Skip to content

December 16, 1941

Fort Stotsenberg had five air attacks yesterday, and Joyce, the army nurse who worked with me, lost her sweetheart during one of the raids. She went about her work silently with red and swollen eyes.

My family at the apartment now numbered four, counting my little pet.

Sophie, the wife of a mining engineer, came yesterday. She had come to the city to do her Christmas shopping ten days ago and she had never been able to rejoin her husband in the provinces. The gold mine where he had worked was already occupied by the Japs, and all communication had been cut off.

When I reached my apartment today, she was standing by the window, weeping quietly. She had just heard that her twenty-three-year-old cousin, a flyer at Stotsenberg, had been killed. When I tried to console her, she wept all the more. “I think my husband is lost, too!” she cried.

From my living-room window on the sixth floor, I saw dense smoke rising from Nichols Field. I gazed hopefully toward Manila Bay for a sight of one of our navy ships, but the bay that once used to be filled with the ships of the Asiatic fleet was completely deserted. The fleet was elsewhere, I thought sadly.