Quiet Room in Manila

In a shell-scarred, balconied Manila ballroom Japan's General Tomoyuki Yamashita, onetime "Tiger of Malaya" and "Beast of Bataan," was on trial for his life. He looked incredibly tame and safe, a froglike man in a green uniform who sat shaven-headed, sleepy-eyed, almost motionless at a long table. Occasionally he smiled. In the ordered courtroom uniformed attorneys shuffled papers, entered objections, laboriously introduced exhibits.

Through newly repaired windows came faint, peaceful sounds from the wrecked city. But as witnesses talked from the stand, the nerves of many a spectator ached for the sound of a scream.

A pretty, 26-year-old Filipino actress, Corazon Noble, began the testimony, with which the prosecution intended to prove that Japanese atrocities were part of Yamashita's plan. She had taken refuge with her ten-month-old baby in a Red Cross emergency hospital during the Battle for Manila, had been trapped there by four Japanese sailors. One had raised his rifle, fired, wounded her in the elbow. Then the Japs bayoneted her.

"I was stabbed nine times," she said. "The baby was stabbed three times. When the Japs were gone I walked out the back door and gave her to my brother. I couldn't stand it any more."

"What happened to your infant child?"

"She died."

Terror in the Streets. Widows told of drunken Japanese soldiers leading their husbands and sons out to be killed. Witness after witness described bayonetings, shootings, the sight of singing, drunken Japanese throwing grenades, setting fires, defiling bodies.

The tales of horror multiplied:

On one Manila street a Jap soldier held a 15-year-old girl's head up by pulling at her hair, hacked at her neck with a sword as she prayed for mercy.

Japs put candy and whiskey in the center of the St. Paul's College dining hall where 800 people were imprisoned. The crowd jammed around the strange offering. Then explosives, fixed in the ceiling, were set off. Hundreds were killed.

As fires roared in the city, Japanese troops rounded up thousands of Russian, Chinese, Filipino and Spanish women and girls, chose the prettiest, led them off to Manila hotels to be raped. In one week 476, some no older than twelve, were hustled away. Some were back to testify last week.

Order in the Court. As the testimony wore on, formality lent the proceedings the curious improbability of a bad horror play. But twice there were real and savage scenes. A Chinese woman, who had seen her baby bayoneted, stared at Yamashita from the stand, cried: "That Jap is to blame. He's got to be killed to pay for what he's done!" A slim Filipino girl halted her testimony, cried in a low, tense voice: "You still have the face to look at me, Yamashita. If I could only get near you. You ought to be cut to pieces."

Both women were led from the room. The five U.S. generals of the trial commission, conducting the first U.S. war-crimes trial, were thus setting a precedent; they proceeded with the utmost caution. Yamashita, who hoped to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, would be given every legal courtesy--by men who devoutly hoped to see him face a firing squad.

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