At the Red Cross headquarters on Isaac Peral Street, the doors opened to all civilian refugees of any nationality, with promises to provide sanctuary and medical care. Every corridor, every room, every stairwell in the building was teeming with refugees, seated on every part of the ground. On February 10, a party of Japanese arrived and demanded to see a roster of occupants. They spurned the staff’s references to the protections of international law. Later in the day, larger groups of soldiers converged on the building and entered by the front and back doors simultaneously. They began killing wantonly with bullets, knives, swords, and bayonets. When a registered nurse asked to speak to the commanding officer, she was butchered on the spot. A mother attempted to save her baby daughter, who had been bayoneted in the abdomen. “I tried to put her intestines back in her stomach. I did not know what to do.”43 The infant died.
A familiar pattern of escalation was seen in the behavior of Japanese troops. At first, before U.S. forces crossed into the Manila city limits, they were menacing but otherwise disciplined. Small parties of Japanese soldiers, led by an officer, might visit a home or premises and demand to know the names and ages of all civilian occupants. The information would be entered into a notebook. A day or two later they might return, explaining that they were under orders to search for guerillas or contraband. Soldiers might pocket valuables found in cabinets or dressers, but otherwise leave the occupants unharmed. On a third visit they might demand to search the occupants as well as the premises, and the robberies would become more brazen. Women might be groped in the course of these searches. Men and older boys might be arrested and led away. On a fourth visit, a single rape might occur. As American forces entered the city, and the din of artillery was heard in the distance, the mood of the Japanese became more wanton and vindictive. Men and women were separated, and gang rapes became more common. In the final stages, with U.S. forces closing in on the perimeter and artillery raining down, the attacks became more frenzied and the cruelty more imaginative. Now it was not enough to rape and kill the women—instead they must mutilate them, cut off their breasts, douse their hair in gasoline, and set them on fire. Survivors reported instances of attempted necrophilia. Sometimes the murderers attempted to cover up their crimes, perhaps by burning down the house or building in which they had occurred. In the later stages, as American forces closed in, the Japanese were more likely to put their execrable handiwork on display—for example, by hanging tortured and headless civilians from lampposts.
The sack of Manila exposed the worst pathologies of Japan’s military culture and ideology. It was a glaring indictment of the “no surrender” principle, revealing the depraved underside of what the Japanese glorified as gyokusai, “smashed jewels.” Iwabuchi’s troops knew that they only had a few more days left to live. They were under direct orders, by officers whose authority was absolute and even godlike, to execute every last man, woman, and child within their lines. Many were instructed to perform the ghastly work with bayonets, or by burning their victims alive, in order to save ammunition. Trapped in this lurid nightmare, stewing in their own fear and hatred, they went berserk and abandoned themselves to a primordial blood orgy that the world will not soon forget.
FROM HIS SHIMBU GROUP HEADQUARTERS in Montalban, General Yokoyama urged Admiral Iwabuchi to attempt a breakout before it was too late. But no such maneuver was possible, certainly not by that point. The remnants of Iwabuchi’s six battalions were besieged on all sides, hunkered down in their bunkers, buildings, and tunnels under a rain of mortars and artillery shells. The U.S. 37th Infantry Division was closing in from the north, the First Cavalry from the east, and the 11th Airborne from the south. Nearly all remaining Japanese artillery pieces had been silenced, either because the weapons had been destroyed or captured, or their ammunition was exhausted. In a radio signal of February 15, the admiral explained his situation to Yokoyama:
The headquarters will not move. . . . It is very clear that we will be decimated if we make an attempt. We can hold out another week if we remain entrenched as we are. What is vitally important now is to hold every position and inflict severe losses on the enemy by any means. Fixed positions are our strong advantage. If we move, we will be weak. Therefore, we will be able to hold out as long as possible and then make a desperate charge with all our strength. We are grateful for your trouble.44
Then Iwabuchi signaled the headquarters at Baguio:
In anticipation of disruption of communications, I hereby submit this message to you. I am overwhelmed with shame for the many casualties among my subordinates and for being unable to discharge my duty because of my incompetence. The men have exerted their utmost efforts in the fighting. We are glad and grateful for the opportunity of being able to serve the country in this epic battle. Now, with what strength remains, we will daringly engage the enemy. ‘Banzai to the Emperor!’ We are determined to fight to the last man.45
About 2,000 Japanese fighters remained barricaded in prepared defensive positions behind the Walled City of Intramuros. Built by the Spanish in the late sixteenth century, this massive stone edifice ran about two-and-one-half miles in circumference; it was 25 feet tall and varied in thickness from ten to twenty feet. Its walls looked similar to the medieval walls that were common in Europe, especially in Italy, Spain, and southern France—but there was nothing quite like it anywhere else in the islands of the Pacific. The walls had once been ringed by a moat, but the moat had since been drained and converted into a city park and a nine-hole public golf course. The four arched gates were all heavily sandbagged and swept by Japanese machine and antitank guns. The Japanese had carved gun emplacements and tunnels into the old masonry, linking them to other defensive positions.
Within those walls were thousands of starving civilian hostages, many packed into ancient dungeons beneath the riverbed, others actually hanging from the outer walls in full view of the American besiegers. Surrender appeals were broadcast by loudspeaker, and leaflets were dropped by spotter planes, but no answer was given. On the morning of February 23, as XIV Corps prepared its assault on the Walled City, it was clear that the Americans would have to storm the fortress and slay every last defender.
Again, General Griswold asked for airstrikes; again, he was denied. It seemed that MacArthur still hoped for a stroke of providence that would preserve the beloved old barrio. Again, the Americans brought in massed heavy artillery to do the same job that the bombers would have done. At half past seven on the morning of February 23, more than a hundred 105mm and 155mm howitzers opened the most concentrated artillery barrage yet seen in the Pacific War. Some of the weapons were positioned at short range, about 300 yards, with the projectiles fired at a flat trajectory. In a single hour, the artillery and tanks fired a combined total of 7,896 high-explosive rounds.46 The entire Walled City disappeared from view amidst sheets of flame, smoke, and dust. It was as if Mount Pinatubo had erupted in the heart of Manila. George Jones, a New York Times correspondent, described “great geysers of black smoke, showering rubble and shrapnel. The air filled with smoke and dust and quickly Intramuros was obliterated from sight. The only thing to be seen through this curtain were flashes of exploding shells.”47
In the catacombs beneath Fort Santiago, Japanese soldiers obeyed orders to slaughter all prisoners remaining in the dungeons. Many were stabbed, slashed, shot, or bayoneted. In the larger cells, jammed with prisoners who had received no food or water for days, gasoline was poured through the bars and onto the floors, and then ignited. According to the later-recovered diary of a Japanese navy lieutenant, Admiral Iwabuchi exhorted his last surviving forces to kill as many Americans as possible before falling in battle: “If we run out of bullets we will use grenades; if we run out of grenades, we will cut down the enemy with swords; if we break our swords, we will kill them by sinking our teeth deep in their throats.”48
When the artillery barrage lifted at 8:30 a.m., and the smoke and dust cleared, large sections of the old ramparts had been reduced to hills of rubble. Tr
oops of the 145th Infantry and the 129th Infantry launched a coordinated assault, with soldiers climbing those hills and shooting their way into the streets on the other side. Armored bulldozers moved in to clear a path for Sherman tanks. A flotilla of about one hundred assault boats crossed from one muddy bank of the Pasig River to the other. Artillery fire had deliberately carved “steps” in the masonry between the river and the walls, so that troops could climb the embankment. Throwing smoke grenades ahead to blind the enemy, platoon-sized units passed in single file through breaches in the walls.49
The rattle of machine guns and rifle fire was heard as the assaulting units spread out into the narrow, labyrinthine streets at the hub of the citadel. The soldiers resumed the street-fighting tactics they had honed in the districts to the east. They took their time, preferring to contain their own casualties rather than to score a quick victory.
Iwabuchi and his principal staff officers, with field headquarters in the Agricultural Building, are believed to have taken their own lives before dawn on February 26.
A few enemy holdouts held the tunnels and catacombs under Fort Santiago. Entrances to these subterranean lairs were sealed with heavy demolition charges. Gasoline was poured into tunnels and white phosphorus grenades thrown after them, converting the interiors into kilns.
Until the very end, MacArthur appeared to be in denial about the unfolding tragedy in Manila. Between February 7 and February 19, he remained at his headquarters in Tarlac, visiting the capital only briefly. Even after seeing the devastation in the northern barrios, and confronted with evidence of fires and destruction south of the river, he continued to issue upbeat opinions to his colleagues. He refused to let his press team describe the full scale of the fighting and carnage in their near-daily communiqués, perhaps because he was embarrassed by his earlier premature victory announcement. Pressuring his field commanders to hurry the reconquest of the city, MacArthur ignored evidence that the Japanese were strongly fortified in the old city.
When the SWPA chief finally entered the wrecked capital on February 23, he was driven in an armored motorcade to his prewar home at the Manila Hotel. The once-elegant landmark building had been gutted by fire. Large sections of the outer masonry had collapsed, exposing the remnants of guestrooms on the upper floors. Accompanied by soldiers armed with submachine guns, MacArthur climbed a rubble-strewn stairway to his old penthouse apartment. To his sorrow, he found it burned out and littered with debris. A Japanese colonel lay dead in the foyer. None of his possessions had survived. His large personal library of military histories was a complete loss. A pair of ancient vases presented to his father by the former Japanese emperor lay in shards. “It was not a pleasant moment,” MacArthur recalled. “I was tasting to the last acid dregs the bitterness of a devastated and beloved home.”50
Four days later, in a formal ceremony at Malacañang Palace, a crowd of khaki-clad U.S. Army officers, Filipino legislators, and war correspondents assembled in the elegant Reception Hall, with its ornate carved woodwork, Persian carpets, and crystal chandeliers. The Philippine commonwealth government was restored to its full prewar authority. Standing behind a battery of microphones, General MacArthur recounted three years of “bitterness, struggle, and sacrifice” to recover the Philippines. He angrily denounced the Japanese for failing to evacuate Manila and declare it an open city, as he had done in 1941: “The enemy would not have it so, and much that I sought to preserve has been unnecessarily destroyed by his desperate action at bay—but by these ashes he has wantonly fixed the future pattern of his own doom.”51 Speaking for another minute or so, the general finally choked up and found that he could not go on. Without concluding his prepared remarks, MacArthur yielded the lectern to President Osmeña. In newsreel footage, he is seen standing in the background, behind the president, dabbing at his face with a handkerchief.52
There was no more talk of a victory parade. Much of Manila was simply gone. In the western districts south of the Pasig, shells of gutted buildings and hillocks of charred rubble stretched away to the horizon in every direction. Blackened, gnarled stumps were the only remains of mature trees that had once lined the boulevards. Most landmarks had vanished, as had the street signs; even native Manileños lost their way while navigating through the ruins of their once-familiar city. Strewn among the debris were the unburied dead—brown and bloated in the sun, features unrecognizable, with blank, staring eyes and hideous grinning rictuses. At massacre sites, dead civilians were piled together in heaps—men, women, and children together, with swollen hands tied behind their backs, shot, bayoneted, or beheaded. The vile stench of putrefying flesh was inescapable, except by traveling well upwind of the city limits.
Refugees camped amidst the rubble and erected pop-up ghettos. Rudimentary shacks were assembled with whatever materials could be salvaged from the wreckage—boards, pipes, bricks, blankets, and sheets of corrugated tin. Looters sifted through the ruins of burned-out buildings or houses abandoned by their owners. Army medics and Red Cross workers distributed distilled water, food, clothing, blankets, and other supplies. Wounded civilians received medical treatment in hastily established field hospitals. A sanitation emergency threatened; the city’s water supply had been secured, but the water and sewage mains in the stricken areas were ruptured. Many districts would have no running water at all for more than a year, and the gutters were open sewers. Prostitution rings were doing a brisk business even before the last pockets of Japanese resistance were eliminated. Street urchins accosted American soldiers and quoted a price for their older sisters. But even in this squalid wasteland, amidst such misery and despair, many Filipinos celebrated their liberation by dancing in the streets while shouting: “Mabuhay!” (“To life!”).53
Manila Bay was an abattoir, polluted by floating corpses and greasy coils of fuel from sunken ships. Of the latter there were at least fifty of various types and sizes, including gutted cargo ships half awash on a mud flat, and several large Japanese warships whose pagoda topmasts protruded above the surface. The wharves had been bombed for six months, by Halsey’s Third Fleet carrier planes and by USAAF bombers operating from points south. At Cavite Naval Base, south of Manila, not a single structure remained intact. The Japanese had taken care to demolish or burn everything left standing after the air raids. They had deliberately scuttled cargo ships at the wharves, in order to render them unusable. At one important berth, according to the U.S. Navy’s salvage command, three small ships had been sunk one atop another, so that the steel wreckage was stacked up and would have to be removed section by section. Clearing the harbor and getting the seaport into working condition was a stupendous salvage job—but it had to be done quickly, as Manila would be one of the major staging bases for the invasions of Okinawa and Kyushu.
For the Filipino people, the price of losing Manila was incalculable. In the old, historic city center, it was not even a question of rebuilding—they would have to cart off the rubble and begin anew, with a blank slate. Much of the nation’s cultural patrimony had been obliterated: architecture, libraries, museums, archives, the history of several centuries. Even the destruction of official government records was a problem with far-reaching consequences, because it destabilized the legal and civil foundations of the nation’s postwar recovery. Manila, the elegant and functional city, “Pearl of the Orient,” had been the single most valuable asset possessed by this emerging Asian democracy. It was the nation’s singular political, commercial, and cultural capital. Losing it was a cruel setback to the Filipino people’s hopes for economic recovery and a successful transition to independence.
General Carlos P. Romulo, who represented the Philippines as a nonvoting delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives, had been forced to leave his wife and four sons behind after the Japanese had put a price on his head in April 1942. Now, returning to his home in the Ermita district, he found it in ashes. The site was deserted. On the edge of his property he found a badly decomposed corpse that had been bayoneted. He recognized the dead
man as his next-door neighbor. Exploring the stricken neighborhood, Romulo ran into many people he knew. He rejoiced in their survival, but no one had word of his family, except that they had fled the capital. Inspecting the bodies strewn in the streets, Romulo found to his horror that he recognized many of their faces: “These were my neighbors and my friends whose tortured bodies I saw pushed into heaps on the Manila streets, their heads shaved, their hands tied behind their backs, and bayonet stabs running them through and through. This girl who looked up at me wordlessly, her young breasts crisscrossed with bayonet strokes, had been in school with my son.”54 (A week later, Romulo was reunited with his wife and children, who had all survived without injury.)
Even while fighting was still raging in the city, teams of lawyers, photographers, stenographers, translators, and doctors began the painstaking work of collecting documentary and eyewitness evidence of war crimes. Witnesses were interviewed, sworn testimony was recorded, prisoners were interrogated, survivors were examined, photographs were taken of the massacre sites, and captured Japanese documents were translated by the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section. In some cases, the perpetrators had attempted to cover up their handiwork with fire, but the atrocities were so numerous and widespread that there was much more evidence than could be practically collected. The files were soon bulging with damning evidence of systematic war crimes, collected with an intention of building a case that “the sack of Manila and its attendant horrors are not the act of a crazed garrison in a last-ditch, berserk defense but the coldly planned purpose of the Japanese high command.”55 (That case was not proven, but Yamashita would hang nonetheless.)
If it had all gone differently—if the Japanese had committed no atrocities and released the civilians unharmed—a last-ditch fight for Manila might have aroused the begrudging admiration of their enemies. After all, the Americans had their own anti-surrender traditions and lore—the Alamo, Captain James Lawrence’s “Don’t give up the ship,” and (much more recently) General Anthony McAuliffe’s one-word reply to a German surrender demand at Bastogne: “Nuts.” But the systematic rape, torture, and massacre of innocents stripped the fight of its honor. Three-quarters of a century later, the Japanese performance in Manila is admired by no one in the world, save a handful of unregenerate mythmakers on the Japanese right.
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