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The next minute, nothing. ” AS MANILA FELL to the Japanese in the waning days of 1941, the landscape in and around the city was a study in contrasts: Here, two Santa Clauses walked along the Escolta River as palm trees swayed; there, the roads out of the city thickened with refugees leaving for their native villages. Here, women in evening gowns arrived for a dance at the palm-framed Manila Hotel overlooking Manila Bay; there, Rocky Gause helped Rita Garcia, a young Filipino woman, to the hospital after she’d been injured in an air raid.

A cacophony of “buy, buy, buy” comeons littered the air from Filipino hawkers working carts and wagons filled with food and wares. Children begged for money. Soldiers searched for bars and whores. In a country of 17 million people, Manila was, in 1941, home to 684,000, roughly a quarter of the population of Los Angeles at the time but still a thriving metropolis. If downtown was rough and poor and brazen, it was also the rich dressed in all white; the now-touristy “Walled City,” built centuries before by the Spaniards to protect them from the “savage natives”; massive acacia trees lining Taft Avenue; the Juan Arellano–designed Manila Metropolitan Theater; and the upscale Jai Alai Club.

But it was a lifeline that was more than eight sailing days away. Meanwhile, the men’s minds were elsewhere. On December 6, a buddy took a photo of Conner teeing up his driver at a Fort McKinley golf course. indd 34 01/08/12 6:40 PM FOUR Paradise Lost December 8, 1941, to December 23, 1941 SOUTH OF MANILA, at Fort McKinley, Conner threw off his mosquito net, rolled out of his bunk on a screened porch, and headed for the showers. He heard the news from a handful of other officers who were huddled around a radio, not that it particularly sunk in.