What the Japanese could not burn, they holed up in, so we blasted them out. Buildings lost either way — either the Japs fired or demolished them or we blew them apart dislodging Nips.
[...]
A lot of naval depth charges were used for both demolition and antitank mines, and what happens to a Sherman tank when it runs up against that much TNT in one package is a caution.
Then they moved on:
Two of my old squad in the MP’s were killed in the city, and several other MP’s as well. They were practically a reconnaissance outfit by now, under a new officer who wanted to see the war first-hand at all times (he eventually went home with a hole in him, and the boys went back to regular schedule, on which they had a better than 50-50 chance of finishing the war).
[...]
I feel us rear-echelon men should be better taken care of. Rifle bullets I can take or leave, if necessary; bombs don’t bother me too much; planes I did not worry about; but artillery is unpopular.
[...]
Our trouble started when some dim-witted Air Corps colonel parked his personal B-25 (not a bomber, but an aerial limousine) right in front of us, not 50 yards from my tent. It was mirror-shiny and could be seen 30 miles, let alone three. Naturally the Nips could not pass it up, so they threw three or four shells at it about 10 o’clock that night. Luckily, all went over both the plane and us.
[...]
When my company left Alabang and headed south to keep in touch with the troops we began to see for the first time towns destroyed by the war. I say the war, and exclude Manila because these towns and small cities had been burned before our invasion, and not specifically because of it. Southern Luzon is covered with these ruins, as about nine out of 10 towns are gone. Nearly all had been burned because of the guerrilla movement. If the town was big enough to be strategically important, the Japs put a garrison in it and the Filipino guerrillas destroyed it to get rid of the Japs; if the town was small, the guerrillas moved in and the Japs burned it to get them out. The community lost either way. These were not jungle villages, but semimodern cities up to 40,000 in prewar population.
[...]
The boys made quite a haul in loot, in an indirect way, here. There were many diamonds in the ruins of the church, from the rings and earrings of the murdered Filipino women, and by going through the ashes in one of the rooms it was possible to find them. Unfortunately for me, I did not find out about it until it was cleaned out. After the company moved up, it was a common pastime to go through the ashes of some of the destroyed homes and find coins. Evidently there had been forgotten hoards in a lot of houses, for the boys found Spanish coins dating as far back as the 17th century.