I got home at 1745. It seems that about the time I was telling Maurice that shrapnel had bracketed our house (denying me a souvenir), one piece did land on our lot. I was lucky to be out as it hit the rear porch — the best place to see today's show over the Bay.

R.I.P.

A fragment had whizzed by our maid as she walked through, blowing her hair in her eyes. The bullet went through the galvanized iron roof over the porch, smashed ten square feet of the bottom and ripped gashes of wood out of the structure. It holed the iron sheeting in four places, sending a spray of shrapnel that smashed eight windowpanes and holed our Venetian blinds in ten places. The front end of the bullet went on and penetrated a piece of carpet we had slung over a bookcase. It missed the top of the bookcase by ten inches, and buried itself in 15 issues of Ma's La Petite Illustration — going through the first nine issues clean as a whistle and damaging the remaining six. So far we have six pieces of shrapnel — each as sharp as the sharpest knife — and the bullet definitely accounted for.

A few things stick out about today's raid. It was the heaviest single-day raid, easily beating September 21 and 22. The airfields received a light but methodical going-over. There were no Japanese planes flying between 0800 and 1600 — though some are up now, safe in the darkness of the night, having flown in from landing strips on either side of the Pampanga highway. The shrapnel is killing ten times more innocent civilians than the bombing. I didn't see any plane hit, though Gonzalez saw one going down in flames (the crew had no time to bail out). The local stations went off the air without giving us the usual warning — the Japanese don't want the provinces to know. This is the first time we have gone into the night under air raid conditions — the alert siren hasn't sounded. It's a certainty that the planes will be back tomorrow to finish the job. And as if that isn't enough, the Embassy boys in their three houses are fully blacked out.

Between the signal and the Embassy crowd you get an idea of how today's raids stunned the Japanese. Maurice and I passed a few — all with the same slow walk — eyes down, brows thoughtfully knitted; and therein lies a tale.

continues...