The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [159]
impaled on bayonets, some also were shot dead. Women who made it through were dragged screaming into nearby ruined buildings where Japanese soldiers gang-raped them. Some were carrying children, but the Japanese bayoneted these babies in their mother’s arms before assaulting the mothers. After being raped many times the Japanese soldiers often cut the women’s breasts off with bayonets; some had petrol poured on their hair and ignited.64
Such utter bestiality was repeated ‘on countless occasions’ right across the city.
On 7 February 1945, advancing American forces discovered the mutilated corpses of forty-nine Filipinos on the corner of Juan Luna and Moriones Streets in Manila. One-third of the corpses were women and another third babies and infants. All had been shot, bayoneted or beheaded, and most of the females – of almost all ages – had been raped. Pregnancy was certainly no protection, as a mountain of contemporaneous evidence proves: ‘In some cases, Japanese troops had cut the foetuses out of their mother’s bellies before killing the victim.’65 As well as bayonet wounds, some young female survivors of a separate massacre had had ‘both of their nipples amputated from their breasts, and a 2-year-old boy had had both of his arms cut off by the Japanese. Some children as young as five were nursing bayonet stab wounds and severe burns caused by sadistic Japanese naval troops for no other reason than to inflict pain and suffering on infants.’
When the MNDF entered the Philippines Red Cross hospital in Manila, further foul scenes of wholesale massacre were enacted, and one survivor, its acting manager Modesta Farolan, recorded, ‘From where we were, we could hear victims in their death agony, the shrill cries of children and the sobs of dying mothers and girls.’ On leaving her hiding place, Farolan discovered that ‘Women were raped and sliced with bayonets from groin to throat and left to bleed to death in the hot sun. Children were seized by the legs and had their heads bashed against the wall. Babies were tossed into the air and caught on bayonets. Unborn foetuses were gouged out with bayonets from pregnant women.’66
Nor was the deliberate attack on the Red Cross hospital out of character for the Japanese Navy. There were many occasions when hospital ships bearing clearly identifiable Red Cross marks were specifically targeted. Whenever doctors and nurses fell into Japanese hands, as in Hong Kong at Christmas 1941, they were particularly ill-treated, possibly because they were seen as responsible for getting wounded men back into action. The Japanese had agreed before the outbreak of war to abide by the provisions of the Geneva Convention regarding non-combatant status, which since 1907 had expressly protected the International Red Cross, but this was entirely ignored after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hospital ships were bombed in harbour, torpedoed at sea and fired upon too often for it to be coincidental.
On occasion the Japanese Navy would go to some lengths to think up imaginative ways to murder people. At St Paul’s College in Manila in February 1945, for example, 250 hungry and thirsty civilians were herded into the school hall and told that there was food and drink under three large chandeliers in one of the buildings. The Japanese then withdrew. The prisoners rushed to the trestle tables loaded with food, but they barely had a chance to take a bite before explosives in the booby-trapped chandeliers blew up. Then