12

THERE ARE TIMES WHEN MEN HAVE TO DIE

Hawai‘i and Alaska were militarized to prepare for an invasion that never came. Both territories were attacked, but except for Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, both remained intact. In this, they were lucky. Elsewhere in the Pacific, the war saw Western colonies invaded and conquered.

It started with Pearl Harbor. The event is remembered by mainlanders as an attack on a Hawaiian base, but of course that was only part of it. On that day, the Japanese launched a near-simultaneous strike on the Allies’ colonies throughout the Pacific. Because surprise bombings work best at the break of day, the idea was to attack the major targets—Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Guam, and Hong Kong—shortly after dawn.

Dawn, however, is a relative concept. The unavoidable flaw in the Japanese plan was that territories that had been hit could warn those farther west, where it was still night. This was particularly a concern with regard to MacArthur’s B-17s, his “ace unit” in the Philippines that served as the pillar of Allied defense in the Pacific. With warning from Hawai‘i, those flying fortresses could be aloft and ready.

Worse, the Japanese planes at Taiwan that were supposed to strike the Philippines didn’t take off on time. Thick fog grounded them for six hours, dramatically expanding the window in which MacArthur could react to the Hawai‘i news. Japan’s pilots had every reason to fear that by the time they reached the Philippines, MacArthur would be waiting. Perhaps his B-17s would bomb Taiwan before their planes could even take off.

But that’s not what happened—not even close. “The sight which met us was unbelievable” is how a Japanese pilot remembered his arrival over the Philippines. “Instead of encountering a swarm of American fighters diving at us in attack, we looked down and saw some sixty enemy bombers and fighters neatly parked along the airfield runways.” MacArthur’s planes were not in the air, and they were certainly not on their way to Taiwan. They were on the ground, lined up in rows.

The astonished Japanese pilots dropped their bombs.


MacArthur had gotten the Hawai‘i news. The phone rang in his penthouse atop the Manila Hotel at 3:40 a.m., Philippine time. He dressed and rushed to headquarters.

But what happened next is impossible to say. For hours, it appears, MacArthur did practically nothing. His air commander visited MacArthur’s headquarters twice in desperate bids for a meeting but saw only MacArthur’s closed office door. Repeated warnings from Washington went unacknowledged; direct orders were ignored.

Had MacArthur gone catatonic? Was he playing some devious (yet ineffectual) game? MacArthur’s biographer found his behavior “bewildering.” It’s a “riddle,” the biographer wrote, “and we shall never solve it.”

Whatever the cause, the effect was catastrophe. The Japanese struck sometime after noon, nine hours after MacArthur’s phone had rung. “We could see our beautiful silver Flying Fortresses burning and exploding right before our eyes as we stood powerless to do anything about it,” one B-17 navigator wrote. In hours, MacArthur lost eighteen of his thirty-five B-17s and some ninety other aircraft. Many of his remaining planes were badly damaged. His air commander regarded it as “one of the blackest days in U.S. military history.”

Before the attack, MacArthur’s air force had been incomplete. Now it was inoperable. The Japanese returned again and again, and MacArthur could do nothing. They, not he, had command of the air.

It was 1898 and the Battle of Manila Bay all over again. Except now the United States was in Spain’s place: the distant empire losing its fleet in a single day.


With the best hope for an Allied defense of the Pacific knocked out in one quick blow, the Japanese made brisk work of the rest. Guam fell on December 10, Thailand on the twenty-first, Wake Island on the twenty-third, and Hong Kong on Christmas Day. New Year’s Day saw Manila succumb. Then came the other great colonial capitals of Asia: Singapore on February 15 (the “worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history,” Winston Churchill moaned), Batavia on March 5, and Rangoon on the eighth. In three breathtaking months Japan had brought the Dutch, British, and U.S. empires in the Pacific to heel.

MacArthur may have lost his B-17s, but he still had his army, which, counting reservists, was 150,000 strong. Yet those barely armed and undertrained reservists were wholly unprepared to face seasoned Japanese troops. Many simply vanished; in two weeks, the North Luzon Force shrank from 28,000 to 16,000. The troops that remained still outnumbered the first wave of Japanese invaders on Luzon, but that didn’t matter. MacArthur’s army fought Japan with all the efficacy (as a journalist put it) of a slab of oak fighting a buzz saw.

MacArthur abandoned the fight and concentrated on maneuvering his men on Luzon to the relative safety of the Bataan peninsula. It was a backpedaling waltz: engage, fall back, dynamite the bridge, repeat. The difficulty was that it was to be danced over long distances (184 bridges destroyed in all) by two of MacArthur’s deteriorating forces at once, and all to the accompaniment of enemy fire. Oddly, it was here, in retreat, that MacArthur proved his worth as a commander. The maneuver was by all accounts beautifully executed. General Pershing called it “a masterpiece, one of the greatest moves in all military history.”

With his crumbling army converging on Bataan, MacArthur declared Manila an “open city.” As of January 1, he would leave it entirely undefended, meaning the Japanese could enter in peace. But before the Japanese took the city, U.S. forces salted the earth. They set oil depots aflame and destroyed the city’s main bridges—bridges that the government had built with great pride (and with Filipinos’ taxes).

“It was hard to believe that our military situation had become this desperate,” one Manilan remarked as he watched the large pillars of black smoke rise over the city.

Once again, as in the days of Cameron Forbes, the whole top layer of government abandoned Manila. But this time it didn’t go to Baguio, which had also been attacked (five bomb craters dotted the Baguio Country Club’s golf course). Instead, it fled to Corregidor, an island fortress in Manila Bay a little smaller than Lower Manhattan.

If Baguio was an open-air spa, Corregidor was a claustrophobic bunker. More than ten thousand service members and leading politicians crammed into deep tunnels carved from the island’s rock. The money was there, too, since Roosevelt had ordered the high commissioner to empty the banks. In all, it was a strange scene: Japanese bombs pounding the earth overhead, MacArthur’s three-year-old son marching up and down the tunnels singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and a dragon’s hoard—some 5.5 tons of gold, 150 tons of silver pesos, and millions in U.S. bills—just sitting there, glimmering.

Bataan was a more sober sight. From a military perspective, the peninsula was a promising place for siege defense. But to survive a siege, you need food, and there was nowhere near enough to feed eighty thousand troops and twenty-six thousand civilian refugees. The men ate half rations in January; by March, they were lucky to get quarter rations. They foraged desperately, picking clean the area around them. They ate horses, dogs, pack mules, iguanas, snakes, and monkeys (“it looked like roast baby,” a nauseated soldier remarked). One sergeant tried eating cigarettes. Unsurprisingly, disease flourished: dysentery, malaria, hookworm, and, that reliable indicator of prolonged nutritional deficiency, beriberi.

“There are no atheists in fox holes” is a familiar wartime proverb, conveying the desperation of frontline combat. It was coined, as it turns out, on Bataan.


Had the siege of Bataan pitted Japan against the United States, it would have been dramatic enough. But three-quarters of MacArthur’s men there were Filipino. The siege thus layered political questions atop military ones. Would the Filipinos fight for their empire? And would their empire fight for them?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt stated his position clearly enough. “I give to the people of the Philippines my solemn pledge that their freedom will be redeemed and their independence established and protected,” he said in a message to the colony. “The entire resources, in men and in material, of the United States stand behind that pledge.”

Those were strong words. Yet they were also, when examined closely, vague ones. Philippine freedom would be “redeemed,” yes, but didn’t that imply it would first be lost? Also, the president had said nothing about when this would happen. Immediately after making the statement, Roosevelt sent his press secretary, Steve Early, to clarify its timeline. Early scolded journalists for reading “too much of the immediate rather than the ultimate” into the president’s pledge. “You must consider distances,” he pleaded.

But Filipinos took the promise seriously. Rumors circulated of a massive convoy, miles in length, brimming with food and equipment, on its way. “In our mind’s eyes we saw the vast fleet of steel gray ships steaming toward us, their bows cutting the waves sending up a multi-colored spray,” a Filipino officer on Bataan recalled. Even MacArthur believed that Washington was preparing a relief effort.

Yet only a trickle arrived, and as the weeks dragged on, hope turned to rage. It was a feeling that Japanese propagandists seized upon. They dropped leaflets on the starving troops, targeting the Filipinos. “Our fight is not with you but with America,” one said. “Surrender, and we will treat you like brothers.” The Japanese promised the Philippines independence. They dropped menus from the Manila Hotel, which had the compound effect of redoubling Filipinos’ hunger pangs and reminding them of the whites-only high life that mainlanders had enjoyed.

Emilio Aguinaldo took to the airwaves, urging his compatriots to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Japan. When interrogated about this after the war, he was unrepentant. Japan had always supported his cause, he pointed out. “It was only the Americans who betrayed me.”

It didn’t help MacArthur that Filipinos could hear all of Roosevelt’s speeches, not just the ones aimed at them. They heard him stress the German enemy over the Japanese one. They heard his firm resolve to defend England.

Barely a week after pledging all the United States’ resources to Philippine defense, Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union address. “It was bitter for us not to be able to land a million men in a thousand ships in the Philippine Islands,” he said. (Wait, why is he using the past tense? Filipinos surely asked.) But, he explained, “we have been faced with hard choices.” An attack on Japan would come “in proper time.”

Manuel Quezon vibrated with anger. “I cannot stand this constant reference to England, to Europe. I am here and my people are here under the heels of a conqueror,” he exclaimed. “How typically American to writhe in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while a daughter is being raped in the back room.”

MacArthur, too, was incensed. The Philippines—the site of his father’s glory, his adopted home—was being treated as a sacrifice zone.

MacArthur enlisted the Manila newspaperman Carlos Romulo to put a better spin on things. Romulo was one of the most influential writers in the colony—he would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize and become president of the United Nations General Assembly. From Corregidor, Romulo operated a radio station, the Voice of Freedom. Its goal was not just to counter Japanese propaganda but also, as one of MacArthur’s top aides put it, “to erase the unfortunate effect of the Europe-centered voices that came drifting through the air from America.” Help was coming, Romulo promised. Whatever it sounded like, help was coming.

But Quezon didn’t believe that, and as he stewed, he came to appreciate the logic of Aguinaldo’s position. “This war is not of our making,” he pointed out in a cable to Washington. What right did the United States have to drag the Philippines into a war and then abandon it? Why was Washington defending an imperialist power, Britain, while letting its own people perish? “While enjoying security itself,” Quezon told Roosevelt, “the United States has in effect condemned the sixteen millions of Filipinos to practical destruction.”

Quezon demanded immediate independence. That way, he reasoned, he could declare neutrality and negotiate to have both Japan and the United States withdraw their forces. MacArthur endorsed the plan, warning Roosevelt that “the temper of the Filipinos is one of almost violent resentment against the United States.”

Now it was Roosevelt’s turn to be irate. “You have no authority to communicate with the Japanese government,” he scolded Quezon. “So long as the flag of the United States flies on Filipino soil,” he promised, “it will be defended by our own men to the death.”

“To the death” was not just stirring rhetoric; it was the likely outcome. The Roosevelt administration had already agreed with Britain on a “Germany first” strategy for the war, which meant prioritizing Europe. The acknowledged price of that strategy was letting Japan take the Philippines. Was the United States truly willing to see that happen? Churchill asked. The secretary of war, a former governor-general of the Philippines, reassured him: “There are times when men have to die.”

In March, Roosevelt ordered MacArthur, Quezon, and other top-ranking officials out of the Philippines. The colony was being abandoned.

First, though, the Corregidor headquarters would have to be scuttled. The gold was sneaked out, at night, to a waiting submarine, which took it to San Francisco. The paper currency was incinerated to keep it out of Japanese hands. (“Guess what I learned after burning ten million dollars?” one officer said. “That Jackson twenties burn faster than Lincoln fives.”) The 150 tons of silver pesos, too bulky to move, were dumped into a secret spot in Manila Bay—a tantalizing challenge for future treasure hunters.

Quezon gave Douglas MacArthur half a million dollars from the Philippine treasury—a reward for services rendered. MacArthur, as an officer in the U.S. military, was forbidden to accept it, but he did anyway. Quezon and MacArthur set off for Australia, with Romulo trailing after them.

“I shall return,” MacArthur promised.

The troops on Bataan, though, went nowhere. The song they sang captured their plight vividly:

We’re the battling bastards of Bataan:

No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,

No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces,

No rifles, no guns or artillery pieces,

And nobody gives a damn.


Inevitably, the Bataan defenses collapsed, though more from starvation than from combat. The Japanese marched the captured troops, Filipino and mainlander alike, great distances to internment camps—the infamous Bataan Death March. Thousands of Filipinos and hundreds of mainlanders died en route, some executed by the Japanese, others simply keeling over.

It was as if the “world was standing on its head,” wrote a Filipina who watched this. “The Americans, rulers and idols for as long as we could remember, were turned overnight into unshaven, shambling wretches.”

Yet in mainlanders’ eyes, the whites who had faced Japan were heroes, MacArthur most of all. While the generals in charge of Hawai‘i on December 7 were relieved of their commands and subjected to repeated investigations, MacArthur got a Medal of Honor for his “gallantry and intrepidity.” Congress declared June 13, 1942, to be Douglas MacArthur Day, and button makers sold MACARTHUR FOR PRESIDENT pins.

“All the people I know think God comes first and then MacArthur,” a shop owner in San Antonio told a reporter. A housewife in Hollywood felt the same: “I’ve never wanted to sin in my life, but I would with that man.”

A book about MacArthur’s defeat, W. L. White’s They Were Expendable (1942), became a hit—the first time a book about the Philippines had ever landed on the bestseller list. The director John Ford, for what was then the highest directorial salary in Hollywood history, made it into a movie starring John Wayne and Robert Montgomery.

It wasn’t the only movie. The “Bataan film” became its own genre. There was Bataan, Texas to Bataan, Corregidor, Manila Calling, So Proudly We Hail, Salute to the Marines, Cry “Havoc,” Air Force, and Somewhere I’ll Find You. Finally, after years of ignoring the Philippines, mainlanders were paying attention.

Carlos Romulo saw an opportunity not to be missed. He frantically toured the mainland, speaking in an astonishing 466 towns and cities in two and a half years. Everywhere his message was the same: Filipinos weren’t foreigners, they were family—and they needed help. The titles of two books he published during the war highlighted that kinship: Mother America and My Brother Americans.

Romulo’s favorite topic was Bataan. He noted that the soldiers there referred to themselves not as Americans or Filipinos, but as “Filamericans.” This put him in mind of Rudyard Kipling and of Kipling’s famous verse “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

“How I wished he had been with us on Bataan!” Romulo mused. “I should have liked showing him miles of fox holes piled with American and Filipino bodies and asked him to repeat over that mingled flesh ‘never the twain shall meet.’”

For Romulo, Bataan was the story of Filipinos sacrificing themselves for the United States. Yet that’s not how Hollywood saw it. Although the title of the film They Were Expendable accurately captured the Filipinos’ plight, the titular “they” referred to the whites in the Philippines—the John Wayne and Robert Montgomery types. In his soliloquy, Wayne’s character mourns Bataan and the “thirty-six thousand United States soldiers” stranded there, “trapped like rats but dying like men.” Actually, there were easily more than twice that many U.S. soldiers trapped on Bataan. It’s just that the other ones were Filipinos.

The films were incorrigible on this score. The stars were white, the writers were white, and the tragedies they acted out befell white people: soldiers, sailors, doctors, and nurses. Even the stereotype-shattering Bataan, a heroic tale of a racially mixed patrol (a young Desi Arnaz played a Mexican American), had only one speaking Filipino character, a Moro who used broken English and walked around shirtless. In other films, Filipinos served largely as scenery.

Romulo, seeing this, tried to get cast in a Bataan movie. His idea was to play not some half-mute native helpmeet, but himself: an English-speaking, Ivy League–educated, decorated colonel in the U.S. Army. He didn’t get the part, though. There was no such part.

In a despondent moment, Romulo confessed to being “shocked and horrified” by mainland indifference to the Philippines. Washington seemed to him to be “crowded with little Neros, each fiddling away blithely” while the empire burned.


While Carlos Romulo implored mainlanders to remember that Filipinos were “Americans,” too, the Philippines was turning into a different kind of place. The all-white clubs now catered to Asians. The bartender at the Baguio Country Club stopped making mint juleps and started pouring sake—it was a Japanese officers’ club. MacArthur’s penthouse in the Parsons-built Manila Hotel was preserved as a tourist attraction. The Leonard Wood Hotel, though, became a brothel.

Taft Avenue, Dewey Boulevard, Fort McKinley, and Burnham Green all got Japanese names. This happened throughout the empire, as Western names were replaced. Batavia became Jakarta, Singapore became Syonan, Manchuria became Manchukuo, Guam became Omiya Jima, and Wake became Odori. There was talk of renaming the Philippines, too. One idea was to name it after the nineteenth-century nationalist Jose Rizal, though nothing came of that.

In short, U.S. empire was being uprooted and Japanese empire laid down in its place. Filipinos no longer celebrated the Fourth of July or Occupation Day; they now observed the Emperor’s Birthday and December 8 (National Heroes Day). Rizal’s birthday, which Manuel Quezon had celebrated as Loyalty Day to the United States, now commemorated the expulsion of “Western imperialism” from Asia.

Filipinos like Aguinaldo were pleased to see the United States finally ousted, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Even those on the U.S. stronghold of Corregidor had ample cause for resentment. As a young man, Manuel Quezon had languished for four months in a U.S. prison without ever facing charges. Carlos Romulo remembered how U.S. soldiers had sought to kill his father, how they had tortured his grandfather with the “water cure,” and how they had hanged his neighbor from a tree, Southern style. “I made up my mind to hate them as long as I lived,” a young Romulo had concluded.

Quezon and Romulo eventually made peace with Western empire, but did others? In the late 1930s Romulo had toured Asia. Everywhere he went, he found “a sense of betrayal at white hands.” In British-owned Burma, the people he met seemed positively eager for a Japanese invasion. Weren’t they worried about how the Japanese would treat them? Romulo asked. “No change could be for the worse,” they replied.

Japan latched on to the bitterness of the colonized. Japanese propagandists reminded Filipinos of the United States’ long history of empire, starting with the dispossession of North American Indians and moving through the Mexican War, the annexation of Spain’s colonies, and the Philippine War, right up to the scorched-earth policy adopted in the face of the Japanese invasion. “America has wasted your funds in the creation of grand boulevards and exclusive mountain resorts,” one Japanese writer added, gleefully rubbing salt into the wounds inflicted in the era of Daniel Burnham.

Japan had something different to offer: “Asia for the Asiatics.” That slogan may sound banal today, but for a region long colonized, it was a powerful, revolutionary idea. Even Romulo conceded that it was “morally unassailable.”

Yet white powers would never allow Asian independence, the Japanese insisted. It had to be seized. Emperor Hirohito claimed that the war’s origins lay “in the past, in the peace treaty after World War I,” when Woodrow Wilson had blocked Japan’s attempt to introduce racial equality into the League of Nations covenant. With the most idealistic of the Allies unwilling to concede even the principle that all races deserved the same consideration, what were the chances that Asians would ever be accepted as equals?


A more pressing question was whether the Japanese could accept Filipinos as equals. The onset of Japanese rule did not bode well on that score. Japan’s first official proclamation after taking Manila was a threat: any hostility or resistance from Filipinos and their “whole native land” would be turned to “ashes.”

In the second week, the military government specified seventeen acts punishable by death. They included rebelling, giving false information, damaging anything of military value (including clothing), concealing food, speaking ill of Japanese currency, disobeying orders, obstructing traffic, or acting in any way “against the interests” of the military. Even suggesting these acts was grounds for execution.

“It was as if the Philippines had become one vast military prison,” one writer remembered. A diarist described Manila in the second month of Japanese rule: “Every day on my way to the office, I run across dozens of Filipinos who have been tied to posts as punishment for some trivial offense which they have committed. Usually the victims are black and blue or bleeding from the terrific lashings they have received.” Public beheadings, carried out on the spot and without a trial, were not uncommon.

Filipinos quickly saw that Japan had come not to liberate the Philippines, but to ransack it. Just as Germany was caged in by neighboring countries, Japan was hemmed in by empires: the British Empire (Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong), the Dutch Empire (the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia), the U.S. Empire (the Philippines, Alaska, Hawai‘i, Guam), and China, in which every imperialist had a hand. The Japanese called this “ABCD encirclement” (American-British-Chinese-Dutch), and it meant that Japan’s access to oil, rubber, tin, and even food depended on foreign markets. The turbulent 1930s, which had shut down international trade, illustrated the danger in this. If Japan wanted its industrial economy to keep growing, it would need to take those colonies itself.

The Philippines was a particularly plump target in this Japanese quest for Lebensraum. It stood right between Japan and the resource-rich colonies of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Moreover, its own large economy could be fed into the Japanese war machine.

And it was. “The Japanese swarmed all over the Philippines like clouds of termites,” a Manila journalist recorded. Purchasing agents scoured the city for war matériel: iron, steel, copper, canvas, corrugated sheets, and machinery. Some factories were placed in Japanese hands; others were strip-mined, with their machines carted away—sometimes the entire factories were removed. Cars were confiscated in the cities, tractors in the country. By 1944, the Japanese were tearing down empty gas stations—the fuel had long since run dry—to get the iron rods embedded in their concrete walls.

The food was the most worrisome thing, though. Japan instituted a command economy, forcing farmers to sell their produce to the government, which would distribute it as rations. But the Japanese ate first, leaving little for Filipinos. And because the government paid farmers in near-worthless occupation currency, many simply abandoned their fields and fled to the cities. Others hid their crops from the government and sold to the black market. Either way, the consequence was hunger.

To those with long memories, it must have felt a lot like 1899. Once again, an imperial power was interfering with the colony’s food supply. Once again, cholera struck Manila—a result of the social breakdown and the movement of people. And, once again, Filipinos fought back. Remnants of MacArthur’s surrendered forces and newly formed guerrilla armies harried the Japanese.

As in 1899, guerrillas gathered in the places where governmental control was weakest. This meant the mountains and the island of Negros, where rebels established their own shadow government. They transferred Silliman University to the hills and ran it as a “jungle university” (after the war, Philippine universities accepted transfer credits from Jungle University). They established a currency board and printed their own money.

The Japanese military, for its part, fell back on a painfully familiar set of repressive techniques. It blocked movement in and out of towns. It tortured suspects, using among its techniques the infamous “water cure.” And it established reconcentration zones.

Yet there was one trick Japan tried that the United States hadn’t. It decided to grant the Philippines independence. Not to promise independence—the United States had done that, eventually—but to actually grant it.

On October 14, 1943, that’s what Japan did.

About half a million people attended the celebration that day on the Luneta. Emilio Aguinaldo was there, carrying the tattered flag that he had once flown against the Spanish in 1898. So was his old comrade Artemio Ricarte, the Father of the Philippine Army, famous for having chosen exile over surrender. Together they raised a new flag, modeled on Aguinaldo’s original, in front of Juan Arellano’s Legislative Building. It was the first time the Philippine flag had been permitted to fly on its own.

“The applause was deafening,” wrote Antonio Molina, who was in the crowd. Molina doubted that much would change. The Japanese army was staying on in the Philippines, though now technically as an “ally.” Everybody knew that the new government would follow Tokyo’s orders. Still, Molina could not deny an “irrepressible satisfaction upon seeing our national flag flutter alone, at long last.” As it climbed the pole, he wept.

A new president was sworn in: Jose Laurel, a Yale-educated justice of the Philippine Supreme Court. His father had died in a U.S. reconcentration camp. Laurel received a twenty-one-gun salute.


Douglas MacArthur watched this unfold with grave concern. Japan’s military economy was nothing compared with that of the United States. In 1941, a year when the United States was at peace, it had produced more than five times as many aircraft and ten times as many ships as Japan had. But those aircraft and ships were mainly going to Europe.

The reason was partly priority—the Roosevelt administration held fast to its “Germany first” strategy. But it was also geography. The distance from San Francisco to MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia was more than twice as far as from New York to England. And, whereas the Atlantic supply lines connected large, long-established ports such as New York and Liverpool, the Pacific lines had to rely on hastily developed ports, some built from scratch, including on far-flung Pacific locales such as Guadalcanal, Tutuila, Kwajalein, and Manus.

Until all that was built, MacArthur had to make do with what he called “shoestring equipment.” He bellowed at Washington for its stinginess, to little effect. His air commander, who arrived in mid-1942, was shocked to discover a “pitifully small” air force awaiting him, with only six B-17s in operation.

Allied plans called for a limited offensive against Japan, chipping away at it until Germany had been defeated. Even this was a daunting prospect at first. Japanese forces had not only taken the Philippines, they were expanding southward over the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. Australia’s military planners, expecting invasion, prepared to sacrifice the north of the continent. MacArthur lacked the resources to roll back the Japanese and retake all the territory the Allies had lost.

Instead, he became a genius of economy. He stopped playing Risk and started playing Go, leaping his units over Japanese positions. What MacArthur (along with Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Central Pacific) had grasped was that, in an age of aviation and on a battlefield of islands, you didn’t have to maintain a continuous, football-scrimmage front. MacArthur could bypass Japanese strongholds, snip their supply lines, and leave them “pocketed and cut off from outside aid.”

He called it his “hit ’em where they ain’t—let ’em die on the vine” philosophy.

It worked. MacArthur grumbled that it would work a hell of a lot better if Washington would give him a battleship, but his progress on the map was nevertheless steady—Guadalcanal (August 1942), Buna (November 1942), Cape Gloucester (December 1943), Los Negros and Manus (February 1944), Hollandia (April 1944)—as he bounded from victory to victory up New Guinea and the islands of the South Pacific. Nimitz, driving across the Pacific from Hawai‘i, did the same.

The twin Pacific campaigns were long and brutal, and it’s telling that many veterans of the war who went on to political greatness earned their spurs in them. John F. Kennedy got shipwrecked in the Solomons (an island there is named after him). Lyndon Baines Johnson won a Silver Star, personally given by MacArthur, for “gallantry” as an observer in New Guinea. Richard Nixon served in air logistics in MacArthur’s theater. Gerald Ford gamely puttered around nearly every island group in the ocean on a light aircraft carrier. The twenty-year-old Lieutenant George H. W. Bush was shot down over Chichi Jima in the Bonins. Bush—the plane’s sole survivor—got rescued by a submarine. He was extremely lucky. Four other airmen shot down later in the same area were captured and became the unfortunate victims in the highest-profile documented instance of Japanese wartime cannibalism.

The point of this two-pronged offensive, however, was not to build presidential résumés. The point was to end the Pacific War by attacking Japan. Yet the island-hopping strategy had raised a vital question. The Allies could reach Japan without conquering every piece of land en route. So, which islands should they take and which should they leap over?

More important, did they need to bother with the Philippines, where the Japanese had dug in? Why not take the southern Philippines and leave Luzon to the Japanese? Or skip the entire archipelago and take Taiwan, which was, after all, closer to Japan? By mid-1944, the highest-ranking men in the military inclined toward the Taiwan plan: Ernest King, chief of naval operations; Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces; and, with some vacillation, George Marshall, chief of staff of the army.

To say that MacArthur disagreed would be putting it lightly. He was outraged. For him, the decision about which route to take was not merely military; it was moral. The Philippines was “American territory,” he fumed, where seventeen million people were “undergoing the greatest privations and sufferings because we have not been able to support or succor them.” So impassioned was MacArthur on this subject that Marshall felt compelled to warn him against allowing “personal feelings” to interfere with strategic decisions.

The issue got thrashed out at a conference with Roosevelt in Honolulu in July 1944. MacArthur gave his all. Bypassing the Philippines, he insisted at great length, would be militarily wrong, psychologically wrong, politically wrong, and ethically wrong. He reminded Roosevelt of the Bataan soldiers languishing in enemy camps. He reminded him that Asians were watching how the United States treated its largest colony. And he reminded him of his pledge to pour the “entire resources” of the United States into rescuing the Philippines. “Promises must be kept,” he told the president.

“Douglas, you win,” Roosevelt said. The question was not entirely put to rest at Honolulu—war planners would argue Taiwan versus the Philippines for another two months—but MacArthur had gotten through. He would, as promised, return to the Philippines.


What might that return look like? When Japan invaded the U.S. Pacific empire in 1941–42, the surrenders had come quickly—Guam gave up within hours, the westernmost Aleutians were taken without a fight. But there were two reasons to think that things might not be so easy going the other direction. First, Japan, unlike the United States, had fortified its frontline colonies. Second, Japanese military culture did not exactly encourage surrendering in the face of superior force.

A hint of what awaited MacArthur could be had in the smaller Pacific territories the United States reconquered before reaching the Philippines. Under U.S. rule, Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians had been barely populated, treeless outposts, far from war planners’ machinations. Japan, by contrast, had turned them into battle stations. Hundreds of buildings—bases, workshops, bunkhouses, factories, a hospital, a bakery—supported thousands of troops. They were dug in and ready to fight.

On Attu they did. When Allied forces moved to reclaim the island in 1943, the ensuing battle killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and wiped out nearly the whole Attu garrison of more than two thousand Japanese soldiers, who fought to the death. It was a high price to pay, on both sides, for an island whose prewar population had been less than fifty.

U.S. commanders expected Kiska, which housed thousands of Japanese troops in its elaborate tunnel system, to be even worse. It turned out not to be. The night before the invasion, Japan’s forces had quietly abandoned the island and escaped. The only casualties were Allied soldiers who tripped mines or accidentally shot one another in the fog.

No such escape was feasible from Guam, which the U.S. Marines attacked in the summer of 1944. The invasion was prefaced by thirteen days of aerial and naval attacks, a bombardment that reached “a scale and length of time never before seen in World War II,” as the Marine Corps’ official history put it. The alternating naval assaults and air raids struck Guamanians and Japanese alike.

Fearing imminent death and worried that Guamanians might aid the enemy, the Japanese troops turned on the populace. Beheadings, rapes, and indiscriminate shooting were common. Japan’s soldiers marched the whole local population of some eighteen thousand to the south of the island, massacring many there. In the aftermath, a marine recalled encountering a pile of decapitated corpses: “The heads lay like bowling balls all over the place.”

Some fifteen thousand Japanese soldiers and hundreds of Guamanians died. In retaking Guam, the U.S. military laid waste to Guam’s capital, bombing and shelling every major structure in the town: the museum, the hospital, the governor’s residence, the courthouse. The war destroyed some four-fifths of the island’s homes.

The United States then interned thousands of “liberated” Guamanians, over their objections, in camps while the navy tore down what remained of the capital to build a military base. It was yet another occasion when the United States interned its own people during the war.


The bloody fighting on Attu and Guam offered a worrying foretaste of what MacArthur might expect in the Philippines, the United States’ great abandoned colony. Things there were already rapidly falling apart. Nineteen forty-four was the year when the Japanese army stopped paying for food with its depreciated scrip and started seizing it outright. President Laurel declared a food crisis and ordered every adult under sixty to work eight hours a week increasing food production. By September, a diarist recorded “a noticeable decrease in the cat population” of Manila. By December, starved city dwellers were dropping dead in the streets.

As Japan’s imperial forces scraped the bottom of the barrel, the violence worsened. Claro Recto, the Philippines’ minister of culture, wrote a daringly frank letter to a Japanese general about it. He noted the routine military practices of “slapping Filipinos in the face, of tying them to posts or making them kneel in public, at times in the heat of the sun, or beating them—this upon the slightest fault, mistake or provocation.” Beyond these daily torments, there were “thousands of cases” of people “being either burned alive, killed at the point of bayonet, beheaded, beaten without mercy, or otherwise subjected to various methods of physical torture, without distinction as to age or sex.” Recto mentioned a massacre of one hundred in his hometown—part of Japan’s ongoing quest to extirpate guerrillas. But there were many other such events he could have mentioned, including a punitive expedition in the Sara district on Panay that killed twenty times that number.

That was the Philippines at peace. In October 1944 more than two hundred thousand of MacArthur’s troops began their assault on the Philippines, shutting down sea-lanes and storming the beaches. MacArthur himself waded ashore on the island of Leyte, south of Luzon, on October 20, 1944.

“I have returned,” he announced to the Filipino people by radio. “Rally to me.”

“I have returned”: Douglas MacArthur, in front, stepping back on Philippine soil. Carlos Romulo, wearing a helmet, is behind him.

MacArthur’s goal was Manila. And, finally, he had the planes to take it. One Manilan remembered them screaming through the city like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, “winging very low but fast, skimming the top of buildings.” They aimed for anything of military value: highways, railroad tracks, trucks, and (yet again) bridges.

Japanese commanders faced a momentous decision. Should they abandon the city, as on Kiska? Or stay and fight, as on Attu? General Yamashita Tomoyuki, commander of Japan’s 14th Area Army, saw the writing on the wall. Supplies of all sorts were running low, and with sea and land approaches to Manila cut off, it was hard to see how they could be replenished. Yamashita’s army had already reduced its food rations from three pounds a day to nine-tenths of a pound. What is more, Manila was impossible to hold. A large city, inhabited by more than a million hostile civilians, full of flammable buildings, on flat ground—to defend it would be suicide. Just as MacArthur had done in 1941, Yamashita ordered the army out.

But the army was not the only Japanese force in the area. As Yamashita moved his troops out, Rear Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji, commander of the Manila Naval Defense Force, moved sixteen thousand men into the city. He regarded himself duty-bound to protect Manila’s military installations.

Iwabuchi must have known that, in the end, MacArthur’s forces were going to take Manila. But he could force them to do it the hard way. His men set explosive mines throughout the city. They erected pillboxes at critical intersections and made fortresses of the larger concrete structures in the city. They stockpiled their ammunition.

Yamashita, once he realized what had happened, angrily ordered Iwabuchi to leave Manila. Iwabuchi replied, accurately, that he couldn’t. By then, MacArthur’s forces had the city surrounded.

“We slammed the back door shut before we began to fight” is how the official history of MacArthur’s leading division put it. A group of military historians judged this enclosure of the city to be “the strategic blunder of the Philippine campaign.” Having cut off Iwabuchi’s escape route, MacArthur practically guaranteed that the admiral would make his final stand in a densely populated city.

The battle for Manila would be a fight to the death.


When Allied troops arrived in Manila, whatever tenuous truce existed between the Japanese forces and the city’s inhabitants broke down entirely. Iwabuchi’s command ordered that all non-Japanese on the battlefield be killed. Japanese troops set about destroying the city. They took out the power and water systems. They dynamited factories and warehouses, and the flames predictably spread toward residential areas. As Filipinos fled into the streets (or, as the soldiers no doubt thought of it, the “battlefield”), they were shot down.

Technically, Iwabuchi’s men were fighting only “guerrillas.” But in the hungry, vengeful, and chaotic days of the U.S. invasion, the line between guerrilla and civilian blurred badly. Excerpts from a captured diary of a Japanese soldier in Manila give a sense of the scale of violence:

Feb. 7: 150 guerrillas were disposed of tonight. I personally stabbed and killed 10.

Feb. 10: Guarded approximately 1,000 guerrillas.

Feb. 13: I am now on guard duty at Guerrilla Internment Camp. When I was on duty, approximately 10 guerrillas tried to escape. They were stabbed to death. At 1600, all guerrillas were burned to death.

The pretense that all victims of the Japanese were guerrillas was easily dispensed with, as when troops rounded up hundreds of young women for sexual predation. Large hotels, including MacArthur’s Manila Hotel, became the site of organized mass rapes. Diaries kept during the Battle of Manila are replete with other stomach-churning atrocities: pregnant women disemboweled, babies bayoneted, whole families slaughtered. Prepared to die, Iwabuchi’s men felt few moral restraints.

This was the first and, as it happened, the only time that U.S. and Japanese forces would fight in a major city. MacArthur’s men entered the bloodbath with caution. Dislodging Iwabuchi’s forces while protecting Filipino lives was a delicate operation. When assessing the area of Intramuros, where the Japanese were particularly well entrenched, MacArthur’s air commander suggested using napalm to “bomb the place until it was completely destroyed.” But MacArthur refused. Intramuros was inhabited by a “friendly” population, he reminded the commander. Aerial bombing was “unthinkable.”

Maybe to MacArthur. But within the first days of the battle it grew more thinkable to those under him. The Japanese were holed up in buildings throughout the city. Storming those emplacements one by one using small arms was treacherous. It would be easier to simply bomb or shell entire buildings.

In the approach to the Philippines, when MacArthur’s men were fighting the Japanese on isolated islands or in jungle clearings, bombs and artillery fire had worked wonders. They had minimized U.S. casualties and let the United States put its overwhelming industrial capability to use. And it finally had that capability. If, in 1941, MacArthur’s forces had been poorly equipped, by 1945—with the European war winding down and the U.S. economy in overdrive—they had all they needed. There were lots of explosives on hand.

The 37th Infantry Division, in particular, believed in the “use of heavy firepower to the maximum,” as its commander, General Robert S. Beightler, put it. The 37th was known as the most wasteful division in the theater for its use of artillery ammunition. “This reputation has certainly never bothered us,” Beightler explained, “for we only point to the fact that we fought for more than two years and lost fewer men than other divisions with comparable fighting.”

Manila, 1945

The 37th handled most of the combat in Manila. On February 9, six days into the battle, it saw nineteen of its men killed and more than two hundred wounded. That was nothing compared with the thousands of Filipinos who were being daily slaughtered, but to Beightler it was “alarming.” The division reverted to its tried-and-true tactic. Rather than engage Iwabuchi’s men in direct combat, it would simply destroy any buildings in which they might be hiding. “Putting it crudely, we really went to town,” Beightler reported. “To me, the loss of a single American life to save a building was unthinkable.”

That’s a sentence worth reading twice. In Beightler’s mind, he was facing a trade-off—and not a particularly difficult one—between lives and architecture. But, as he well knew, those buildings were inhabited. Some by enemy soldiers, of course, but many by civilians. Those civilians were “Americans,” too, even if no one treated them that way.

The other divisions attacking Manila also turned up the heat. Though Intramuros was spared aerial napalming, it was nevertheless, with MacArthur’s approval, comprehensively destroyed. During one manic hour on February 23, the closely packed (and still inhabited) section of the city had three tons of explosives hurled at it per minute. Shells struck, more than one per second, “hurtling like lightning bolts from the hands of an angry god,” as one observer wrote.

“We made a churned-up pile of dust and scrap out of the imposing, classic government buildings,” Beightler boasted.

Within a week of fighting, U.S. shelling of the whole area in front of advancing troops became, as one report put it, “the rule rather than the exception.” Any structure suspected of containing Japanese troops was a target. “Block after bloody block was slowly mashed into an unrecognizable pulp,” recorded the 37th’s official history.

That included refugee centers, such as the Philippine General Hospital (a Parsons-built landmark), where a few Japanese soldiers were holed up—and more than seven thousand civilians. The 37th fired at the hospital for two days and nights. These were “days of terror,” remembered a Filipino trapped inside. “I can still hear the screams of the wounded clearly to this day.” Other refugee shelters—the Remedios Hospital, the Concordia Convent—met similar fates.


U.S. shelling and Japanese slaughter combined in a concoction of ghastly lethality. The politician Elpidio Quirino got his own taste of it. Quirino had been one of the delegates who wrote the commonwealth constitution. He’d been a member of Manuel Quezon’s cabinet, and later, after the war, he would become president of the country. He lived in the affluent enclave of Ermita (506 Colorado Street) with his wife, Alicia, his sons Tommy and Dody, and his daughters Norma, Vicky, and Fe Angela (who was two).

Quirino’s “darkest hour” began with the fires Japan had set. Ermita was particularly in peril, all the more so because the Japanese had taken up fortified positions at the main intersections and were shooting anyone who walked into the street. On the morning of February 9, a U.S. shell crashed into the Quirino home. The family decided to brave Japanese bullets and flee to the home of Alicia’s mother, Doña Concepcion Jimenez de Syquia, who lived down the street. Alicia led four of her children out, while Elpidio and Dody stayed behind to gather food. But when Alicia reached the corner where her mother’s house stood, a Japanese machine-gun nest opened fire, killing Alicia and Norma. A Japanese marine hurled the infant Fe Angela into the air and impaled her on his bayonet. Only Tommy and Vicky made it to their grandmother’s house.

Elpidio left Dody at home and tried to carry food to Doña Concepcion’s house. But he was held down by Japanese fire and U.S. shelling and didn’t make it until the next day. When he arrived, he discovered that his wife and two daughters were dead. Dody, who had sought to retrieve the bodies of his mother and sisters, was also killed—a shrapnel wound to the temple.

The shelling continued. The Quirinos and the Syquias, fourteen in all, ran back out into the street, darting amid the shells and gunfire from one insecure shelter to another. At night, a U.S. shell struck the house where they had taken refuge, cutting the body of Elpidio’s sister-in-law nearly in two. Doña Concepcion had a fatal heart attack during the barrage.

The family fled again. It had to. The house was on fire.

Sanctuary was hard to find. “If you escaped the shells of the Americans, you could not escape the machine guns or bayonets of the Japanese,” Elpidio remembered. After stashing his dwindling family in yet another temporary shelter, he went out again in search of safer ground. Soon after he stepped out, a U.S. shell hit the building, striking five members of his clan and Doña Concepcion’s cook. Three died, and three were injured, including his son Tommy. Once again, the Quirinos fled. This time they reached safety.

The Quirinos’ neighbors in South Manila flee to U.S. troops for protection.

In four days, Elpidio Quirino had lost eight members of his family, including his wife, his mother-in-law, and three of his five children. A woman who saw him at the end of this remembered Quirino staggering around Manila in his undershirt, smeared with mud, a vacant stare in his eyes—a latter-day Lear.


Admiral Iwabuchi took his stand on the Luneta, in the cluster of governmental buildings Daniel Burnham had planned. The very architectural qualities Burnham prized—large, solid concrete structures, commanding views of the city—made them ideal fortresses.

Juan Arellano’s Legislative Building served as the headquarters of Iwabuchi’s Central Force. Some 250 Japanese troops waited inside. With all approaches to the building on open ground, dislodging them would be difficult. A U.S. battalion tried but was driven back. An attempt to smoke the Japanese out failed, too. So the 37th Infantry Division did what it did best: fired its howitzers and tank guns point-blank into the building for two unrelenting hours, bringing the massive edifice crashing to the ground.

The pride of the colonial state, built by a Filipino to a mainlander’s plan, lay in ruins. The symbolism was hard to miss.

Manila wasn’t short on symbols. The sixth-largest city in the United States—substantially larger than Boston or Washington, D.C.—had for a month of fighting been converted into an abattoir. South Manila, where Quirino lived, had been leveled. Bodies decomposed everywhere, many bearing the marks of torture or execution. The stench was unbearable.

“The largest buildings had been transformed into mere piles of rubble and debris. Over areas, miles square, hardly one stone was left on top of another. It was as if all the forces of destruction had operated together, and that even this had been exceeded,” wrote a local journalist. “This seemed demonic work.”

Demonic, maybe, but not indiscriminate. The “better to lose a building than an American life” logic succeeded in protecting mainland soldiers. In the month of fighting, 1,010 of them died. Compare that with the 16,665 Japanese troops who perished. And compare that with the 100,000 Manilans killed. For every “American life” lost, 100 Manilans died.

Juan Arellano’s Legislative Building after two hours of point-blank shelling by the 37th Infantry Division

Or so we think. As usual, mainland lives lost were counted with to-the-last-digit precision, while Filipino fatality numbers were at best informed guesses. The 100,000 estimate, accepted by the U.S. Army, was extrapolated from figures submitted by undertakers after the war.

At any rate, Manila wasn’t the only place hit. Smaller towns and cities were bombarded as well. “The whole city of Baguio was razed to the ground,” lamented Jose Laurel, the Philippine president. Laurel himself had barely survived the attack there. U.S. planes repeatedly bombed his residence, destroying it entirely. Those planes dropped 466 tons of bombs and nearly five thousand gallons of napalm during the Baguio campaign.

“We levelled entire cities with our bombs and shell fire,” admitted the high commissioner. “We destroyed roads, public buildings, and bridges. We razed sugar mills and factories.” In the end, he concluded, “there was nothing left.”

Senator Millard Tydings surveyed the colony after the war. He estimated that 10 to 15 percent of its buildings had been destroyed, and another 10 percent damaged. After the war, Filipinos submitted claims to the government on behalf of 1,111,938 war deaths. Add Japanese (518,000) and mainlander fatalities (the army counted slightly more than 10,000) and the total climbs to more than 1.6 million.

The Second World War in the Philippines rarely appears in history textbooks. But it should. It was by far the most destructive event ever to take place on U.S. soil.


Oscar Villadolid, a boy at the time, remembers a familiar scene from the aftermath of Manila’s “liberation.” A GI came down his street handing out cigarettes and Hershey bars. Speaking slowly, he asked Villadolid’s name. When Villadolid replied easily in English, the soldier was startled. “How’d ya learn American?” he asked.

Villadolid explained that when the United States colonized the Philippines, it had instituted English in the schools. This only compounded the GI’s confusion. “He did not even know that America had a colony here in the Philippines!” Villadolid marveled.

Take a moment to let that sink in. This was a soldier who had taken a long journey across the Pacific. He’d been briefed on his mission, shown maps, told where to go and whom to shoot. Yet at no point had it dawned on him that he was preparing to save a U.S. colony and that the people he would encounter there were, just like him, U.S. nationals.

He thought he was invading a foreign country.