The Leper Spy (13 page)

They told her who to look for once she had reached the American headquarters at Calumpit, thirty-five miles north of Manila, but no one advised her how best to get there. She knew the Japanese army was spread between Manila and Calumpit, probably planning ambushes on the southbound Americans. Roads and footpaths would be guarded, and passersby would be searched, possibly stripped naked. Other dangers lurked as well, not the least of which was the Hukbalahap, the Communist guerrillas who were also fighting the Japanese but had a reputation of fighting everybody.

She went to confession and prepared herself for the long journey. Since travelers in cars were more likely to be searched, she thought it best to walk the thirty-five miles. Her illness had not subsided and she was often paralyzed by headaches and fatigue, but she swallowed her pain and set out. She walked off to the side of a two-lane highway that stretched due north out of Manila and soon reached Malolos, a little more than halfway to Calumpit, without being noticed. The Japanese sentries didn't think a little woman
would be going much farther, so they left her alone with perfunctory searching.

A villager in Malolos warned her of the open warfare between the Japanese and the Huks up ahead, and she decided to leave the roadway to avoid the conflicting forces. In Malolos, she hired a
banca
driver to take her along the Pampanga River to Hagonoy, but just after they left, they were pursued by six
bancas
filled with river pirates. Her
banca
was swift and the driver was unafraid and they made it to Hagonoy ahead of the pirates. She walked the remaining eight and a half miles to Calumpit but got bad news when she arrived. The Thirty-Seventh had advanced three hours earlier, relocating headquarters to Malolos. She had to turn around and walk all the way back.

When she finally found the Americans, she asked for Captain Blair, which she assumed was another alias. The soldiers subjected her to a battery of questions before letting her through. A soldier named Dixon with the 129th Infantry attached to the 37th Division passed a note through at 10:17
AM
.

“A CO picked up a Filipino woman who has contact with a Capt. of the guerrilla forces,” he wrote. “They have complete info of enemy installations to the South.”

After much shuttling about, she was brought to Captain Blair, who put her through further questioning. Then he asked about the map. She had not spoken a word about the map, just that she was in contact with guerrillas and knew about enemy movements in the city. She removed the drawing from her back and handed it to him. The captain opened a large map that revealed all the mines and traps on the north side of Manila, including the newly sown field east of Blumentritt. He swore. Then he asked her how she slipped through Japanese lines. She told him what she had been through and he swore again.

“By God,” he said. “I never dreamed that Filipino women had such courage.”

She attached herself to the Thirty-Seventh and rode with the troops toward Manila in the race to be first to the city.

Other soldiers pushing north, with the help of Emmanuel de Ocampo and the Hunters, saw Manila burning from atop Tagaytay Ridge. Fires and great columns of smoke reached into the sky as the Japanese, aided by the Makapili, torched their own stores and ammo dumps. The Hunters and men from the Eleventh Airborne nonetheless pushed on before running into fierce resistance south of Nichols Field. Though they suffered some nine hundred casualties, they successfully cut the Manila Naval Defense Force's escape and sawed off reinforcement routes.

That Saturday, February 3, 1945, the First Cavalry crossed the northern city limits at 6:35
PM
, a few hours before the Thirty-Seventh Division, and spread out, following MacArthur's orders to take Malacañang Palace and the Legislative Building.

The thin and hungry men, women, and children at Santo Tomas watched as American planes swooped in close, nearly buzzing the roof off the guard tower. The prisoners saw something the guards had not. From one plane a pilot dropped something that landed in a
courtyard near the main building. One of the residents fetched the fallen object. It was a pair of goggles with a note attached. “Roll out the barrel,” it said. “There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”

When darkness fell on Santo Tomas, a great cheering could be heard filling the streets of Manila, followed by the roar of internal combustion motors and the clanking sound of metal on stone. One US Army nurse at Santo Tomas lifted her nose and said, “That smells like GI gasoline.” In the confused excitement, the internees were ordered into the main building, where they listened as the rifle fire got closer and Japanese guards manned their posts. Then, a voice in the darkness:

“Where the hell is the front gate?”

Soon a tank named Battlin' Basic, from the Forty-Fourth Tank Battalion, crashed through the gates of Santo Tomas, followed by one called Georgia Peach. Capt. Manuel Colayco, a guerrilla fighter and one of Joey's friends who had led the cavalry through the city to Santo Tomas, was pointing out buildings to the Americans when, out of nowhere, a Japanese soldier lobbed a grenade. It exploded before the guerrilla, and he became the first guerilla casualty of the liberation of Manila.

The internees huddled inside one of the buildings were jarred when a soldier kicked in a door and pointed his carbine at the crowd.

“Are there any goddamned Japs in there?” he asked.

One elderly woman spoke up, tears in her eyes.

“Soldier, are you real?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I reckon I am.”

The soldiers were healthy white boys from places like Corning, New York, and Kerrville, Texas, and Towers Hill, Illinois, and Lewistown, Pennsylvania, and they'd all get shiny medals pinned to their uniforms for their courage and speed. The prisoners began cheering and screaming and they raced to the yard and up onto the tanks pouring in, slapping backs and crying. They sang “God Bless America” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” as soldiers cleared the buildings of the remaining Japanese guards. When one of the enemy
reached for his shoulder bag, he was shot in the gut by an American major. Lieutenant Abiko, whom internees referred to as “the devil's right hand,” fell on the lawn, writhing, and the crowd of internees attacked him, spitting at him and kicking him and stripping the medals from his uniform. Some slashed him with knives and others burned him with cigarettes. When they had taken their revenge, the medical staff took over and treated Abiko's wounds with sulfa and bandages, then sent him to bed, where he died within a few hours.

“War makes animals of us all,” one doctor said to another.

Many Japanese soldiers had fled the city to join fighters in the mountains, but those left behind were operating under confused orders. Some holed up, prepared to fight to the death, which would prove tragic for the Filipinos and their beloved city.

General MacArthur's intelligence units weren't able to come up with a clear picture of Japanese intentions, but it seemed likely that General Yamashita would abandon the city, as MacArthur had done before. However, Manila was also being defended by a rear admiral in the Japanese navy whose duty was to destroy all naval installations. Rear Adm. Sanji Iwabuchi had already been embarrassed by MacArthur when he failed to stop the US advance along the northern coast in New Guinea. He didn't want to go down again without a fight. Yamashita disagreed with Iwabuchi, but he couldn't control the naval officer, who wanted to defend the fifteen square miles of the city to the death.

When the Thirty-Seventh entered the city, Captain Blair gave Joey permission to go anywhere, even to the front lines.

The city was in the throes of destruction. In Tondo, Japanese soldiers dragged civilians by the dozen, children included, into the Paco Lumber Yard and bayoneted them, slashed their throats, or shot them cold. The Thirty-Seventh Division found more than one hundred dead, left to rot in the heat of the sun or doused with gasoline and burned. The imperial soldiers strung dynamite in the private buildings, and as fire reached each new charge, massive explosions shook the neighborhoods and fountains of flame flicked the sky.
Brick and stone rained down like a hailstorm. When the Thirty-Seventh reached the camp at Bilibid Prison, they found 1,275 prisoners of war, their dirty toes sticking out of busted shoes and their mouths gaping at how large and healthy their rescuers appeared, as though they were giants or immortals. During the assault to take the prison, some of the internees were so scared they'd be slaughtered that they had tried to dig foxholes with their fingers. When the Americans tried to escort the prisoners to safety, they ran into the sniper fire that seemed to be coming from all directions.

And there in the thick of the madness was Joey, walking through the growing inferno as Japanese soldiers blew their own munitions houses, just as the Americans had done three years before. She walked through the roar of war like an angel of mercy, unafraid, bullets biting the ground at her feet. American soldiers, huddled behind walls or crouched in foxholes, marveled as she walked upright while bombs burst around her.

“You are tired,” she would say to the soldiers. “Stay here and rest.”

At Santo Tomas, still being targeted by Japanese potshots, twenty-two people were killed and thirty-nine were wounded on the very day General MacArthur claimed that Manila had fallen like a ripe plum. Maybe strategically, but the battle was far from over.

As the fight spun on, Joey bound up the wounds of soldiers and civilians and carried frightened children to safety. She prayed for the dying and closed the eyes of the dead. Some men she buried. She worked herself to exhaustion and was thrilled the day she suffered a hemorrhage of the lungs, thinking that soon she might die and be with God. One priest who observed her work overheard a man say, “I have not seen a human being like Joey.”

Her countrymen were falling. Japanese commanders issued a special order declaring open season on Filipino civilians.

“The Americans who have penetrated into Manila have about 1,000 troops, and there are several thousand Filipino guerrillas. Even women and children have become guerrillas,” it said in Japanese.
“All people on the battlefield with the exception of Japanese military personnel, Japanese civilians, Special Construction Units, will be put to death.”

All the Filipino men inside the walled city of Intramuros, some three thousand of them, were herded into a cell at Fort Santiago, doused with gasoline, then shot by a cannon placed 110 yards away. One witness said just fifty of the three thousand were able to escape. When American shells began falling on private homes in Ermita, the Japanese tricked residents into gathering in the plaza; then they sorted the young girls from the rest. Girls ages fifteen to twenty-five were taken to a café, where they were raped by marines coming off their shifts. One young girl was cut open by a bayonet. Another girl would later testify at a war crimes trial that she was raped by as many as fifteen men that first night.

A radioman from CBS News sent a report back to America on February 9, a full week after he had arrived at Santo Tomas with the First Cavalry.

“The fight for the city is progressing, but that progress is slow, because it is necessary to pry these suicidal maniacs out of their every hiding place, one by one and group by group,” he said. “They are not trying to retreat, withdraw, or reinforce. They are just staying put until such time as we kill them off. And their ultimate death will have served but one purpose—the reduction of the population of an over-crowded Japan. Militarily it will have contributed absolutely nothing to the fast crumbling New Order of East Asia.”

The Japanese, or at least some rogue elements, intended to defend Manila, and they eventually withdrew to the confines of Intramuros, entirely surrounded by sixteenth-century walls as thick as they were tall. No one was sure how many Japanese troops were inside, but they were there, firing on any fraction of exposed flesh. The radioman for CBS News, William Dunn, watched Intramuros from high atop a burned-out hotel on the opposite side of the Pasig River as a full corps, the Fourteenth, under the leadership of
Lt. Gen. Oscar Griswold, tried to dislodge the Japanese from the ancient district.

“I had been impressed with the naval shore bombardments at Gloucester, Leyte, and Lingayen, but none of them could compare with the artillery barrage that struck those ancient walls,” he would write. “In a shore bombardment, the shells that streak overhead burst long distances inland and the cacophony, while deafening, is somewhat muted by distance. In this bombardment the shells were bursting directly in front of us, barely three hundred yards distant. The shelling started exactly at 7:00
AM
and continued without pause for 90 minutes, slowly grinding holes in the ancient, resisting walls but falling far short of destroying them. In those ninety minutes our artillery, mortars, and light guns poured more than three hundred tons of steel into their target as we watched.”