The Leper Spy (9 page)

“We can't hold out very much longer,” Wainwright told them. “Maybe we could last through this day, but the end certainly must come tonight. It would be better to clear up the situation now, in daylight.”

At the threshold of capture, Wainwright composed his last message to MacArthur:

I feel it is my duty to the nation and my troops to end this useless slaughter. There is apparently no relief in sight. American and Filipino troops have engaged and held the enemy for nearly five months.

We have done our full duty for you and for our country. We are sad but unashamed. I have fought for you to the best of my ability from Lingayen Gulf to Bataan to Corregidor, always hoping relief was on the way.

Goodbye, General, my regards to you and our comrades in Australia. May God strengthen your arm to insure ultimate success of the cause for which we have fought side by side.

The morning sun revealed a once lush island now pulverized to a treeless desert littered with bodies. The Japanese had lost more than four thousand soldiers, but they'd managed to land tanks on Corregidor. General Wainwright met with Major General Moore and said he was prepared to surrender, considering the heavy casualty toll from the night of fighting. He'd give up the fortified islands at noon. He ordered Moore to destroy the entire armament by then, along with all records, secret maps, papers, correspondence, and diaries.

Wainwright also told Moore to lower the flag on Corregidor, burn it, and replace it with a white flag.

At noon, the American flag, which had been shot down twice and replaced during the siege, was burned and replaced by a white flag of truce. Despite the flag, the Japanese continued firing and dive-bombing.

The two men and their aides drove under a white flag to meet Japanese commanders. They left the car at the base of the Kindley Field Water Tank Hill and began the slow walk up. All around them
were the dead and dying. It looked to Moore to be a ratio of three Japanese soldiers for every one American or Filipino.

Surrender of American troops at Corregidor, Philippine Islands, May 1942.
National Archives and Records Administration

Wainwright met General Homma and surrendered. The Japanese put the prisoners on a boat and shipped them across the blue bay to Manila and paraded them through the city, making a mockery of the men. Wainwright was forced to walk past his defeated, pathetic soldiers. Despite being malnourished, battered, and injured, they struggled to their feet and stood at attention for their general.

T
he priests wept when Bataan fell, but they thought Corregidor would hold. They watched from the roof of the Ateneo as wave after wave of Japanese bombers assaulted the island, twenty-five miles away. The bombs rattled windows. Not one square yard of the island was without scar. The fathers snapped photographs of the planes over the island, then more when the Japanese navy steamed into Manila Bay. They listened to
Voice of America
reports on a hidden shortwave radio, but the good news was sparse.

Father Fred Julien, the La Salette priest now marooned in a war-torn city, had been keeping a diary filled with pictures of Japanese war planes and descriptions of what he had seen and heard since the invasion began. Besides that, he had jotted down detailed accounts of two Americans who had escaped during what was now being called the Bataan Death March and had then sought shelter at the Ateneo. The fathers helped hide Pfc. Clayton Rollins and Lt. James Atwell inside the compound until they were able to smuggle them out in the darkness and help the boys get to the mountains of Antipolo. The diary was Father Julien's secret, and he kept it hidden in his trouser belt, under his cassock.

Father Julien had taken to caring for another priest who was ill and interned at the University of Santo Tomas. He'd slip on a scarlet armband, which allowed relatively free movement in the city, and
walk to the marketplace to collect donated items for his friend, then pass them through the fence at Santo Tomas. But the armband was illegal; it had been stolen off a commandant's desk. Father Julien prayed no one interrogated him about the band, but he kept up his trips to visit his friend and weekly ventures to offer Mass at a chapel on a palatial estate outside of town.

The trips were risky. Soldiers patrolled every street in the city around the clock, and the stories of their brutality had reached the Ateneo. The fathers heard stories of soldiers splitting heads open like melons, of soldiers pulling teeth and cutting tongues out, of suspected spies being beheaded. A young soldier at the hospital had given Father Julien his diary, which described many atrocities.

The Japanese had already launched an intense investigation into Father John Hurley, the superior at the Ateneo, and they returned to campus every two or three days. A young man at the gate of the Ateneo would press a secret button beneath his desk, alerting the priests on the third floor that the Japanese had arrived. Hurley, who had hung a sign outside his door that said C
ONTAGIOUS
D
ISEASE
, would quickly climb into bed and pretend to be ill.

Father Julien was returning to the Ateneo one day after a respite at the chapel outside of town. As he walked through the gate with his illegal armband and secret diary, a woman whispered. He recognized her from before. It was Josefina Guerrero.

“Do you have anything you shouldn't have?” she asked. “The Japanese are here searching for contraband.”

“My diary,” he whispered.

“Give it to me,” she said. “Quickly.”

He reached into his robe for the diary, but a military policeman grabbed him and escorted him over to the barracks, where about forty priests lived. Military police were searching everything. He tried to hide the small book, but one of the soldiers found it and flipped through the pages until he came to the photographs of Japanese planes bombing and strafing.

“War, war, you write,” the soldier said.

Julien tried to explain that it was for his mama and papa back home.

The man put the diary on a stack of confiscated material.

“Anyone touch, we kill,” one of the soldiers said.

Father Julien was scared to death. If they found out what he had written, or if they found the soldier's account of the atrocities, he feared he'd be killed. When they weren't looking, he grabbed the diary and hustled to the toilet, where he ripped out all the pages containing pictures or descriptions of war. He tore them into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet, then returned the book to the stack. He was amazed that no one noticed.

The next morning, Japanese soldiers arrived at the Ateneo and ordered the priests to pack one bag each. They were driven across the city and unloaded at Santo Tomas Internment Camp, where they slept that night on the concrete gymnasium floor. They woke at 2:00
AM
and were forced onto a train for the forty-mile journey to a prison camp at Los Baños. Some would never make it back.

T
he black limousine pulled to the curb on Manhattan's busy Fifth Avenue, outside St. Patrick's Cathedral. The back door opened, and out stepped Manuel Quezon, who looked out of place against the New York grit in his bright white suit, scarlet pocket square, and white wingtips. It was just before Low Mass at 8:00
AM
, and the Philippine president was trailed by his wife and two young daughters, Maria Aurora, nicknamed Baby, and Zeneida. The party was greeted by Monsignor Joseph F. Flannelly, administrator of the cathedral, and Bishop John F. O'Hara, military delegate to the Catholics in the armed forces.

They were shown inside the neo-Gothic cathedral and seated facing the throne.

Archbishop Francis J. Spellman, who had entered the sanctuary earlier, was kneeling at the prie-dieu at the altar. When the party was seated, he was vested and began Mass.

Monsignor Flannelly extended a greeting to President Quezon.

“It is a very special privilege that I have this morning of welcoming to this Mass in the name of the Most Reverend Archbishop of New York the Hon. Manuel Quezon, President of the Philippines, and his family,” Flannelly said. “Mr. President, I use the word welcome, but perhaps there is no need for it, for this is God's house, and whether a child of God be a part of the North, South, East, or West, he is always welcome here. And then in addition you have a second
claim on this great cathedral of New York, because you are of the Household of the Faith. There is, therefore, added joy in bringing you into this House of God today, because of the fact that you are a member, that you are of the Household of the Faith. And when we think of your people today, the people whom you represent, when we think of them today, stricken as they are, we see the great ray of hope in this fact alone, that you, their leader, are a man of ideals, you their leader are a man of Christian ideals. Today we offer up this Mass for you and with you for your people. We pray for mercy and we pray that mercy may be speedy. And we do thank God today that you and your people have that faith, have those ideals which will draw down from heaven the mercy that we all need.”

Bishop O'Hara, former president of the University of Notre Dame, offered the sermon, then addressed Quezon from the pulpit in closing.

“A few years ago, in a prophetic utterance, Dr. Carlos Romulo stated that the security of a small nation lies in its remaining unnoticed or uncoveted,” the bishop said. “In a world in which for the moment injustice abounds, Dr. Romulo's beautiful nation could not remain unnoticed. Our own nation had been enriched and inspired by the loyalty and brilliant courage of the citizens of that nation who stood shoulder to shoulder with us on Bataan and Corregidor. And to you, Mr. President, with every American, we endorse and repeat our own President's pledge, that we will return and will be proud to help you restore liberty to the only Christian nation in the Orient.

“Our task must be fulfilled without hatred. Justice and charity alone can bring peace; justice alone can give us the proper fruits of victory. Hatred can never produce anything but destruction. Only justice that abounds more than that of the Pharisees can bring the peace of God.”

When the service was over, Archbishop Spellman, a man who would hold true to that promise, approached the party and stopped to speak with them. They each kissed his ring, then left through the front doors, and the archbishop then turned and knelt again at the prie-dieu and resumed his prayers.

T
he bombs make the headlines, but war is made up of a million tiny moments that slip by unnoticed but for those in the thick. Joey received another assignment, her most dangerous yet. She was asked to map the Japanese fortifications and gun emplacements on the Manila waterfront.

The port area and much of the land around Manila Bay was heavily guarded and to do her work, she knew she'd have to infiltrate the fortified zones again and again. The past year had been the hardest of her life. There was a chronic food shortage to begin with, and medicine was nearly impossible to get. Prices on the black market had soared. Without medicine, her disease overtook her. Red blotches appeared on her face, arms, and back.

But she was beginning to notice an advantage to the swollen nodes and skin discoloration. The Japanese soldiers, who had been so aggressive when she didn't appear to be afflicted, now wanted nothing to do with her. All it took was seeing the blotches, and the sentries practically fled. The Japanese were culturally horrified of a disease they misunderstood. They thought leprosy was highly communicable and feared being anywhere near someone afflicted. In a way, it became Joey's passport. She began to embrace the disease and use it as a tool, better than any weapon.

“Unclean,” she'd say if a sentry approached.

It was not uncommon for sentries to force suspected spies or couriers to undress and submit to a full-body search, but Joey never had to relent.

“I'm a leper,” she'd say.

“Go, now!” the frightened soldier would say.

She made her way along Dewey Boulevard and around the banks of the silver Manila Bay, in clear view of the barren hulk of Corregidor, making note of where gun emplacements were before heading home to jot them down on her hand-drawn map. The information was crucial, she knew, but she had no idea how timely it would be, how soon the bombs would start falling.

A puppet government had grown in Manuel Quezon's absence. In early 1942, before Bataan and Corregidor fell, General Homma appointed a stand-in government to run the country. These collaborators soon declared war on the United States and Great Britain, and a few thousand Filipinos signed up to join the Makapili, a militant group established to aid the Japanese when the Americans returned.

While MacArthur felt betrayed by the puppet government and swore to “run to earth every disloyal Filipino who has debased his country's cause,” the country regained a sense of stability. Much of society was not affected by Japanese rule, outside of occasional hassles and severe food shortages. The city rocked along on a steady beat, fishermen navigating the shores in
bancas,
peasants carrying bags of rice down dirt roads, the faithful celebrating Mass inside crumbling churches. Flames of independence flickered in all their hearts, but the timing had to be right.