Walking with my bike up Buenos Aires, MacArthur passed by on his Cadillac and threw me a royal salute and a grin. I returned it as best I could then noted the time: 1615 — towards the end of a hectic day as any day spent at Santo Tomas was.

Before Father Cosgrave left Santo Tomas for Pasay, Father English gave him a report of Japanese atrocities in Batangas. It was damning and all down in notebook form too.

At the Connor shanty, Charruca Ferrer, a good friend of my brother Joe and of an alleged prominent pro-Axis family, was sympathetic enough to tell her story in English for my benefit. Despite being somewhat friendly with the Japanese, they had been kicked out of their home several times, and her father and brother were even roughed up once. She explained later that they happened to walk into the scene of a fresh robbery where the Japanese were rounding up all and sundry.

Anyway, during the battle they found themselves at the Concordia College, overcrowded as it was with many refugees from the area and patients from the Hospicio de San Jose. The Japanese were firing a cannon from a building nearby, and the Americans "thought," she said, that the shells came from the Concordia. Ignoring Red Cross flags hanging from the building, the Americans shelled the place in retaliation, caving part of the roof in. Fortunately the Japanese retreated beyond the Concordia once they lost the Paco Station.

A Padre José was known to dash out during the shelling to check that the chapel wasn't burning. On the afternoon of the 9th, he returned from one such foray, pulled Charruca aside and said: "Don't say anything now; maybe I'm crazy, but I just saw soldiers out there and these were bigger men and with different uniforms. I think they're Americans."

They were too. One of the American rescuers said: "Good thing we got here — we thought the Red Cross was a Japanese blind."

continues...