New Picture

Orders from Tokyo (Philippine Commonwealth-OSS-Warner) were found on Japanese soldiers who died in Manila's walled city. They were detailed instructions from Imperial Headquarters for "the systematic massacre" of the city's civilians, children and women as well as men. This short color film, the work of Marine Captain David C. Griffin, is the record of the execution of these orders.

The picture is introduced by Brigadier General Carlos P. Romulo, Resident Commissioner of the Philippines. General Romulo, aware of the immense distance, both physical and spiritual, which separates U.S. civilians from such horrors, has said: "These things are not to be known, they must be felt." Color adds its own gruesome assurance that the horrors will be felt.

Captain Griffin's record shows the 80% destruction of "the greatest Christian city in the Orient." It shows, still more dreadfully, the destruction wrought upon the mild, brave people who lived in it: children who were shot down as they prayed; gnarled stacks of bodies burned alive; people who were killed with their hands tied behind them; a bayoneted mother & child at the feet of the Virgin. It shows, among the living, bayonet wounds, and the agonized collapse of a woman who has been raped; and, in the faces of those physically untouched, wounds of the soul no less piteous to see. It shows the starved American prisoners and the American dead, and, in the immediate aftermath of combat, the uncontrollable tic in the face of one of the liberators.

This film will be part of the evidence when Japan's war criminals are brought to trial. Meanwhile it serves, as forcefully as anything could, to make the enemy and his work an intimate matter to U.S. civilians.

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