Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila

by James M. Scott

“We wished we were dead.” Out on the street, survivors listened to the clatter of trucks rolling through the rubble. “Every minute we were expecting the Americans to come up,” Aquino testified. “We could hear voices and then they would vanish. We did not know whether it was the Japanese, Americans or Filipinos.” Around noon on February 15—seventy-two hours after the massacre—the survivors heard voices outside of the school, this time speaking English. “Father,” Aquino said to Cosgrave, “I think they have come.” “When I see Americans, I will go out and wave at them,” replied the priest, who kept watch out the windows. “But the Japs are still around.” The survivors had endured too much to risk being killed now. Rather than dart out, the refugees huddled and waited as minutes turned to hours. Around five p.m. that afternoon, American soldiers entered the bloodied downstairs of De La Salle. “Anybody alive?” one shouted. Up the same staircase where Helen Vasquez-Prada’s painful cries had once echoed, now came the familiar twang of an American accent. For the exhausted survivors crouched behind the chapel altar, liberation had at long last arrived. “Yes,” Cosgrave shouted. “We are alive. We are here.”