Hard to Get

THE PHILIPPINES Hard to Get Long ago the Japanese dubbed William Henry Donald "the evil spirit of China." They offered angry and growing rewards for his capture, dead or alive. Once they almost got him--when Japanese Zeros attacked his transport plane over China--but his pilot escaped into a cloud bank. Last week it turned out that they had had him for more than three years. Still they could not find him.

Donald, trusted and powerful confidential adviser to Chinese leaders from Sun Yat-sen to Chiang Kaishek, turned up last week, safe & sound, in one of the Manila prison camps. He had been a prisoner since 1942, when the Japs caught him on his way back to China from New Zealand via the Philippines. Obviously, he had used a false name to fool his captors.

Allied censorship had successfully covered up the identity of the Japs' prisoner. The fact that Australian-born William H. Donald was known to be a prisoner was never mentioned. His relatives in Australia made no attempt to communicate with him. But news of his capture eventually reached his captors anyhow.

The Japs combed the prison camps to find and kill him. They failed partly because they had no idea that Donald was 69 years old. They were looking for a much younger man. If they had remembered to turn to LIFE'S issue of Oct. 25, 1937, they would have found a striking likeness of him with Madame Chiang Kai-shek (see cut).

Man of Mystery. Donald's captors may also have been misled by the fact that after 43 years in China he still does not read or speak the language. He has helped to change China, but China has not changed him. Like all men of mystery, big, bluff, teetotaling, incorruptible Donald has kept his confidences to himself. Not much is known about him for certain. But he has had a way of popping up in the midst of most of China's crises since the Nationalist Revolution of 1911, soothing the opposing contenders for authority, untying the snarls of Chinese controversy.

Donald's career as a powerful oriental factotum began with Sun Yatsen. After his successful revolution had overthrown China's 300-year-old Manchu dynasty in 1911, Dr. Sun needed someone to communicate his ideas, help work out his plans. Donald became his adviser. A newspaperman, he had arrived in China in 1902, via Sydney's Daily Telegraph, to go to work for Hong Kong's China Mail. He was Shanghai correspondent for James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald when Dr. Sun heard about him. Donald, profoundly moved by the revolution and by the inability of Shanghai papers to grasp its meaning, jumped at the job.

From that time on, although he occasionally tried to pull out, he was hip-deep in Chinese affairs. He became editor of the Far Eastern Review, with an eye to breaking down "the cake of custom" blocking the modernization of China. He had a seat at the negotiations over Japan's notorious Twenty-One Demands upon China in 1915, and helped soften the blow which would have made China a vassal. The Japs never forgave him.

Man of Fact. The Chinese Government asked Donald to establish a Bureau of Economic Information to gather the little-known facts about China and tell them to the Chinese and to the world. Donald did. In 1928, the Old Marshal, Chang Tso-lin, Warlord of Manchuria, uttered a frantic call for his services. Donald served him and, later, his son, Chang Hsueh-liang, until Chiang Kai-shek called him, soon after Japan invaded China.

For the Generalissimo Donald performed one service, among many, which no one else had the courage to do. He told Chiang bluntly what was wrong with his government and what should be done about it. He pointed out graft, inefficiency, abuses, and named the men responsible.

It was Donald, too, who became the intermediary for Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Government when the Old Marshal's son, Chang, kidnapped the Generalissimo in 1936. As usual, he was just the man for the ticklish job.

Donald had bought a seagoing yacht in 1935, with the idea of retiring to write his memoirs. He planned to sail along the China coast to the Dutch East Indies, writing where and as he pleased. He left on his belated adventure just before Pearl Harbor. How the Japs caught him, how he managed to conceal his identity, is a story that closemouthed Donald has still to tell.

MacArthur's Back!

The battle of Manila had just begun; its deepening pall was still only a thin haze over the city. On the north side of the town, where troops of the 37th Infantry and 1st Cavalry Divisions were still hunting out Jap snipers, a command car whisked across the city limits, pulled up near a command post. Within a few minutes the word had gone down to the lowest ranks; "It's MacArthur!" Douglas MacArthur had lost no time getting back to the capital he had evacuated on Christmas Eve 1941, after declaring it an open city to save it from destruction by the Japs. He made a swift inspection of the areas his troops had al ready taken, could see without going farther what Manila had suffered, foresee what it was going to suffer. This was a city of desperate hunger. It was also a city destined to more destruction. The demolition charges of the Japs already thundered south of the Pasig and tall columns of black smoke had begun to rise (see WORLD BATTLEFRONTS).

"These Are My Own Men." Douglas MacArthur went back to the staff car and drove off. His next stop was a hospital where some of the rescued veterans of Bataan and Corregidor were lodged. "These are my own men and I am one of them," he said. "I owe them a lot. I promised I would return, and I'm long overdue. . . " Down through a double line of cots the General strode, pausing at bedside after bedside. Down the gaunt faces ran the unashamed tears of fighting men -- now the wasted victims of malnutrition and dysentery. Said MacArthur: "I tried to get here as soon as I could. I'm going to give you all the medical attention you need. And then you're going home." Then the General inspected Santo Tomas University, where 3,700 had endured Japanese imprisonment for three years.

There's MacArthur! Occasional shells from Jap artillery still fell in the com pound. While gaunt and sickly survivors cheered from the windows ("He's back!"), the General greeted old friends--Colonel Charles C. E. Livingston, who had become camp chief of police; Colonel Peter Grim, the new commandant of Santo Tomas.

The General strode inside. He poked through jammed corridors and rooms, grimly inspected the ravages of slow star vation. He talked with Dr. Theodore Stevenson. Presbyterian medical mission ary who had been the camp doctor. Dr. Stevenson had been jailed by the Japs be cause he refused to change death certifi cates on which he had boldly stated the contributing cause of death as "malnutrition." To BiIibid. As General MacArthur left Santo Tomas, maimed veterans hobbled toward him to salute, and some to touch his uniform. Women embraced him; one kissed him on the cheek. He went on to Bilibid. There he saw the same human devastation, the same scars of suffering.

There was still more to be seen in the streets as the staff party visited the Presidential residence, Malacanan Palace. Then Douglas MacArthur stopped for a glass of beer at San Miguel brewery; after that he headed for the front, toward the smoke-shrouded Pasig River.

On the streets, as U.S. troops battled flames and snipers and fought for the southern part of the city, hungry groups of men and boys were attacking people carrying sacks of rice, forcing them to share it. The price of a 110-lb. bag of rice had soared from eight to 20,000 pesos. By now starvation was an old story to Manila.

In Santo Tomas, ravenous prisoners had scrambled for garbage, for roots, for cats to eat (they found they taste like rabbit). In the camp's black market they had bartered diamond rings and watches for condensed milk and rice, had paid thousands of dollars for food the Jap guards stole from the camp storehouse. Additional supplies were smuggled past Jap guards by solemn-faced stretcher-bearers.

In notorious Bilibid, 800 prisoners had survived on a meager ration of wormy corn, rice and soybeans. But they thought this was not so bad as life in the "hellhole" camp at Cabanatuan. Survivors liberated from Cabanatuan by U.S. Rangers and Filipino guerrillas told of the menu there two years ago: rats, cats, dogs, worms and frogs they caught hopping from latrines.

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