Page 49 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Passenger on a Ship

funds, he continued working with Byrnes and Baker. But then “At some point I had
to make a decision whether to ask for an exemption or join the military,” he says. It
was a dilemma that would soon be rendered moot by a horrifying bit of news.

Sometime late in 1942, in New York, Wash received a letter from his friend Mary Fitt,
expressing her sympathies. The letter mystified Wash, who didn’t know what Mary
was sympathizing with him for. It only made Mary feel worse that Wash seemed
completely unaware of what she had already learned—that his father had been killed.
She told him of an article she had read in the Reader’s Digest—condensed from an
article by Carl Crow in The Nation—telling of his father’s execution by his Japanese
captors.

“Crow had written that two of his friends—one of them Chief Justice Jose Abad
Santos and the other my father—had been killed. My father had been put in solitary
confinement, and usually one got shot after that. I wrote Carl Crow. He wrote back
and said, ‘This was the information I had.’ So I thought my father had been killed.”

Unknown to Wash at that time, Crow’s source may have been a dispatch cabled
to the US State Department by longtime Manila resident Charles “Chick” Parsons
dated August 12, 1942 from aboard the M/S Gripsholm, which reported in part that
“from information available, it appeared that populated centers in the Philippines
were comparatively free from atrocities; the story in more isolated places, however,
was quite different. In February, three British nationals (two of them ship’s officers
from the S. S. Tantalus) who had escaped from the Santo Tomas Interment Camp
were, after brutal torture on the camp premises, taken to Camp Santiago and shot.
There were also reports of the execution of 20 out of 50 leading Chinese in Manila
who were taken into custody by the Japanese upon their entry, the executed men
including the Chinese Consul General, Mr. C. Kuangson Young, and Alfonso and
Albino SyCip. Justice Jose Abad Santos was also reported as having been executed in
Cebu.”

The news devastated Wash. “I took it very, very badly. Later on, news came out, from
different sources, that people had seen him in prison, alive. But that was much later.
I was already in military training in the States.” He had decided that “the right thing
to do was to be directly involved in the war effort.”

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