NINE
THE LARGEST CAMPAIGN of the Pacific war, second phase of MacArthur’s drive to recapture the Philippines, began on 15 December 1944. Elements of Sixth Army landed on Mindoro, just south of Luzon. The island was of comparable size to Leyte, but the Japanese mounted no significant ground defence. The operation became, in the words of an American engineer, “just a maneuver for shore party units.” Within a fortnight, airfield construction teams accomplished on Mindoro what had proved so difficult on Leyte—the creation of strips from which large numbers of aircraft could operate.
The Japanese knew that a landing on Luzon would not now be long delayed. On 2 January 1945, Yamashita moved his headquarters to the pine-clad summer resort town of Baguio, 7,400 feet up in the mountains of the north. From there, he planned personally to direct the “Shobu” group, 152,000 strong, one of three such commands into which he divided his army. The second “Kembu” force on Bataan and around Clark Field had 30,000 men, the third “Shimbu” group another 80,000 south of Manila. Staff officers described Yamashita in those days as possessing a mellow, fatalistic calm. He spent hours reading the essays of a Buddhist priest. In the evenings, he often wandered into the staff mess and gossiped to whichever officers were on hand. He was not above chatting to his private soldiers. His mind seemed much on the past. He expressed concern about the welfare of Allied prisoners on Luzon, and told his superior Field Marshal Terauchi that he intended to relinquish these to the Americans as soon as they landed. Terauchi sternly dissented, but Yamashita told the officer responsible to surrender the POWs anyway.
At MacArthur’s headquarters at Tacloban, the general and his staff nursed a delusion that the Japanese army in the Philippines had been largely destroyed on Leyte. During a conference before the Luzon operation, Sixth Army intelligence asserted that large Japanese forces remained in the Philippines. MacArthur, sucking on his corncob pipe, interrupted: “Bunk.” Brig.-Gen. Clyde Eddleman, Krueger’s G3, laughed and said, “General, apparently you don’t like our intelligence briefing.” “I don’t,” responded MacArthur. “It’s too strong. There aren’t that many Japanese there.” Eddleman said: “Most of this information came from your headquarters.” Maj.-Gen. “Sir Charles” Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, one of the courtiers least admired by outsiders, leapt angrily from his chair. “Didn’t come from me! Didn’t come from me!” he exclaimed. Eddleman sighed: “General, may I skip the intelligence portion and go on to the basic plan?” “Please do.”
Afterwards, MacArthur called Eddleman to follow him into the bedroom of his quarters in the old Palmer House, almost the only coconut planter’s house still standing in Tacloban. “Sit down,” said the general428. “I want to give you my ideas of intelligence officers. There are only three great ones in history, and mine is not one of them.” Sixth Army asserted that there were 234,000 Japanese troops on Luzon. MacArthur preferred his personal estimate—152,000. Krueger’s officers were much more nearly correct. Nothing, however, including substantial Ultra intelligence, would persuade the commander-in-chief to believe that his forces would face important resistance. Herein lay the seeds of much distress to come.
MacArthur spent hours at Tacloban pacing the verandah in solitary state or with a visitor. “We grew to know his mood429 from the way he walked, how he smoked,” wrote one of his staff. “There would be times we would see him racing back and forth, an aide at his side, talking rapidly, gesticulating with quick nods, sucking his pipe with deep, long draughts.” Those who once questioned the general’s courage—the “dugout Doug” tag—were confounded by the calm with which he endured frequent Japanese bombings, and indeed near misses. His paranoia, however, had worsened. He attributed Washington’s supposed lack of support for his operations to “treason and sabotage430.” He was an unremitting critic of Eisenhower’s campaign in Europe, and indeed of everything done by the supreme commander who once served under him as a colonel. When the U.S. Treasury forwarded a draft of a proposed advertisement promoting War Bond sales on which his own name appeared below Ike’s, he wrote angrily that unless he was listed before his former subordinate, he refused to feature at all. Later, in July 1945, he was enraged to discover that Eisenhower was briefed on the atomic bomb before himself. More seriously, his confidence in his chief of staff had been fatally weakened by the scandal about the presence of Sutherland’s Australian mistress at Tacloban. Sutherland kept his title, but for the Luzon campaign MacArthur relied increasingly on the counsel of Brig.-Gen. Courtney Whitney, an ambitious officer much given to bombast, neither liked nor respected by anyone else.
On 9 January 1945, MacArthur’s Sixth Army landed at Lingayen Gulf, halfway up the western coast of Luzon. Kamikazes provided fierce opposition. MacArthur had reproached Kinkaid for his allegedly excessive fear of suicide planes, but now the admiral’s apprehension was vindicated. Again and again during the days before the assault, suicide pilots struck at the invasion armada. Fortunately for the Americans, the Japanese as usual focused attacks on warships rather than transports crowded with troops. One escort carrier and a destroyer escort were sunk, twenty-three other ships damaged, many severely. The enemy’s pilots seemed more skilful than before, their tactics more sophisticated. They approached at deck level, often baffling American radar, and provoking a storm of reckless AA fire which killed men on neighbouring ships—the battleship Coloradosuffered significant casualties. The British admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, designated commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy’s embryo Pacific Fleet, was a guest of Jesse Oldendorf’s on the New Mexico when a kamikaze crashed into its superstructure. Lt.-Gen. Herbert Lumsden, Churchill’s personal representative on MacArthur’s staff, was killed, along with the ship’s captain and other officers. Fraser escaped only because Oldendorf had beckoned him across the bridge moments before: “This thing came down just where we had been standing.”
During the seaborne approach to Luzon 170 Americans and Australians were killed and five hundred wounded by kamikaze attacks. The strain on men’s nerves became acute. They found themselves obliged to remain alert every daylight hour for a guided bomb that could hurl itself into their ship’s upperworks, mangling steel and flesh. Aboard the heavy cruiser Australia, Pierre Austin was one of many sailors aggrieved by the enemy’s madness: “At this late stage, after all one had survived431, the feeling was: ‘Not now—please, not now!’ We knew it was going to be our war; we were going to win.” On 8 January, a Val dive-bomber crashed into Australia’s foremast, killing thirty men and wounding sixty-four, including Pierre Austin. His war ended in a hospital.
Oldendorf, commanding the naval force, warned MacArthur that he lacked sufficient air cover to hold off the kamikazes unless Third Fleet’s carrier aircraft could be diverted from attacking Japan to provide support, which of course they were. In the month beginning 13 December 1944, the cumulative toll from Japanese air assault was alarming—twenty-four ships sunk, sixty-seven damaged. Yet to the astonishment of the Americans, as MacArthur’s troops drove inland from Lingayen, the kamikaze offensive stopped. The Japanese had lost six hundred aircraft in a month. Only fifty remained on Luzon. Japanese fighter pilot Kunio Iwashita was at Clark Field, Manila, on 9 January when he was ordered to lead his squadron’s three surviving aircraft to a new strip. Some five hundred personnel, most of them ground crew, were left to join the retreat of the Japanese army, and face months of attrition and starvation. Just four of these men were afterwards recorded alive. A few minutes after Iwashita and his fellow pilots arrived at their new base, American aircraft struck, destroying all three fighters. The Japanese airmen escaped by sea to Formosa. On Luzon thereafter, neither the U.S. Navy nor Sixth Army faced significant air attack. Tokyo husbanded its remaining planes to defend Formosa, Okinawa and the homeland.
The American invasion of Luzon, January–June 1945
Krueger’s troops met only spasmodic artillery and mortar fire as they advanced inland, and there were soon 175,000 Americans ashore. While most of the Leyte fighting had engaged only four divisions, Luzon would ultimately involve ten, in addition to huge numbers of support troops. At first, climate slowed the advance more than the enemy. On 16 January alone, forty-nine men of the 158th Infantry were evacuated with heat exhaustion. Water was short. Five thousand tons of supplies were landed each day, but shifting them forward proved a nightmare, only marginally assisted by jury-rigging stretches of Luzon’s battered rail system. I Corps drove north and eastwards.
In the first three days ashore, the Americans lost just 55 dead, 185 wounded, while claiming 500 enemy killed. Krueger and his staff were bemused by the desultory resistance. When the Americans reached the hills, however, Yamashita’s plan became apparent. Knowing that he could not prevent the Americans from achieving a lodgement, he had instead concentrated most of his forces in the island’s mountain areas. Experience on Leyte had shown how effectively steep uplands could be defended. Fourteenth Army’s commander believed that he could inflict pain and delay on MacArthur by exploiting Luzon’s wildest terrain. He had no thought of victory. “What is wanted of us,” he told his officers, “is to get in one good blow at the Americans, to strengthen the government’s hand in negotiations at the conference table.”
The Japanese held positions prepared with their usual skill, and were soon killing Americans. “This is terrible country to fight in432, jungle thicker than Biak, heat is prostrating…There is an awful lot of combat hysteria among the new recruits and heat exhaustion among all hands,” wrote Captain Paul Austin of the 34th Infantry. On board the transports to Luzon, his regiment had suddenly received an intake of eight hundred replacements: “They had no chance to learn their duties or who their non-coms were. They had a high incidence of hysteria and caused deaths of many of our old men by freezing under fire.”
In the south, however, at first there was less resistance. XIV Corps advanced towards Manila under relentless goading from the theatre commander. “General MacArthur visited433 Corps CP,” Gen. Oscar Griswold of XIV Corps wrote in his diary on 14 January. “Said he expected little opposition, that the battle of the Philippines had already been won on Leyte. I do not have his optimism.” As late as 23 January, MacArthur was raging against “Sir Charles” Willoughby for allegedly overestimating Japanese strength. The general said petulantly: “I don’t see how I have gotten434 as far as I have with the staff I have been surrounded with.” Eichelberger of Eighth Army reported this remark to his wife, adding with relish: “So you see, they all have their troubles.”
Griswold’s men reached the forward defences of Clark Field a week later. Around the air base they fought a sluggish series of battles to secure the commanding heights. These provoked bad-tempered recriminations between elements of Sixth Army. The 129th Infantry, for instance, protested at the flight of its supporting tanks, which refused to return to the line even when the regiment found itself facing a Japanese armoured attack at Tacondo. MacArthur accused the 37th Division of “a notable lack of drive and aggressive initiative.” Krueger wrote angrily to Kenney, the air chief: “I must insist that you take435 effective measures to stop the bombing and strafing of our ground forces by friendly planes.”
XI Corps made a new beach landing at San Antonio, north-west of Manila, on 29 January, and on 31 January two regiments of 11th Airborne Division came ashore at Nasugbu, some forty-five miles south-west of the capital, and began their own advance on the city, soon joined by a third regiment which parachuted in. By 4 February, the first airborne units were on the outskirts of Manila, facing the main southern defence line. A glider infantry company commander famously radioed his battalion: “Tell Admiral Halsey to stop looking for the Jap fleet. It’s dug in here on Nichols Field.”
Meanwhile, in the north, the 37th and 1st Cavalry Divisions raced each other for Manila, slowed by difficult terrain and increasingly stubborn resistance. As the Japanese retreated, they lit the fuse on demolition charges at the only bridge over the Tulihan River. This was snuffed out by a gallant navy lieutenant, James Sutton, attached to 1st Cavalry, who dashed forward alone and pitched a clutch of mines over the parapet into the water. MacArthur had identified the internment camp at Santo Tomas University as a key objective. On the evening of 3 February, a P-38 flew low overhead and dropped a message to its 3,400 inmates, almost all American civilians: “Roll out the barrel. There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.” A relief column pushing towards the camp met two Filipino guerrilla officers who offered to show the way to the camp. After overcoming initial American wariness, the guerrillas clambered aboard the lead tank. They met few Japanese until there was a brief skirmish outside the internment centre, in which one of the Filipinos was killed.
At 2100 “Battlin’ Basic,” a Sherman of 1st Cavalry Division, crashed through the camp gate with its searchlight blazing. A trooper burst into the main building, demanding: “Are there any goddamn Japs here?” An elderly American woman touched him: “Soldier, are you real?” The prisoners broke into hysterical screams and cheers, snatches of “God Bless America” and “The Star Spangled Banner.” A Japanese officer, one of the most detested in the camp, suddenly ran out in front of the tank brandishing a sword and pistol. He was shot in the stomach. “Groaning and writhing on the ground436, he was seized by the legs and dragged to the main building clinic, internees kicking and spitting at him, one or two men even slashing him with knives, and some women burning him with cigarets [sic] as he was pulled past them.” The wounded man eventually received American medical aid, but died a few hours later.
Most of the Japanese staff barricaded themselves into the education building, with 275 Americans as hostages. After a parley, in exchange for the prisoners’ freedom the guards were allowed to leave. Santo Tomas was in American hands, but the compound was soon beset by enemy gunfire, which killed some internees who had survived almost three years of hunger, disease and confinement. One woman, Mrs. Foley, lost an arm at the shoulder when a shell exploded in her room. She was taken to the emergency hospital with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Mary Frances. “Mrs. Foley kept asking about437 her husband, and Mary Frances told her he was fine,” said American nurse Denny Williams. “She knew he was dead, but she did not want to tell her mother when she was facing surgery for her amputated arm. Kids grew up fast in Santo Tomas.”
Then, inevitably, MacArthur came, to take his bow in the midst of a frenzied throng of his fellow countrymen. “They seemed to be using their last strength438 to fight their way close enough to grasp my hand,” he wrote mawkishly. “They wept and laughed hysterically, and all of them at once tried to tell me ‘thank you.’ I was grabbed by the jacket. I was kissed. I was hugged. It was a wonderful and never to be forgotten moment—to be a life-saver, not a life-taker.” Next day, 4 February, MacArthur sought to enter Manila. Griswold of XIV Corps wrote sourly: “He is insane on this subject! With just a handful of scouts we passed along a road where our dead and enemy dead could often be seen…Finally prevented from getting in by enemy action. Why we didn’t all get killed I don’t know! This, in my opinion, was a most foolhardy thing for a C-in-C to attempt.” South of Manila, Eichelberger of Eighth Army wrote warily: “We met more resistance around Nichols Field439 than we expected. We had hoped to get in without resistance, and I do not recall any G-2 reports that predicted the Japanese would try to hold in the city.” MacArthur’s headquarters announced the imminent fall of the capital. The enemy disagreed.
American intelligence was correct in supposing that Yamashita did not wish to defend Manila. He knew that his forces could neither hold a long perimeter around the city, nor feed its 800,000 people. He had thus ordered the local commander, Gen. Shizuo Yokoyama, to destroy the harbour installations and bridges over the Pasig River, then pull out. Humanitarian sentiment about Manila’s civilians also seems to have played a part in Yamashita’s thinking. Such scruples were not, however, shared by Rear-Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, who commanded 16,000 naval personnel in the city. The army had no authority over Iwabuchi, and he was determined to fight. Though his sailors possessed no infantry training—most, indeed, were survivors of lost vessels including the battleship Musashi—they were plentifully supplied with automatic weapons and munitions salvaged from ships and planes.
In the weeks before Sixth Army arrived, they fortified key areas of Manila to formidable effect. General Yokoyama persuaded himself that since the navy intended to fight, honour demanded that the three army battalions left in the city should do likewise. As MacArthur’s troops approached, the Japanese withdrew across the Pasig River, blowing bridges and making demolitions which started huge fires in residential areas.
For centuries visitors had been inspired by Manila, from the old Spanish city of Intramuros with its narrow cobbled streets, churches and fort built on the site of an old Muslim stockade, to the broad avenues and Luneta, a great greensward where fiestas were held. By 1945, however, Manileros had little scope for partying. The price of rice had soared. Almost everyone was hungry, including the Japanese, some of whom were reduced to supplementing their rations with wild grasses. Dysentery and typhus were rife. The city’s Mayor Guinto urged the starving to take to the countryside, and some did so. Repression intensified: there were roundups of suspected American agents, identity parades at which “secret eyes”—hooded informers from the makapili, the 5,000-strong quisling militia—denounced hapless people who were removed to Fort Santiago’s old Spanish dungeons.
Manila’s Europeans were prime suspects. On 28 December 1944 the Japanese kempeitai descended on the Malate Church, arrested Fathers Kelly, Henaghan and Monaghan, and took them away. What was left of the priests after torture was eventually returned. The people of Manila had plentiful warning of the occupiers’ intention to turn their city into a battlefield, which makes it all the more curious that no such intelligence reached MacArthur. Sailors laboured at building strongpoints and barricades, felling the palm trees on Dewey Boulevard so that aircraft could land there. Artillery was manhandled onto the upper floors of office buildings. Mines improvised from shells and bombs were laid at road junctions, machine guns emplaced to cover them.
The American advance was repeatedly checked by cheering crowds of local people. Troops entering northern Manila were greeted with flowers, fruit, beer. Some Filipinos doffed their hats and bowed. Progress was delayed when troops found that the Japanese Balintawak Brewery was undamaged. For several hours, GIs filled and emptied helmets again and again, until the beer vats ran dry. “Throngs of Filipinos441 filled the streets as though celebrating a jubilee,” wrote Captain Bob Brown of the 5th Infantry. “In places they were so many I could not pick out my men. When Jap mortar shells came in they disappeared like mist in hot sunshine, but when the firing stopped they returned just as quickly to resume the celebration.”
“The fighting became a shoot-out442, Wild West style,” said Captain Labin Knipp. “Japs popped out of alleys and buildings trying to escape the fires. We were ready and shot first.” There were strange encounters. Maj. Chuck Henne of the 3/148th Infantry found himself invited into a house by an immaculately dressed Chinese woman, who offered refreshments in perfect English, clapping her hands for a servant despite the fires and detonations only a few streets away. “Not many men were ever privileged443 to sit on a balcony with a beautiful woman, partaking of tea and cakes and looking out on a burning city,” marvelled Henne.
The stage was now set for one of the ugliest battles of the Pacific war, the only one in which American forces found themselves contesting possession of a conurbation. For the next month, Sixth Army found itself committed to a street-by-street, often house-by-house struggle against suicidal Japanese resistance. American encirclement denied General Yokoyama the option of withdrawal, even had he been able to persuade his naval counterpart to accede to this. The Japanese knew they were trapped, and fought accordingly. The battle’s principal victims were not combatants, but the civilian population, which suffered appallingly. Instead of a triumphal parade through the streets for which MacArthur had made elaborate preparations, he found himself presiding over Manila’s martyrdom.
As so often in his campaigns, the general was slow to perceive the gravity of the struggle. “Our forces are rapidly clearing444 the enemy from Manila,” announced a bulletin from his headquarters on 6 February, followed next day by another: “The 37th Infantry and 1st Cavalry Divisions continued mopping-up operations in north Manila, while the 11th Airborne did the same in south Manila.” MacArthur himself declared on 6 February that the capital had been secured at 6:30 that morning. Time magazine, swallowing the general’s assertion and adding a cliché to taste, said that the city had fallen “like a ripe plum.” In reality, its ordeal had scarcely begun.
“MacArthur has visions445 of saving this beautiful city intact,” wrote Griswold of XIV Corps on 7 February. “He does not realise, as I do, that the skies burn red every night as [the Japanese] systematically sack the city. Nor does he know that enemy rifle, machine gun, mortar and artillery fire are steadily increasing in intensity. My private opinion is that the Japs will hold that part of Manila south of the Pasig river until all are killed.” Griswold added two days later: “Army commander [Krueger] dissatisfied with progress, as usual. Damndest man to serve with I ever saw!” American intelligence about enemy deployments was almost non-existent. Some fifteen hundred Japanese were killed in clashes north of the Pasig, but these were only an overture. As Krueger’s men began to force the river crossings on 7 February, they discovered how hard the enemy was willing to fight.
The 3/148th Infantry crossed the river in amphibious tractors and assault boats. “Leaving the near bank446,” wrote an officer, “the I company boats were making good progress, moving in a ragged crescent, when the Jap fire stormed through them—machine guns and cannon. This fire, coming from the west, ripped through the formation scattering boats, turning the move into a mad dash for the cover of the far bank. It was spellbinding to watch pieces of paddles and splintered chunks of boat plywood fly through the air while men paddled with shattered oars and rifles. On reaching the far bank, the men jumped out of their boats and scrambled up the bank taking their dead and wounded comrades with them. What seemed to last for hours was over in ten minutes.”
“The sky was a447 copper-burnished dome of thick clouds,” wrote a senior officer of the 37th Division, an Ohio National Guard formation. “So great was the glare of the dying city that the streets, even back where we were, were alight as from the reflection of a reddish moon. Great sheets of flame swept across the rooftops, sometimes spanning several city blocks in their consuming flight…We saw the awful pyrotechnics of destruction, spreading ever faster to encompass and destroy the most beautiful city in the Far East.”
The U.S. Army in the Philippines possessed none of the extensive experience of street fighting acquired by Eisenhower’s forces in Europe. In Manila, they learned hard lessons. The city’s principal buildings were designed to be proof against earthquakes. Paco police station, for instance, defied repeated assaults by infantry supported by artillery and heavy mortars. Two tanks were lost to mines before the armour suppressed Japanese fire sufficiently to allow a final assault: “Even then448,” declared a Sixth Army report, “the Japanese did not withdraw and the last of them were destroyed in sandbagged emplacements dug deep in the floor of the basement.” Against large public buildings, it proved necessary to use 155mm howitzers firing at point-blank range, six hundred yards. Assaulting the Finance Building, 155s and tanks bombarded lower floors only, lest high-trajectory shells burst in civilian areas beyond. Shells systematically demolished the structure until the defenders retreated to its basement. Americans fighting their way up the stairs of the Manila Hotel found the enemy reoccupying the lower storeys behind them. Some two hundred Japanese were finally driven into its basement air-raid shelter, which became their sealed tomb.
Guards fled from Bibilid Prison, leaving behind 447 civilian and 828 military prisoners, most American. Some were men whom MacArthur had left behind on Corregidor in 1942. It was a merciful surprise that they were left alive, but beyond their emaciation, all the prisoners liberated in the Philippines proved traumatised. The world had changed so much, while they were isolated from it. Col. Bruce Palmer described seeing POWs freed at Cabanatuan: “I’ll never forget the bewildered look449 on these men. They just could not believe they had been released. Our equipment—everything we had—helmets and everything else were so foreign to them. They just thought we were men from Mars.” Krueger’s staff officer Clyde Eddleman visited liberated POWs in their hospital tents. A sergeant was “sitting there on a cot, sort of dazed, and he looked at me and said: ‘Didn’t you command HQ Company450 the 19th Infantry back in 1938?’ Yes, I did. ‘Well, I was Corporal Greenwood who fought in the lightweight class.’” Now, NCO and officer met as men from different universes.
Block by block, ruin by ruin, dash by dash across streets swept by enemy fire, the Americans advanced through Manila. After the first days, Japanese senior commanders could exercise little control. Their improvised battle groups simply fought to the death where they stood. The baseball stadium was ferociously defended—Japanese sailors dug in even on its diamond. They held the post office until it was reduced to rubble. On Provisor Island in the Pasig, American soldiers played a deadly game of hide-and-seek amid the machinery of a power station. Maj. Chuck Henne reflected: “Such…are lonely, personal times451 during which the presence of other troops counts for little. Relaxing is impossible, for uncontrollably muscles tighten and teeth are clenched. The blast of a heavy shell is unforgettable, as is the dud that goes bouncing overhead down a cobblestone street. The close ones leave a chalky taste in one’s mouth. Being bounced in the air and stung by blasted debris gets a trooper counting arms and legs and feeling for blood.”
Americans were amazed by the fashion in which civilians wandered across the battlefield, apparently oblivious of the carnage. A company commander inspecting foxholes was disconcerted to discover some of his men clutched in the embraces of Filipino women. He sighed: “I hope they don’t get VD452.” The streets crawled with destitute children. A boy named Lee attached himself to the 3/148th Infantry, then after some days tearfully confessed to being a girl named Lisa. She was delivered to a Catholic orphanage.
Again and again, advancing troops suffered unwelcome surprises. When a jeep struck a mine dug into the street, not even body parts of its occupants were recovered—only the chassis of the vehicle reposed at the base of a crater. While a group of men was being briefed to fall back to a rest area, one of their number standing on a mound suddenly rolled to the ground, stone dead. A stray bullet, fired probably a mile away, had struck him without warning. A colonel from a reserve battalion visited a forward command post. Stepping up to a window, he fell dead to a Japanese bullet. “It was…so common in combat453,” said an eyewitness. “One mistake and you’re dead.” Though there was much talk of snipers, in reality there were few marksmen among the Japanese navy contingent. They relied overwhelmingly on machine guns, for which they possessed almost unlimited quantities of ammunition.
Private Dahlum of the 3/148th454 was point man of a patrol moving down an alley when a Japanese officer and six men sprang out. Before any American could react, the officer swung his sword and delivered a fearsome, mortal blow at Dahlum’s head. The patrol then shot down all the Japanese without further loss. The incident was over within seconds, leaving the survivors scarcely believing that it had taken place. “Suspecting that every closed door455 and dark window screened a lurking Jap was nerve-racking,” wrote an American officer, “and all too often the Jap was there. Once across the street and into a building the job seemed less risky as the men turned towards the offending emplacement using demolitions to open ‘doors’ through fences and building walls. The final move would be fast shooting to cover a demolition team which could close and blast the position using grenades or satchel charges.”
The most repellent aspect of the Japanese defence of Manila was their systematic slaughter of the city’s civilians. The Japanese justified this policy by asserting that everyone found in the battle area was a guerrilla. Over a hundred men, women and children were herded into Paco Lumber Yard along Moriones and Juan Luna Avenue, where they were bound, bayoneted and shot. Some bodies were burned, others left rotting in the sun. Japanese squads burst into buildings packed with refugees, shooting and stabbing. There were massacres in schools, hospitals and convents, including San Juan de Dios Hospital, Santa Rosa College, Manila Cathedral, Paco Church and St. Paul’s Convent.
Some civilians found themselves herded out of their homes by Japanese who asserted that shellfire made them unsafe. They were taken to an assembly area on Plaza Ferguson, where there were soon 2,000 under guard. Young girls were then separated and removed first to the Coffee Pot Café, then to the Bay View Hotel, where brothels were established. The Japanese sought to give their men who were soon to die a final exalting sexual experience. One twenty-four-year-old named Esther Garcia later gave evidence about the experiences of her fifteen-and fourteen-year-old sisters, Priscilla and Evangeline: “They grabbed my two sisters456. They were in back of me. And we didn’t know what they were going to do. So my two sisters started fighting them, but they couldn’t do anything. So they grabbed my sisters by the arm and took them out of the room. And we waited and waited and waited and finally my younger sister came back and she was crying. And I asked her, ‘Where is Pris? Where is Pris?’ And she said: ‘Oh! They are doing things to her, Esther!’ So everybody in the room knew what was going to happen to us. When Priscilla came back, she said: ‘Esther, they did something to me. I want to die. I want to die!’” A Japanese soldier had cut open her vagina with a knife.
At night, Americans on the line were bemused to hear sounds of chanting and singing, shouts and laughter, as Japanese conducted final carouses. These were sometimes succeeded by grenade explosions, as soldiers killed either themselves or hapless Filipinos. Some of the worst Japanese atrocities took place, ironically enough, at the city’s German Club, where five hundred people died, five of them Germans. Twelve members of one family, the Rocha Beeches, were bayoneted and then burned alive, along with their nursemaid. A fifteen-year-old was raped in the street amid gunfire and screaming people. The Japanese responsible then rose and used his bayonet to open her body from groin to chest. Twelve German Christian Brothers were killed in the chapel of La Salle College. Doctors, nurses and patients at the Red Cross centre were all massacred on 9 February. The Irish fathers at the Malate Church who had been tortured earlier in the month were now rearrested, and never seen again.
A pregnant woman, Carmen Guerrero, walked into the American lines, clutching a child in her arms. She had seen her husband tortured before her eyes, then removed to be shot. She had neither eaten nor slept for a week. She wrote later: “I had seen the head of an aunt457 who had taught me to read and write roll under the kitchen stove, the face of a friend who had been crawling next to me on the pavement as we tried to reach shelter under the Ermita Church obliterated by a bullet, a legless cousin dragging himself out of a shallow trench in the churchyard and a young mother carrying a baby plucking at my father’s sleeve—‘Doctor, can you help me? I think I’m wounded’—and the shreds of her ribs and her lungs could be seen as she turned around.”
The big villa of Dr. Rafael Moreta on Isaac Pearl Street had become a sanctuary housing sixty people. At midday on 7 February, twenty Japanese sailors burst in with fixed bayonets, led by a short, stocky officer with a heavy moustache. Men and women were separated, searched for arms and stripped of their valuables. The men were then forced into a bathroom, and grenades tossed in with them. Those who remained alive heard the screams of women, the sobbing of children. When silence descended and the Japanese had gone, the surviving men stumbled out to find thirty women, all of whom had been raped, dead or dying, along with their children in like condition.
It quickly became plain that murders on such a scale represented not spontaneous acts by individual Japanese, but the policy of local commanders. If their own men were to perish, the victors were to be denied any cause for rejoicing. A captured Japanese battalion order stated: “When Filipinos are to be killed458 they must be gathered into one place and disposed of in a manner that does not demand excessive use of ammunition or manpower. Given the difficulties of disposing of bodies, they should be collected in houses scheduled for burning, demolished, or thrown into the river.” Oscar Griswold of XIV Corps459 was bewildered to read a translation of a diary found on a dead Japanese, in which the soldier wrote of his love for his family, eulogised the beauty of a sunset—then described how he participated in a massacre of Filipinos during which he clubbed a baby against a tree.
It seems purposeless further to detail the slaughter, which continued until early March. The incidents described above are representative of the fates of tens of thousands of helpless people. A child emerging from a hospital saw a Japanese corpse and spat on it. His father said gently: “Don’t do that460. He was a human being.” By now, however, few Manileros were susceptible to such sentiments. In considering the later U.S. firebombing of Japan and decision to bomb Hiroshima, it is useful to recall that by the spring of 1945 the American nation knew what the Japanese had done in Manila. The killing of innocents clearly represented not the chance of war, nor unauthorised actions by wanton enemy soldiers, but an ethic of massacre at one with events in Nanjing in 1937, and with similar deeds across Asia. In the face of evidence from so many different times, places, units and circumstances, it became impossible for Japan’s leaders credibly to deny systematic inhumanity as gross as that of the Nazis.
Yet the U.S. Army took little pride in its own role. To overcome the Japanese defences, it proved necessary to bombard large areas of the city into rubble. Before the Philippines landings, MacArthur dispatched a message to all American forces, emphasising the importance of restraint in the use of firepower. Filipinos, he wrote, “will not be able to understand461 liberation if it is accompanied by indiscriminate destruction of their homes, their possessions, their civilization, and their lives…this policy is dictated by humanity and our moral standing throughout the Far East.” In consequence, and much to the dismay of his subordinates, MacArthur refused to allow air power to be deployed over Manila. Only after the 37th Division suffered 235 casualties in one day on 9 February did the theatre commander reluctantly lift restrictions on the use of artillery. “From then on, to put it crudely462, we really went to town,” said the 37th’s commander. A hundred American guns and forty-eight heavy mortars delivered 42,153 shells and bombs. The U.S. official historian shrugged: “American lives were undoubtedly far more valuable463 than historic landmarks.”
One post-war estimate suggests that for every six Manileros murdered by the Japanese defenders, another four died beneath the gunfire of their American liberators. Some historians would even reverse that ratio. “Those who had survived Japanese hate464 did not survive American love,” wrote Carmen Guerrero. “Both were equally deadly, the latter more so because sought and longed for.” Artillery killed four hundred civilians around the Remedios Hospital. A local man, Antonio Rocha, approached a U.S. mortar line and told its officer that his bombs were falling on civilians, not Japanese. The American impatiently gestured him away. The columns of the neoclassical Legislature Building collapsed into heaps of rubble. On 14 February, MacArthur’s headquarters announced: “The end of the enemy’s trapped garrison is in sight.” Yet death and destruction continued unabated as Krueger’s men approached the last Japanese stronghold, the old Spanish city.
Oscar Griswold of XIV Corps wrote on 28 February: “C-in-C refused my request465 to use air on Intramuros. I hated to ask for it since I knew it would cause death of civilians held captive by Japs. We know, too, that the Japs are burning large numbers to death, shooting and bayoneting them. Horrid as it seems, probably death from bombing would be more merciful…I fear that the C in C’s refusal to let me have bombing will result in more casualties to my men…I understand how he feels about bombing people—but it is being done all over the world—Poland, China, England, Germany, Italy—then why not here! War is never pretty. I am frank to say I would sacrifice Philipino [sic] lives under such circumstances to save the lives of my men. I feel quite bitter about this tonight.”
In the last days of February, the Americans began the final and most brutal phase of the struggle to overcome the defenders of the old city. Griswold wrote: “The assault upon Intramuros was unique466 in modern warfare in that the entire area was mediaeval in structure, and its defense combined the fortress of the Middle Ages with the firepower of modern weapons.” Granite walls twenty feet thick were breached with heavy artillery. The 145th Infantry then attacked, supported by a company of medium tanks, a company of tank destroyers, an assault-gun platoon, two flamethrower tanks and self-propelled artillery. Once inside Fort Santiago, American demolition teams sealed deep recesses, dungeons and tunnels, after throwing in white phosphorus grenades or pumping down gasoline and igniting it. To its end, the battle remained fragmented, confused, pitiless.
Only on 3 March could Manila be deemed secure. Some 3,500 Japanese escaped across the Marikina river. Weary and exasperated, Oscar Griswold wrote: “General MacArthur had announced [Manila’s] capture several days ahead of the actual event. The man is publicity crazy. When soldiers are dying and being wounded, it doesn’t make for their morale to know that the thing they are doing has been officially announced as finished days ago.” MacArthur picked a path through the debris of his old quarters in the penthouse of the Manila Hotel, where he found his library destroyed, a dead Japanese colonel on the carpet: “It was not a pleasant moment467…I was tasting to the acid dregs the bitterness of a devastated and beloved home,” he wrote later. It seems bizarre that he paraded his own loss of mere possessions in the midst of a devastating human catastrophe. He wrote to his wife, Jean, reporting the good news that he had recovered all the family silver. He took over a mansion, Casa Blanca in the smart Santa Mesa district, established residence, and defied widespread criticism by summoning Jean to join him there.
American soldiers were not merely exhausted, but also deeply depressed by all that they had seen, done and suffered in Manila. The 3/148th Infantry, for instance, had lost 58 percent of its strength. Many of the casualties were veterans of the Solomons campaigns. Among new replacements there was an outbreak of self-inflicted wounds, which caused the perpetrators to be court-martialled. To relieve his men’s gloom, the battalion’s colonel ordered an “organised drunk468.” Two truckloads of Suntory whiskey were procured, and issued at a rate of three bottles per man. One day was devoted to drinking, a second to “healing.” This may not have been a good answer to the battalion’s morale problem, but its officers were unable to think of better ones.
The victors counted 1,000 American dead, together with 16,665 Japanese—and 100,000 Manileros. In those days, other Luzon cities also suffered massacres by the occupiers: 984 civilians were killed in Cuenca on 19 February; 500 in Buang and Batangas on 28 February; 7,000 civilians were killed in Calamba, Laguna. In all, a million Filipinos are estimated to have died by violence in the Second World War, most of them in its last months. There was intense debate about whether MacArthur should have bypassed Manila, rather than storm it. What is certain is that he was mistaken in his belief that he could serve the best interests of the Philippine people by committing an army to liberate them. Whatever Filipinos might have suffered at the hands of the Japanese if the Americans had contented themselves with seizing air bases for their advance on Tokyo, and held back from reoccupying the entire Philippines archipelago, would have been less grievous than the catastrophe they suffered when MacArthur made their country a battlefield. And in March 1945, the struggle for the islands was far from ended.