Sixty years ago today, at about 9 p.m., troops from the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division and 44th Tank Battalion advanced 100 miles through enemy territory on the Philippine island of Luzon.

A Sherman tank known as “Battlin’ Basic” headed down Manila’s Quezon Boulevard and crashed through the gates of the University of Santo Tomas, where soldiers shot the Japanese commanding officer who stood with samurai sword in one hand, revolver in the other.

Santo Tomas – which housed 3,785 American and Filipino civilian prisoners of war for three long years – was liberated.

The arrival of the Army troops was a welcome sight, particularly for one family.

Orono resident Sam Hamilton Jr., then 14, and his dad were in the university plaza when the American tank broke through concrete walls in front of the gate.

“It was glorious,” Hamilton, 74, recalled recently.

It was also in the nick of time, he found out later.

“The story was that the Japanese were going to take the men and teenage boys, hold them as hostages, then drive everybody else into the main building and set it on fire. They were doing that in Manila,” he said.

“Gen. Douglas MacArthur got wind of the fact that we were going to be taken care of – murdered,” Hamilton said. “That afternoon, one of our planes flew over and dropped a message attached to aviator goggles. It said, ‘Roll out the barrel, there’ll be a hot time tonight.'”

Hamilton had lived in a shack in the prisoner of war camp since 1942 with his parents, Sam Sr. and Mary, and younger brothers David and Bill.

Military spouses already had been taken out of the Philippines by 1942, but not the civilians. The Hamiltons had lived for many years in the Far East, where Sam Sr. was a banker.

Hamilton remembers well the day the Japanese went house to house in 1942 and told civilians to bring enough food and clothing “for three days,” rounded them up at Rizal Stadium, then took them to Santo Tomas, where at first they slept on cement floors in the administration building.

That first year, there was enough to eat because the civilians’ household help brought food weekly. Then the Red Cross sent food, but the Japanese soldiers helped themselves to that.

By the end of the third year, each internee was subsisting daily on food with no more calories than one slice of bread.

Hamilton’s father was down to 96 pounds, his mother down to 85. Like other youngsters in the camp, the three boys were both small for their age and delayed in physical maturation.

From time to time, prisoners “went over the wall,” Hamilton acknowledged. “They were tortured, beaten badly, made to dig their own graves, taken out and shot.”

Hamilton’s younger brother, Bill, who lives in Venezuela, described the rescue in a 1995 essay:

“But every one of us can see it in the mind’s eye, as the men of the First Cav roll under cover of night into our prison. My mother told us they would be big and beautiful, and they were – avenging angels, bigger than life and generous beyond belief, giving us their last rations and raising us up in their arms.”

The starving youngsters were glad to once again have treats such as chewing gum and candy bars.

“The K-rations the GIs had were just delicious as far as I was concerned,” Hamilton said.

But, he adds, “the freedom didn’t happen right off the bat.”

There were still plenty of Japanese soldiers in Santo Tomas, and they held 200 internees hostage in the education building for a day and a half.

By the time MacArthur arrived a couple of days after the liberation, the internees had taken down the Japanese flag hanging from the main building and replaced it with a U.S. flag.

Even after the Japanese were rousted, “there were times we were afraid after we were liberated,” Hamilton said.

The Japanese mortars and heavy artillery increased during the next month, and up to two dozen internees, still living in the camp, were killed. Some 100,000 Filipino civilians were killed as well.

The internees, among them nurse Lt. Alice Zwicker of Brownville Junction, stayed in the camp for almost two months, but Sam Jr. managed a little excursion the day before they were due to leave Manila.

“I went out, got into Intramuris – the walled city where the Japanese were killed. The stench of death was all around,” he said. The Allies had vanquished the Japanese in Manila.

From there, the civilians were flown to a military rest-and-relaxation camp on the island of Leyte, then taken by ship to Pearl Harbor before going on to San Francisco.

“Let me tell you, the Golden Gate Bridge looked awful good to everybody,” Hamilton said.

He cherishes a sampler his mother cross-stitched of the family standing in front of their lean-to in Santo Tomas. Across the top are the words, “Food and Clothing for Three Days.”

Mary Hamilton wove into the cloth the date they entered the compound, but never put in the date the family was liberated. Her son added that decades later.

High school, Penn State University, a stint in the U.S. Navy and marriage to a Maine girl were all in Hamilton’s future.

After living in Chicago, he and his wife Betty moved to Caribou, where they would raise two sons and a daughter and be involved in the family business, Briggs Hardware. For more than 15 years, they have lived in Orono.

For the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Santo Tomas, Hamilton and brother Bill joined 25 other internee “children” for a reunion in 1995 in Manila.

Along with three of the men who helped liberate them, the group visited a cemetery with rows of white crosses and then emotionally watched a pageant put on by students and Filipino troops, re-enacting the liberation.

Going back “was closure,” said Hamilton, who will go to Virginia this spring for a small reunion with some of those who were in the camp.

“There are times when it doesn’t seem possible it’s been 60 years,” he said, “and there are times when the memories are very vivid.”

The experience of living in a POW camp for three years, Hamilton said, “has made me a very patient person.

“I say to myself, ‘This, too, will pass, and we’ll get through it,'” he said. “I guess that’s what my parents taught me at Santo Tomas.”