those who show hostility against the Japanese Armed Forces.

(2) Those who jeopardize or break any existing means in politics, economics, industry, transportation, communication, financials, and etc.

(3) Those who disturb the thoughts of the officials and peoples.

(4) Any actions disturbing the economic and financial status.

Those who report to the Japanese Forces any flagrant offence or preventing of any said crime will be rewarded by the Japanese Armed Forces.

C
OMMANDER
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IN
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HIEF

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APANESE
A
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F
ORCE

T
he woman in the black dress called out to the young priest as he strolled around the Ateneo de Manila compound. He turned to see a diminished human being, her head and arms covered by a veil. She waved. He waved back and kept walking.

She called out once more, and he spun around. He'd given his last peso to a beggar at the Ateneo gates the day before, and there was little hope of getting any more. He hesitated. She beckoned him to come closer. When he did, he could see that the veil covered open sores on her arms, face, and legs.

“Are you Padre Hulian?” she asked.

“I'm Father Fred Julien,” he replied. “Possibly you are looking for a Jesuit priest of the same or a similar name.”

Father Julien hadn't been in Manila long, certainly not long enough to be recognized on the street. He wasn't supposed to be in the Philippines. Newly ordained, he had taken a train from his hometown of Albany, New York, across the country to San Francisco, and then boarded the SS
President Grant,
bound for Burma, where his band of La Salette fathers were starting a mission. They'd brought along six packing crates full of provisions—enough, they hoped, to last ten years in Burma. But the fathers noticed something strange after a short stop in Hawaii. The
Grant
was suddenly part of a five-ship convoy that was entirely blacked out at night,
and a spotter plane came and went from a cruiser escort each day. Close to Guam, the entire convoy made a sharp turn for Manila, where it arrived on December 7, which was December 6 in Hawaii. The next day, after Father Julien said Mass, the captain of the
Grant
announced that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. He told his passengers to sleep ashore in Manila that night because the Japanese might try to bomb the ships in the harbor. He told them the
Grant
would leave for Australia the next morning. If only. The La Salette fathers left their luggage and provisions aboard the ship and went in search of a place to stay at one of Manila's religious communities. The Jesuit priests at Ateneo de Manila, six blocks from the piers, invited them to stay. The students had been sent home when war broke out, so there were plenty of beds. But when the fathers returned to the pier the next morning, the
Grant
was gone, along with their luggage and provisions and a four-hundred-pound church bell for the mission in Burma. What little money the fathers had they soon handed over to the Jesuits at the Ateneo for room and board. Father Julien was very aware that he was penniless and stuck in a foreign country now engaged in war.

The mysterious lady in black asked him once more if he was Padre Hulian, a La Salette priest.

“Are not there three of you stranded in my country?” she asked.

“That is correct,” Father Julien answered.

She reached inside the folds of her dress and fished out an envelope and handed it to the priest. She told him that someone had asked her to give it to him. Then she turned and walked away.

Father Julien opened the envelope and gasped. He counted the money. One hundred pesos.

He began asking the Jesuits about the lady in black. One of them told him her name. Josefina Guerrero. He'd see her again.

T
he convoy entered Lingayen Gulf after nightfall on December 22—eighty Japanese ships carrying Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma and his Fourteenth Army of forty-three thousand soldiers who disembarked and fought ashore. The only challenge to the massive fleet was from a few 155-millimeter guns. On land, it quickly seemed like they knew exactly what they were doing. More and more it seemed as though the enemy had been living among the unsuspecting Filipinos, watching, waiting. The Japanese fishing fleets, friendly before the outbreak, knew every landing. The kindly Japanese photographer, who owned a legitimate business, had been taking pictures of the rapidly built fortifications. The laborers and farmers and merchants, it would be learned, were part of a patchwork of thousands of spies who for years had been turning over information to the empire in preparation for this day of conquest.

Maybe if the Filipino fighters were better trained or weren't fighting with World War I-era rifles, they could have driven back the attacking force. There was no choice but to retreat, lest they be easily overrun and slaughtered. And when Japanese troops landed at Lamon Bay on the east coast of Luzon, forty miles south of Manila, General MacArthur saw a nightmare coming: two forces working toward each other like the jaws of a “great military pincer,” he later wrote.

MacArthur was shocked, according to those around him. He was unable to give commands to his staff officers. When he finally got his bearings, he ordered troops from all over South Luzon to withdraw to Bataan, where the US and Philippine soldiers would make a final stand, side by side. They streamed through Manila, saying good-bye and “It'll be a long time before you see us again,” then rushed toward the peninsula, calling home one last time along the way, blowing up bridges behind them. He ordered the units fighting the Japanese in the north to “stand and fight, slip back and dynamite,” a delay-action retrograde maneuver that would give troops from the south time to get to Bataan.

The ROTC boys from the Ateneo and cadets from the Philippine Military Academy—the young ones who weren't commissioned but refused to go home—began trying to organize. They wanted to fight. They wanted to go to Bataan. There were about forty-three boys from the Ateneo alone, and they joined together with the military academy cadets and University of Santo Tomas students who couldn't return to their home islands, forming what they called the Second Regular Division. Some of them were fourteen and fifteen years old. Their elders were nineteen. They had courage but no weapons. They went to the Ateneo, to the Jesuit fathers, and asked if they could use the ROTC weapons.

“If you have authority, we will give you the guns,” one of the fathers said. “Anyway, if the Japanese get these, they'll use them against us.”

Father Monaghan, who had taught many of the boys, felt the two-way pull of pity and pride. They were all so eager, and so naive.

“Wherever you are, know that back here we will be praying for you every day,” he told them.

“Yes, father,” one said. “We know you will.”

And with that, a bunch of Catholic boys who had lied about their ages, who had left notes informing their mothers and fathers, boarded buses with rifles on their shoulders and began the long trip to Bataan to fight. As they left Manila, some of the boys began to
cry. They were men enough to go to war, but they wept openly as their city burned in a blur outside the window.

The Japanese warplanes continued screaming overhead, shelling the riverfront district and Intramuros, despite the surrender of the beautiful city. Convents and colleges erupted into rubble. Turned-up ships dotted the bay like tombstones. Knives of black smoke stabbed skyward. Everything burned. The piers, the oil depots of Pandacan, the port area. Those who could fled for the countryside. Those who couldn't stayed inside, doors locked. The areas not blazing were deserted, empty black curtains drawn over the windows.

When the sun slid down and the sky turned red, the casualties of the day's raids began to arrive at the Ateneo, a trickle at first, then a flood. Father Monaghan saw men running and an ambulance with a busted windshield trailing behind them. He ran to help the driver, who jumped out and threw open the rear doors. Inside lay the wounded, covered in blood. Some were naked, for their clothing had been blown clean off their bodies. When the fathers had emptied the ambulance, the driver shouted, “The port area is filled with others like these and no one is there to pick them up.”

“Let's go,” Monaghan told him, climbing in.

They raced to the Bureau of Printing, near the port, a temporary shelter that had taken a direct hit and was now ablaze. The priest found a pile of bodies at the door and a fire raging beyond. He snatched his sacred oils from his pocket and began anointing the dead.

Placards rose in a place now shocked by abandonment. O
PEN
C
ITY
, the signs over Taft and Rizal Avenues declared. Manila's gates were wide. The feared “yellow menace” would arrive any day. The men of Manila wondered how they'd be treated. The thought of how their wives and daughters would be treated brought them to tears. There were already whispers of the Rape of Nanking, in which brutal Japanese troops massacred and raped as many as three
hundred thousand noncombatants during the country's war with China. What would happen to the citizens of Manila?

Looting broke out at the piers first, then moved uptown to the grocery stores. Anything of value—bread, sugar, rice, cracked wheat—disappeared from shelves. Pharmacies were hit, too, and medicine grew scarce.

Carlos Romulo, a colonel on MacArthur's staff, had been left behind to see that all of the headquarters' personnel made the move to Corregidor. On New Year's Eve, he drove down Dewey Boulevard to say good-bye to his wife, then headed for the pier to catch a boat for Corregidor. He stopped at the Manila Hotel, where MacArthur had enjoyed the penthouse in peacetime. As the city outside burned, a band played in the lobby and well-dressed guests slow danced into the last American morning.

T
he first sound they heard in Manila was a chorus of hobnailed boots on stone like some sort of faint hymn carried on the January wind, getting closer, closer. The Japanese soldiers had moved so quickly on the city that the rumor spread that they'd been seen swinging limb to limb through the jungle like monkeys. There was no challenge when they arrived at the ancient city.

Manila had a new regime by January 3, 1942.

Around the city the Japanese soldiers marched, rounding up some five thousand British and American civilians, then the Dutch, Australians, and Canadians, pulling them from their homes and businesses and shuffling them off to Rizal Stadium, where they were sorted and sent to the harsh Bilibid Prison or the University of Santo Tomas, which was quickly converted into a prison camp and filled to capacity with men, women, and children. Fear caught in the throats of wives stripped from husbands, children snatched from mothers.

On January 4, soldiers showed up at the Ateneo to round up American civilians for internment. The priests were told to pack their bags because they were next. Businessmen who saw what was coming had opened up their warehouses and invited citizens to take what they could before the Japanese did. The Jesuits, sensing the war could last a long while, claimed wine in barrels and all the flour
they could carry so Mass could be administered daily. And it did go on as planned, but it was rationed from the first day. Priests prepared a small host and put wine into the chalice with an eyedropper.

Confusion reigned in those early days, exacerbated by a curious custom among the Japanese soldiers that drove the Filipinos mad. It was common practice for the soldiers to slap citizens who wouldn't or couldn't follow directions or didn't show proper respect. If a Filipino did not bow to a Japanese soldier, or did not bow low enough for his satisfaction, the citizen could expect a hard slap across the face. What was customary in Japan was incredibly insulting to the Filipinos. And while Japanese propaganda posters were being plastered across the city, promising they came as friends to assist the
Asiatic people, assaults on citizens solidified Philippine loyalty to America.