Victory finally seemed within reach—and the liberation of Manila. But then disaster struck, thanks to a fanatical Japanese officer who decided to turn the ancient city into a holocaust.
—
General Yamashita originally had no plans to hold Manila. On the contrary, the city’s large perimeter and the logistics of holding a potentially hostile city of 800,000 inhabitants made defending the capital look more like a strategic liability than an asset—especially since Manila’s thousands of wooden structures and thatched-roof houses made it a natural tinderbox.61
Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, on the other hand, had his own ideas. He had no effective fleet left, only a few ships stuck in Manila Harbor. But he did have some 16,000 soldiers and sailors under his command, and he was determined to make a last-ditch stand in the city—his own version of the banzai charge or kamikaze suicide mission. He also had plenty of ammunition and weapons, and so he began barricading Manila for a fight to the death.
When Yamashita got word of what Iwabuchi was going to do, there was nothing he could say to stop him. He would much rather have had those 16,000 men and mounds of weapons and ammunition to use for his own plan, but under the command arrangements of the Japanese military, he had no authority to countermand the admiral’s orders. So Yamashita made the best of a bad situation. He ordered his own general there, who had already blown up bridges connecting northern and southern Manila in preparation for evacuation, to add his three battalions of troops to Iwabuchi’s forces, and then Yamashita, still safe and secure in his headquarters at Baguio, waited to see what would happen.
Meanwhile, Iwabuchi and his men blocked city streets with barricades; streets were mined, buildings booby-trapped, naval guns stripped from ships in the harbor and installed inside buildings and houses for the final fight.62
The Americans assigned to liberate Manila were going to be in for a very nasty surprise.
CHAPTER 24
BATTLEGROUND
Every soldier must expect to sacrifice his life in war,
Only then has his duty been done;
Be thankful that you can die at the front,
Rather than an inglorious death at home.
—GENERAL SOSAKU SUZUKI, JAPANESE COMMANDER ON LEYTE
Yalta is a resort town in Crimea facing onto the Black Sea, with a warm, subtropical climate that supports vineyards and fruit orchards around the city.
On February 4, 1945, hundreds of officials and diplomats were gathering in Yalta for the last summit conference of the Big Three leaders of the Allies, Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as MacArthur and the First Cavalry were racing to complete the envelopment of Manila.
The war in Europe was nearly over. Nazi Germany was on its last legs; Adolf Hitler had only two months more to live. The Big Three had gathered to decide on how to arrange the postwar settlement in Europe, and complete the war in the Pacific—even though one of the Big Three, Stalin, had still not entered the fighting against Japan.
Now Stalin shrewdly used that fact as diplomatic leverage. In exchange for agreeing to declare war on Japan within three months after the surrender of Nazi Germany, he was able to reclaim almost all the territory Russia had lost during the Russo-Japanese War, including the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin peninsula. Stalin also won major concessions of territory in Mongolia and Manchuria from China, even though China had no representative at the conference.
But there was one piece of territory in East Asia on which Stalin agreed to make no claims. This was the peninsula of Korea, annexed by imperial Japan in 1910, which Stalin now agreed with Roosevelt and Churchill—and later President Truman—would come under four-power trusteeship (Russia, China, Great Britain, and America) after Japan’s defeat. All agreed that no matter what happened, Korea would remain intact, a single sovereign nation once it was ready for independence.
And so, even before the current war in Asia was over, the stage for the next global conflict was being set.
—
In the race into Manila, the Eighth Cavalry Regiment beat the Thirty-seventh Division into Manila by a curled lip.
A tank from the Eighth’s Forty-fourth Battalion, B Company, “Yankee,” was the first to enter the city. The tanks of B Company arrived buttoned up, expecting trouble, but instead what stood out in the mind of B Company’s Private John Hencke as his Sherman rumbled forward, were the church bells. “The ringing of bells, church bells, out across the fields. Filipinos out there started running toward the road, waving their arms. It was a very pleasant sight to see.”
People were cheering but also looking for food. “They were starving and didn’t have much [to offer], jewelry, rings, clothing.” But B Company had no food to give, so they pushed on, “until we reached a large, open boulevard. It was like a parade without tickertape, the people yelling, hollering, climbing up on the tanks…Then some Japanese snipers fired a few shots and everyone disappeared. We fired back into the upper stories and rooftops of building to discourage anyone pointing a gun at us and continued down the boulevard.”1
Their goal was the University of Santo Tomas, now an internment camp where some 3,500 people, most of them Americans, had been held for more than two years. It was just turning dark when the men of the Forty-fourth found themselves outside the large campus. The university was pitch-black. The Japanese guards had cut off all electricity, and now began firing away into the night.
Inside the darkened compound terrified civilians and prisoners could hear only shooting and the rumble of tanks. The only warning they had received that rescue might be on the way was late in the afternoon on the 3rd when an American plane buzzed the camp and dropped a pair of aviator goggles. People picked them up before guards noticed. A note attached, “Roll out the barrel. Santa Claus will be coming Sunday or Monday.” Few figured out what it could mean, and even fewer dared to think it might be true.2
Now it was Sunday night, around 8:30 under pitch-black skies. The firing suddenly ceased. People near the windows heard a welcome American voice calling out: “Where the hell’s the front gate?”
There was a pause, then one of the Forty-fourth’s light tanks, nicknamed “Battling Basic,” smashed through the entrance of the university compound. Another followed, and then another, as the Japanese sentries gave up and scattered.3
John Hencke’s was one of those first tanks driving through the university gate. He used his searchlight to sweep the darkened buildings, looking for pillboxes. “When we got to within ten or fifteen feet of the first building I saw a doorway that had a bamboo screen covering part of it. Beneath it I saw some feet. I yelled, ‘We’re Americans! Come on out!’ A boy and girl, teenagers, scared to death, came out. Once they saw who we were it didn’t take long for them to be happy.”4
Other inmates then began venturing out, still in a daze about what was happening. But most refused to leave: they couldn’t believe Americans were actually here. It had to be a trick or a trap. One of those who did go out was Betsy McCreary, who had grown up with American parents in Iloilo. She was almost nineteen. At the sound of American voices she and a friend had raced down the stairs into the open plaza, but then had second thoughts.
“We were still under curfew,” she recalled, “and all I could see was the silhouette of a man with a gun.”
It turned out to be an American soldier, holding an M-1. “He was huge,” she remembered with awe. “Compared to the more recent uniformed men in our lives,” meaning the Japanese, “he seemed gigantic.” Betsy gingerly touched his sleeve, not believing he could be for real. “I put the palm of my hand on his sleeve and I felt the sweat that had come through. He was real. He handed out cigarettes and I took one.”
Betsy had no doubts now. She brought the cigarette back to the other people in her room who still refused to believe their rescuers were here. “Look at this,” she said, “an American cigarette. The blue letters on it say Camel.” Three or four had to examine the cigarette for themselves before they were convinced.<
br />
MacArthur and the Americans had come back, just as he had promised.5
—
It wasn’t until the next morning that the last Japanese resistance in Santo Tomas gave up. Sixty-three Japanese held 266 prisoners hostage in a small building and refused to release them until they were allowed to leave the camp under safe passage. After they fled, the internees were finally safe and free. By then, the Thirty-seventh Division had also carried out its own mission of mercy, nearby at Bilibid Prison.
They had entered Manila shortly before dark on the 4th, the 148th Infantry moving southward through the Tondo and Santa Cruz Districts, west of Santo Tomas.6 By eight their Second Battalion had reached the northwest corner of the notorious prison where at least 800 Allied POWs were believed to be held, as well as 500 civilians. There was an intelligence report that the Japanese were planning to set off an ammo dump on the premises if American troops showed up, so Sergeant Ray Anderson and the others of F Company moved up cautiously, in spite of the crowds of grinning Filipinos slapping them on the back and offering them small gifts. They were greeted by a burst of machine-gun fire and scattered rifle shots; eventually Sergeant Anderson and his men managed to kill two Japanese sentries and shoot off the lock on the prison’s side entrance.
They pried the slats off some boarded-up windows, and looked in. “There were about fifty people huddled together in the room,” he remembered, looking terrified. He and his men urged them to come out, but they refused. The Americans inside had never seen soldiers like these, soldiers with round helmets instead of the World War One–era tin hats that MacArthur’s men had worn when they were defending Bataan.
They had never seen soldiers carrying M-1s and “grease guns” (the army’s M20 machine pistol) instead of the sturdy ’03 Springfield they had last seen army troops carrying. They had never seen soldiers carrying bazookas and driving tanks and half-tracks, which hadn’t even existed when the war had ended for them back in April 1942. The soldiers of the Second Battalion looked as strange as men from Mars, and the Bilibid inmates were firmly convinced that these men were there to kill them.
Even when Anderson and his men sang a couple of choruses of “God Bless America,” they refused to budge.
Then Anderson tossed in some Philip Morris cigarettes. Like Betsy McCreary’s Camels, they finally convinced the inmates that these were indeed fellow Americans and they were there to rescue them, not execute them. Soon the entire battalion followed up to sweep the buildings clear and free the rest of the Bilibid prisoners, many of whom were on the verge of death from starvation and malnutrition (at Santo Tomas, where conditions were not as harsh, prisoners were down to half a cup of rice per day).7
Just three blocks away came the sound of shooting. They were troops from the Eighth Cavalry, who had also hoped to reach the prison—but they were busy with the first serious firefight since Americans had come into the city.8
As the Eighth Cavalry’s tanks and troopers had headed down Quezon Boulevard toward the Pasig River that afternoon, they were met by a firestorm of machine-gun and rifle fire from the three-story concrete buildings of Far Eastern University, as well as 47 mm artillery fire.
Tanks began backing up, slamming into vehicles advancing from behind. In the ensuing chaos they could have been perfect sitting ducks, but Filipino guerrillas guided them off onto side streets and back to Santo Tomas to regroup and reinforce, and wait to renew the fight the next day. Meanwhile, the Fifth Cavalry, ordered to take Quezon Bridge at the foot of Quezon Boulevard, also ran into heavy fire from Far Eastern University and a huge roadblock, complete with mines, steel rails driven upright in the roadbed, and trucks lashed together. They too had to pull back and await reinforcements even as the Japanese blew the bridge.9
Until now the Americans had found going into Manila fairly easy. But now the battle for the city had begun. Yamashito hadn’t planned on it; MacArthur hadn’t expected it. But it was real and here and now, with every broad street blocked or barricaded, every intersection set to be a death trap of machine-gun crossfire, and every large structure a major fortress that would have to be taken floor by floor, room by room, closet by closet.
It was the first time in the entire Pacific War that Americans would have to take a major fortified urban center, and neither MacArthur nor his men were prepared for it.
—
Indeed, at first MacArthur refused to believe it was happening. The drive into Manila had been so straightforward, and the ease and efficiency with which the final trap had been sprung so impressive, that on February 6 he launched one of his famous victory communiqués:
“Our forces are rapidly clearing the enemy from Manila. Our converging columns…entered the city and surrounded the Japanese defenders. Their complete destruction is imminent.”10 Congratulatory telegrams poured in from the usual suspects: George Marshall, Henry Stimson, Churchill, FDR. MacArthur’s biggest priority wasn’t rushing to supervise the fighting but visiting the Americans and Filipinos he had let fall into captivity, and now had finally set free.
He started at Bilibid. These were veterans of Bataan and Corregidor, the men who had followed his orders in the hopeless weeks after the Japanese invasion and cursed him as Dugout Doug. Colonel Paul Bunker, MacArthur’s classmate who had been part of the final resistance on Corregidor before the Rock surrendered on May 6, was not there. He had died in 1943 in a prison camp on Luzon. Sam Grashio, the P-40 pilot who had witnessed the destruction of Clark Field, was not there. He managed to escape to Mindanao after the fall of Bataan, and was one of the handful of Americans who had joined the anti-Japanese insurgents. Jim Wainwright was not there; he was reportedly still alive in a distant camp, but no one knew where.
What MacArthur did find were men who had been too ill to be marched off to work camps in Japan, Korea, and Manchuria, but who somehow managed to pull themselves into “some semblance of attention” in front of their lice-ridden cots.
The first to greet him was a virtual skeleton who saluted and said softly, “Welcome to Bilibid, sir.” He introduced himself as Major Warren Wilson, an army doctor now in charge of the prison hospital.
MacArthur could barely speak. “I’m glad to be back” was all he said as he shook hands with the ghostly figure.11
He first visited the hospital, where hundreds of men too weak to stand stared out from their beds and tried to smile and shake his hand. Some simply stared in disbelief: “You’re back,” they whispered, or “You made it,” or sometimes simply “God bless you.”
“I could only reply, ‘I’m a little late but we finally came.’ ” MacArthur moved along to the barracks and looked around at the debris of prison life, the tin cans the prisoners had eaten from and the filthy old bottles they had been allowed to drink from. “It made me ill just to look at them.”12
Then came Santo Tomas, which was still under fire (Betty McCreary remembered an artillery shell crashing through a window and maiming two girls in her dormitory) but where inmates still had enough energy to raise a cheer and pull off his coat and throw their arms around him.
“I entered the building and was immediately pressed back against the wall by thousands of emotionally charged people,” he remembered. “In their ragged filthy clothes with tears streaming down their faces, they seemed to be using their last strength to fight their way close enough to grasp my hand.” He remembered a woman trying to lift her son up to touch their savior: “I took the boy momentarily and was shocked by the uncomprehending look of deprivation in his eyes.”
For MacArthur, it was an unforgettable if harrowing moment, to be extolled as “a life saver, not a life taker.” But as he left Santo Tomas, surrounded by crowds of Filipinos as “men and women literally danced in the streets,” shouting and reaching out to touch him, it still hadn’t dawned on him that his role as life taker was not yet over.13
Then his jeep was stopped by his own troops. They had captured the San Miguel brewery barely an hour before. They brought their general a beer, which he
drank and pronounced good. They drove on to Malacañan Palace, a place filled with memories, where to his amazement he found his Cadillac limousine, which the Japanese military governor had used and kept intact. It wasn’t until he tried to get down to Manila Bay and was met with a curtain of sniper and machine-gun fire that the reality sank in.
All the same, his mood was exultant. “The fall of Manila marks the end of one great phase of the Pacific struggle,” he wrote in a communiqué, “and sets the stage for another. We shall not rest until our enemy is completely overthrown. We do not count anything done as long as anything remains to be done.
“We are well on the way, but Japan itself is our final goal…On to Tokyo! We are ready in this veteran and proven command when called upon. May God speed the day!”14
Meanwhile, outside in the streets the Japanese were now being pressed from three directions at once. The Thirty-seventh Division was still attacking from the north along the Manila waterfront; First Cavalry was still driving down from the north and northeast. But now the Eleventh Airborne was finally in position to start pushing up from the south.15
First Cavalry probably had the easiest job, at least at first. In addition to continuing the advance south from Santo Tomas, they were also assigned the task of clearing the enemy away from the dams, reservoirs, and other facilities northeast of the city. The Japanese were certainly thick on the ground there, but the operation involved less urban fighting. They could use heavy artillery and even air support, to clear resistance—something MacArthur resolutely forbade inside Manila itself. Indeed, by the morning of February 7 the men of First Cavalry were done and ready to tackle the next big objective.
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