Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror

9. War

✦ 9 War for jewish refugees in Manila, the Hawaiian Islands were lush, romantic , and remote tropical islands somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, owned by the United States. There was some bewilderment on that fateful Monday morning when most of them first heard about the Japanese air attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor.Although there was little doubt that war had come to the Pacific,the full implications and its dimensions may not have been immediately apparent. The refugees would soon learn the consequences: that night the Japanese air force paid a noisy visit to the Manila area. I was awakened at about 3:00 a.m. on December 9, 1941, by the sound of explosions accompanied by fiery flashes and the roar of aircraft engines, confirming that an air raid was in progress without the benefit of warning by sirens. That came thirty minutes later. By then, thousands of frightened civilians were huddled under tables or had crawled under their houses. Dawn brought forth the visible damage. Nearby Nichols Field and Fort McKinley had been bombed, and ships in Manila Bay were hit and several had been sunk. To most Manila citizens the events of the night were harrowing but also puzzling. Where was the vaunted U.S. Army Air Force? How could the Japanese pilots, who it was rumored could not see at night, have managed to fly all the way to Manila without being intercepted? Some of the explanations are disputed to this day, but at that moment America was fo- 84 escape to manila cused solely on the “Day of Infamy”—the surprise air attack by the Japanese that annihilated most of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and brought the country into World War II. The sound of explosions and flashes in the early hours of December 9 in Manila was an attack by seven Japanese naval bombers on Nichols Field, two and a half miles south of the Manila city limits. Members of the Jewish community lived in widely scattered areas of Manila, and for all of the refugees it was the culmination of their worst fears that war had followed them to this haven in the Far East. The Manila constabulary became very active the day after war was declared —they began to arrest all male German citizens. Scouring residential and business areas, the constabulary picked up Franz Eulau,the radio expert who had arrived with his parents from the small city of Offenbach, near Frankfurt,back in 1939.Eulau was working for the Heacock department store in its radio service branch. On the morning of December 8, 1941, he was listening to his favorite music program when it was interrupted by the news of Pearl Harbor. The next morning he returned to work, and the Philippine constabulary arrested him. Taken to the nearby police station he recognized many of his fellow Jews suffering the trauma of being confined by Filipino authorities who until recently had been friendly, even welcoming. Later that morning a harried Morton Netzorg, the secretary of the Jewish Refugee Committee, made the rounds of the police stations in Manila to vouch for the arrested German Jews, declaring that they were friendly to the Allied cause and that they had been persecuted by the Nazis. This was done, semiofficially, by the Jewish Refugee Committee, which issued a certificate that was generally accepted by the authorities.The Jewish men were released within hours.1 Not expecting any turmoil, Dr. Harry Preiss and his wife, Margot, came to Manila from Lilio a day before Pearl Harbor because their son Ralph was to enter Mercy Hospital in Pasay to have his tonsils removed. The operation was canceled,and the tonsils never did come out.With the school closed and more Manila bombings expected,the Preiss family returned to the little town of Lilio in Laguna Province, south of Manila. They would wind up staying there because not long afterward the Philippine army dynamited the bridges that spanned the narrow,fast-flowing rivers to prevent Japanese vehicles from advancing.2 Not far away,in Sariaya,fifteen miles southeast of Lilio,the Eichholz family watched as a single Japanese aircraft bombed the National Coconut Corporation (NACOCO) plantation, but fortunately no one was hurt. The next War 85 day the local constabulary captain came to take Siegfried and Günther Eichholz to...