• U.S.

THE PHILIPPINES: The Last Word

2 minute read
TIME

Wizened, wiry Jimmy Baldassare’s parents died when he was eleven. He roamed the streets of Manhattan’s East Side, saw many things a little boy should never see. As a Regular Army soldier in World War I, he saw a lot more of the brutal side of life & death. But he never saw, or felt, or even imagined the sort of things that happened after he was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II. Beaten, kicked, unspeakably abused, he swore to stay alive to see the Japs humbled.

He did—though thousands around him died during the Death March, in a stinking prison ship, in a Manchurian prison camp. Last week he took the witness chair in the big Manila ballroom where cool, suave Japanese General Masaharu Homma is on trial for his life. Talking quietly and precisely, as befitted his 28 years of service, Jimmy Baldassare became the first witness to link Homma to the infamous Death March.

Master Sergeant Baldassare never took his eyes from the multi-clad general. “I saw Japanese officers riding along the route,” he said. “There is one in this place right now that I can recognize who was riding in an official car—Lieut. General Homma. I asked a Japanese guard, ‘Who is that man?’ He said: ‘That is General Homma.’ ”

But Sergeant Baldassare, bald and toothless, his shoulder awry from a Japanese blow, had kept himself alive to say a little more than that, and in different tones. He stopped outside the courtroom and made a fierce little speech.

“They should hang the man,” he said, in words touched by the Italian accents of his youth. “He is a no-good son of a bitch. I should pull the rope. This is too much of a trial. They should never give him a trial. They never trialed us. They killed people like flies. Send him to me. I’ll fix him up.”

Then Sergeant Baldassare put a cigar in his mouth, pushed his overseas cap back off his sunburned forehead and walked out with the air of a man who has just paid an old debt.

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