Scribbled at the bottom of this photo is “To Mike From Bobby” in childish handwriting—a dedication from Bobby Romulo (around age 11) to his oldest brother, Mike, who had returned to the Philippines to attend law school in 1947.

The Romulos moved to Washington, DC, arriving in the Spring of 1945. After more than three years’ separation, this was a special time for my grandparents and their boys—a period of healing and getting to know each another anew. Critical years had been lost. My dad, now six years old, no longer recognized his own father. “Who’s he?” he had asked his mother, as the story goes. Japan had dropped its first bombs on Manila on his third birthday, after all, and immediately afterward my grandfather joined the ranks of the military, disappearing into a crowd of other uniformed men.

By October 1946 they had settled into what would be their home for the next fourteen years. In sharp contrast to their lives on the run from the Japanese, DC was safe, tranquil, and downright luxurious. An article from The Sunday Times (October 3, 1948) offers a glimpse into what it was like:

The Romulos own one of the loveliest homes in Washington, D.C., which they acquired during the stress of the housing shortage immediately after the war. It was the difficulty of getting a suitable apartment that inspired Virginia Romulo to buy a house. The General was in London at the time of the sale and simply received a three-letter cablegram “House bought love” signed Virginia.

A rare shot of the whole family on their front porch. I’m guessing this was taken in the Spring of 1947.

Lola Virginia transformed the basement of the house into “the Philippine room,” where this family portrait (with Greg and Bobby) was taken. The painting in the background was created by Galo B. Ocampo (1913-1985), who was considered one the Philippines’ most distinguished postwar artists, along with Manansala, Joya, Tabuena, Zobel, and others.

He disclaims any credit for the improvement or the décor of the house, giving all of it to Mrs. Romulo, for her wise selection in buying the furniture and the furnishings and her doggedness and perspicacity in hunting up bargains and critical items at the time were none too plentiful.

She spent many weary days shopping around Washington and Baltimore to furnish the three-story white house on Garfield street, but she has been more than amply repaid for her trouble, for she now reigns over one of the best appointed homes in the U.S. capital today, and she does it in an effortless, charming way, as if she had a corps of servants to help her instead of just one capable Filipino maid, who does the washing and waiting at the table, one Filipino cook (Pedro) who lives in his own house, and one Negro chauffeur who doubles as butler when the Romulos entertain, which is quite often.

The house is unfenced, giving extra spaciousness to the yard. All around it grow zinnias in deep reds, yellows and pink; cosmos and other flowering plants which are easy to grow. The beauty of the Romulo garden is that in spite of its lack of a fence, the beautiful blooms remain on the stem until they dry up and no one, but absolutely no one, ever dares to take away one little flower from the patch. There are no children to ask for a flower for teacher, nor are there covetous hands that reap what others planted with loving concern.

The Romulos acquired 3422 Garfield Street, Washington, DC, during the housing shortage after the war (If you look closely at this photo, a tiny figure on the left of the house looks like CPR in uniform.).

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They married on July 1, 1924, in Pagsanjan. He was twenty-six, and she was nineteen.

I never really knew my grandmother Virginia Serapia Vidal Llamas from Pagsanjan; she died before my first birthday. I’m told, however, that she was the quintessential lady—informed, impeccably dressed, and quietly dignified—who in her own words chose to “glow faintly in her husband’s shadow.” Perfectly at ease in Western dress, she preferred to wear the traditional terno, complete with pañuelo. Well-versed in English and Spanish, she preferred to speak Tagalog.

As the story goes, Lolo fell in love with her when he was assigned to be her escort at the Manila Carnival, an annual pre-Easter Mardis Gras with a series of nine balls presided over by the carnival queen. (Lola Virginia, at age sixteen, was voted that year’s queen.) But Lolo already had another love interest, and was caught in a dilemma. How could he act as her prince consort, and, to make matters  even more unbearable, wear a silly costume?

The news reached her that he was reluctant to be her escort (indeed, at first he downright refused to do it), and she let it be known that she was not  pleased. “I was staring at her,” he wrote in his autobiography. “She was so angry and so much prettier than her pictures that I, usually glib of speech, found myself tongue-tied.”¹

From I Walked with Heroes: “‘You , an editor!’” my mother said. ‘You, a university graduate, who has been to the United States! Acting as prince consort to a Miss Philippines!’ Then, suddenly suspicious, she demanded, ‘Did she ask for you?’”2 (On the far left is Eugenio Lopez, Sr. Can you identify the others in this photo?)

After two and a half years of courtship, they married on July 1, 1924, in Pagsanjan, and honeymooned in Baguio. They had four sons: Carlos, Jr., (“Mike”) in 1925; Gregorio Vicente (“Greg”) in 1927; Ricardo Jose (“Dick”) in 1933; and Roberto Rey (“Bobby”) in 1938.

Circumstances of war forced them apart seventeen years later, and they had no contact for more than three years. A stoic woman, she never complained and never showed distress—not under the intense conditions of war; not even during her final days in January 1968 while hospitalized for leukemia.

Virginia Llamas, in 1946 or 1947, with her youngest son, Bobby, in front of St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Washington, DC.

“Mommy never complained,” said one of her sons to The Daily Mirror. “When she realized the end was near, she looked hard at each of us, one by one, until her eyes rested on Daddy’s face. There was no fear of dying in that look she gave Daddy. Somehow we felt that she was instead trying to convey to him the message that he must be brave . . . that she knew he would suffer losing her but that he must be strong and bear it.”

She died at the age of 62.

¹ I Walked with Heroes, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 167
² I Walked with Heroes, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 166

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Lolo knew firsthand the nightmare and desperation of war, and once on US soil the indifference of Americans shocked him as much as the cheerful jitterbugging in nightclubs jolted him. Having just arrived from the battlefield, bloodied friends and mangled bodies still fresh in his mind, such gaiety and seeming ingratitude made him lose faith in the America that twenty-one thousand Philippine youths had died defending. To him it was like “laughter in a funeral parlor.”⁶

The ignorance and complacence he encountered infuriated him, but he refrained from berating his audiences and instead went out of his way to make them feel at ease. Being an expert in PR, Lolo knew full well that scolding would get him nowhere in terms of garnering public support. The Philippines still needed to be liberated. Perhaps mindful also of the rehabilitation funds his nation would eventually need from the US, as well as the veterans’ benefits that would be due to Filipino soldiers, he was careful to position himself as a friend; not a critic. Getting people to like him was an important first step in convincing them to care about the Philippines, after all, and it would serve Filipinos well, both at present and in the long run.

Liberation finally began on October 20, 1944, when my grandfather—now a brigadier general—joined President Osmeña and General MacArthur on their triumphant return to the Philippines. Sailing for seven days from Hollandia toward Leyte aboard the 140-meter troopship John Land with 1,800 young American soldiers, tensions were high. But Lolo must have been filled with the hope of reuniting with his family, and cruising at a speed of 17 knots (or 31.5 kilometers) per hour must have felt interminably slow.

In November he received a cryptic message from guerilla leader Yay Panlilio that gave him reason to believe that his wife and children were still alive. It had been almost three years since he’d had contact with them.

Photo dated February 28, 1945, from Leocadio De Asis's book Crusade of Service: “In a hut on the grounds of Santo Tomas University, Brig. Gen. Carlos P. Romulo addresses the first ‘Rotary meeting’ held in Manila since 1941. Most of the internees in his audience had spent 3 years of enemy occupation here and had been released just 25 days before.”7

But the reunion did not come for several more months. My grandmother was trapped in enemy-held territory with my dad and my uncle; the other two sons, already teenagers, had joined the resistance as guerillas. Before they could be located and rescued, General MacArthur sent Lolo on a new mission. As the new Resident Commissioner to the US Congress, he was to report to Washington about the landing in Leyte.

“It is the story of these men on Leyte beach that I have returned to tell you today,” he said before the House on December 7, 1944, his heart aching for his family, “but it is also the story of other men who fought—in the beginning without uniforms or shoes or guns or food or hope. Their courage helped us on A-Day on Leyte. They are the Filipino guerrillas whose story can at last be told.”

As he spoke these words he could not have known that a terrifying bloodbath was still to come. The battle of Manila, which ended the Japanese Occupation, resulted in the total destruction of what was then considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Having been “seized by the Spanish in the 16th century, attacked by the Chinese in the 17th, occupied by the British in the 18th, and taken by the Americans at the end of the 19th,” Manila had had its share conflict. “But even this tumultuous history could not have prepared the Filipinos for what happened in 1945, when Manila was utterly destroyed in a single month” and more than a hundred thousand civilians were slaughtered.⁸ General Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe who, prior to the war, had spent four years in Manila as MacArthur’s special assistant, has been often quoted as saying, “Of all the cities I have visited, Manila is the most devastated, next to Warsaw.”

On March 3, 1945, the same day the battle of Manila finally came to an end, my grandfather kissed his boys and held his wife in his arms once again.

“To the men who fought
In defense of the Philippines
In the 1941-1942 campaign
The ill-trained, ill-armed recruits
In straw helmets and rubbers shoes
The pilots without planes
The sailors without ships
The men on horseback
Fighting tanks with sabers
The gunners short of shells
The soldiers with obsolete rifles
Hungry in the foxholes of Bataan
And the batteries of Corregidor
Racked by dysentery, malaria, beriberi
Surviving on false hopes
Defeated at long last by their bodies
Sent to die in their faceless thousands
In the long cruel march to Capas
And in the concentration camps
This memorial is dedicated
By their grateful countrymen
Who will not forget
That their defeat was weakness of the flesh
But victory of faith loyalty and love.”
~ Carlos P. Romulo⁹

⁶ Al Lesmez, Notre Dame Scholastic, March 17, 1944, p. 6.
⁷ Leocadio De Asis, Crusade of Service, (Manila: Rex Book Store, 1994), p. 81.
⁸ www.pbs.org
⁹ These lines are written on the back of what appears to be a memento in memory of soldier Philippine Sergeant Antonio N. Fenix. Though it is not clear when General Romulo wrote the lines, or even for what purpose, it is implied that it is the text inscribed on the Bataan Monument. The date reads April 9, 1975. (This still needs to be verified.)

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His backbreaking, voice-obliterating speaking tour took him across more than 143,000 kilometers, mostly by train, and to 466 cities.¹ With faultless elocution and dramatic flair, he quickly became, as The New Yorker described him, “the hottest thing to hit the American lecture platforms.”² He spoke everywhere, often accepting multiple engagements in a single day—from factories to college graduations and school assemblies; from medical societies to Rotary clubs and women’s clubs. He addressed Latin American students in Spanish, warmed up audiences with jokes, helped raise war bonds in several rallies—whatever it took to prick people’s ears and make them listen.

For two years Colonel Romulo tirelessly served as the voice of the Philippines, bringing the plight of his war-torn nation to the attention of regular Americans, the majority of who had barely heard about Bataan until two years after its fall. Photo from The Philippines Herald, September 25, 1949.

By the time I went to school in the United States, forty years had gone by, but people still remembered him. “You’re a Romulo,” they’d say upon meeting me. “Romulo from the Philippines?” I’d nod yes, and they’d go on, “A Colonel Romulo came to my school. . . . Are you related?”

Over the years I’ve come across countless individuals upon whom he’d made a lasting impression, a testament to his brilliance as an orator. “Several times the audience has carried him out of the auditorium on its shoulders,” reported The New Yorker, “and he has been kissed on the cheek by more clubwomen than he can remember.”

A champion debater since he was a teenager, Lolo also acted in school plays in high school and college. His experience on stage, along with his sincerity and passion, might have accounted for his ability to captivate audiences on an emotional level. So popular was he as a guest speaker during the war that he earned the unique distinction of having tripled his lecture fees in a single season.³

He spoke on behalf of the tens of thousands of soldiers—both Filipino and American—who fought for the American flag and now languished in internment camps as prisoners of war. His standard lectures “I Saw Bataan Fall” and “Last Man Off Bataan” vividly depicted wartime Philippines: the carnage, the months of pitch battles, and the dire lack of supplies.

Remember that during the battle for Bataan, water, food, medicine, and artillery had dwindled to nearly nothing, and outside reinforcements never came. Recall that President Roosevelt had decided to concentrate US power against Hitler, and that it was not until 1944 that the general public found out about Bataan, Corregidor, and the Death March, when the first reports were released by the US government. Recall that MacArthur had retreated, leaving behind his troops in the Philippines on Roosevelt’s orders, but had promised to return. It was therefore my grandfather’s mission to beat the drum, raise awareness, shake Americans out of complacency, and ensure that the Philippines would not be forgotten.

“Under General MacArthur’s instructions,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I was officially assigned by President Quezon and Secretary Stimson to give the Philippine side of the story.”⁴

Colonel Romulo with his boyhood hero President Manuel L. Quezon. According to Mrs. Beth Day Romulo, this photo was taken shortly before Quezon's death in 1944, in Lake Saranac, New York, a vacation resort with a sanatorium for tuberculosis. Quezon made Romulo Secretary of Information and Public Relations in January of 1943. The following year President Osmeña gave him an additional job as the Philippines’ Resident Commissioner to the US Congress, a position he served until 1946.

In March 1944 he addressed the University of Notre Dame: “In these dark nights of danger, more men wait for help to come. And this help must come from the strength of people who believe in liberty. These young men, with many things for which to live, are waiting for our strength to be felt. I who come from the holes of Bataan, holes of sweat and tears, holes of death—I who have seen my fellow buddies torn apart and butchered, who stand on this spot by a miracle of God Who spared me, plead with you brothers to ask our compatriots not to abandon us in this terrible fight.”⁵

He spoke from the heart, urgently and with mounting fervor, as his mission went far beyond official duty; it was personal. His days were filled with constant dread as he remembered the loved ones he had abandoned back home, in particular his wife of twenty years. Virginia Llamas, my grandmother, had been living in terror since Japan’s surprise attack. She and their four sons had been running from the Japanese, hiding in the hills, almost since MacArthur had called my grandfather to active duty in mid-December 1941. Lolo had managed a short visit with them only once, on New Year’s Eve, at their home on Vermont Street, Malate (Manila), and—having no idea where they were and if they were still alive—he worried about them endlessly.

As he donned his US army uniform every morning, a Philippine army fourragère on his shoulder, he wondered perhaps if one’s duty to country should come before one’s duty to family. One might imagine that he felt regret in some of his darkest hours, especially given that the country requiring his duty belonged not to him but to a colonial master. Even though he’d been appointed as MacArthur’s personal aide just before coming to the US, a tremendous honor that entitled him (and only four other full-general’s aides in the world) to wear a special insignia on both lapels, were the honors enough to compensate for the personal sacrifices?

¹ Robert van Gelder, The New York Times.
² “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, June 26, 1943, p. 12.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Carlos P. Romulo, I Walked with Heroes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 226. Henry L. Stimson was US Secretary of War.
⁵ Al Lesmez, Notre Dame Scholastic, March 17, 1944, p. 6.

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