After 71 years, loved ones’ deaths still a mystery

By Joan Orendain

RODERICK MCMICKING HALL and his sister, Connie Hall McHugh, continue to wonder how, where and when their mother was killed by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army in 1945’s 30-day carnage.

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They are only two of the scores of survivors among 100,000 killed from Feb. 3 to March 3 who have tried to unearth information about their loved ones.

All they know is that the victims’ end came in the bloody battle between advancing American forces and the Japanese Imperial Army which held the Philippines cruelly hostaged for three years in World War II.

Hall, 12 at the time, his younger sister Connie, seven, and two younger brothers, lived on Dakota St. (now Adriatico) in Malate.

Their father, Alastair Hall, a British subject, had been interned at the University of Santo Tomas Internment Camp where 3,500 civilian citizens from Allied countries, including children, had been held since January 1942. Interns languished there, sparsely fed only watery, weevil-ridden rice, and bunking in crowded, mosquito-infested quarters.

On the morning of Jan. 20, 1945, the family were seated on the porch where his mother’s sister, Helen McMicking, was being visited by Carlos Perez-Rubio, her fiancé.

Japanese soldiers armed with rifles and fixed bayonets “began a three-hour meticulous search of the house and the attic,” Hall wrote in Manila Memories. The book contains accounts by four men who had been classmates at the American School, recounting their boyhood war years.

His uncle, Alfred McMicking, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, had hidden a strictly banned short-wave radio that was discovered by the Japanese. All, including Rod Hall and his brother Ian, were marched to the Masonic Temple, the Japanese headquarters on Taft Ave. Younger children Alastair, Jr. and Consuelo were playing at a neighbor’s house, evading arrest.

Rod and Ian, their Cantonese amah (nursemaid) Ah Nam, the housekeeper, and five household help, were all released that afternoon. Held at the Masonic Temple were his mother, Consuelo McMicking Hall, grandmother Angelina Rico de McMicking, uncle Alfred McMicking, aunt Helen McMicking, and her suitor Carlos Perez-Rubio.

The Hall boys were allowed to bring hot food stacked in fiembreras (enamel food containers) daily to the Masonic Temple for their captive family. After a week, however, they were told to stop bringing food.

“We thought that they had been transferred to Fort Santiago, but after the liberation, it was discovered that they were among more than 200 people executed at the Masonic Temple.” So his memoirs read. But now, he isn’t sure.

Not without great travail fleeing Ermita and Malate district’s street-to-street, house-to-house fighting, through sniper fire, their amah, housekeeper, and the four McMicking children, were spotted by an American GI. He led the motley group behind the front lines to safety. Sleeping out in the open watching the night sky “lit up with tracers, flares and shell bursts,” they built a shelter for themselves the next day.

“Look, Uncle Arturo, we’re building a bahay kubo,” Rod hollered as Arturo Ortigas, a relative, walked by. Found scraps were their “home.”

“Oh my God, your father is frantic about you!” Ortigas brought the six to UST, walking northward through gunfire and the city’s rubble. They had a tearful reunion with their father at UST, where they stayed until returning to their Dakota home which had remained intact. There they were joined by their uncle, Colonel Joseph McMicking, and his wife, Mercedes Zobel de McMicking. (“Uncle Joe,” their mother’s brother, will go down in Philippine history as urban Makati’s architect.)

In 1946, Rod’s father announced that he was getting married. Rod broke down and cried. “How could he get married? I thought Mother was in the mountains, hiding with the guerrillas.”

His father explained that he and Uncle Joe McMicking had gone to the Masonic Temple after they were reunited, but that “they couldn’t go in. It was such a mess, 200 bodies rotting in the basement,” concluding that their family had been massacred there.

Last year, Rod was sent a list by a friend, of 72 names of persons jailed or killed at Fort Santiago by the Japanese. It had been compiled by “Agent 61,” assigned by the “Philippine Army’s 1st CIC detachment, APO75, File #47” dated Oct. 24, 1945.

The Memorare shrine at Intramuros honors the 100,000 innocents killed in the Battle of Manila.

Prisoners Numbers 48 through 50 were the McMickings, “caught with radio transmitter” and “killed.” Number 51 was “another unknown daughter,” who was Consuelo McMicking Hall, Rod’s mother. Carlos Perez-Rubio, Helen’s fiancé, was Number 52.

According to Rod Hall, however, Miguel Perez Rubio, Carlos’s brother, “told me that Joe McMicking had told him that guerrillas had told Uncle Joe that both Carlos and Alfred were among those beheaded at the Masonic Temple.”

Continuing to wonder which version is accurate, Rod intends to research records at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Collecting what data he can, he says “someday, someone will put the pieces together and the truth will come out.” After 70 years, Rod and his sister Connie continue to wonder, as thousands of others do, about how and where their loved ones met their end.

Business executive David Arcenas was never quite sure how his father Benjamin, a guerrilla, met his end. A friend showed him Number 44 on the list; only in 2015 did he finally discover where his father met his end. He may never know the how.

Maria Teresa Escoda Roxas, erstwhile president of the Cultural Center of the Philippines who has since passed away, described her guerrilla parents’ passing to a writer. Antonio Escoda had been the night editor of the Manila Bulletin until war struck. His wife, Josefa Llanes-Escoda, had founded the Girl Scouts of the Philippines and was president of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs before the war.

Her father was caught with General Vicente Lim escaping in a batel (a sailboat) in June 1944 and was beheaded in Bilibid in November 1944. Her mother was picked up in August 1944 and had been taken to Fort Santiago. Sometime in January or February 1945, a friend spotted her in a truck with other prisoners. “She may have been taken to Cementerio del Norte and executed there,” Roxas said. The Escoda couple are Number 46.

Loreto Franco Racho has her own sordid memory of 1945.

“The Japanese, berserk and desperate, had lost the war,” she writes. “We feared them and had to go to a place of refuge. We occupied a shallow pit together with my grandmother, Paciencia Gamboa, and the Nograles family, our relatives.

“The sun was about to set and the Japanese, armed to the teeth, stormed in and went on a rampage. They were vicious. They were evil. They were satanic. They shot at my father. They shot at Rosario. They shot at Luz [her sisters]. They shot at my grandmother. They shot at Noel, but missed. The bullets just grazed my brother’s hair. They missed my mother because she was so pale and they took her for dead. She told me to be very quiet and covered me with her body so they missed me too. Little did they know that I witnessed the deadly drama. Right before my eyes I saw my father die. I saw my two sisters die. I saw my grandmother die. And for what?!

“The saddest part of it was that my sister Rosario, mortally wounded, had a bit of life left in her and was crying for help but none of us could do anything for her.”

Someone covered their bodies with a thin layer of earth. Eventually, the Francos unearthed their dead and re-interred them at the Cementerio del Norte.

Rod and his sister Connie are here from the US to attend Memorare 1945, an annual commemoration of the 100,000 killed in the Battle of Manila from Feb. 3 to March 3, 1945. A shrine in their memory occupies a plot of land in Intramuros, graced by a stirring sculpture in granite by Peter de Guzman.

They, together with former Ambassador to Spain Juan Jose Rocha, who sadly passed away in August, were the founding members of Memorare, of which Rocha, whose mother was felled by a shell in February 1945, was president. Lourdes R. Montinola, whose family was torched to death that terrible month, is president of the Memorare 1945 Foundation.

Annually from 1995 onward, usually on the second week of February, a commemoration ceremony is held at the Memorare shrine. This year it was held on Feb. 13. Attendees at the brief but poignant event are survivors of families who were killed between February and March, 1945. Ambassadors from other nations also attend the event.

Memorare, the granite sculpture by Pedro de Guzman, is at the Memorare shrine in Intramuros. It depicts the over 100,000 non-combatants killed in Manila between Feb. 3 and March 3, 1945, in World War II.

This year’s guest speaker was Professor Emeritus Randy S. David, a sociologist and writer. Wreaths were laid, including one by the Bridge for Peace, a Japanese group who arrive annually to attend the ceremony. The Manila City Hall band, as well as its choral group, performed at the brief but moving event.