Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

In the Tondo District, advancing patrols came upon hideous scenes of civilian massacres. Hobert D. Mason of the Medical Corps discovered forty-nine bodies strewn across the floor of a cigarette factory, including many women and children as young as two years old. Their wrists had been tied tightly behind their backs. Most had been butchered by bayonets and samurai swords.21 Nearby, at the Dy-Pac Lumber Yard, U.S. soldiers counted 115 murdered civilians. Children and even infants had been beheaded. In a sworn affidavit provided to war crimes investigators, Major David V. Binkley described what he took to be a mother who had tried to save her two children: “A woman lay face down with an arm around each child. This woman had been slashed to death by a sabre-like weapon. One child had part of its skull sliced off.”