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Me and World War II, page 2
* * * * Who were these Japanese? What were they? What were they doing in our country? Why, they were the proprietors of stores around the corner of my little home town of Caloocan, in the province of Rizal, in the [U.S.] Commonwealth of the Philippines.
The Japanese were businessmen who worked inconspicuously in the city of Manila. They were ordinary workmen to be found
in almost all walks of life in towns and cities of my country, people never even noticed that they were NOT FILIPINO!
We could not envision them later with insignias denoting high rank decorating the epaulets of their Japanese Army uniforms, when the country had been overrun. No one had any suspicions about their presence in the Pearl of the Orient which the Philippines was called at that time. I did not hear of anyone who might have seen somebody up on a hilltop with binoculars, because those binoculars would have been noticed, hardly anyone possessed a pair. Nobody mistrusted their motives. But we found out when the reasons became clear later.
In William B. Breuer's 1995 "MacArthur's UNDERCOVER WAR," you can read about a Shiko Souy, photo studio proprietor, who apparently was an Imperial Japanese Army major, one of "a swarm of spies that Tokyo had infiltrated into the Philippines... an alarmingly growing rate of Japanese immigration... [most of which] 'immigrants' were young men of military age... holding reserve [Army] commissions..."
Just operating his photo studio and minding his own business, besides spying on the United States military for the Japanese intelligence.
To a nine-year-old, when someone mentioned a "Gathering Storm", it meant that clouds were dark gray overhead and rain would soon be pouring down on kids with soap in their hands
scrubbing their bodies as if in an indoor shower. Not too many houses had indoor bathrooms at that time. But it was the
"Gathering Storm" which Winston Churchill wrote about on the War in Europe which applied equally to us in the Pacific.
When our people saw airplanes like fighters and bombers and tanks and huge guns in the newsreels, they considered those newsreels as nothing more than just another movie. Nothing to be concerned about, was the general reception of news about the war that was raging throughout Mongolia and, later, China. We had not the slightest inkling that hundreds of thousands of people, innocent bystanders, were dying so far away, yet in our area of the globe. We simply could not believe all that we saw.
We thought of Asians fighting fellow Asians as something unreal, impossible and highly unlikely. Our people could not fathom anyone in Asia seriously trying to kill another human being except in a murder mystery. When once the suspension of disbelief was lifted, there was the general knowledge that all this was nothing more than an act and that the actors were still
alive and probably smoking a cigarette after filming that scene in which these actors had been portrayed as having been murdered
But people were watching babies crying on the ground while all around were the whistling and exploding bombs, of people being bayonetted to death, really being killed! It was a strange
sight -- war was beginning to educate us as nothing did before!
We heard about Japanese bombing of towns like Aparri and Vigan in the Ilocos provinces of Northern Luzon, northernmost of the 7000+ islands of the Philippine archipelago. I know there were many more cities and towns destroyed early in the War by Japanese bombers, town citizens mowed down by the strafing of Japanese fighter planes. On the horizon were the strange configurations that turned out to be warships and troopships the Japanese were assembling for their full-scale invasion.
Villagers were not too reliable as carriers of news and deliverers of announcements to the proper authorities, and it was my belief (shared by many others) that the invasion could have been seriously detained if not delayed or stopped. But what these simple folk saw in the distant horizon meant nothing to them, personally, not the threat that today's readers or televiewers of news have learned to anticipate and predict.
When the Japanese did invade in force that fateful February of 1942, they did not encounter much resistance from a poorly-organized Philippine Army, trained though it was by United States forces. There was not much of a Philippine Navy, just a fledgling edition of today's naval forces, consisting of a few torpedo boats and supply vessels which did not have the luxury of staying together as a fleet for too long.
The Japanese invasion took about a month. Suddenly, people in our little town were constantly being deprived of sleep by the wild bombardment taking place on the peninsula called Bataan
and the fortress island of Corregidor, visible below our hill town of Caloocan that overlooked much of the battle scene. Rockets and tracer bullets (terms I later learned firsthand) displayed the ominous brightness of 4th of July or News Year's Eve fireworks but without the thrill and exhilaration.
There was no joyful display in these fireworks, none of the usual excitement in their wild and beautiful pyrotechnics that inspire feelings of daring and warmth and patriotism. Nothing but the sinking feeling that what was happening was destruction and more destruction. What was being destroyed, even we little kids could tell, were the things that belonged to us -- our buildings, our beaches, our homes, our own people.
We little kids of the time felt the excitement of something wild going on, but that something was not wonderful but dreadful.
We did not need to be told by the caring adults around us that there was the very high risk that our lives and our safety were involved, even as we heard about people we did not know being killed and injured by the thousands in the fighting that was now going on in earnest.
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