December 9, 1941

About 2:00 A.M. was awakened by distant explosions & shaking of the building. Jumped from bed & ran outside. Explosions & gun fire from Nichols field accompanied by a myriad of red flares. Staid up discussing the situation with some apprehension. At 4:00 A.M. all hands called to Sternberg as casualties started arriving from Iba & Clark Field. These continued to come in all day keeping the O.R. constantly busy. Very difficult to keep admissions straight & impossible to keep locator cards accurate due to the large number of transfers. Patients were brought in in trucks, ambulances, etc. The trucks having several layers of patients most of whom had gruesome wounds. Many had shrapnel wounds of the buttock. During the morning all the patients from the Naval hospital at Canacao were brought into Sternberg. Most were put in estate Mayor annex. About 12:30 we sighted 54 two motored bombers flying high. No clouds & was difficult to watch them because of sun. Was a beautiful sight paradoxically. They flew from the north almost directly over head and it was laughable the way our A.A. went to work. The bursts were seen at all points of the campass & those that were in the general direction of the planes were several thousand feet short. No pursuits went to intercept them for as we learned later, practically all our air force had been wiped out by the previous days bombing at Iba, Clark, & Nichols Fields. For some unexplained reason our B-17’s & pursuits were held on the ground all lined up nicely so that a minimum amount of bombs were required. (This is hearsay about the plane destruction). The bombers dropped a few on Nichols completing their devastation there & went out to Cavite & after a dry run came back over the Navy yard & really unloaded. They skipped the hospital & then hit the radio towers. It was an accurate sample of bombing completely putting the place out of commission. There were several thousand workers in the yard at the time and the amount of casualties were untold. About 4:00 P.M. casualties were brought by boat to the A & N Club landing and to the navy pier between pier 1 & pier 3. These continued to come by boatload thruout the nite. The injuries were terrific –Many compound fractures & barge loads of dismembered corpses were brought over & stacked in vehicles to be carted away to the morgue for identification & burial. I was at Port Area evacuating a boat loaf of about 100 patients at midnite when the sirens came on. I sent the loaded ambulances on to Sternberg & after some consultation, the skipper decided to push out into the bay until the raid was over & then return & unload the remainder. I took the remaining ambulances up to the Luneta to wait as we figured port area was due & it is hard to stay hitched in a place like that.