Grandma and the Japanese soldiers

One Christmas evening after dinner with all the kids, nieces and nephews at the table, Grandma leaned forward in her chair and told the grandchildren a story she wanted them to remember.

“Most of us are lucky," she said, "that we have never experienced war on our own soil."  And then she began to tell the kids that she was not so lucky.

She looked across the dinner table at her grandchildren.

“Right after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor we heard news that they were coming toward the Philippines,” she told them.  Grandma lived in Legaspi, Philippines when she grew up.  A lush, mountainous area south of the capital of Manila.

“My father began to prepare for us to leave the town.  He started to gather and pack food and clothing.  I was 22 years old then,” she said. 

Adela Yanzon, center top and 
her mother Pilar, right in Legaspi.

“But the Japanese came sooner than we expected,” she said.  “We stayed in our homes with our doors locked.  After a while we heard stories that Japanese soldiers had been taking local girls with them, raping them and keeping them for the soldiers.  The Japanese called them ‘Comfort women’” she said.

A few days later we saw a group of soldiers coming into the neighborhood and going into the houses.  My mother called for me and quickly pulled me into the laundry room.  She emptied the clothes out of a large clothes hamper and had me get inside and roll up into a ball.”   It probably wasn’t that hard for a young woman who stood only 149 cm, or 4’ 11”.

“She told me not to move, not to make a sound.  Then she piled the clothes on top of me.  A short while later there was a loud pounding on the door.  I heard men coming into our house.  I could hear their boots on the wooden floor.  They were going from room to room.  They were speaking Japanese to each other.  I heard the boots coming closer and closer to me, and then I heard the door open.  I could feel the boots next to me.  I was frozen," she said. "I didn’t even breathe.”

The grand kids stared at grandma while she spoke.

“Then the boots started walking away, into the next room.  After a few moments the boots walked more quickly and finally out of the house.  I heard the sound of the door close and latch.  My mother said nothing. It seemed like a long time.  Then I could hear her speaking to me.  She came into the room and pulled the clothes off of me.”

“When my father came home that afternoon,” she said, “my mother told him what happened.  Infuriated, my father left the house and went to the Japanese Army post and protested to the Captain about what had happened.  The Captain, who my father said seemed like a nice man, apologized and said he would make sure they never did that again.  But my father didn’t believe him.

"Later my father and my brother were imprisoned by the Japanese for giving rice to the resistance fighters," she told the kids.  "But a month later our family was able to get them released.

“When my father returned we packed up what we could carry and we walked for hours up into the mountains to a cabin we sometimes used .  It was a long walk, and I remember being tired from carrying so much and walking for so long.

Americans entering Legaspi

“We stayed in the cabin for over two years,” she said.  Grandma said she grew to like it in the mountains. “We had no electricity or running water.  But we had a waterfall, fruit growing everywhere, and we planted our own vegetables.  We used a kerosene lamp, but kept it under a table so it wouldn’t shine out the window.  We felt safe.

"Guerrilla fighters passed through the mountains and often visited our cabin.  We offered them food.  We had guns in the cabin to protect us, but we never saw the Japanese soldiers where we were.  There were eventually about 30 of us,” Grandma said.  “Uncles, aunts, cousins, all hiding from the Japanese.   On some days we could hear the airplanes fighting overhead.

“One day we heard news that the Americans had come ashore at Legaspi.  We finally went down the mountain back into town.  American soldiers were driving through our streets.  We were fortunate, but others who stayed were not so fortunate.  While we were gone some of the townspeople had been cruelly killed.”



Adela Yanzon, left, and her mother Pilar right,
in Manila at the end of WWII

I don’t know if the kids really appreciated the point Grandma was trying to make that holiday evening.  It’s one thing to hear her stories and quite another to live in a place visited by the horror of war.

Perhaps that’s why it seems some of the people who are most critical of war have been those who lived through it themselves.

____________________

Adela Yanzon Concepción is 91 and lives in California

Whatever became of this little girl?

It looked like a shoe box.   When I opened it I found a stack of old photos. After flipping through some I stopped and pulled a black and white 5x7 out of the pile.   I recognized it immediately – all but forgotten over time.

She was a small girl in diapers, perhaps two years old, laying on her back playing with the shoe lace of her knit bootie.
 
The memories began to come back to me.

It was April 2, 1975. I was 25 years old.  I was driving on the freeway in Oakland California. Suddenly a radio report described an incredible event that had taken place in Vietnam just a few hours before.

A World Airways cargo jet had taken off from Saigon, Vietnam under chaotic circumstances. The crew had hastily boarded several dozen Vietnamese orphans to be brought over to the U.S. There was understandable resistance from the Vietnamese government about such an endeavor as questions swirled about whether or not it was appropriate or conducted with enough oversight.  But chaos and panic reigned in Saigon during that month of April as the northern soldiers advanced into the south and the southern government began to crumble.

As the flight taxied away toward the runway there was a change of heart by authorities and they denied a takeoff clearance to the aircraft. Undeterred, the World Airways crew continued to the runway. The controllers in the tower turned off the runway lights to prevent the aircraft from departing, leaving Tân Sơn Nhất Airport in darkness. But the crew taxied onto the runway anyway and, using the aircraft’s landing lights to illuminate the runway, took off without a clearance and climbed northeastward into the night sky toward their planned fuel stop in Japan.

The radio announcer reported that the aircraft was now somewhere over the Pacific and due to land in Oakland that night. He kept referring to it as “Operation Babylift.”

I was intrigued.  That night I drove to Oakland airport and parked along a chain link fence next to the World Airways hangar.  I climbed up on the top of my car and, camera in hand, waited for the arriving aircraft.

Crowds began to appear. TV crews and throngs of reporters and dignitaries assembled near the anticipated parking spot. Soon the high pitched whine of the jet's engines could be heard as the red, white and gold colored DC-8 emerged from the darkness at the far side of the hangar, turned toward us and then inched slowly into its parking spot. The bright lights lit up the side of the airplane revealing the faces of small children crowded together peering through the windows.  Then the engines slowly became silent, as did the crowd.

When the stairs were rolled up to the front door, officials climbed up, opened the door and stepped inside.  Later we would be told they were astonished to see a plane load of children from babies to 12 year olds sitting and laying on mats and flattened cardboard boxes. There were no seats.

Finally the children were taken down the stairs one by one, and last the crew came down to a welcome of applause.

I had heard that volunteers were needed to care for the children in the hangar during the night.  Somehow I ended up working in a four hour shift from midnight until 4AM. I was asked to care for the little girl in the photo. She spent the night playing on one of many mattresses spread out across the hangar.

I don’t remember her name. But I do remember that with the multiple time zone changes, she was wide awake after her long flight from Vietnam and full of curiosity and energy. She played with my keys, my camera, and I remember feeding her a bottle and changing her.

As I stared at the photo in my hand – and a second one showing the arrival of the aircraft – I wondered whatever became of this little girl.   She must be 37 years old now, I realized.   Where is she?  What is she doing?  What is her name?  What kind of life did she choose for herself?   Does she have any children of her own?  What does she know about that night long ago?

I wonder if I’ll ever find out.

__________________________________

Two days later, April 4, 1975, a U.S. Air Force C-5 cargo jet departed Saigon's Tân Sơn Nhất Airport carrying 149 orphaned children.  30 minutes after takeoff while making an emergency return to the airfield, it crashed into a rice paddy killing 141 of the children.

The World Airways flight was the first of what became known as Operation Babylift.  That month over 3,300 orphaned children were flown out of Vietnam to the U.S. and other countries.

You may contact me or send comments to pspalazzolo@gmail.com

All photos protected by copyright. Not to be used for commercial purposes.

Lost

                                                                              Pago Pago, American Samoa

I walked across the hot ramp at Pago Pago Airport to the waiting airplane. It was a 9 passenger, British-built Islander. Aptly named, I thought, since I was about to take it island hopping among Samoa’s rural Manua islands.

I was 27 years old. It seems like a very long time ago.

Three weeks prior I had been walking through the financial district of foggy San Francisco trying to get a foot in the door to what would be my first flying job. While I had toyed with other paths in my life – I had been admitted to law school, and given some thought to the foreign service as well as teaching, I knew my love was with flying.

I opened the cockpit door and looked inside. This would be my very first commercial flight as a pilot in command.  I had flown my first two weeks in Samoa as a copilot on the company’s other aircraft, a DeHavilland Twin Otter.  I was a low-time pilot and I knew that my first flying job would be somewhere where the more experienced pilots wouldn’t bother.   And so I ended up in Pago Pago, American Samoa, smack in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean.

I placed my maps and paperwork on the right seat.  With only nine passenger seats, only one pilot was required by regulations.  A Samoan woman walked up to the airplane. She would be my only passenger for the flight.  She was about 40 years old and quite big.  No, make that very big.

She sat just behind my seat.  I went through the checklist recalling the short training flight the chief pilot had given me the day before.  It was a simple twin engine airplane.  For a pilot the numbers were easy to remember.  65 knots for takeoff and 65 knots for approach to landing.  In cruise you kept it at 130 knots to be kind to the airplane.

A map showing the various islands was stuffed in the side pocket near the pilot’s seat.  Today we would be flying to Ofu.  Ofu and Olosega, a figure-8 set of two islands that almost touch, are part of the three Manua Islands.  The airline flew there once a day -- whenever they had time.  There were no phones on the outer islands, so the protocol was to buzz the village to let them know the plane was arriving, then swoop across the island to the coral sand runway and wait for the villagers to arrive.

The map had a straight line drawn on it from Pago Pago Airport to the island of Ofu.  Along the line was written “83° -- 36 min.”  The line to Tau said, “86° -- 42 min.”   So after take-off I turned the plane east and nailed the compass at a heading of 83 degrees, then glanced at my watch to start the 36 minutes.

We leveled off at 5,000 feet.  The brilliant tropical clouds danced below us and peeking between them was the beautiful blue South Pacific Ocean.  I was a half a world away from everything I had ever known and I was in heaven.

About thirty minutes later as I descended below the scattered clouds I looked around for Ofu.  It was nowhere in sight.   Great!” I thought to myself.  “My very first flight and I’m lost!”

In my short time flying in the South Pacific it became apparent how difficult it was to see islands from the air.  Each puffy white cloud casts a dark shadow on the coral blue sea painting a picture of what looks like hundreds of islands.   An island could easily hide among these illusions.

Ofu left, and Olosega                                                                                          

After another minute or two of looking left and right the lady sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder with her very large finger.

“We should have been there by now!”

“Um…Yes, I know.”

Just then, far off to my left, I saw a shadow that had peaks!  It was an island.

I banked the plane steeply left and said -- with as much confidence a lost, 27 year old pilot on his first flight could muster -- “There it is.”

As the island grew closer her very large finger found my shoulder again.  “It’s the wrong island,” she scolded!

I grabbed the map and looked at it again.  There were only three islands out here, so it was a simple matter of trying to figure out which one it was.   If it wasn’t Ofu, it could only be Tau.

“It’s Tau,”I told her, knowing she probably knew that already. “Ofu and Olosega are on the other side,” I added, realizing she probably already knew that, too.   How did we get so far off course? I wondered.

Soon, with the island’s village of Alaufau off to our right, I pointed the nose down and let the plane scream toward the shoreline while I turned toward the cluster of buildings.  As we flew about 500 feet above the rooftops I cycled the propellers causing the engines to roar.  We pulled up smartly and climbed back out over the crystal blue water.

That was the most fun I think I had ever had in an airplane!

                                                                                                  Olosega and Ofu

Looking for any excuse to do it again, I turned to my passenger and said, “I’m gonna do it one more time just to make sure they heard!”  And once again we roared low over the village and pulled up steeply for the lazy flight around the coast to the landing strip.

The runway was actually a patch of coral sand about 2,000 feet long and more than a football field wide.  When we touched down, no brakes were needed.  The plane slowed on its own from the softness of the ground.

I taxied over to the side, shut down the engines and stepped out.  I opened the door for my brave passenger and helped her down onto the hot sand.  I gave her a step stool to sit on and the big overhead wing on the Islander conveniently shaded us while we waited for the villagers to arrive.

After several minutes I realized what an odd sight we were.  A big Samoan woman who knew very little English and a skinny 27 year old kid who knew no Samoan, sitting there on stools next to each other under the shade of an airplane wing on a sandy expanse along the ocean.  In the middle of nowhere.

“You live here?” I asked.  That was stupid, I thought. Of course she lives here.

She didn’t say anything.

We must have sat there for over a half hour.  I stood up.  Did I land on the wrong island?  Of course not, she would have jabbed me hard with her finger.  She must know every square inch of these islands, I thought.

I wondered if anyone had heard us back in the village. I walked over to the water's edge and looked in.  It was crystal clear with submerged rocks and colorful fish visible from where I stood.  It was peaceful here.

Later, some sounds. And at the far end of the landing strip a cloud of dust.

I walked back to the airplane.  Within a minute or so a small Toyota pick-up truck was bouncing down the runway toward us.  A rooster tail of dust rose up behind it. The truck stopped beside the plane.  The back of the truck was sitting low, close to the ground from the weight of all the people crammed into the back.  The driver's door opened and a young woman got out holding a clip board.  On the passenger’s side an older man, barefoot and wearing nothing but a traditional lava-lava skirt, climbed out.  He was the village chief.  And she was his daughter.

I had learned earlier that I had little to say about who got on the flight or what they could bring. The chief made those decisions. His daughter spoke English and introduced herself to me. “I'm Moka. Are you new?” she asked.

“Yes. I'm Pat."

She was about my age and was very pleasant. “Welcome to Ofu. You will have to come visit some time when you can stay longer.”

Her father was covered with warrior-like tattoos.  I suppose they were very prestigious. The chief stood there and talked quietly with people, but it was the daughter who was organizing the transfer of luggage from the truck to the plane and telling people where they would be sitting.

A young boy who was staring at me walked up slowly and said, "Hello palagi," the Samoan word for white person.  

I smiled and asked Moka if the boy could ride in the front seat. "He's not going with you.  He just came out to see the airplane."

Finally the five passengers climbed aboard, Moka gave me their tickets and we said good bye. I looked over at the Toyota pick-up and saw my passenger from Pago Pago sitting in the back more than ready to go home.

 Islander.          Copyright Sam Pollitt                                                                     

We taxied back to the far end of the landing strip, turned around and accelerated down the runway toward the pick up. I looked out the window and saw the chief’s daughter Moka and the young boy waving good bye as we turned toward Pago Pago.

And so began my life of flying.  33 years later with a life time of flying across the oceans to almost every continent, I know that the pinnacle of my career will in many ways never compare to the simplicity and beauty of flying in Samoa many years ago.

_________________________

After returning to Pago Pago I reported my off-course journey to the chief pilot.  He looked at me for a moment, then mumbled, “…Oh, I forgot to tell you, the compass on that plane is broken. You have to subtract 12 degrees when flying to the islands.”   It was, I would learn again, one of many occupational hazards of flying for a lean-budget operation in a far corner of the world.