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

by Ian W. Toll

General MacArthur visited Santo Tomas later that afternoon. He was mobbed by a grateful, tearful crowd. They pressed toward him from all directions. He greeted those he knew by name. Some of the younger children, having spent three years in the camp, remembered little of their prewar lives. “One man threw his arms around me, and put his head on my chest and cried unashamedly,” MacArthur recalled. “It was a wonderful and never to be forgotten moment—to be a life-saver, not a life-taker.”18 As the prisoners were interviewed, the stories they told vindicated MacArthur’s insistence upon speed in liberating the camps. The food allocations to the prisoners had declined sharply in the past month, and many were verging on starvation. If the liberators had arrived thirty days later, said Bill Dunn, the CBS radio correspondent, “the results might have been completely tragic.”