Piñol's Story

Penny is at the top of my list of those able to tell a coherent and precise account of his experience so I was anxious to get it down to the last detail. We went at it today for one and a half hours on the porch:

It started on Saturday evening, February 3 ... 10:00 PM or so. Neighbors from the north side of Manila phoned and said, 'Say, you know those guys we've been waiting for? Well they're here — one of them just got blasted. There's firing somewhere nearby.' The consensus was that Americans had entered our Oregon Street in Paco. Happiness and tense expectations reigned at fever pitch as people tried to remain calm for fear of exciting the Japs. There was the question, you see, of mopping up the few that were around, and then maybe in a day or two the long, long reign of anxiety and fear would end.

But Sunday, the 4th, passed with tension only beginning to increase. Previously, the Japs had been ousting people from their houses on a couple of hours notice on grounds of military necessity — to turn them into barracks or shelters. Now they began to hurriedly construct new barriers, plant new mines and dynamite the remaining bodegas while destroying unused supplies. In the case of several concrete buildings like Esco, they greatly damaged them until fires left concrete skeletons. Anyway, the Japs became visibly feverish as time passed.

Monday, February 5: The same war activities increased, but as no Americans showed up and fires began to engulf the city, doubts began that the Americans had entered at all. The Americans would prevent fires, so why the sharp increase in fires? As a whole, though, we all sat back in fear and waited for developments. The blasting indicated the Japs never expected to make a successful defense of the City.

February 6, the third day, was the day fires began with increasing artillery shelling. We were at a complete loss to account for the activities and we were to find ourselves even more at a loss as time passed. The Japs too began to exhibit signs of desperation. The battle had not yet reached our area; we didn't know what to expect and how much more we would endure. We saw very few regular Japanese soldiers — marines probably — but it's doubtful that they were many. They so matched the American soldiers in paraphernalia that when dead you couldn't tell if they were American or Japanese except by their faces. Then there were the ridiculously equipped irregulars. Some with only wooden mockups of rifles to which a bayonet or lance was affixed, and I saw others with just a wooden stick. They marched around from street-to-street in single file, fully exposed in the open, peeking around imaginary corners as if expecting to find Americans there.

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