-LIFE IN LEYTE DURING WORLD WAR II
PATERNAL GRANDFATHER William Lewis Chapman
PATERNAL GRANDMOTHER Emma Eslinger
FATHER Lewis "Louis" Eslinger Chapman October 1886 - 1941
MOTHER Hipolita Dolina Chapman 1906 -1985
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SISTER Emma
May 1920 - October 1987
HALF SISTER Ida
1920 or 1921 - death year unknown
SISTER Ena
May 1922 - March 2002
SISTER Helen
September 1924 - April 1999
BROTHER Bill
June 1926 - October 2010
SISTER Mary
July 1928 - November 2012
BROTHER George
August 1930 - March 1996
SISTER Ethel
April 1933 - November 1987
SISTER Evangeline April 1935 SISTER Evelyn March 1937 BROTHER Danny
1939 - survived 1 month
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bright sky press
. . HOUSTON, TEXAS
2365 Rice Blvd. , Suite 202 Houston, Texas 77005 Copyright Š 2015 Evelyn Chapman Castillo No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval devices or systems, without prior
wrinen permission from the publisher, except that brief passages may be quoted for reviews.
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Library of Congress Caraloging.in.Publication' Data Castillo, Evelyn Chapman, author And they returned: life in Leyte during World War II I Evelyn Chapman Castillo. pages cm Summary: "A personal understanding of the WWlI Japanese invasion and occupation of the Philippines. Hipolita Chapman, the author's mother, married at age twelve, was widowed, and faced the 1941 invasion of Leyte alone, taking her family into hiding in the mountains before being forced to live under Japanese occupation"-Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-942945-1 1-6 (alk. paper) I. World War, 1939-1 945-Philippines-Personal narratives. I. Title.
D767.4 .C363 2015 2015032310
940.53'5995--dc23
Editorial Direction: Lucy Herring Chambers Editor: Eva J. Freeburn Managing Editor: Lauren Adams Designer: Marla Y. Garcia Printed in Canada through Friesens
LIFE IN LEYTE DURING WORLD WAR II
EVELYN CHAPMAN CASTILLO
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bright sky press
_ _ HOUSTON, TEXAS
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An old Waray-Waray saying passed down to Hipolita from her father:
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A NOTE ON LANGUAGE:
This narrative begins in 1941, when English and (to a lesser extent) Spanish were the official languages of the Philippines, a mountainous, island country then populated by some seventeen million people. For almost four centuries, my people had lived under Spanish, and then American, rule. Most Filipinos could carry on a basic conversation in English. But on the different islands, different dialects were spoken. My first language was Waray-Waray (wuh-rye); Spanish names and words were sprinkled into our dialects. Barrio (the Spanish word for neighborhood) is one example. After we gained our independence in 1946, we developed our own national language, Filipino. Today, the Filipino word for barrio is barangay (bah-rahng-aye), meaning village, district or ward.
PROLOGUE
And They Returned recounts
the experiences of my FilipinoAmerican family during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II. At the time, the Philippines was an American Protectorate. My. mother, Hipolita, had vivid memories of her childhood from an early age. Her family lived in a small town in southern Leyte, one of the large islands lying midway down the thousand-mile-Iong archipelago that is the Philippines. My father, Louis "Chippie" Chapman, was a thirty-yearold American from Iowa who remained in the Philippines after his discharge from the army on December 20, 1910. Upon his discharge at Fort McKinley, my father likely attended engineering school and learned the trade that led him to future success as the owner of his own construction company, Chapman Construction. Thousands of Americans like him settled in the islands after their time in service and married Filipinas. It was not long after when he met and married my mother, a then twelve-yearold Filipina. They prospered financially. Nine months before the Japanese attacked the Philippines in December 1941, and after almost twenty years of marriage, my father died and my mother was left to face the war alone with their nine young American-looking children; at the time, I was just four years old.
PROLOGUE
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This story begins with my parents' unusual courtship and then chronicles my family's accounts of World War II. Except for the tragic loss of their youngest child, life in the Philippines moved smoothly for my parents, and by 1936, at the age of thirty, my mother was a grandmother. Then the war began in 1941, and my mother, by then a widow, took our family into hiding in the mountains for almost a year. We were later forced to live under the Japanese occupation in Tacloban and Leyte. The fearsome Kempetei, the Japanese secret police, used our house as headquarters during the occupation. All the atrocities and degradation of war are laid out in the pages that follow: the execution of an American captain and a Filipino sergeant after a futile escape from a prisoner of war camp, the experiences of my eldest sister Emma, and her husband's death, her reluctant participation in the guerilla movement with our sixteen-year old brother, Bill, in the jungles on the island of Samar, the torture of her loyal and trusted house boy, and my brother Bill's first experience with love. To remain on good terms with the Japanese, my family opened a restaurant-used for official functions and banquets-which ultimately kept them alive during the war. I recount the bloody assault of the United States forces for the liberation of Leyte, MacArthur's landing at Red Beach, the desperate struggle by the Japanese forces to take back the island, and our survival under their indiscriminate bombings on the American-held island. This story ends with the return of my family to our home in Tacloban, which was full of memories from before the war, but also bore scars left from it. I may have been a small child, but I have many indelible memories of the three-year occupation that followed. Some are frightening. Some are details that only a small child might remember. I have the memories that belong to my mother-gained from the telling and re-telling of dozens of family stories about that sad, worrisome and fearful period. Through it all, her strength, determination and wisdom helped us survive. I am glad that I am able to pass on some of these stories.
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.hul1/wa ReiuM.e.J is a tribute to my mother, and to all brave Filipinos who endured those awful days.
/JaJmgt_g Chan",,1
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TABLE OF CONTENTS PART I
CHIPPIE AND HIPOLITA .......... 15 PART II
LEYTE ISLAND . ......... . ......... .. 49 PART III
SAMAR ISLAND .. . . .. ....... . ...... 119 PART IV
THE BATTLE OF LEYTE GULF .. 161 PART V
BACK IN SAMAR ISLAND ......... 179 EPILOGUE ........................... 196 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & DEDICATION ..... . ........ . .... . . 199 GLOSSARY ...... . ................... . 201 THE PHILIPPINE COMMONWEALTH ERA . . . ........ . 205
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