CULTURAL BRIDGE PRODUCTIONS
Childhood Memories of the Pacific War
by Joseph Romero, © 1997

EDITOR'S PREFACE:  What follows is an eyewitness account of the two most significant events occurring in the Philippines during World War II.  Written by Joseph Romero, a physician in Washington, D.C. who has been practicing for over 36 years, they are the experiences of a young boy.  In as much as he is speaking openly about the events he witnessed, he speaks for a generation who have either consciously remained silent about their experiences or have not survived as witnesses to share their stories. Joseph's memoirs were written as a personal history for his family.  His writings have been edited here only to address a wider audience.  They appear by the express permission of Joseph Romero.


I was prompted to write about my childhood experiences during World War II after reading my wife's great-granduncle's memoirs of the American Civil War.  Endeavoring to rely only on direct observations while my memory was still good, I wrote about my experiences so that my family will know what happened. Unfortunately the world has long forgotten these events.

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis
[The times are changing and we are changing with them]

I was born on July 5, 1933 in Manila, the Philippines of a mestizo (Spanish and Filipino heritage) father and a German-American mother from New York City.  I was raised, until age eight, at Fort William McKinley (now Fort Aguinaldo) near Manila, where my playmates were American.  Shortly before the onset of the Second World War, my parents separated and I was sent, along with my younger sister, Nancy, and brother, Mike, to live with my aunt and paternal grandmother in the town of Capas, located in the northern province of Tarlac.  My mother remarried and I was raised by my stepfather.  

WAR!

On December 8, 1941 (Philippine time) I was eight-years old.  I heard low-flying bombers go right over our house.  I was terrified and asked my aunt what was happening.  She said, "The war has started."  I cried: "Let's leave!"  Her discouraging answer was, "There is no place to go, this is a World War."

The residents of our village tried to prepare for an imminent attack by the Japanese.  Rumors flew:

"How do you tell a Japanese from a Chinese?"

"Well, you look at their big toes, Japanese wear a sneaker with a mitten-like thumb for these toes.  Spread-toe equals Jap."

I wondered if a Japanese fifth columnist would take off his shoes so I could tell.

The men of the village dug L-shaped trenches, which were then boarded over and sandbags placed over the whole works.  The soil was weeping clay and I had a bad toothache. It felt like every tooth in my head was rotting out.  There was nothing I could take for relief, not even alcohol. I tried to pull the damn things out myself.  Never, ever get a tooth-ache squatting in a dark, damp hole in the ground.

It was decided that we should head for the hills.  We walked all night and when we finally stopped, I was so tired I slept in a ditch.  The moon was bright and when I looked up from the ditch where I could finally rest, I saw the tombstones of a cemetery. To this day I hate camping - might as well sleep in a ditch.

Everything quieted down, and we returned to town.  My older cousins decided I should join them in looting the abandoned Chinese stores.  I knew that looters were to be shot on sight by the Japanese, but went anyway.  We were in one of these stores when a convoy of soldiers stopped nearby.  My loot was one piece of orange hard candy.  I was terrorized when the soldiers got out of their trucks.  I can still flashback to my body going weak, my mouth dry and my heart racing.  We weren't shot or even caught.  Others were not so lucky.

After the Japanese had established a military government in town, we were told that anyone who had looted was to place the stolen goods in the marketplace where the rightful owners could reclaim them.  No one showed up so we were all rounded up and made to stand in the churchyard.  Then a Jap truck pulled up and three men were brought out.  It was a clear, blazing hot day.  It had to be the quietest day of my life.  The men were holding rosaries as they prayed.  I never saw such religiosity before or since.  They were forced to kneel in front of three previously dug holes.  A Japanese officer then stepped forward and beheaded each of them.  It wasn't at all like I expected it to be.  The heads were not completely lopped off.  They just kind of hung to their bodies.  The Japanese then kicked the three bodies into the holes, and an officer shot into the holes for the coup de grace.  That broke the quiet.  I didn't peek to see if he hit anyone.  Almost immediately they started shoveling dirt into the holes.  That was the end of the looting.

The Death March From Bataan

Our town was on the road to Bataan and Corregidor and was the last village before the dusty road that ended at Camp O'Donnell.  Here the "Death March" ended.  Day after day, truck-loads of Japanese headed south.  Then they came back empty.  We were sure the Americans and Filipinos (don't forget two-thirds of the troops were Filipinos) were killing them as fast as the Japanese could get there.  I saw some odd sights those days.  For example, I saw a busload of German sailors heading down that road.  I have never figured out what they were doing in that part of the world.

Then, the impossible happened. Bataan fell and the march began.  Stories preceded the prisoners' arrival in our town.  The women of the town made small loaves of bread when they learned our soldiers were starving.  We kids were designated to bring the bread and, more importantly, water to the soldiers.  Then the soldiers started to arrive.  They looked like skeletons.  Americans are much taller than Filipinos and I thought you would die before you got as thin as they were.  We brought the victuals to them.  The Japanese were displeased to put it mildly.  Fortunately they only hit us with their rifle butts to fend us off.

Guys were dying every day in the camp.  We were close enough to see the burial details bring out the bodies.  They would remove the deceased's clothes and shoes because the living needed them.  The body was wrapped in paper and buried outside the barbed wire fence.  Now and then, we would hear shots.  These were executions.

The very last truck carrying prisoners finally turned off our macadamized road to the Death Camp. The prisoners threw their money into the air for us to grab. I didn't get any. I read a lie later that the people gave or sold food to the soldiers. The latter did not happen. When you consider the danger we were in there was no way we could bargain with the soldiers even if we were inclined to do so.

During this entire time, the only act of kindness I witnessed on the part of any Japanese soldier was when one guard walked an American soldier to a small nipa shed so he could defecate (most of the prisoners had diarrhea as the result of malnutrition and diseases they caught).  I had thought the American was being led off to be killed.

School

The village school reopened.  The entire system was built on some 40 years of American occupation.  Our books were the same primers used in the U.S.  Even the language of instruction was English.  We were made to bring in rice paste and paste together any pages with American flags or even American looking scenes.  We ended up with rather bulky books.

We had one Japanese teacher, Watanabe san, who taught us Japanese. He had been a teacher in his homeland. He was a gentle man and a Christian who would furtively stand in the back of the church on Sundays. The villagers thought this was a risk to him since the rest of the Japanese worshiped the emperor.

Comfort Houses

The occupying troops would go to a house where women with a lot of makeup lived.  My eight-year old eyes noticed that most of the women had big bellies.  I wondered what made them swell up but no one told me and I never asked.

Ermita

It is unlikely that more than a dozen of us who survived the battle in of Ermita (a district in Manila) are still alive.  A few years ago, a Filipino friend asked me where I was at that time.  When I told him, "Ermita," he responded with, "That's impossible.  No one came out alive."  The bottom line is that our home was burned to the ground along with everything else, so I have no pictures of those days.

We had returned to the capital, Manila, in 1943 to live with my mother and stepfather.  Ermita was inhabited primarily by Caucasians: Spanish, Italians, German Jews, American women married to Filipinos, White Russians; and some African-Americans. Most of us were trapped in this section of the city and were forbidden to leave. Anyone trying to leave would have been easily identified and arrested. Unlike some of my compatriots, "heading for the hills" was never an option because of my American mother. We lived at 12 Plaza Ferguson (now Roxas Boulevard) in Ermita.

The Japanese males would bathe at an open fire hydrant near Fergusonn Plaza. Filipinos passing by were expected to stop, face these worthies and execute a deep, polite bow then proceed deferentially, never turning their back to them.

Once I saw one of my compatriots, who must have omitted part of this protocol, receive a lesson in manners from these good gentlemen. He was held to the street by several naked Japanese, then one of these nude fellows jumped up and down on the belly of the hapless man.

My young mind tried to picture the bathing practices in Japan. I wondered if both genders cavorted happily together on their public streets.

There was also a fountain at Plaza Ferguson with a busted pipe that drained day and night for years. As a result, the earth there was muddy. The Japanese soldiers would throw their leftover rice into this quagmire. The wretched, starving Filipinos would scratch this up and suck on the muck for the rice. The Japanese would howl with laughter at the sight.

Prostitutes also used the Plaza. They discarded smelly coffee cans of prophylactics in some kind of brown liquid. The wretches would wash them off with the flow from the broken pipe, dab them dry and sell them back to the proprietess at a side door to the house.

I knewthis guerrilla who instructed me and my friends to bury Molotov cocktails by designated coconut trees.  Had we been caught with these, we would have been shot on the spot, or tortured first by the Kempei.  Dressed as girls, we would also walk by the ammunition dump with a perambulator, steal gunnery shells and hide them.  We had no basement so I kept them in an area beneath our house.  We thought we were great big spies.  Fortunately we were never stopped.

In early February 1945, our family was going to seek refuge at my uncle's house where we had hoarded salted pork and water, but we never made it there.  My mother told me that uncle had called and said the streets were too dangerous for us to hazard the trip, but I knew the real reason.  One of our servants had come to our house and we gave him food for his family.  He opened the door to leave, took a few steps and was shot dead.  We tried to re-open the door to pull him in, but this brought a hail of bullets in our direction.  I tried to peek out a second story window to see if he was alive, but I dove to the floor when bullets came through the window.

The visible city around our house was ablaze.  Glowing bits of paper were sailing like leaves against the orange-black sky.  Japanese soldiers ordered us out of our our house and directly ahead of us I could see hundreds of people being shouted at and pushed by Japanese troops as they tried to assemble them into some order.  As I shuffled across the street, my foot knocked over an inverted flower pot.  I knew this was a cover for an aerial bomb buried with the fuse pointing up.  We had watched the Japanese dynamite holes to emplace them.  Civilians memorized these locations so we could warn the American tankers when they came.  A Japanese soldier came up to me and yelling "Kura!" shoved me away.  Had my heel struck the fuse, that would have been it.  The Jap was going to die anyway, sooner than later; I didn't.

In the plaza, the men were being pushed to the left and the women and children to the right. The Jap shoved me to the left, but my stepfather, knowing something was going to happen to the men, shoved me to the left. Hey, I'm the kind of guy who would have put on a dress and scarf on the Titanic!  My stepfather later told me the men were walked to the Manila Hotel, where they were taken out in groups of 30 and killed.  The Japs would bale a group of men with wire, after which gasoline was thrown on them followed by a hand grenade.  It wasn't as efficient as the Germans, but personal.

Those of us in the group of women and children were driven down the walkway of the Bay View Hotel.  Each side of this walkway was lined with soldiers who pointed their fixed bayonets at us as they shouted orders to go into the hotel.  It was used as a garrison so all the furniture had been taken out long before we were herded into the rooms there.  American artillery pounded the area throughout the night.  Sitting on the floor of the room, there were flashes of light, deafening noise, and the building shook.

There was no food or water.  We drank toilet water which was rationed out a few gulps-per-day.  Then the tanks ran dry.  My mother, who pretended to be crazy, complained to the officer so much that he grabbed my ten-year old sister and me and led us to the Manila Hotel swimming pool with empty buckets.  The shelling was heavy.  When it got close, the three of us would duck into a Japanese bunker.  I remember soldiers sitting there.  They would look up startled at the two children and then when the officer who escorted us entered, they seemed bemused.  I don't think his presence saved them from us, but I know it saved us from them.  We were so used to the American shelling by then that we could predict patterns.  Each time there was a lull in the bombing, we darted towards the Bay View.

Not all of the rooms at the hotel were barren.  The Japanese officer in charge had a nicely furnished room, food, drink and a mistress, Nadja.  Nadja was a White Russian woman who lived near us.  We passed by their room on one occasion, and when she saw us, she invited us to stay with her.  My mother declined the invitation.  My dad later told me that when the Americans got close, the survivors of the Manila Hotel massacres ran towards the lines.  Nadja lay shot on the ground, alive and begging for help. Men ran around her, but no one stopped.  Her beau had shot her as he took off for his last banzai.

I knew all along that these murderous bastards were going to fight and die to the last man.  They were determined that none of us would live.  I think the Filipinos had been a great disappointment to them.  Sure there were traitors and collaborators as in any war, but the puppet government never raised an army to join the fight for the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere."

In general, resistance to the occupation took the form of graffiti and the guerrillas. The former were constrained, because anytime a Japanese soldier was killed, innocent civilians were executed in retaliation. This made it very difficult to support guerrilla activity. Puppet officials ran civil affairs exclusively and were later pardoned by my stepfather's uncle, Elpidio Quirino, when he became president of the Republic. This was no less than remarkable. The elder Quirino and his family suffered attacks during the Occupation for his refusal to collaborate and lost a two-year old child who was thrown in the air to be speared by a Japanese bayonet for sport. There were really no Quislings or Lavals, and we preferred a civil government to direct Japanese martial rule.

At times, there were no troops around and I would wander around some empty rooms of the hotel.  I came upon a large bound book, opened it and found that it contained the Sunday colored comic strips of Tarzan.  There must have been a year's worth of the comics.  I spent hours reading the comics and looking at the pictures.  I wondered if the Japanese had a Tarzan fan club.

Sometimes I would look out the window of the hotel from our floor (I think we were about six stories up).  The view was, of course, of Manila Bay.  The first time I looked out, I saw a Filipino with his hands up on the beach approaching Japanese soldiers.  When he got into range, they shot him.  He dropped instantly.  I recognized the man as my guerrilla friend who had had us bury Molotov cocktails.

Ere long the Japanese started taking the young girls out of the rooms to rape them.  The older women would cross themselves and lament, "She is such an innocent girl.  She has never missed a day of mass."  The girls were usually shoved back into the same room by these "gentlemanly" escorts.  The process was unrelenting.  I did not witness these atrocities of course.  My sister, Nan, hid laying down behind my mother, my seven year old brother, Mike, and myself.  With my mother acting crazy, the Japanese did not go near us and did not see her.  In time some of the people, who had been scrounging for food said they saw a soldier raping the corpse of a dead girl.  By then, having accepted these Japs as animals, this did not surprise me.

After about a week, the building was burned.  I am certain this was set off by the Japanese, since mortar and howitzer fire could not put a dent in the walls of this building, built to withstand earthquakes.  Smoke came up the hallways.  The building was designed so that each cross section contained an empty square within a square.  The smoke came up these center, vacant squares.

The Japanese would not let us leave.  I remember the next sequence of events vividly.  My mother, who was in her thirties at the time had some knowledge of Japanese psychology, perhaps acquired during the frequent interrogations by the Kempei she underwent at Fort Santiago.  She spotted the Japanese officer in charge and said to him, "Number one man say no can go."  Whatever his reason, I presume it was to "save face," this officer said, "I number one man, go!"  So without further ado, we started streaming out of the building into the shelling outside.  The entire Ermita section was now rubble.

By now, instinctively we hit the ground when we heard the whistle of incoming fire.  During our run through the debris ridden city, I fell face down on the ground next to the trunk of a fallen tree when  I heard an incoming shell.  The shell exploded on the other side of the tree.  I would guess that the impact was not more than five to ten yards from me.  I came very close to proving the theorem that "two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time."  Oddly enough, I didn't think it was a big deal or close call at the time.

We looked for any structure that would give us cover.  There were some buildings standing, albeit lacking much of their walls.  The first place we went to had housed a beauty shop.  The wall facing the Bay View Hotel was gone.  I sat under a sink, with an inverted pot over my head, facing the Bay View - I remember by sister laughed at my appearance.  Suddenly a terrific explosion shookthe hotel.  Plaster and smoke came out of every window.  Then there was a second blast.  The building withstood both explosions, but I'm certain that we wouldn't have.  I understand that after the war, the building was repaired and resumed functioning as a hotel.

We ran from ruin to ruin, hoping to get nearer the American lines.  By now I believed I brought bad luck to everyone I spoke to.  They all died.  I remember sitting in a room with my friend, Eddie L_____.  We looked at each other, but neither of us spoke.  I last saw Eddie when we were running out of a ruined building, to which we had attached a sheet with a large red cross.  We poor souls thought this would save us from friendly fire.  The Americans opened up on our feeble ruin.  Eddie's mother laid against a fallen sheet of corrugated galvanized roofing with a red spot in the center of her white top.  Just that, no blood pouring elsewhere.  She probably was dead.  Later my father told me he ran into Eddie and Eddie told him he saw me and I looked scared.  Hey Eddie!  If you read this please understand that I didn't speak to you because I didn't want you to die too.  It's weird how kids think under such circumstances.

Now there was no food or water. We went to another building, and I laid down on the floor of a room at ground level. A shell hit the room on the other side of the wall from us. The wall fell. There had been a group of refugees in that room which was now filled with fire, smoke, and dead and dying people. The survivors were bleeding and groaning. There was no way for us to help. Then we learned that there were more groups of people in other rooms of the building. All of a sudden, a couple of Caucasian men in civilian clothes, speaking unaccented English approached our group. One guy said, "watch out for the boots, they are hobnailed." Then they left and returned a few minutes later with a soupy pot of boiled rice. We gratefully ate what was given us and never saw these guardian angels again.

The upper floors of the building were infested with Japanese soldiers. The shelling got worse and worse and more civilians died, but the Americans could do no wrong. People said, "they have to shell because the Japanese are in the building."

In desperation, it was decided that the blonde women and children would step outside and wave a white flag at the Piper Club spotter planes. It was no use. Within a few moments, the shelling opened up in saturation mode. This time we rationalized that "they think the Japanese have forced us to wave the white flag so the Americans will stop shelling." I thought the spotter pilot was an S.O.B. He killed a lot of us, but I doubt that his judgment accounted for one additional Jap. He was probably the same guy who called fire on our "Red Cross" building. We had to leave this building. When we did, we headed directly for the sound of small arms fire because we knew it had to be the American lines.

We ended up in a vacant house.  I lay on the floor of the kitchen.  There was a catalog of the 1939 World's Fair.  I read this from cover to cover.  No food in that kitchen.  Then a terrific explosion hit the building. The bomb landed in the living room.  I went to the place where the bomb had landed.  Dante would have been inspired.  Flames, blue smoke, bodies or parts thereof were strewn all over the place.  A mother carried the upper part of her four or five year old daughter, while another daughter carried the child's leg.  The three of them were dazed, scared, crying hysterically, and wandering in shock.  The little one was still alive, but unresponsive.  The fire was getting hotter and hotter.  We left the building for the streets again.  Someone said, "Americans would never do this.  The Japanese must have planted a bomb."  Any explosive was called a "bomba" whether it was an aerial, a howitzer a land mine or a booby trap.

We ran across more debris and ruins, as we got several yards away, a Japanese soldier ran by waving a pistol at us.  He seemed to be smiling, but did not shoot.  We had not had face-to-face contact with any Japanese for several days, and I was certain that this was it for me.  I looked him in the eyes, I don't know why.  Perhaps I thought this would be my last sight on earth.  Who knows?  Maybe human eye contact elicited a touch of pity or mercy.  He did not shoot me.

As I write of these experiences, I have lost count of the close calls and have only written the memorable ones.  I haven't counted starving as one.

When we were about a block from the burning house, the heat was so intense that even today, I can feel my body heating up when I recall the scene. I literally felt as if I would fall to the ground from the extreme temperature.

We passed through more rubble, another burned-out building.  The small arms fire got closer and closer.  Someone came and said there were Caucasian soldiers nearby, but didn't know if they were Germans or Americans.  Before the war, Americans wore the same helmets as the British - "Tommy helmets."  Their new helmets resembled the German helmets we had seen in pictures.  We had to decide whether to run to the American lines or wait for them to reach us.  My mother said without hesitation, "We're going to the lines, whatever they are they can't be any worse than these Japs."  About half of the survivors elected to go with us.  I later found out that those remaining were all killed in the room-to-room fighting.  Americans had to throw grenades into each room.  Of our group, about half lived.

As I ran for the American lines, the Japanese in the upper floors were shooting at me.  Bullets kicked up spots of dirt about me.  I was a speedy and by then streetwise eleven-and-a-half-years old.  I instinctively knew that running in a non-linear fashion would give them less chance to draw a bead on me.  I never slowed up or looked back.  My speed and the broken field would have won me the Heismann trophy.  I took this business of shooting at me personally, the other times were more random.

Then there was quiet.  A vacant street, with three dead Japs in the middle of it.  Corpses do not keep well in the tropics.  The bodies were black and bloated, the bloated skin had split in places with yellow fat visible.  The eye and mouth apertures looked like they were full of boiled rice moving incessantly.  These were maggots, feasting.  Some would drop off and fall down a chin or cheek.  Some people were kicking the corpses.  I didn't.  First of all, I didn't think to and secondly, the bodies were soggy and my foot would have would have gone into or through them.

Tired, we sat on a curb.  Looking behind us, we saw five or six more putrid, bloated bodies.  "Mom," I said.  "There are some dead men behind us."

"They're just Japs."

"No mom, they're Filipinos, their hands are tied behind them."  Silently, we continued with our rest stop.

We heard English voices. They were G.I.s. Holding their rifles from behind a low cement wall. Someone in our party yelled: "We're Americans." From behind the wall came a, "So are we lady, get back. In about five minutes the artillery is going to open up right where you stand." Prudently we moved on making no more idle chit-chat.

We walked deeper and deeper into the ruined city. Several G.I.s were sitting on the ground, eating K rations. I was starved, but too proud to beg, but my emaciated face must have said it all because one of the guys said, "Sorry kid. This is the first food I've had in days." Those k-rations sure looked good. Since the end of the war, my mind goes back to this episode whenever I hear soldiers or veterans gripe about army chow.

Epilogue

We were safe at last, but poor refugees.  The Red Cross handed us dry rice and the meat we found was putrid, coming from swollen tin cans.  Fortunately I didn't know what botulism was.   The city was ravaged.  Finally, my mother, my brother, my sister and I took refuge in an abandoned store.  We slept on the dirty, debris littered floor.  We would wander the streets looking for familiar faces or relatives to help us.  We did not know if my stepfather survived.  Eventually we found a distant relative, a Mason, who could predict the future.  We would sit with him at a table which had a candle placed in the center.  He would murmur "San Anton.  Is he dead or alive?"  St Anthony is the patron of lost objects. Then he told us, "San Anton says he is alive."  In a couple of weeks my stepfather came to our hovel.  I guess the soothsayer was right (or a good guesser fifty percent of the time).  Still we had no work, no food, no home, and no relatives - they were all dead.  My parents made the decision to report to the U.S. Army for repatriation to the States.

Within six weeks of the final battle, we were processed at Santo Thomas, then put aboard the SS Monterrey - a prewar cruise ship commandeered during war to transport troops,  and enroute to San Francisco.  That was on May 3, 1945.  While we were at sea, the captain announced that Germany had surrendered.  We didn't care.  That was another war in another world. 

As I mentioned above, the area of Manila we lived in was predominantly Caucasian-inhabited: Spaniards, Italians, German Jews, American women married to Filipinos, White Russians and American Negroes, which reminds me that even in hell humans are all the same.

As we wandered through the battered, burning city a brown-haired woman said to my mother, "My dear we mustn't mingle with the natives." My mother shot back, "Back home you couldn't walk on the same side of the street with me." Later, I asked my mother "Why not?" She said, "because she is an American Negro." I still didn't get it until I observed racism in the U.S. Shortly after disembarking in San Francisco, we were put up in barracks in Oakland. I made my first American friend there. I would go to his house, where his mother always made us cookies and other treats. Then I was told, "You shouldn't be playing with that boy." I asked, "Why not?" and was told "Because he is a Negro." Incredible!

My mom had sisters in Los Angeles.  We stayed with them for about a year. In 1946 my stepfather's uncle was elected vice president of the new Philippine Republic.  My stepfather was appointed to the Philippine embassy in Washington, DC.  More than half a century later I am still here, having gone to grade school, high school, Georgetown College and School of Medicine.  I married a beautiful, wonderful girl from Indiana in 1960.  We  have 4 beautiful daughters,  a handsome son, and eleven loving grandchildren. Despite the influences of the  Vietnam generation they have grown up drug free and have both my wife's and my quaint old values.  I am blessed with the  most stable and loving family anyone could hope for.


Assistance in editing this story was provided by Kevin McClure
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