Post by VeeVee on Apr 21, 2009 20:46:18 GMT -5
www.amazon.com/Manila-Memories-Juergen-Goldhagen/dp/1848610106/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240364294&sr=8-1
---------------
Manila Memories, Four Boys Remember Their Lives Before, During, and After the Japanese Occupation edited by Juergen R. Goldhagen
Reviewed by John H. Bradley 1
Published by Old Guard Press, Exeter, U.K., 2008. Pp. 138; over 40 b&w photos; several drawings and maps. ISBN 978-1-84861-010-1. $17 paperback.
Manila Memories is an unusual and valuable book that recounts the stories of four pre-teenage boys – Juergen Goldhagen, Roderick Hall, Hans Hoeflein, and Hans Walser -- who lived in Manila with their parents during the Japanese occupation of the city from 1942 to 1945.
It is unusual because the then-young authors provide perspectives of World War II in Manila that are not found in most personal memoirs of the era. Each narrative, however, may be offset somewhat by the fact that the author told his story over sixty years after the events took place, and that may have clouded his memory or affected his perspective of war-time events.
It is valuable because the individual authors recount the lives a neutral Swiss-American family and two German families whom the Japanese did not intern in Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. And, one author tells the story of a Scot-Spanish family which had one member interned while the rest of the family remained free in Manila.
I found Manila Memories personally intriguing because I knew the authors when they attended the American School2 in Manila in 1948 and 1949. I paid a great deal of attention then to “Bob” Walser because he played varsity basketball and I played with some of the varsity players from time-to-time when I was on the junior varsity team. I knew Hans Hoeflein because Hans was active in many aspects of school life – he was everywhere - and I served on the Student Council with him. I knew of “Jake” Goldhagen. And I knew of Rod Hall, but knew his brother Ian better because he was in the grade ahead of me. But what I discovered in the book was that I really did not know much about them at all. I never knew that “Bob” was Hans and “Jake” was Juergen. Looking back, I obviously had naively assumed that everyone in the American School -- except for “Heley” (Helmut) Meyer,3 who spoke with a strong German accent, and some Spanish students -- were American. Moreover, I had not focused on the fact that some of the students at the American School had not been interned and assumed that they had either been in Santo Tomas if they had lived in the Philippines before the war, or they were the children of new Manila residents – businessmen, diplomats, Army officers, or Navy officers. It never dawned on me that the four authors had lived “outside the walls” during the war or that two – Hans and Jake - were German citizens, or that Bob was Swiss, or that Rod was the son of a Scot and a Spanish lady. Consequently, their stories piqued my interest and enriched my knowledge of the war.
At the time, I just considered the four of them to be Americans. I should have been more perceptive because one of my running buddies was Hans Weber and I knew that his family was German and had not been interned. Moreover, like the Bob Walser, one or more family friends – Gladys Savory, an American restaurant owner, was one – carried Swiss passports and remained free in Manila.
The authors each wrote about four subjects: “Life before the War,” “Life During the War,” “The Liberation,” and “War and Peace.” Their stories varied in length and detail. I found their stories from before the war and during liberation to be the most interesting.
Jake wrote the Preface and set up the stories.
A few of us in my graduating class of 1950 at the American School of Manila, generally Swiss, Germans, and Italians, were considered by the Japanese to be neutrals, or allies. While the Japanese in Manila considered us friendly allies, Hans Hoeflein and I would have been treated differently back in Germany.
He added: “I hope our stories, briefly told, will give future historians insights into life in Manila before the war, during the war, and after the war, from the viewpoint of four youths.”
His stories dominate the book and in my view he is the principal author.
Jake’s commentary about his early life in Germany peaked my interest. Early on he “learned to give” the Nazi salute to a parade of marching soldiers,” he participated in air raid drills, and he lived and played with his relatives after his father sailed to the Philippines without taking his family along. Jake reported a chilling incident that could have changed his life: one day the Gestapo ordered his mother to report to them and they told her “that they knew that she was married to a Jew who lived in the Philippines, and that they would never let her leave Germany because she had a son and the Reich needed all the males they could get.” Fortunately, friends helped Mrs. Goldhagen and her son escape from Germany and they arrived in Manila in 1937. For all intents and purposes, six-year-old Jake Goldhagen’s additional stories were anti-climactic.
Hans Hoeflein’s stories seem minimalist. I would have like to learned more about his experiences.
Hans’ story also began in Germany. He reported that his father left Germany with his family after he learned that the Gestapo planned on arresting him for allegedly murdering two Nazis. After some delays, six-year-old Hans and his parents escaped to Manila in 1937 where his father continued to work for his German company. The Nazis never forgot about his father because “In 1942 or 1943, the Nazis in Germany contacted the Japanese and asked them to return my father because he was considered a murderer by the Germans.” The Japanese did not honor the request. Perhaps the German defeats in the Soviet Union mitigated their support of their once dominant ally.
Bob Walser’s and Rod Hall’s narratives began in Manila. Both were born in the Spanish Hospital in Manila where I was born a few years later. Both grew up in Manila as I did. Bob’s father was a Swiss; his mother was an American from Iowa. Rod’s father was a Scot who had married a beautiful woman from a Scot-Spanish family that had deep roots in the Philippines
The four boys lived reasonably normal lives during the war. Jake recounted one exception: “Occasionally, there would be a knock at our door and there would stand a Japanese officer and a soldier. We were always scared about what they could want, but they always turned out to be asking routine questions about who we were and what we were doing. We always showed them our expired German passports, which satisfied them that we were allies.” Their “allied” status would not have pleased the Allied internees in Santo Tomas. Hans Hoeflein reported that, “Until the American air raids began [in September 1944] we always had enough food to eat. We had lots of rice, vegetables, and carabao meat.” His comments also would not have pleased the internees who by that time were slowly starving. Rod’s life was even more comfortable. He had a private tutor, went to catechism class, lived in his grandmother’s house where there was lots of food grown in her garden, went to the beach with relatives, and seemingly lived a normal, but restricted life in Manila. Rod’s father was interned, but often gained passes that permitted him to stay with his family for extended periods. Bob Walser wrote that, “Life for me as a kid was pretty boring. Most of my friends were Americans and interned in Santo Tomas.” He added that, “City life in Manila was a normal as it could be. Wherever I went I had to walk or go by caleza [horse cart].”
Two of the boys said that they saw or heard about nasty Japanese actions during the occupation, but they did not see anyone killed.
While the low point of the war was the arrival of the Japanese, the boys all reported the first high point of the war – the first American fighter and dive-bomber raids on Manila during September 1944. Some of their stories were eerily similar to the ones I heard about and often passed on in Santo Tomas. Jake’s report about the explosion of an American B-24 bomber nearly exactly mirrored my remembrance of what had to have been the same event. We must have watched the same bomber explode from our different locations in Manila.
Life turned mean after September. The Japanese began evacuating the military POWs to Japan. Fewer than 300 of the 3,000 plus POWs shipped out on the Arisan Maru and Oryoku Maru survived. In Manila, the Japanese soon began indiscriminately killing civilians and suspected guerrillas.
Rod reported the great tragedy of the book.
In the late afternoon, a Japanese soldier came out and started reading names from a list that had been complied. He pointed and said ‘As I read your name, you will move over there.’ First they called Uncle Alfred and Carlos Perez Rubio, then Aunt Helen, my mother and grandmother. I was called next, and started to follow when the officer said ‘No, no, you go over there,’ pointing the other way. My group included brother Ian and all the servants…
[After] liberation it was discovered that our family members were among more than one hundred people executed at the Masonic Temple. They were identified from the charred bodies.
Rod reported no reason for the atrocity. Two reasons seem most probable: the Japanese believed that Rod’s mother and his other relatives had supported American and Filipino guerrillas in some way, or jealous or self-serving Filipino collaborators had accused the victims of being guerrilla supporters or being anti-Japanese. Just before these killings, the Japanese had executed four internees from Santo Tomas for apparently supporting guerrillas, and about the same time, the Japanese executed several captured American and Filipino officers and soldiers who had fought as guerrillas.
With the arrival on the American troops in Manila, life changed for the four boys. They and their families found themselves at the mercy of their various situations. The attacking Americans could have killed them as they maneuvered to seize key positions in the city or the defending Japanese could have murdered them. Hoeflein explained: “We were lucky that they didn’t force us to stay inside the houses when they burned them, as they did in many other sections of the city. They also set houses on fire and, as people ran out, they shot or bayoneted them.”
Bob Walser provided a riveting report of life inside the battleground that was Manila. On the morning of 10 February, he wrote that an American shell hit his house and more exploded all around it. When the shelling intensified, he said that his family decided to move to a shelter next door that had been built for a Japanese general. Bob described the first of many moves:
Listening for Japanese soldiers, running to the wall, stepping on boxes, peeking over the wall to see if Japanese soldiers had entered the yard we were going into, going over the wall, and running for cover in the next yard, became a routine we did many, many times in the next few days. If we had ever been spotted, we would have been killed.
He added that on the 10th, “in between American artillery barrages, we moved our suitcases that we had packed with our papers, food and what we thought were necessities from our house to the shelter…” He continued: “There was a lot of noise that night from the artillery shells, the machine guns and the rifles, as both American and Japanese soldiers fought house to house in our neighborhood.”
Walser summed up his experiences in his neighborhood that abutted the American School:
Nearly all the families and their servants on Vito Cruz were murdered. The Swiss Community lost 25 people and it wasn’t a big community to start with. But it was hard to tell how many people in our area survived since the ones that had escaped the fires, the Japanese shooting, the Japanese bayoneting and the American shelling were Filipinos and had scattered in all directions probably seeking relatives. However, we know that very few civilians in our area survived. There were just too many dead and partially-burnt dead people in our neighbors’ houses and yards.
I found Bob’s narrative about the battle in his neighborhood to be the most substantial contribution to the book, but because of its complexity I would have welcomed a sketch map of his home area. For my own use, I developed such a map, but I am not confident that I drew it accurately.
Fortunately, Bob’s family survived the war, as did Jake’s and Hans’ families. My father, as Rod’s mother, did not. All the families, including mine, either stayed in Manila or returned shortly after they were evacuated. Apparently, the American Government did not penalize the two German families in any way, and consequently they joined the Allied community without any problems and the boys joined their pre-war friends at the American School. That seemed remarkable because some American and British internee families did not look kindly on the former allies of the Japanese who had not been interned. The boys did not say much about their post-war lives. That would have added to the story. However, Rod Hall, apparently now an American citizen, reported that he joined the US Army and served as a light-weapons infantryman in US-occupied South Korea around 1954. Seven years later, I deployed to Korea for similar duty as an infantry captain.
After I finished reading the book, I felt it needed closure. I wished that Jake had written a Postscript and provided a perspective of the authors’ experiences. He might have added something like this.
With one nasty exception, we and our families were lucky compared to those civilians whom the Japanese interned in Santo Tomas.
For the most part we had more food and did not starve. In Santo Tomas, over one hundred internees died from starvation or related complications in 1944, and over thirty more died before liberation in February 1945. For the most part, they were all unnecessary deaths. In our group, only Rod’s maternal grandfather died of natural causes during this time.
The Japanese did not humiliate us. They did not slap and beat us. They did not conduct periodic searches of our homes. They did not conduct roll calls to determine our whereabouts. However, just as in Santo Tomas, they forced us to bow to them whenever we saw or passed by them.
Our relative freedom permitted us to lead somewhat normal, if restricted lives, often in our own homes, but during the air raids, we faced greater danger than the internees because the Americans did not know where we lived. Fortunately, as in Santo Tomas and in the nearby military prison, Bilibid Prison, we suffered no casualties from the frequent bombings.
Just before the Americans returned to Manila, the Japanese began what could be considered a crusade against selected people in Manila. As he reported, Rod lost four family members and two family friends for unexplained reasons. About the same time, the Japanese in Santo Tomas arrested and executed four men for apparently helping guerrillas.
Life became the more dangerous for the internees and for us after the Americans returned. Because of the intense house-to-house combat, as related, Bob Walser lost most of his neighbors, most likely to Japanese actions. In Santo Tomas after the “Flying Column” of the 1st Cavalry Division liberated the camp, the Japanese fired artillery into the camp for several days and killed seventeen internees and wounded many others. The seventeen dead included several teenage girls in the Main Building and many patients, including internees, in the new Field Hospital that the Army had established in the Education Building. Fortunately, the cavalry arrived in time to prevent the Japanese from killing all the prisoners and leaving no traces as they had been ordered to do in late 1944. February 1945 proved to be the most dangerous time for us and for the internees.
Outside the camp, the Americans could have killed all of us as they battled for control of the city, and the Japanese could have killed us out of sheer spite. German passports would not have protected us. Swiss passports would not have protected us. Filipino citizenship would not have protected us. Only Providence -- and some fast footwork on the part of the Walsers -- saved most of us.
War touched everyone in Manila -- American, Australian, British, Dutch, German, Swiss, and Filipino. Hans Hoeflein wrote that “All in all, it was a very interesting experience.” It was much more than that. War destroyed our homes, killed relatives, friends, and neighbors, scarred us in many unknown ways, and it changed our lives forever.
With such a Postscript, Bob Walser’s closing comment would have had more punch: “…it is still hard, 63 years later, to like the Japanese.”
__________________________________
John Bradley was interned with his parents in the University of Santo Tomas from January 1942 to 3 February 1945. After the war, he attended the American School from 1947 to 1949. Following graduation from the US Military Academy in 1958, John served a full career in the US Army and retired as a lieutenant colonel. During his career he taught military history at West Point and wrote The Second World War, Asia and the Pacific and developed maps for the accompanying Atlas that supports the text. He currently operates a small consulting company in Houston and teaches courses in American History and World War II history at the University of Houston-Downtown. He will teach his new course, World War II: The War Against Japan, at Rice University’s Glascock School of Continuing Studies in early 2009. John continues to research and write about military history and has just completed writing Remind Me to Tell You: Harry Fleeger and His Friends, Prisoners of the Japanese which is based on Fleeger’s war diaries.
2 Hans Heinz Hoeflein graduated in 1949. Jake Goldhagen, Rod Hall, and Bob Walser were in the Class of 1950.
3 Helmut Lawrence Meyer graduated in 1949. I met him in 1960 at Ft. Campbell, KY where he was serving as a lieutenant in the 1st Airborne Battle Group, 502nd Infantry. As I recall, Meyer served a full career and to the best of my knowledge retired as a colonel. He told me some years ago that he retired after he sustained a serious parachute jump injury and was no longer physically fit for field duty. He never lost his strong German accent.
---------------
Manila Memories, Four Boys Remember Their Lives Before, During, and After the Japanese Occupation edited by Juergen R. Goldhagen
Reviewed by John H. Bradley 1
Published by Old Guard Press, Exeter, U.K., 2008. Pp. 138; over 40 b&w photos; several drawings and maps. ISBN 978-1-84861-010-1. $17 paperback.
Manila Memories is an unusual and valuable book that recounts the stories of four pre-teenage boys – Juergen Goldhagen, Roderick Hall, Hans Hoeflein, and Hans Walser -- who lived in Manila with their parents during the Japanese occupation of the city from 1942 to 1945.
It is unusual because the then-young authors provide perspectives of World War II in Manila that are not found in most personal memoirs of the era. Each narrative, however, may be offset somewhat by the fact that the author told his story over sixty years after the events took place, and that may have clouded his memory or affected his perspective of war-time events.
It is valuable because the individual authors recount the lives a neutral Swiss-American family and two German families whom the Japanese did not intern in Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. And, one author tells the story of a Scot-Spanish family which had one member interned while the rest of the family remained free in Manila.
I found Manila Memories personally intriguing because I knew the authors when they attended the American School2 in Manila in 1948 and 1949. I paid a great deal of attention then to “Bob” Walser because he played varsity basketball and I played with some of the varsity players from time-to-time when I was on the junior varsity team. I knew Hans Hoeflein because Hans was active in many aspects of school life – he was everywhere - and I served on the Student Council with him. I knew of “Jake” Goldhagen. And I knew of Rod Hall, but knew his brother Ian better because he was in the grade ahead of me. But what I discovered in the book was that I really did not know much about them at all. I never knew that “Bob” was Hans and “Jake” was Juergen. Looking back, I obviously had naively assumed that everyone in the American School -- except for “Heley” (Helmut) Meyer,3 who spoke with a strong German accent, and some Spanish students -- were American. Moreover, I had not focused on the fact that some of the students at the American School had not been interned and assumed that they had either been in Santo Tomas if they had lived in the Philippines before the war, or they were the children of new Manila residents – businessmen, diplomats, Army officers, or Navy officers. It never dawned on me that the four authors had lived “outside the walls” during the war or that two – Hans and Jake - were German citizens, or that Bob was Swiss, or that Rod was the son of a Scot and a Spanish lady. Consequently, their stories piqued my interest and enriched my knowledge of the war.
At the time, I just considered the four of them to be Americans. I should have been more perceptive because one of my running buddies was Hans Weber and I knew that his family was German and had not been interned. Moreover, like the Bob Walser, one or more family friends – Gladys Savory, an American restaurant owner, was one – carried Swiss passports and remained free in Manila.
The authors each wrote about four subjects: “Life before the War,” “Life During the War,” “The Liberation,” and “War and Peace.” Their stories varied in length and detail. I found their stories from before the war and during liberation to be the most interesting.
Jake wrote the Preface and set up the stories.
A few of us in my graduating class of 1950 at the American School of Manila, generally Swiss, Germans, and Italians, were considered by the Japanese to be neutrals, or allies. While the Japanese in Manila considered us friendly allies, Hans Hoeflein and I would have been treated differently back in Germany.
He added: “I hope our stories, briefly told, will give future historians insights into life in Manila before the war, during the war, and after the war, from the viewpoint of four youths.”
His stories dominate the book and in my view he is the principal author.
Jake’s commentary about his early life in Germany peaked my interest. Early on he “learned to give” the Nazi salute to a parade of marching soldiers,” he participated in air raid drills, and he lived and played with his relatives after his father sailed to the Philippines without taking his family along. Jake reported a chilling incident that could have changed his life: one day the Gestapo ordered his mother to report to them and they told her “that they knew that she was married to a Jew who lived in the Philippines, and that they would never let her leave Germany because she had a son and the Reich needed all the males they could get.” Fortunately, friends helped Mrs. Goldhagen and her son escape from Germany and they arrived in Manila in 1937. For all intents and purposes, six-year-old Jake Goldhagen’s additional stories were anti-climactic.
Hans Hoeflein’s stories seem minimalist. I would have like to learned more about his experiences.
Hans’ story also began in Germany. He reported that his father left Germany with his family after he learned that the Gestapo planned on arresting him for allegedly murdering two Nazis. After some delays, six-year-old Hans and his parents escaped to Manila in 1937 where his father continued to work for his German company. The Nazis never forgot about his father because “In 1942 or 1943, the Nazis in Germany contacted the Japanese and asked them to return my father because he was considered a murderer by the Germans.” The Japanese did not honor the request. Perhaps the German defeats in the Soviet Union mitigated their support of their once dominant ally.
Bob Walser’s and Rod Hall’s narratives began in Manila. Both were born in the Spanish Hospital in Manila where I was born a few years later. Both grew up in Manila as I did. Bob’s father was a Swiss; his mother was an American from Iowa. Rod’s father was a Scot who had married a beautiful woman from a Scot-Spanish family that had deep roots in the Philippines
The four boys lived reasonably normal lives during the war. Jake recounted one exception: “Occasionally, there would be a knock at our door and there would stand a Japanese officer and a soldier. We were always scared about what they could want, but they always turned out to be asking routine questions about who we were and what we were doing. We always showed them our expired German passports, which satisfied them that we were allies.” Their “allied” status would not have pleased the Allied internees in Santo Tomas. Hans Hoeflein reported that, “Until the American air raids began [in September 1944] we always had enough food to eat. We had lots of rice, vegetables, and carabao meat.” His comments also would not have pleased the internees who by that time were slowly starving. Rod’s life was even more comfortable. He had a private tutor, went to catechism class, lived in his grandmother’s house where there was lots of food grown in her garden, went to the beach with relatives, and seemingly lived a normal, but restricted life in Manila. Rod’s father was interned, but often gained passes that permitted him to stay with his family for extended periods. Bob Walser wrote that, “Life for me as a kid was pretty boring. Most of my friends were Americans and interned in Santo Tomas.” He added that, “City life in Manila was a normal as it could be. Wherever I went I had to walk or go by caleza [horse cart].”
Two of the boys said that they saw or heard about nasty Japanese actions during the occupation, but they did not see anyone killed.
While the low point of the war was the arrival of the Japanese, the boys all reported the first high point of the war – the first American fighter and dive-bomber raids on Manila during September 1944. Some of their stories were eerily similar to the ones I heard about and often passed on in Santo Tomas. Jake’s report about the explosion of an American B-24 bomber nearly exactly mirrored my remembrance of what had to have been the same event. We must have watched the same bomber explode from our different locations in Manila.
Life turned mean after September. The Japanese began evacuating the military POWs to Japan. Fewer than 300 of the 3,000 plus POWs shipped out on the Arisan Maru and Oryoku Maru survived. In Manila, the Japanese soon began indiscriminately killing civilians and suspected guerrillas.
Rod reported the great tragedy of the book.
In the late afternoon, a Japanese soldier came out and started reading names from a list that had been complied. He pointed and said ‘As I read your name, you will move over there.’ First they called Uncle Alfred and Carlos Perez Rubio, then Aunt Helen, my mother and grandmother. I was called next, and started to follow when the officer said ‘No, no, you go over there,’ pointing the other way. My group included brother Ian and all the servants…
[After] liberation it was discovered that our family members were among more than one hundred people executed at the Masonic Temple. They were identified from the charred bodies.
Rod reported no reason for the atrocity. Two reasons seem most probable: the Japanese believed that Rod’s mother and his other relatives had supported American and Filipino guerrillas in some way, or jealous or self-serving Filipino collaborators had accused the victims of being guerrilla supporters or being anti-Japanese. Just before these killings, the Japanese had executed four internees from Santo Tomas for apparently supporting guerrillas, and about the same time, the Japanese executed several captured American and Filipino officers and soldiers who had fought as guerrillas.
With the arrival on the American troops in Manila, life changed for the four boys. They and their families found themselves at the mercy of their various situations. The attacking Americans could have killed them as they maneuvered to seize key positions in the city or the defending Japanese could have murdered them. Hoeflein explained: “We were lucky that they didn’t force us to stay inside the houses when they burned them, as they did in many other sections of the city. They also set houses on fire and, as people ran out, they shot or bayoneted them.”
Bob Walser provided a riveting report of life inside the battleground that was Manila. On the morning of 10 February, he wrote that an American shell hit his house and more exploded all around it. When the shelling intensified, he said that his family decided to move to a shelter next door that had been built for a Japanese general. Bob described the first of many moves:
Listening for Japanese soldiers, running to the wall, stepping on boxes, peeking over the wall to see if Japanese soldiers had entered the yard we were going into, going over the wall, and running for cover in the next yard, became a routine we did many, many times in the next few days. If we had ever been spotted, we would have been killed.
He added that on the 10th, “in between American artillery barrages, we moved our suitcases that we had packed with our papers, food and what we thought were necessities from our house to the shelter…” He continued: “There was a lot of noise that night from the artillery shells, the machine guns and the rifles, as both American and Japanese soldiers fought house to house in our neighborhood.”
Walser summed up his experiences in his neighborhood that abutted the American School:
Nearly all the families and their servants on Vito Cruz were murdered. The Swiss Community lost 25 people and it wasn’t a big community to start with. But it was hard to tell how many people in our area survived since the ones that had escaped the fires, the Japanese shooting, the Japanese bayoneting and the American shelling were Filipinos and had scattered in all directions probably seeking relatives. However, we know that very few civilians in our area survived. There were just too many dead and partially-burnt dead people in our neighbors’ houses and yards.
I found Bob’s narrative about the battle in his neighborhood to be the most substantial contribution to the book, but because of its complexity I would have welcomed a sketch map of his home area. For my own use, I developed such a map, but I am not confident that I drew it accurately.
Fortunately, Bob’s family survived the war, as did Jake’s and Hans’ families. My father, as Rod’s mother, did not. All the families, including mine, either stayed in Manila or returned shortly after they were evacuated. Apparently, the American Government did not penalize the two German families in any way, and consequently they joined the Allied community without any problems and the boys joined their pre-war friends at the American School. That seemed remarkable because some American and British internee families did not look kindly on the former allies of the Japanese who had not been interned. The boys did not say much about their post-war lives. That would have added to the story. However, Rod Hall, apparently now an American citizen, reported that he joined the US Army and served as a light-weapons infantryman in US-occupied South Korea around 1954. Seven years later, I deployed to Korea for similar duty as an infantry captain.
After I finished reading the book, I felt it needed closure. I wished that Jake had written a Postscript and provided a perspective of the authors’ experiences. He might have added something like this.
With one nasty exception, we and our families were lucky compared to those civilians whom the Japanese interned in Santo Tomas.
For the most part we had more food and did not starve. In Santo Tomas, over one hundred internees died from starvation or related complications in 1944, and over thirty more died before liberation in February 1945. For the most part, they were all unnecessary deaths. In our group, only Rod’s maternal grandfather died of natural causes during this time.
The Japanese did not humiliate us. They did not slap and beat us. They did not conduct periodic searches of our homes. They did not conduct roll calls to determine our whereabouts. However, just as in Santo Tomas, they forced us to bow to them whenever we saw or passed by them.
Our relative freedom permitted us to lead somewhat normal, if restricted lives, often in our own homes, but during the air raids, we faced greater danger than the internees because the Americans did not know where we lived. Fortunately, as in Santo Tomas and in the nearby military prison, Bilibid Prison, we suffered no casualties from the frequent bombings.
Just before the Americans returned to Manila, the Japanese began what could be considered a crusade against selected people in Manila. As he reported, Rod lost four family members and two family friends for unexplained reasons. About the same time, the Japanese in Santo Tomas arrested and executed four men for apparently helping guerrillas.
Life became the more dangerous for the internees and for us after the Americans returned. Because of the intense house-to-house combat, as related, Bob Walser lost most of his neighbors, most likely to Japanese actions. In Santo Tomas after the “Flying Column” of the 1st Cavalry Division liberated the camp, the Japanese fired artillery into the camp for several days and killed seventeen internees and wounded many others. The seventeen dead included several teenage girls in the Main Building and many patients, including internees, in the new Field Hospital that the Army had established in the Education Building. Fortunately, the cavalry arrived in time to prevent the Japanese from killing all the prisoners and leaving no traces as they had been ordered to do in late 1944. February 1945 proved to be the most dangerous time for us and for the internees.
Outside the camp, the Americans could have killed all of us as they battled for control of the city, and the Japanese could have killed us out of sheer spite. German passports would not have protected us. Swiss passports would not have protected us. Filipino citizenship would not have protected us. Only Providence -- and some fast footwork on the part of the Walsers -- saved most of us.
War touched everyone in Manila -- American, Australian, British, Dutch, German, Swiss, and Filipino. Hans Hoeflein wrote that “All in all, it was a very interesting experience.” It was much more than that. War destroyed our homes, killed relatives, friends, and neighbors, scarred us in many unknown ways, and it changed our lives forever.
With such a Postscript, Bob Walser’s closing comment would have had more punch: “…it is still hard, 63 years later, to like the Japanese.”
__________________________________
John Bradley was interned with his parents in the University of Santo Tomas from January 1942 to 3 February 1945. After the war, he attended the American School from 1947 to 1949. Following graduation from the US Military Academy in 1958, John served a full career in the US Army and retired as a lieutenant colonel. During his career he taught military history at West Point and wrote The Second World War, Asia and the Pacific and developed maps for the accompanying Atlas that supports the text. He currently operates a small consulting company in Houston and teaches courses in American History and World War II history at the University of Houston-Downtown. He will teach his new course, World War II: The War Against Japan, at Rice University’s Glascock School of Continuing Studies in early 2009. John continues to research and write about military history and has just completed writing Remind Me to Tell You: Harry Fleeger and His Friends, Prisoners of the Japanese which is based on Fleeger’s war diaries.
2 Hans Heinz Hoeflein graduated in 1949. Jake Goldhagen, Rod Hall, and Bob Walser were in the Class of 1950.
3 Helmut Lawrence Meyer graduated in 1949. I met him in 1960 at Ft. Campbell, KY where he was serving as a lieutenant in the 1st Airborne Battle Group, 502nd Infantry. As I recall, Meyer served a full career and to the best of my knowledge retired as a colonel. He told me some years ago that he retired after he sustained a serious parachute jump injury and was no longer physically fit for field duty. He never lost his strong German accent.