The Leper Spy Read Online Free PDF Page B

divisions, and young Filipino soldiers began to report to the University of Santo Tomas, on España Boulevard, the second-oldest university outside of Europe. They marched in prepared for the unknown, cured of their sentiments, ready to defend a country that was home but that they had never really owned. Some had barely a week of training; the veterans had no more than four months. The police commandeered private trucks and buses across the metropolis, and the long columns of transports carrying soldiers by the hundreds pushed north out of Santo Tomas toward Lingayen Gulf, the most likely landing shore for Japanese foot soldiers. The army moving out of the city had been organized just four years before. The men were raw, inexperienced, and ill equipped. They came out of the rice paddies and out of merchant tents and off fishing boats and didn’t fully understand why they were fighting for America. But they were vicious and loyal.
    They trusted the Americans. They trusted MacArthur. As Japanese bombers pounded their shores, sinking their boats in the harbor, blasting their buildings in Pasay and Malate, they cinched their belts and tugged on their cheap US-issued shoes and fired unfamiliarEnfield rifles into the sky. Even those not in uniform trusted. As Japanese troops steamed toward landing zones on Luzon, they insulted the enemy in the pages of the
Manila Herald
and on radio stations like KZRH, where Leon Maria Guerrero of the Ermita Guerreros, who had learned to use the equipment with the Ateneo Jesuits, started the
Victory Broadcast.
    At the Ateneo, telegrams poured in from frightened parents telling their children to come home. Some packed up quickly and left with short good-byes. The Jesuit fathers decided to send the boarders home, all but the ROTC cadets. Word reached the Ateneo that General MacArthur and Philippine president Manuel Quezon had instructed the cadets who had finished the basic ROTC training to stay on, to be rapidly trained for military service and sent to the field as officers when training ended in January. Hundreds of boys stayed and began drilling, digging trenches with intensity, and studying war plans.
    The boarders who hadn’t left, plus those from closed schools across the city, grabbed their belongings and rushed to the pier to catch one of the few interisland boats leaving Manila to return home to their families in other island provinces, Cebu and Davao and Zamboanga and Mindanao. Some twelve hundred crammed onto the
Corregidor,
an eighteen-ton transport ship that was fleeing Manila harbor for the safety of the outlying islands. But the ship struck a mine at the mouth of Manila Bay and sank in two minutes. Navy small boats picked up 280 oil-covered survivors, and others helped as well, searching for the living in shark-infested waters, but some 500 passengers were lost. Those who survived were taken to a building at the Ateneo that had been turned into a Red Cross station. The Jesuits accepted any survivors, and the campus—with its main academic building, the famous Manila Observatory, the auditorium, the laboratories, the library, the chapel, and the gymnasium—became an unofficial refugee center. When word spread that the religious school was taking refugees, more began to arrive. The population swelled by an additional four hundred people, from thenavy yard at Cavite and Nichols Field, women without husbands and babies without fathers.
    The days ticked by, and the bombs fell like clockwork on the airfield in Zambales Province, on Fort Wint, on Cabcaban airfield on Bataan.
    On December 22, Maj. Gen. George Moore, holding the fort on Corregidor, received word that the enemy was near. Japan had made landings to the north and south, and foot soldiers were pushing southward in the central plain of Luzon toward Manila.
    On December 23, an army officer told an assembly of ROTC boys at the Ateneo that they were to go home, to help their families and save themselves. En masse the