Dust, Drought, Depression, and War No. 7
See images of Santo Tomás and other camps and more in my Manila, Philippines, February 1953 album on Flickr
Carl Mydans was an American photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration in the 30s and Life magazine in the 40s. In 1942, Mydans had been captured by the Japanese in Manila, Philippines, with his wife Shelley and interned at Santo Tomás2 camp for more than nine months before being moved to a Shanghai, China camp. After a year there, they were released as part of a POW exchange. On February 3, 1945, accompanying an American unit of about 700 that punched through Manila with tanks, jeeps, weapon carriers, command cars, and engineering and service units, Life photographer Mydans was one of the first two men into Santo Tomás camp’s “big house.”
Internees Arriving in Santo Tomás, 1942Carl Mydans:
But my route turned left with Colonel Conner rather than into the ambush and in a few moments the black, swale covered fence of my old prison camp of Santo Tomás was flanking us. For just a moment I felt a flush of illness. This was the moment I’d been living for for three years. But then I was caught in the scramble of dismounted infantry now crouching at the ready as they moved in black silhouetted columns on either side of the vehicles. Fires were burning over much of the city and the red-lighted sky and stealth of the scene and pitch of emotion had me shaking so that my camera bag pounded against me. Behind me was Frank Hewlett of United Press, no less gripped with emotion than I was. We had come all the way together and he had come for his wife Virginia3, who got caught in Manila and put in Santo Tomás while Frank went through Bataan and Corregidor and got out to Australia.
I go into Santo Tomas
Half the front gate was open, the inside was black. We shouted and got no answer. Two tanks rumbled up facing the gate and turned on powerful lights. I cut a hole through the fence and looked in but could see nothing. Then we threw up flares. A swale fence had been constructed across the front since my days there, cutting off the view of the building. There was some delay and Frank lay beside me alongside the fence. Then impatience got me and I turned to Frank and said, “The gate’s half open and I’m sure the Japs have gone. Let’s slip in.” Frank followed. As we reached the guardhouse at the gate entrance and approached the grass-covered bunker a Jap jumped from the other side four feet away, shrieked and fired point-blank at us. The blue flame blinded us for a moment as we hit the ground. The bullet had gone neatly between our heads. We lay there for a moment, then dragged ourselves on our stomachs along the side of the fence, breathing hard. Frank said simply, “There are Japs in there.”
Then, like many such scenes in war, I never did know the sequence for as I moved over toward Colonel Conner, who was directing the operation on foot by the edge of the road, someone shouted “grenade! and I hit the ground with my face in the gutter. Several men were wounded near by.
Then Colonel Conner shouted to the leading tank: “Run that tank in through the fence,” and behind him to several men huddled together, “Keep the flares going up as she goes in.”
The “Battling Basic4” medium tank got straightened away and walked through the concrete fence as if it were corrugated paper. The area was bright now for flares were hanging overhead. There was shooting behind us and on the other side of the camp. Jeeps with headlights on followed in and then the infantry, which spread out at once. Frank and I walked up to the second fence and I could see the building as I had once seen it before. There was the “big house” I had lived in so long. I walked farther in and shouted, “Any Americans in there?” There was no answer. Later we learned they had answered me with a chorus of “Yes, yes” but we did not hear them. Then tank lights caught three Japs with rifles in the beam and we rook cover.
“It’s been so long”
A moment later a long-coated American appeared from nowhere. He was an internee. He said simply, “You Americans?” A few voices answered tiredly, “Yes.”
“Good,” he said, “I’ll lead you in.”
Two tanks were just ahead and foot soldiers moved forward over the driveway outside of the main building where my wife Shelley and I had paced back and forth for so long. Frank and I were right behind the tank. Then our guide said suddenly, “There’s a Jap machine-gun nest on the left side of the building,” and as the tanks and soldiers turned left, I shouted to Frank, “I’m going in across the lawn,” and I made my last dash with Frank behind me. I tripped once, recovered myself and pushed into an hysterical mob of internees waving, shouting, screaming, some weeping. The feeble, shadowy light from several candles only partly lighted the large lobby. I could not say anything, the din was so terrific. Hands just felt me, pressed me, and voices cried, “Thank God you are here.” “It’s been so long.”
Crowds pressed in on me so closely that I could not move and then suddenly the crowd picked me up, 40-pound camera kit and all, and passed me from hand to hand overhead.
I was helpless, nor was I able to talk above the din. Then I was put down and a stern voice rang above all the others. “You are an American soldier? Put the light on yourself so we can see.” I turned the flashlight on myself and said, “I’m Carl Mydans.”
For a moment no one said anything. Then a woman’s voice came, “Carl Mydans. My God! It’s Carl Mydans,” and Betty Wilborne broke through the crowd and threw her arms around my neck and cried.
I was pushed through the crowds to the stairs in the main lobby with shouts of “speech” and for a moment I was unable to talk. I mumbled something about I never knew how good it could feel to be back here in Santo Tomás. Then I made my way out of the building, everyone feeling me, holding on to me as I struggled through the crowd. I brushed past a woman holding a weeping child. “No, darling, no,” she was saying, “he’s an American. He’s an American soldier. They have come for us, darling. Don’t be afraid.”
Outside I found a sight I had dreamed about many times. In the brilliant light beside the Battling Basic stood three Japanese in officers’ uniforms, ringed by soldiers pointing rifles at them. The Japanese were part of the administrative staff of this and other prison camps on Luzon. But they were strangers to me. The staff I knew had left some time ago.
Now I was aware of the crowds in the windows above, cheering and cheering. They had been there during my dash across the lawn but I was unaware of them. “God bless America.” “Oh what a sight for sore eyes you are.” “Oh how long we’ve waited,” were some of the things they shouted at us.
Hewlett finds his wife5
Throughout it all, Hewlett had stood at Mydans’s side, but he could not wait any longer. “I found a little girl who could answer the question which was foremost in my mind,” he later wrote. “She told me where I could find my wife and kindly offered to accompany me to the hospital where Mrs. Hewlett was held.”
The three years of war had been unkind to Virginia Hewlett, who like others had nearly starved to death in Santo Tomas. In the wake of her nervous breakdown, she refused to bathe or even eat, picking her nails and face with a blank stare.
“He’s gone, he’s gone,” she mumbled. “I didn’t know.”
In recent months, Virginia Hewlett had improved, but she often remained in a wheelchair. That night, amid the shouts and commotion, she rallied, standing in a windowsill. Virginia told her friend Rita Palmer she wished Frank could be with her to witness the liberation. She had no idea he was now just steps away.
Hewlett burst into the men’s ward of the camp hospital. “Where’s my wife?” the reporter demanded.
Nurse Eunice Young escorted the anxious reporter to the women’s ward. There for the first time in 1,128 days Frank Hewlett saw his wife. “I found her there today, recovering from a nervous breakdown. Doctors said she would have fully recovered now if she had had sufficient good food. Though never a big girl, her weight has dropped to 80 pounds, but I found her in excellent spirits,” he wrote in his first dispatch from the camp. “It was a reunion after years about which I do not want to think.”
Soon after, Hewlett approached Dunn. “I found her!” he shouted. “I found her!”
“Frank grabbed me in a rugged. bear-hug, then literally danced away to break the news to the others,” Dunn recalled. “We were in the midst of thousands of deliriously happy people, but not one could top the happiness of Frank Hewlett.”
Raising the Flag
(A Manila businessman had insisted that the flag-raising be by and for the internees.)6
Sunday morning we raised the American flag over Santo Tomás. The internees stood by breathlessly as the colors were carried to the front of the building. They shouted and cheered when they were raised. Then someone started singing God Bless America and the entire camp picked it up. I have never heard it sung as it was sung that day. I have never heard people singing God Bless America and weeping openly. And they have—never seen soldiers—hard-bitten youngsters such as make up the 1st Cavalry—stand unashamed and weep with them.
- Mydans, Carl. “My God! It’s Carl Mydans.” Life. Time Inc. February 19, 1945. Accessed August 22, 2021. https://books.google.com/books….
- Santo Tomas Internment Camp, also known as the Manila Internment Camp, was the largest of several camps in the Philippines in which the Japanese interned enemy civilians, mostly Americans, in World War II. The campus of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila was utilized for the camp, which housed more than 3,000 internees from January 1942 until February 1945. Conditions for the internees deteriorated during the war and by the time of the liberation of the camp by the U.S. Army many of the internees were near death from lack of food. (read more at Wikipedia)
- Scott, James. Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Virginia Hewlett was supposed to have been repatriated earlier. However, Mydans wrote, “Under the stress of war and separation from Frank, whose fate she never learned, she lost her mind. At the last minute the Japanese had ruled she was too sick to travel. She had been left behind in prison.” - “40Th Anniversary of Liberation of Manila.” Los Angeles Times, February 2, 1985. Accessed August 22, 2021 https://www.latimes.com/archives….
“We were within a few hundred yards of the University of Santo Tomas, in the darkness, when we began to pass many buildings, which were being blown up by the enemy. Many were burning, and the light from these fires aided us in reaching our destination. We entered the university grounds behind one of the two tanks of the 44th Tank Battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division accompanying us. This tank was nicknamed “Battling Basic,” the other was called “Georgia Peach.” The tank crashed through the gates and incidentally brought to a halt a large American Packard car filled with Japanese officers attempting to escape.” - Scott p. 141-142
- Scott p. 190-192
Manila businessman Sam Wilson, who had served two years as a colonel of the guerrillas in Mindanao, arrived amid the morning excitement, anxious to see his wife and two sons. He brought with him a large American flag. “Bill Chase was ecstatic at the prospect of a formal review of his troops and a ceremonial flag-raising, but Sam overruled him,” CBS reporter Bill Dunn recalled. “This flag, he insisted, was for the internees. They must be allowed to raise it themselves.”
Even with the loudspeaker out, word spread that the American flag would be raised over Santo Tomas, and internees migrated toward the front entrance of the Main Building. Others leaned out of second-and third-floor windows, craning their necks for a glimpse. News reporters and army photographers jockeyed for spots to watch, some even climbing atop tanks and trucks to capture the historic moment. “Many prisoners put on the best clothes they had left,” Prising wrote. “The men hid their arms in long-sleeved shirts and each woman wore her most respectable dress. Few wished to look like prisoners of war—that would have been an admission of defeat.”
Dunn joined the crowd out front for the nine-thirty a.m. ceremony, describing it in his news report later that day. “It was simple but unforgettable,” he reported. “A few of the men emerged from a second-story window to the roof of the building entrance, unfurled the flag to the sight of thousands of milling internees in the courtyard before them, then slowly hauled it to its proud position once again. As it caught the breeze—still tinted with the smoke of a hundred fires—the hungry thousands, without signal, began to sing ‘God Bless America’ in voices choked with obvious emotion.”
Many of the internees lifted their arms over their heads as the words wafted through the crowd. An American bomber, as though on cue, buzzed the camp. “We nearly all broke down,” recalled nurse Denny Williams, “but if our voices failed, our faith in our country and its fighting men was stronger than ever.”
New York Times correspondent Ford Wilkins, whose weight had plummeted to ninety-nine pounds during his years as an internee, reflected on the ceremony’s importance in an article that day. “For three years these people had not been permitted to express their loyalty to their country or to demonstrate their feelings,” he wrote. “They had not seen an American flag, the symbol of their hopes and certainty of eventual liberation. This was the first display of the American flag in Manila since the Japanese invasion lowered the one in front of the High Commissioner’s Residence on January 2, 1942, trampled it underfoot and raised in its place the red circle on a white field.”
Amid the celebration, Dunn glanced over at Col. Fred Hamilton, who stood beside him. The cavalryman wept; so, too, Dunn noted, did other soldiers around him. The simple ceremony moved all who witnessed it. “No fanfare, no shouting,” Dunn reported that day. “Just a song that was more than a prayer.”
