“The American flag floats once more over the campus of Santo Tomas University, where 3,700 internees have been liberated.”
—WILLIAM DUNN,
CBS NEWS, FEBRUARY 5, 1945
COLONEL BRADY GATHERED WITH HIS TROOPS OUTSIDE THE Education Building before daybreak on the morning of February 5, 1945. After more than thirty-six hours, the time had arrived to escort the remaining sixty-five Japanese out of Santo Tomas and officially conclude the standoff. The moustached Brady outlined the morning’s plan, noting that the Japanese would only be allowed to depart with side arms and rifles. All machine guns and grenades would be left behind. The cavalrymen would march in two parallel columns, sandwiching the enemy between them.
Brady’s troops, lined up before him in an area that only hours earlier had been a no-go zone, listened attentively.
Each cavalryman, the colonel continued, would cover one enemy soldier, a cartridge in the chamber at all times. When the column reached the front line, the Americans would halt and the Japanese would continue alone. “Under no condition is any man to be trigger happy,” Brady demanded. “We hope to get away with it without anyone being hurt.”
The colonel concluded with a pragmatic warning.
“But if they fire—give them hell.”
One of those waiting to capture the spectacle was Life magazine’s Carl Mydans. “It was still dark,” the journalist wrote. “Most of the camp was asleep, and the sounds of fighting in the city had lapsed into a few intermittent explosions.”
Promptly at six-thirty a.m., Commander Hayashi and his men emerged from the Education Building in the cool predawn darkness, rifles slung over their shoulders as instructed. “As they appeared our men tensed up and fingers played with triggers,” Mydans observed. “These Americans had seen many Japs before but they had always shot at them or were shot at. There was nervousness all around.”
American soldiers armed with rifles and automatic weapons fell in along either side of the Japanese. Brady stepped to the front of the procession, trailed by Hayashi and civilian internee Ernest Stanley, who served as an interpreter.
“Let’s go,” Brady shouted over his shoulder. Stanley translated for Hayashi, who barked the order to his troops.
The column of American and Japanese troops marched toward the university’s front gate. “Two limped because of wounds,” wrote reporter Frank Hewlett in his news dispatch filed that day. “One rode a litter, in a two-wheeled cart.” Like moths to a flame, internees crowded around to watch, while others hung out of building windows. “All arrangements had been made under cover of secrecy,” noted the Fifth Cavalry’s report, “but the entire populace of Santo Tomas hurriedly assembled to witness the reluctant release of the Japs and to happily congratulate the newly freed internees.”
Denny Williams spotted the departing troops from her upper-floor window, then hollered to the other nurses sleeping in her room. “Hey, Shack, Josie, Frances,” she shouted. “You’ll miss something big if you don’t wake up right now.”
Williams watched the Japanese depart, final proof that her torturous ordeal was over. “Our former captors, in baggy pants with helmeted heads hanging and rifles on their shoulders, looked sloppy and ill-kempt beside the trim GI’s,” she wrote. “The long agony of doubt and uncertainty and pain and deprivation and near-death marched out of Santo Tomas Internment Camp with them. I felt like cheering.”
One of the nurses did squeal.
“Be quiet!” warned another.
On the ground below, as the Japanese marched past, internee children shouted at them. “Make them bow,” the youths demanded. “Make them bow.”
American soldiers tried to distract them, no doubt afraid that any disruption might trigger violence. “Who would like a nice ice cream cone?” one soldier asked.
“What’s that?” the children replied.
Such efforts proved futile, as Robin Prising, who was up early that morning scavenging for breakfast, observed. Just like spitting on the dead body of Abiko, insulting the outgunned Japanese was too much a temptation. “Small bands of men and women followed them through the encampment jeering and hooting—the women loudest of all—until the Japanese plodded out of the camp and the gates clanged shut.”
The Eighth Cavalry’s report noted how bizarre the morning’s procession must have appeared. “This, the first parley or truce in the Asiatic war, was indeed a strange sight,” the report stated. “The spectacle of live Japanese walking unscathed through lines of Cavalrymen is not one ever to be forgotten by the participants.”
The scene triggered bitterness in some. “They got off too easy,” more than a few muttered.
As soon as the Japanese departed, internees focused on what mattered most, a sentiment echoed in shouts from second- and third-floor windows: “How about chow!”
Once outside the university gates, Brady led the column east. Mydans ran ahead of the procession, snapping pictures that would soon run in Life magazine. “The Japanese marched confidently, singing cadence, heads erect, seemingly without thought of fear,” he wrote. “In the silent, empty streets the column moved swiftly through the brightening dawn. Here and there a few Filipinos peering out of their houses in the besieged town witnessed the incredible sight and either ducked to safety or stood transfixed and silent. Several I noticed started to make the V-for-Victory sign but then, seeing armed Japanese as part of the column, froze in their motion.”
American soldier Delphino Peña marched alongside the Japanese column when one of the enemy troops elbowed him. “Well, I just elbowed back a good two times,” Peña recalled. “He didn’t do anything like that anymore.”
After a few blocks, Brady ordered his men to halt, and then addressed Stanley, the interpreter. “Tell the colonel that this is as far as we take them.”
Hayashi shook his head no. “He asks you to conduct him farther,” Stanley translated. “He says we are still within American lines.”
Brady agreed with a nod, and the column continued. The morning sky brightened, and more locals appeared in doorways to watch. Mydans could hear distant gunfire. The column soon reached the large intersection of Legarda and Aviles.
“This is as far we go,” Brady told Hayashi. “This is the front line. You are on your own.”
Mydans noted Hayashi appeared nervous. The former commandant huddled with two of his officers, sending them ahead a block to survey the area. The men trotted back and conferred with Hayashi, who again asked Brady to escort them farther.
“This is where we leave you,” Brady said, shaking his head no.
Filipinos continued to emerge from nearby buildings to witness the bizarre spectacle. “V for Victory! Americans!” some hollered. “Mabuhay!”
Such shouts only seemed to encourage other curious locals to venture outside, many of whom began to cheer and wave at the Americans. “Brady raised his arms toward them for silence,” Mydans recalled. “He was misunderstood. The shouts of welcome increased and more people came running toward the street corner.”
Colonel Brady ordered his men to step back, a cue for Hayashi that this was the end. The former commandant of Santo Tomas raised his sword and barked an order. Hayashi then faced Brady and saluted the American officer. “Brady returned it as the Japanese fell in step and began to move forward,” Mydans observed. “As they passed out of our column, each officer and each man either saluted or bowed to Brady.”
Mydans watched the Japanese set off down Legarda Street, where a large group of Filipinos had gathered to watch. “Stand back and keep quiet,” Brady ordered.
The cheering Filipinos fell silent as the armed Japanese troops marched straight toward them. A second later terror befell them. Locals raced to get out of the way, tripping over one another and shouting in fright. “Under orders to make a show of bravery, the Japanese could not look back,” Mydans wrote. “They could see only the terrified Filipinos scrambling for cover in front of them; and they knew only that the Americans stood behind them with guns at the ready.”
Brady, Mydans, and the other cavalrymen watched to see what the spooked Japanese would do. Many of the enemy troops, overcome by fear, suddenly darted for nearby doorways. Others dove into the gutters, leaving only a few officers in line. “Behind them, screaming like a madman, ran Hayashi, grabbing at them, shoving them, beating them over the shoulders and rumps in a futile effort to re-form them into a dignified unit of soldiers,” Mydans recalled. “And all the while Colonel Brady stood before his men, one hand supporting his elbow while the other gently twirled his mustache, until the last of the running Japanese had disappeared down the street.”
SANTO TOMAS WAS NOW truly liberated—free at last of all Japanese forces. American troops swept the Education Building for bombs as wives, mothers, and friends raced to greet the former hostages. Manila businessman Sam Wilson, who had served two years as a colonel of the guerrillas in Mindanao, arrived amid the morning excitement, anxious to see his wife and two sons. He brought with him a large American flag. “Bill Chase was ecstatic at the prospect of a formal review of his troops and a ceremonial flag-raising, but Sam overruled him,” CBS reporter Bill Dunn recalled. “This flag, he insisted, was for the internees. They must be allowed to raise it themselves.”
Even with the loudspeaker out, word spread that the American flag would be raised over Santo Tomas, and internees migrated toward the front entrance of the Main Building. Others leaned out of second- and third-floor windows, craning their necks for a glimpse. News reporters and army photographers jockeyed for spots to watch, some even climbing atop tanks and trucks to capture the historic moment. “Many prisoners put on the best clothes they had left,” Prising wrote. “The men hid their arms in long-sleeved shirts and each woman wore her most respectable dress. Few wished to look like prisoners of war—that would have been an admission of defeat.”
Dunn joined the crowd out front for the nine-thirty a.m. ceremony, describing it in his news report later that day. “It was simple but unforgettable,” he reported. “A few of the men emerged from a second story window to the roof of the building entrance, unfurled the flag to the sight of thousands of milling internees in the courtyard before them, then slowly hauled it to its proud position once again. As it caught the breeze—still tinted with the smoke of a hundred fires—the hungry thousands, without signal, began to sing ‘God Bless America’ in voices choked with obvious emotion.”
Many of the internees lifted their arms over their heads as the words wafted through the crowd. An American bomber, as though on cue, buzzed the camp. “We nearly all broke down,” recalled nurse Denny Williams, “but if our voices failed, our faith in our country and its fighting men was stronger than ever.”
New York Times correspondent Ford Wilkins, whose weight had plummeted to ninety-nine pounds during his years as an internee, reflected on the ceremony’s importance in an article that day. “For three years these people had not been permitted to express their loyalty to their country or to demonstrate their feelings,” he wrote. “They had not seen an American flag, the symbol of their hopes and certainty of eventual liberation. This was the first display of the American flag in Manila since the Japanese invasion lowered the one in front of the High Commissioner’s Residence on January 2, 1942, trampled it underfoot and raised in its place the red circle on a white field.”
Amid the celebration, Dunn glanced over at Col. Fred Hamilton, who stood beside him. The cavalryman wept; so, too, Dunn noted, did other soldiers around him. The simple ceremony moved all who witnessed it. “No fanfare, no shouting,” Dunn reported that day. “Just a song that was more than a prayer.”
With the cavalry and the infantry now in Manila, General Griswold split responsibility for the city’s north. The Manila Railroad, which ran just a few blocks east of Santo Tomas, would serve as the dividing line. The Thirty-Seventh Infantry would cover the sector from the railroad west to the bay, while the First Cavalry would take the eastern sector. The Sixth Army commander, General Krueger, meanwhile ordered Griswold to protect the city’s electrical supply and secure the Novaliches Dam, Balara Water Filters, San Juan Reservoir, and the associated pipelines that formed the heart of the city’s pressurized water system. “Intelligence reports indicated that the enemy intended to destroy or possibly pollute the source of water for the Manila area,” observed the Sixth Army’s report. “Early seizure of these sources of water supply was therefore vital to the health and even to the existence of the city’s population.”
The Eighth Army forces commanded by General Eichelberger raced to close Manila’s back door. On January 31, the Eleventh Airborne Division had sloshed ashore at Nasugbu, fifty-five miles south of the capital in a move heralded by MacArthur. “This operation places the Eighth Army on the south side of Manila, which is now the center of the converging columns of the Sixth and Eighth armies,” he announced to the press. “It largely seals off the possibility of the enemy troops south of Manila joining those in the north.” Three days later the 511th Parachute Infantry landed atop Tagaytay Ridge. The two forces then charged north up Highway 17, a paved two-lane road. Just that morning Eichelberger had crossed the partially destroyed bridge over the Parañaque River, alerting MacArthur afterward that he had entered southern Manila. The general’s vise around the capital tightened.
Early Monday afternoon fourteen food trucks from Lingayen roared through the gates of Santo Tomas, each one greeted by throngs of internees. “Food, Food, Food,” Margaret Bayer wrote in her diary that day. “Each of us got a package of cigarettes and a box of matches today.” Internees still struggled with the rich new foods. “We had good army chow today!” Roka wrote. “Wonderful army slum-gum, canned fruit, and coffee with all the sugar and milk we wanted! No food had ever tasted this good! No food had ever made people more ill! A few hours later, hundreds of us were seized with cramps and diarrhea, and many of us were too ill and weak to reach the toilets.”
The American Red Cross likewise delivered 4,400 letters, triggering long lines of eager internees, some of whom had heard no word from home in three years. “As they tore open the envelopes,” Hartendorp wrote, “it was easy to see on their faces whether the news was good or bad or a mixture of them.” Hartendorp was one of the recipients of sad news. “There were several for me and from one of them, dated November 21, 1944, I learned that my father had died on June 17, aged a few months short of 78,” he wrote. “The last time I had seen my dear father was when he was waving me good-bye in the Denver railway station in April, 1917, twenty-eight years before.”
Even though American forces had arrived, armed with lifesaving food and medicine, starvation continued to claim victims. Some of the internees were beyond saving. Two had died the day of liberation. Two more had passed Sunday, and three on Monday. “Paul Whitaker died,” Margaret Bayer noted in her diary on February 5. “He said he was ready since he had seen the Americans come in.”
Internees and liberators alike struggled to adjust. As Carl Mydans wandered the grounds of Santo Tomas, spotting familiar faces in the hallways and lining up for food alongside former captives, he found that he could not shed his own experiences as an internee. “It was when I used the showers,” he later wrote, “that I most had the uncanny feeling that nothing at all had changed and that I was still a prisoner, for there we were, crowded under the same shower heads, placing our soap and towels in the same little personal niches chosen years ago, and bumping and crawling over each other with a kind of reptilian unawareness of the bodies next to us. The voices, even the points of view, seemed the same. And so did the rumors.”
“You know those sixty-five Japs they took out of the Education Building?” someone asked. “I just heard that they walked them right into an America-led Filipino ambush and killed every God-damn one of them right there on the street.”
Mydans just listened, even though he had been there that morning and seen the release executed without a single shot fired. “Nothing had changed,” the photographer later wrote. “Even some of my own prison self remained, for I knew enough not to inject fact into prison fancy and went right on showering.”
Several of MacArthur’s top aides visited Santo Tomas on Monday, including General Fellers and colonels Sidney Huff and Courtney Whitney. The sixty-five-mile trip from MacArthur’s headquarters at a sugar refinery in San Miguel should have taken about an hour, but on this day the journey through pockets of fighting took twelve. Like the cavalrymen who had arrived forty-eight hours earlier, MacArthur’s aides were shocked by the tragic condition of the internees who greeted them. “I don’t know just what I had expected to find at Santo Tomas, but the scene was far different from anything I could have imagined,” Huff later wrote. “We stopped in horrified silence when we saw, coming toward us, emaciated men and women dressed in torn, limp clothes. Hoarse cries came from their mouths. Tears flowed down their cheeks. I thought I had never seen such an unhappy sight, until I realized it was not a demonstration of sorrow; it was an outburst of pure, unalloyed joy!”
Before Huff could object, one internee wrapped his arms around him. What stranger would be so brazen? he wondered. Then he realized the man was no stranger but British engineer Sam Howard, who before the war had worked on the Philippine torpedo boat program. Huff, who assisted MacArthur on naval affairs, had considered him a brother. “I had to look again to be sure that this living skeleton of about 100 pounds was the same man who, when last I saw him, weighed 190 pounds,” he recalled. “His thin arms cut into my flesh as we embraced. Other faces began to emerge from the strange crowd; faces that had a shadowy familiarity. Hands grasped mine in tight embrace—and I had to ask an old friend who he was!”
The colonel spotted his friend Myrtle Castle from Washington State in the crowd. When last Huff saw her, the day before he left Manila in 1941 for Corregidor, she had given him four diamond rings: “Take care of these for me, Sid.”
Huff had wrapped them in chamois and placed them in his watch pocket, keeping them until he reached Australia, where he placed them in a safe deposit box. He had brought them back to the Philippines now, hoping to find her.
“I’ve got something for you!” he announced.
“I pulled them out of my pocket and held them out to her,” he recalled, “four big, shining diamonds and worth plenty.”
“Thanks,” she said.
Her attitude of indifference irritated, even angered Huff, who felt he had done her a great service in safeguarding her jewelry for three years. “Don’t you want them?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied. “I want them.”
“Look,” he pressed, “if you’re not interested in the diamonds, what do you want?”
“Why,” she said, her eyes growing large, “I’d give anything in the world for a piece of bread and butter.”
For Huff and many of MacArthur’s other senior aides, the pain of seeing such suffering was exacerbated by the fact that many were old friends. The officers struggled to match up these hollowed-out souls with their prewar memories of the suited bankers, business executives, and socialites who now swarmed around them. In a letter that afternoon to his wife, General Fellers singled out internee Margaret Seals, the spouse of Brig. Gen. Carl Seals, who had served on Corregidor. The Japanese had captured the couple on the island of Mindanao after the navy seaplane that had evacuated them from the Rock suffered a ruptured hull during a stopover. General Seals eventually landed in a Manchurian prison camp, while the Japanese marched his wife off to Santo Tomas with other civilians. “Mrs. Seals weighs about 70 pounds,” Fellers wrote, “her arms are about as large around as a half dollar.” Fellers closed his letter with a simple statement that summed up his disgust: “The Japanese are fiends.”
In a letter to his wife twelve days earlier, Colonel Whitney had imagined the postliberation social scene, a return to the gaiety many had known in Manila before the war. He now realized how wrong he had been. “The condition of these people was so pitiful dear,” he wrote in his first letter after visiting the camp. “Had we delayed their liberation one week longer many more would have died.” He couldn’t shake the experience when he put pen to paper again the following day. “My visit to Santo Tomas was really very depressing—to see so many who had for years lived in the lap of luxury reduced to a livelihood like rats was pathetic,” he wrote. “To see once proud aristocrats in a bread line with old rusty tin cans and then gobbling up the chow as tho their lives depended on it—as they did—was a terrible sight. I couldn’t eat the whole time I was there in the realization that so many need it so much more than I.”
The trauma of Santo Tomas weighed upon everyone—officers, soldiers, and even journalists. CBS’s Bill Dunn was exhausted, opting to leave camp and travel to MacArthur’s headquarters. “Never have I undergone such emotional extremes in such a short time, and I wanted a break, quickly,” he later wrote. “Seeing so many old friends in various stages of malnutrition from bad to critical, listening to their stories of those thirty-seven months of trying to keep their spirits alive and their faith in their distant nation unwavering, was something I wasn’t designed by nature to handle.”
Despite the shock, the officers had important work to do. An inventory General Fellers compiled that day for MacArthur showed there were 3,677 civilian internees, including 480 children under age ten. Americans and British accounted for most of the internees, with 2,708 and 696 respectively. The rest came from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and France, among other nations. Of the internees, 295 remained bedridden. The Japanese had pilfered all the rice but left a fifteen-day supply of food, including seven tons of corn, most of it in poor quality. American forces likewise discovered 2.5 tons of cassava, which is similar to a camote, and 1.5 tons of soybeans. “The Japanese tried to break the spirit of our internees and prisoners of war. They failed,” Fellers wrote. “Sheer determination to survive probably sustained and saved those who survived. The majority need rest and food. A surprisingly few will require hospitalization.”
Food proved only one of the concerns.
Fires devoured the districts north of the Pasig River, darkening the skies with acrid smoke and burning the pavement under the heels of American troops. “Manila is now a blazing inferno,” Bilibid prisoner Robert Kentner wrote in his diary. “The fires are spreading and also coming towards the camp.” Fellow captive Alan McCracken described the conflagration as a “holocaust.” “Several times,” he wrote, “I was conscious of definite whiffs that smelled exactly like beefsteak frying in your kitchenette—only it wasn’t beefsteak.” Soldiers stood on alert. “Japanese troops, caught in the flames they and their fellows had set, started running, screaming in fear, toward the American lines around the prison,” a United Press reporter wrote. “They were silhouetted by the flames and the doughboys of the Thirty-seventh mowed them down.”
At 9:11 p.m. on February 5, as fires raged on three sides of the prison, American forces ordered the former captives to evacuate Bilibid for the Ang Tibay Shoe Factory a few miles away, where soldiers rounded up cots and blankets, dug toilets, swept floors, and readied meals. Around the same time, troops gathered all available demolitions in Manila in preparation for blowing a firebreak. The job of moving 1,275 people from the prison proved enormous, requiring all of the Thirty-Seventh Infantry’s vehicles and many commandeered from the cavalry. Jeeps, trucks, and weapons carriers rolled up to the prison’s gate that night. “Stretcher cases went first,” a reporter wrote, “then the walking casualties, a pitiful procession of wounded, paralysis and beriberi sufferers, some lacking an arm or a leg, all emaciated by long starvation, many staggering.”
Despite the danger of enemy snipers and fire, the taste of freedom excited the former captives. “It was a thrill to get outside that wall and to ride in a wonderful jeep,” Ethel Herold wrote in her diary. “The driver gave us crackers and gum.”
General Beightler, commander of the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division, watched as the vehicles pulled up outside the shoe factory.
“You guys sure have made monkeys out of those blasted Nips!” one former prisoner of war hollered to an American military policeman.
The prisoner then appeared to turn self-conscious.
“But I guess they kind of made monkeys out of us,” he added.
The fires, the glow of which could be seen as far away as Los Baños internment camp some forty miles southeast of the city, set off alarms among senior officers:
“Japs going thru Tondo district setting fires,” one intelligence report noted.
“Alert all your personnel to be especially careful tonight,” warned another.
“These fires may be used as a cover by the Japs attempting a breakthrough.”
The sudden scramble stood in marked contrast to the slow realization of some American commanders of the threat posed by Japanese demolitions, which was likely attributable to the weeks of conflicting intelligence reports over whether the enemy planned to evacuate or fight for Manila. The same day Colonel Noguchi’s Northern Force began detonating buildings north of the river—and American forces rolled into the capital—Eichelberger had scoffed at the initial news of the fires. “The guerrilla reports make me laugh,” he wrote to his wife on February 3 from a position just south of the capital. “The report tonight is that Manila is being burned by the Japanese, and yet I can look right down into the town and see lights and one little fire.” Two days later the Eighth Army commander realized the error of his earlier assumption. “The fires in Manila,” he wrote, “were bright enough so that we did not need a flashlight.”
Compounding the challenges troops now faced were the swarms of eager civilians, anxious to greet the Americans and force gifts upon them even as the city around them burned. The flames meanwhile grew by the hour, radiating so much heat as to block one company of infantrymen from reaching the Pasig River. “The smoke and the dust were so intense, and the heat from burning structures so terrible, that little progress could be made,” noted the XIV Corps report. In the skies overhead, MacArthur’s personal pilot Weldon “Dusty” Rhoades watched Manila burn. “The spectacle was an appalling sight. The entire downtown section of the city was a mass of flames,” he wrote in his diary. “Flames were rising 200 feet in the air from the center of the city.”
Beightler, who was on the front lines of the inferno, could only vent over what he now realized was a deliberate plan to destroy Manila. “We were powerless to stop it—we had no way of knowing in which of the thousands of places the demolitions were being controlled,” he wrote. “Imagine the major portion of the downtown shopping and business sections of Columbus or Cleveland or Cincinnati suddenly erupting in smoke and flames. Big, modern, reinforced concrete and steel office buildings were literally blown from their foundations to settle crazily in twisted heaps.”
Infantrymen caught in the conflagration had no choice but to turn back as flames jumped from one building to the next, threatening to trap and incinerate them. But fire was only one of the hazards. Many of Colonel Noguchi’s soldiers who had set off the explosions now retreated south toward the Pasig River. The fires corralled opposing forces onto the same few safe streets—the Americans charging north, the Japanese south. The two sides collided. “Japs popped out of alleys and buildings trying to escape the fire,” recalled Capt. Labin Knipp. “We were ready and shot first. Most of the men in the lead threw grenades and charged shooting from the hip.” Troops armed with Browning automatic rifles moved to the front. “We made quite a hole killing every Jap we saw,” added First Sgt. Roy “Bus” McMurray. “At one place the fire had nearly choked off our street. We had to charge through the opening in a rush. The blistering heat and the walls of fire closing in on us had me wonder if we would make it.”
But the infantrymen did.
The soldiers rallied at Plaza Santa Cruz, just a few blocks south of Bilibid. First Lt. Neil Anderson marveled at the raging inferno he had just escaped. “It was the first time I had ever seen a firestorm,” he said. “Looking into the fire was like looking into a blast furnace of a steel mill of my native Pennsylvania.” Sergeant McMurray meanwhile tallied the survivors. “Every time I ran a count our losses got higher. My best count was that we had over a hundred men wounded or lost in the fire,” he recalled. “Looking south all I could see was a solid wall of roaring flame.”
Maj. Chuck Henne, executive officer of the Third Battalion, 148th Infantry Regiment, ducked into a nearby building, searching for cover, only to find that scores of armed Chinese filled the ground floor. An elegant Chinese woman who spoke flawless English appeared, introducing herself as the liaison for the neighborhood defense group. Henne asked if the infantrymen might rest inside. She responded with an invitation for tea and cakes on an upstairs balcony, an offer the major couldn’t refuse. “It was a once in a lifetime experience for not many men were ever privileged to sit on a balcony with a beautiful woman, partake of tea and cakes, and look out upon a burning city.”
The conflagration just blocks beyond the gates of Santo Tomas replaced food as the talk around the camp. Internees and soldiers stood ready to stomp out any fires that might arise from the burnt ash and debris that drifted down inside the camp. “The Nips are systematically destroying Manila,” a friend told nurse Denny Williams. “The bridges are all gone, and they’ve dug in behind the walls of the old Spanish city. Trouble is, a mess of Filipinos are dug in with them, so we don’t dare bomb it.”
Nightfall only accentuated the chaos outside in Manila’s streets, a scene best described in the Fifth Cavalry’s report: “With the coming of darkness large explosions followed by streaks of flame lit the western part of the city like a huge candle. At the mercy of the Japs the once most beautiful city in the Orient would soon be nothing more than a blackened skeleton. Each hour saw one section after another burst into flames,” the report stated. “To many a soldier this night would not be forgotten and a feeling of retaliation, if and when the opportunity presented itself, ran high.”
“Well, boys,” one soldier lamented as he watched the fires from one of the university’s towers. “There goes our good time in Manila.”
MacArthur’s aides joined internees to watch the inferno, some of whom climbed up to the university’s roof for a better view. “Last night was a night of horror in Manila,” Whitney wrote in a letter. “Throughout the night the terrific explosions from the enemy demolitions shook the city and great flames belched up thousands of feet to make it appear that the whole city was aflame.” Internee Anna Nixon found the burning city mesmerizing, a scene she described in her diary. “I hear the fire crackle and am wiping off perspiration from the heat of it. In fact, I am writing this by the light of it, and it’s nearly midnight now. Someone down there under a tree is playing his ukulele. It reminds me of Rome and Nero. The Japanese said they would burn the city and they have kept their word,” she wrote. “I’m bone weary, but I can’t sleep. These rolling, golden billows of fire fascinate me. They are so awful, beautiful, and tragic!”
THE JAPANESE CONTROLLED the city south of the Pasig River, the Americans the north. Across Manila residents began to flee for safety, searching out large concrete buildings that might offer protection from artillery shells and fire. Red Cross director Modesto Farolan opened the headquarters on Isaac Peral as a refugee center. Other residents escaped to the German Club—a social hall on the corner of San Marcelino and San Luis streets—and De La Salle College on Taft Avenue.
In the walled city of Intramuros, Japanese troops blocked exits on the afternoon of February 5, demanding that all residents report to the Manila Cathedral on the corner of Santo Tomas and General Luna streets or to the San Agustin Church just three blocks away. By early evening several thousand gathered, lining the pews and crowding the courtyards outside. Many carried satchels of rice and beans, while others pushed carts. That night under the glow of the fires, Japanese troops began to pull young women out of the masses in what would become a citywide pattern of rape as parents and families proved powerless to intervene.
“No, please,” residents heard women beg.
“Mama,” another cried, “don’t let them take me.”
Elsewhere in the city residents hunkered down at home. Power had failed; so, too, had the city’s water system. Newspapers had ceased publication, and absent electricity, many residents could not tune in to radio broadcasts for news. Japanese troops scoured the south bank of the Pasig, armed with saws and axes, destroying any canoes or boats that manileños might use to escape across the river. Japanese detonations continued to shake the capital, prompting Marcial Lichauco to compare the explosions to a July Fourth celebration. “Today should have been bright and clear,” he wrote in his diary, “but only occasionally have I been able to get a peek at the sun through the clouds of smoke which envelop the city.” The bespectacled lawyer watched Japanese troops retreat past his home, carrying little more than rifles and ammunition. “Discouragement, despair and defeat,” Lichauco observed, “were plainly written on their faces.”
From the church steeple near his home, Lichauco could see the Stars and Stripes that floated in the smoke-filled air above Malacañan Palace. All that separated him from liberation and freedom was the muddy Pasig River, which in a city filled with enemy forces might as well have been an ocean. Lichauco had already come to understand the reality of that danger acutely after Japanese troops, without warning to nearby residents, set fire to several warehouses across the street, triggering an inferno punctuated by the exploding fuel drums that rocked the neighborhood. Lichauco’s wife and children fled to a residence a quarter mile away while he remained to pack the necessary items. Every ten minutes he would crawl up to the front windows for a glimpse. “The heat was so intense that we could not look out of our front windows for more than a few seconds at a time,” he wrote. “I shall probably never again have a chance to witness such a spectacle at close quarters.”
The explosions and fire drove the Garcia family into the backyard bomb shelter of their home just off Taft Avenue near De La Salle College. Unlike others who built their shelters belowground, Ramon Garcia had converted his library adjacent to the garage into a shelter, carefully relocating his prized books into the main house. He then lined the single room with sheets of galvanized iron, leaving a one-foot gap behind them that he filled with dirt. Garcia installed beams overhead yet below the ceiling, atop of which he piled sandbags. Inside the family stored oil lamps and candles along with canned food and twenty-gallon cans of water. Ida Garcia loaded the shelter with towels, which could be soaked in water and used to combat smoke inhalation. Inside this cramped shelter the family slept dressed each night. “A big bang or the staccato of machine gun fire, which appeared to get closer and closer every day, often interrupted the little sleep we got,” recalled Jack Garcia, who was then ten years old. “We didn’t know what would happen next.” The spreading fires proved one of the largest fears, particularly since there was no way to combat them. “There were no fire fighters. There was no water. There was only hope,” Jack wrote. “Hope that the winds would turn the fire around and spare us.”
A few blocks away Far Eastern University founder Nick Reyes likewise moved his family downstairs to the first floor, where the children distracted themselves with games of chess and pick-up sticks while the parents hovered over a battery-powered shortwave radio. Sixteen-year-old Lourdes watched her mother kneel in prayer before an altar in her bedroom. Other times her mother and aunts repeated the rosary together. Lourdes and her father climbed to the third-floor tower room with its view of the city, one that worsened by the hour as the fires closed in on the neighborhood and shrapnel rained down upon the roof. “The nights turned into days, and the days into nights as the skies turned brilliant red with the blazing fires of the burning city,” Lourdes recalled. “From dawn to sunset the pall of smoke blocked the sun.”
MACARTHUR WAS ANXIOUS TO GET TO MANILA.
Each day the general had set off south to the capital only to be thwarted by delayed troops and destroyed bridges. Finally on February 6, without having set foot in the city, MacArthur decided he could wait no longer. That Tuesday his headquarters announced to the world at six-thirty a.m. the liberation of the Philippine capital. “Our forces are rapidly clearing the enemy from Manila,” the communiqué read. “Their complete destruction is imminent.” Just as his headquarters had begun planning his victory parade before the first shot was fired, so, too, had MacArthur prepared his remarks dated February 2, the day before troops actually reached the city. “The fall of Manila was the end of one great phase of the Pacific struggle and set the stage for another. We shall not rest until our enemy is completely overthrown,” he declared. “With Australia saved, the Philippines liberated and the ultimate redemption of the East Indies and Malaya thereby made a certainty, our motto becomes ‘On to Tokyo.’ ”
American newspapers and magazines trumpeted the general’s victory—even if it was a fiction. “Manila fell to MacArthur like a ripened plum,” declared Newsweek, while the New York Times hailed it as “a spectacular climax to a spectacular campaign.” A columnist in the Washington Post called it “a masterpiece of military planning and execution.” Some editorial writers expressed amazement at the ease of the capital’s liberation. “Given the far-reaching psychological and strategic importance of Manila,” Barnet Norver wrote in the Washington Post, “it is nothing less than astounding that the Japanese did not make more of a fight for it than they did.” Others, including noted columnist Ernest Lindley, couldn’t help but point to the powerful symbolism of MacArthur’s return: “It completes a cycle as dramatic as any in legend.”
Personal congratulations for MacArthur poured in from world leaders, ranging from Australian prime minister John Curtin to Mexican president Manuel Avila Camacho. “The lustre of your recapture of Manila gives unbounded cheer to the Chinese people,” wrote Chiang Kai-shek. “My Government and people join me in sending the forces under your command our heartiest congratulations.”
The news of Manila’s fall electrified Washington. Franklin Roosevelt cabled his personal appreciation to MacArthur. “This is,” the president wrote, “an historical moment in the reestablishment of freedom and decency in the Far East.” Others in his administration likewise showered the general with praise, including War Secretary Henry Stimson, a former governor-general in the islands who described Manila’s recapture as the “culmination of one of the most brilliant campaigns in all history.” Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew, who had served as ambassador to Japan for ten years leading up to the war, held a press conference, telling reporters that sharing the news of Manila’s liberation gave him “more pleasure than any he had been called upon to make since he left Japan.”
Congratulations went beyond just the administrative branch. The House of Representatives voted unanimously to commend MacArthur; so, too, did the Senate. The city of Philadelphia went so far as to announce plans to hold a civic celebration in Independence Hall to celebrate the victory. Many of MacArthur’s fellow officers cabled him, from Army Air Force head Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold to Lt. Gen. George Patton, commander of the Third Army in Europe. Even retired Gen. John Pershing, who had blasted MacArthur decades earlier for his oversize ego, cabled his congratulations. “Well done,” Pershing wrote. “Your latest victory has thrilled all your countrymen and particularly those of us who served in the early days in the islands.”
MacArthur’s declaration of victory—now heralded worldwide—stood in stark contrast to actual events on the ground. The internees had been liberated, but as the general’s own senior aides witnessed, much of the city now burned.
The Battle of Manila, in fact, had not even truly begun.
The letters and diaries of MacArthur’s top commanders not only confirmed the horror, but to most, the ruin of Manila appeared certain. General Eichelberger wrote his wife on February 6—the same day MacArthur bragged to the world of the capital’s capture—that the inferno was visible from fifty miles away. “The view of Manila last night was a terrible thing as the whole part of one side of the city seemed to be on fire. Smoke and flames were going way up in the air,” he wrote. “What a shame it is.” Even for a battle veteran, the level of destruction proved a first. “It was something,” Eichelberger concluded, “I shall never forget.” General Beightler, commander of the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division, likewise watched from the rooftop of his headquarters. “The sky was a copper-burnished dome of thick clouds,” he wrote. “So great was the glare of the dying city that the streets, even back where we were, were alight as from the reflection of a reddish moon. Great sheets of flame swept across the roof-tops, sometimes spanning several city blocks in their consuming flight. The roar, even at that distance, was like a Bessemer converter, and the earth shook frequently as yet more powerful demolition charges exploded, sending fountains of flame and debris in a hot, swirling eruption to meet the dense clouds overhead. We saw the awful pyrotechnics of destruction, spreading ever faster to encompass and destroy the most beautiful city in the Far East.”
General Griswold, commander of the XIV Corps, saw no hope for Manila. “MacArthur has visions of saving this beautiful city intact,” he wrote in his diary on February 7. “He does not realize, as I do, that the skies burn red every night as they systematically sack the city. Nor does he know that enemy rifle, machine gun, mortar fire and artillery are steadily increasing in intensity. My private opinion is that the Japs will hold part of Manila south of the Pasig River until all are killed.”
Even among the press, there existed a huge disparity in the accuracy of coverage, based on the reporter’s location. New York Times correspondent Lindesay Parrott, filing a dispatch from MacArthur’s headquarters outside the city, mimicked the general’s cheery communiqué. “What fighting still remains to be done in the city,” Parrott wrote, “may be in the nature of mopping up rather than combat with an organized enemy.” That contrasted wildly from fellow Times reporter George Jones’s dispatch filed from within Manila, which presented an apocalyptic view of the capital. The New York Times published both on the same day, but Parrott’s ran on the front page while editors buried Jones’s report inside. “Fires were spreading over the greater part of Manila. The columns of smoke have merged until one great pall hangs over the southern portion of the city,” Jones wrote. “Last night a red glow covered the skyline south of the Pasig River, silhouetting the cathedral domes and the towers of public buildings.”
MacArthur’s premature announcement of victory in Manila followed a trend his headquarters had adopted throughout the Pacific, one that frustrated his senior commanders, including Griswold, who repeatedly griped about it in his diary. “Why does he do this?” he wrote after one such announcement. “The man is publicity crazy,” he huffed another time. “When soldiers are dying and being wounded, it doesn’t make for their morale to know that the thing they are doing has been officially announced as finished.” Eichelberger agreed. “It seemed to me, as it did to many of the commanders and correspondents, ill advised to announce victories when a first phase has been accomplished,” the lieutenant general wrote. “Too often as at Buna and Sanananda, as on Leyte, Mindanao, and Luzon, the struggle was to go on for a long time. Often these announcements produced bitterness among combat troops.”
The general’s press statements drew the ire not only of his senior commanders but also of reporters, including Robert Martin, a correspondent with Stars and Stripes and Yank. “Mop-up is a favorite communiqué word. It sounds like a postscript that doesn’t count,” he wrote. “The battle has been won, the campaign is over, the strategy decisions have been made. All that remains is a mop-up of men who are not afraid to die by men who don’t want to die. Mop-up is a tragic word. And who wants to die for it?”
In the case of Manila, MacArthur had no real sense of what was happening inside the city. Even as his commanders privately lamented the looming loss of Manila, MacArthur’s headquarters’ aides typed up final preparations for the planned victory parade, organizing jeep assignments and requesting that senior commanders radio the names of officers who would participate. One such invite went to Eichelberger, who dodged a chance to alert MacArthur of the parade’s impossibility. “I shall be honored,” he replied, “to accompany you on occasion of your formal entry into Manila.”
CBS correspondent Bill Dunn, who had left Manila for a respite, arrived at the general’s headquarters in San Miguel, astonished to learn of a pending press conference to announce the parade. “All at once the emotions and tensions of the past few days broke the dam,” Dunn wrote, “and I became almost hysterical.”
The newsman interrupted MacArthur’s spokesman, arguing a parade was impossible. The Japanese had destroyed all the bridges; the city was in flames. Then it hit Dunn, who knew that the general’s aides had visited the city. “General MacArthur had declared Manila an open city in 1942 and believed the Japanese would do the same,” he said. “None of his immediate staff wanted to tell him he was wrong.”
Dunn took the floor.
“If this announcement is released the General is going to look ridiculous!” he protested. “There is no possibility, physically, of a parade. Get down on your knees if necessary, let me talk to him, do anything, but don’t release this announcement!”
“Calm down, Bill,” urged Col. LeGrande Diller, MacArthur’s aide-de-camp and public relations officer. “You’ve been through a lot in the past few days, but you mustn’t get hysterical. The General knows what he is doing.”
But Dunn refused to relent. “Emotion has nothing to do with this,” he countered. “This is plainly a case where the General has been given erroneous intelligence. This statement will only tell the world he doesn’t have the facts.”