Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [164]
Some civilians found themselves herded out of their homes by Japanese who asserted that shellfire made them unsafe. They were taken to an assembly area on Plaza Ferguson, where there were soon 2,000 under guard. Young girls were then separated and removed first to the Coffee Pot Café, then to the Bay View Hotel, where brothels were established. The Japanese sought to give their men who were soon to die a final exalting sexual experience. One twenty-four-year-old named Esther Garcia later gave evidence about the experiences of her fifteen-and fourteen-year-old sisters, Priscilla and Evangeline: “They grabbed my two sisters456. They were in back of me. And we didn’t know what they were going to do. So my two sisters started fighting them, but they couldn’t do anything. So they grabbed my sisters by the arm and took them out of the room. And we waited and waited and waited and finally my younger sister came back and she was crying. And I asked her, ‘Where is Pris? Where is Pris?’ And she said: ‘Oh! They are doing things to her, Esther!’ So everybody in the room knew what was going to happen to us. When Priscilla came back, she said: ‘Esther, they did something to me. I want to die. I want to die!’” A Japanese soldier had cut open her vagina with a knife.
At night, Americans on the line were bemused to hear sounds of chanting and singing, shouts and laughter, as Japanese conducted final carouses. These were sometimes succeeded by grenade explosions, as soldiers killed either themselves or hapless Filipinos. Some of the worst Japanese atrocities took place, ironically enough, at the city’s German Club, where five hundred people died, five of them Germans. Twelve members of one family, the Rocha Beeches, were bayoneted and then burned alive, along with their nursemaid. A fifteen-year-old was raped in the street amid gunfire and screaming people. The Japanese responsible then rose and used his bayonet to open her body from groin to chest. Twelve German Christian Brothers were killed in the chapel of La Salle College. Doctors, nurses and patients at the Red Cross centre were all massacred on 9 February. The Irish fathers at the Malate Church who had been tortured earlier in the month were now rearrested, and never seen again.
A pregnant woman, Carmen Guerrero, walked into the American lines, clutching a child in her arms. She had seen her husband tortured before her eyes, then removed to be shot. She had neither eaten nor slept for a week. She wrote later: “I had seen the head of an aunt457 who had taught me to read and write roll under the kitchen stove, the face of a friend who had been crawling next to me on the pavement as we tried to reach shelter under the Ermita Church obliterated by a bullet, a legless cousin dragging himself out of a shallow trench in the churchyard and a young mother carrying a baby plucking at my father’s sleeve—‘Doctor, can you help me? I think I’m wounded’—and the shreds of her ribs and her lungs could be seen as she turned around.”
The big villa of Dr. Rafael Moreta on Isaac Pearl Street had become a sanctuary housing sixty people. At midday on 7 February, twenty Japanese sailors burst in with fixed bayonets, led by a short, stocky officer with a heavy moustache. Men and women were separated, searched for arms and stripped of their valuables. The men were then forced into a bathroom, and grenades tossed in with them. Those who remained alive heard the screams