Ma found three pieces of shrapnel in my room. A piece hit my bookshelf and scattered books all over. Sixty pieces of broken glass littered the floor from the hundreds of small windowpanes (mostly intact). The shell had made a 15-inch deep hole in the ground, and singed an area about 5-feet in diameter. It was probably a mortar shell — and it came from around Pandacan, not Intramuros. These shells are small but throw nasty shrapnel around a wide distance. A third person had been injured on the street, receiving a nasty gash in his leg from shrapnel. Shrapnel had also hit other houses including the Klinglers'. Servants quickly extinguished the small fire in the Bachrach house. Later we heard that several shells dropped below us on Altura, one of which instantly killed one Tuason and his son.

Two days ago, two shells from the same mortars landed in the back of the Bernard house. Yesterday, a shell slightly injured the wife of Fernando Perez and two others in his family. Rollie Garriz is going around with his thumb bandaged. "Shrapnel," he says, happy that his twin brother is not the only one now wounded in the family.

1640: The Americans continue to give hell to the Japanese. Dive-bombers are active; I haven't seen a B-24 in ten days though a B-25 was about today. As the ambulance was driving away, the Japanese opened up with two mortars on our area, sending Rollie Garriz, George Bernard and me into a ditch. Brother, did we hug the ground! They fired 15 more shells later in the afternoon but on Brixton Hill where the American batteries are. I'm confident that the Japanese are really on their last legs, though their shells answered a question heard often in the streets: "Are there Japs still on the other side?"

Mrs. Lerocque was taken to two U.S. Army Field Hospitals and rejected by both because they had no female nurses. She ended up in St. Luke's, and the driver was good enough to drive Dr. Ayesa all the way back here. The Americans are definitely not short of gas, hospitals or ambulances on this side ... but on the South? Dr. Ayesa reported all field hospitals were jammed with patients. An unconfirmed report says a shell landed in the hospital of Santo Tomas.

. . . .

A few civilians evacuated from the South via the American pontoon bridge this morning, bringing reports that the Japanese are machine-gunning any and all civilians on the street — men, women or children. They did that on the Escolta too according to Altwegg's brother. He was living in the Capitol Theater Building when the Quezon Bridge was blown up last Saturday night, hurling big pieces of iron right into the Escolta. Concerned about what would happen when the Santa Cruz and Jones bridges were blown up, the people wanted to get out, but by then the Japanese holed up in their pillboxes were firing at anything that moved.

To reconstruct the events: The Americans entered Manila from the North with about 20 Sherman tanks and 600 men by Avenida Rizal or parallel roads. They turned left from Azcarraga into Quezon Boulevard where the first skirmish was fought near the Far Eastern University. Smaller units went directly to Santo Tomas to liberate the prisoners. Alerted, the Japanese blew up the Quezon Bridge and took up their showdown positions. From that time on, the Japanese started firing at anything moving in the streets. From their perspective, it could be a guerrillero or someone who could reveal their positions, apart from downright Japanese cussedness.

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