This is Howard Pyle recording cut number six in the current series of
broadcasts for Katie AARP.
I have now spent a sufficient amount of time in the Philippines to be able
to give you a fairly accurate picture of exactly what strikes the
observer's eye. In this rather chaotic post occupational period, as
mentioned before, Manila is about as completely wrecked as your wildest
stretch of imagination could conceive as fred Mcpherson's reviews of this
area have probably told you there was a time when the city of Manila fully
deserved the title Pearl of the orient. It's 400,000 citizens had
developed a center of trade and industry that must have been a real
tribute to the patient toiling that still characterizes the attitude of
the Navy. In these pre japanese days, Manila was one of the most densely
built up cities in the world. There was hardly a square foot of ground
that didn't accommodate some sort of a place of business or dwelling.
Beautiful homes line the city's better streets for miles and miles. They
were not single story in different types of dwellings, but elaborate two
and three story houses with many of the most modern features known to home
construction, steel, window sash, tiled baths and ropes built in features
that would be a credit to even the most pretentious of our stateside home.
The city's apartment houses were extensive, each of them representing a
certain palatial comfort that was essential to Manila's brightest day. The
hotels were positively regal in many of their appointment for the sports
minded. The city had provided the great resolve stadium, unquestionably
one of the largest and most completely equipped sports plants to be found
anywhere in the world. The theaters must have been models in design and
facility. The governmental buildings gave the center of the city something
solidly beautiful in the finest kind of concrete and steel construction.
The downtown business district, though perhaps a little more congested
than would be our preference in the states was a bustling parade of well
stocked stores of every description. Manila was indeed the most occidental
metropolis in the orient today. Manila is a tragic reminder of the waste
of war. Whole blocks of the city's residential district are vacant,
overgrown with weeds and cluttered with debris. Wooden structures once
covered these areas and the result is that they were left absolutely
vacant by the fires that emptied those lots. The beautiful homes of steel
and concrete are hollowed eyed hulks of glass, less windows and blistered
walls. They look like skeletons as they stand out against the sky, empty
of everything but the memories of having once been the pride of the
streets they made famous, where a few of the better homes still stand in a
reasonable state of preservation. The windowpanes show the clean round
holes made by the bullets of various types of small arms. The walls had
chipped and splintered with gunfire. The yards are jungles that
undergrowth all about there is an arab desolation, a forsaken look that
leaves you depressed as you wonder what happened to the happy families
that once made these comfortable dwellings, Rhonda views of happiness and
contentment. The great apartment houses are cracked ruins from one end of
the city to the other. The hotels have been gutted of everything, but
their steel reinforced walls inside the elaborate furnishings have been
burned with crisp and now lay in grotesque piles of melted jumble of loose
ends. The tremendous resolve. Stadium looks as though a pitched battle had
been played as a spectacular game, with no regard whatsoever for the
devastation that goes with wild uses of explosives. It's a shell of its
former self capable of holding thousands of sports loving fans. Most
terrible wall is the remains of the costly public buildings. There,
concrete and steel immensity is so battered and split apart that
rebuilding will be absolutely impossible. The Japs retired to them as
fortresses during the siege of Manila. The only way to route them was to
tear the buildings down stone for stone, room for room with the heaviest
artillery that could be brought to bear on them. The wreckage is complete.
Only the city hall remains 10able. The remainder of the circle will have
to be cut apart with torches broken into small chunks with dynamite and
carted away as a total loss. The theaters are a tragic comedy in real life.
There once elaborate marquees no longer gleam with the brilliance of a
nightlife. That must have been a thrill to the thousands who throng these
centers of entertainment. Instead what is left marks, the hour when men
forsake pleasant diversions for the hellish insanity of self destruction.
The downtown business district is a pulverized travesty. Black and walls
show the marks of fires that wiped out blocks of buildings at the same
time robbing them of goods that could today be the salvation of Philippine
trade. Most of the stores have been left as the japanese left them. The
attempt to open them for business at this stage of the game is futile, for
there is nothing to put in them. Here and there merchants have walls that
have so secluded little corners where they have now assembled the remnants
of what little there is left slowly and the pace is agonizing. The
businessmen of manila are casting about for the wherewithal to revive some
semblance of the business that once made this great city the hub of
Philippine trade prices have reached a point that makes buying prohibitive
the rate of exchange between the american dollar and the Filipino peso is
2 - one. It would be unfair to offer a snap appraisal. The exact ratio of
inflation, but it's sufficient to make normal trade almost unthinkable
scarcity is the answer. The scarcity made many times more severe, but the
vastly increased needs of the destitute thousands who have returned to
manila in the vague hope of resurrecting some sort of a future out of the
heart breaking ruins that show the crushed state of things. Heavy traffic
, no maintenance, and a variety of other difficulties have left the roads
and streets of the city in a terrible state. The bridges across the Pasig
River originally equal to all the traffic the streets could carry our
Today the best the army can provide in the emergency, but still far from
equal to the burden that makes them a perpetual bottleneck in the flow of
activity from one side of the city to the other through this vast tumble
of ravaged rubble, the people of Manila are threading their uncertain way.
The poor are everywhere, because today everyone in Manila is poor, bare
feet are common, virtually the only shoes available of the awkward wooden
clogs that only the most practiced can use to advantage like so many ants.
The men, women, and Children are wandering the city in search of anything
and everything that can be salvaged, either for sale to the dealers in
odds and ends, or as a means of assisting in the rebuilding of the most
humble kind of shelter. Corrugated iron litters almost every block the
rusted and misshapen. The natives are beating into usable length and winds
as much of it as possible, and carrying it from one part of the city to
another, considering the small stature of the native, his light bone and
muscle. You wonder where he finds the physical strength to handle the
great loads that he carries on the top of his head, his shoulders, and on
the ends of poles balanced across the back they go in a trot. The gate
apparently being helpful in holding their burdens on a fairly even balance.
They pay no attention to anything. Along the way. Eyes straight ahead
they amble onto goodness knows where rain or shine. Their labors continue
how their frail bodies stand up under the beating they received as a
constant mystery. If this is the heart of the Philippines, then no amount
of privation will long confined these islands under the most trying
conditions, they are doing their best to clean up the wreckage, watching
them pick at the endless pile at his manila. Today leaves you amazed at
their courage. They have no machinery, except that to the army engineers,
and most of that equipment is largely essential to the actual needs of the
armed services in this vicinity. A few little carts, some horse drawn, but
most of them pushed by hand represent the limit of the mechanical means
available to them. Transportation here makes the situation at home seem
almost perfect. I have seen as high as 15 persons riding on the converted
delivery type body with which many of the bantam cars of the area have
been equipped. These bantam cars are not one ounce bigger than the
Austin's that briefly held the public's fancy in the States. Most of the
cars once owned by the natives may now be seen scattered along the streets
and the roadways burned beyond recognition and so full of bullet holes
that there's hardly a square foot of their bodies that isn't perforated
tires and gasoline for the few native motor vehicles are so scarce that
their operation has become virtually impossible. The little Children have
suffered probably more than anyone else. The alleyways are full of them,
and always they are grubbing through the ruins for anything they can find.
It might relieve their hunger or bring them the spare scientology or two.
Their clothes are in tatters, their bodies show all the effects of
undernourishment, their eyes at the dull eyes of boys and girls whose
senses have been so numbed by the absence of even the bare necessities of
life as to be almost beyond revival. How happy they would be with just the
cast off from the wardrobes of America's Children, the scraps from even
the most modest tables, the things they improvising to play things would
be scorned as junk by many a boy and girl. I know. In fact, all of them
whom I know still these native Children are glad to have the least of
their possessions. They smile to even laugh at times in spite of the
misery of their circumstances. Imagine the distress of the mothers and
fathers who are powerless to give their little ones anything but the worst
of it. Fortunately the most of the suffering and want is in the cities
such as Manila. The country hereabouts is richly productive, and those
natives who have been wise enough to make the most of this fact are at
least getting enough to eat. Their lives are hard to, but hardship is
robbed of much of its sharper pang when there is food and shelter. After
visiting this war torn area, Senator Millard Tydings returned to
Washington with the intention of asking the United States Government for
an outright gift of $100 million. Told the rebuilding of the Philippine
commonwealth. This gives you some idea of what Japanese aggression has
left behind, what militarism leaves in its quaking Wait, as time permits,
I hope to give you other sketches of things as I see them in these distant
places. My first mission, of course, is to locate as many of our boys as
possible. But as this diminishes in possibility, we'll devote more and
more time to conditions, prospects and situations out here in the pacific
and now back to fred for a roundup of the spot news from this theater.