UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 28, 23 September 1946, Page 8

UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT

ACTIVITIES IN MANILA “SOME HOMECOMING” For Joaquin Pacis, it was quite a home-coming, that mid-February day in 1945. He leaned his tommy gun against the shattered masonry which sheltered him from the Manila Hotel and watched a Sherman tank fire point blank against the Hotel. Joaquin Pacis, pre-war recreation director at the hotel, serving as a captain in the Bata Balani guerilla company, watched the Americans retake the building from the Japanese, floor by floor, room by room. Pacis told of an underground movement which operated among hotel employees under high-brass Japanese noses for 3| years. “I was a Lieutenant in the Philippine Army when war broke out,” he said. “We were among those who were unable to reach Bataan and, on December 23, 1941, were ordered to return to our civilian jobs and do what we could in that capacity to help out. “After the Japanese came in and took over the hotel as quarters for high-ranking officers, I organised a group of employees into an underground. “We obtained information about Japanese ship arrivals and movements, the names and ranks of various high officers and the locations of their units.

“The information was relayed by courier to Batangas (in southern Luzon) from there to Mindoro Island and then to Panay. Panay Island was where the guerilla army of Gen. Marcari® Peralta was fighting.'

Pacis told the story as workmen scurried about the lobby of the government-owned building in a race against time to prepare it for the July 4 independence ceremony, a job rendered the more difficult by a lack of materials and building supplies.