Rampage

“High and low, all are brought down in the great sieve of war.”

—NATALIE CROUTER,

DIARY ENTRY, MARCH 8, 1945

SHORTLY AFTER BREAKFAST ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 7—the same day MacArthur visited Santo Tomas and the infantry crossed the Pasig River—Japanese troops at San Agustin Church ordered males fourteen and older to gather in the front plaza, continuing the roundup of all military-aged men in the Walled City. Against the backdrop of artillery fire and explosions, the Japanese lined the men up in groups of four, marching an estimated fourteen hundred off to Fort Santiago, just as was done the day before with the men from the Manila Cathedral. “The only ones that they left behind,” recalled thirty-five-year-old Lourdes Lecaroz, “were the old men and the home guards.”

Three blocks north at the Manila Cathedral, which was still crowded with families whose husbands and fathers Noguchi’s forces had seized the morning before, a soldier climbed up on a bench in front of the refugees. All eyes fell on him.

“Listen everybody, listen,” he announced. “You can go home.”

The women and children poured out of the cathedral’s wooden doors just as the long column of men from San Agustin marched past. “We thought it was our men folk come back to us,” recalled thirty-one-year-old Rosa Calalang, whose husband Jesus the Japanese grabbed the day before. “We were wrong.” When the prisoners arrived at the citadel, troops ordered them to empty their pockets of pens, keys, cigarettes, and lighters. The Japanese then went down the line, stealing watches off the arms of the captives before marching the men inside and locking them into cells.

Around nine-thirty a.m., the Japanese stormed the San Juan de Dios Hospital on Calle Real in the Walled City, rivaled only in size by the Philippine General Hospital.

“Where is the director?” troops demanded.

The accuracy of America’s artillery had convinced the Japanese that someone in the two-story hospital possessed a radio. Troops searched all the rooms but failed to find the offending transmitter. The Japanese demanded a list of all doctors, nurses, and patients before stationing guards at every exit to block anyone from leaving.

Elsewhere in Intramuros, Japanese troops armed with cans of gasoline, torches, and grenades began to systematically burn houses, shops, and offices. Calalang had barely arrived home from the cathedral when a neighbor ran past.

“Fire,” she cried out. “Fire.”

“Where?” Calalang asked.

“They are burning the houses,” her neighbor replied. “The Japanese are throwing hand grenades at the houses. They threw one in our house.”

Calalang rushed outside to see her neighbor’s house enveloped in flames. She scanned the street and spotted Japanese troops hurling explosives into other homes. She darted back inside and grabbed her three children and seventy-year-old mother, Victoria: “We ran out of our home as fast as my children and my aged mother could make it.” Two nuns likewise witnessed the Japanese sloshing liquid into the windows of the convent at San Agustin, mistakenly concluding that the troops were battling the fire. “This is not water,” one of the nurses hollered after she smelled the fumes. “This is gasoline.”

The Japanese had sealed all the gates and posted sentries, trapping residents inside the Walled City as explosions thundered. The flames threatened San Juan de Dios Hospital, triggering the Japanese to order the 160 doctors, nurses, and patients to evacuate to the nearby ruins of Santa Rosa College. Destroyed three years earlier during Japanese air strikes at the start of the war, the ruins now served as a firebreak. “We moved everyone except four of our bed patients who were too weak to walk out themselves,” recalled nurse Sister Nelly de Jesus Virata. To the shock of the hospital staff, the Japanese refused to allow the attendants back inside to carry them out. Virata returned the next day after the fires died down to discover the bedridden patients had been burned alive. “We found them,” she said, “all dark like charcoal.”

The fires intensified as the afternoon turned to dusk and then evening. Block by block the Japanese methodically destroyed much of the 160-acre Walled City, erasing four centuries of history in an afternoon. Throughout the alleys and narrow cobblestone streets, terrified residents in the ancient city choked on the acrid smoke that billowed skyward. The Japanese had rigged explosives in the Manila Cathedral and surrounding buildings, detonating them early that evening. Thirty-seven-year-old Spaniard Miguel Blanco saw the cathedral’s iconic dome explode, hurling debris and stones. Blanco dove for cover at a nearby fire station. The tall arched doors of the station framed the conflagration outside. The entire roof burned and collapsed into the sanctuary, littering the adjacent streets with twisted metal, brick, and blazing timbers. Thirty-five-year-old Mariano Agilada, perched at the window in the nearby Santa Clara Monastery, watched the cathedral burn until past midnight. “The breeze was very strong at that time,” he said, “and we could see the fire getting bigger and bigger.”

Rosa Calalang joined scores of her neighbors—along with the evacuated doctors and nurses—in the ruins of Santa Rosa College as the fires devoured Intramuros. “It was like broad daylight,” Calalang recalled. “The heat was unbearable.”

Just blocks away inside the cells of Fort Santiago, the Japanese began the slaughter, a process that would run almost nightly for several days, no doubt part of a plan to eradicate males in the ancient citadel who might pose a threat when the walls finally came down. Troops marched into the cellblocks armed with drums of gasoline, tipping them over and letting the fuel flood the floors. Another marine tossed a torch. Prisoners trapped inside yanked on the cell bars. The Japanese machine-gunned those few who managed to escape. A captured Japanese diary dispassionately described the fates of the thousands of men imprisoned in Fort Santiago. “150 guerrillas were disposed of tonight,” the unknown diarist wrote on February 7. “I personally stabbed and killed 10.” Two days later he put pen to paper again: “Burned 1,000 guerrillas to death tonight.” He concluded his diary on February 13. “While I was on duty, 10 guerrillas tried to escape. They were stabbed to death,” he wrote. “At 1600, all guerrillas were burned to death.”

AMERICAN INFANTRYMEN HUNKERED DOWN in the palace gardens on the night of February 7, an area dotted with trees and stables and encircled by a brick wall. Beyond the perimeter, troops could see an open expanse of rice paddies, while to the east rose an earthen dike that protected the Estero de Pandacan. After the perilous river crossing, the exhausted soldiers welcomed a few hours of rest that night in the soft grass, the sky aglow as the Walled City burned just a mile and a half south.

Two battalions had made it across the river during the afternoon and early evening. Orders on the morning of February 8 called for expanding the American bridgehead about a mile through Pandacan and Paco to Harrison Boulevard, which would serve as the Thirty-Seventh Infantry’s southern boundary. That job fell to Maj. Chuck Henne and others with the 148th Infantry. Meanwhile the 129th Infantry would cross the Pasig that day and hook west to capture Provisor Island, followed by the New Police Station, City Hall, and the General Post Office.

Little was known of Admiral Iwabuchi’s immediate plans other than to repel the Americans and try to hold central Manila. Japanese snipers proved a powerful reminder of the enemy’s wily defense. When Sgt. Tank Stauffer stepped in front of a gate to talk with Major Henne and Capt. Bob Brown, inadvertently exposing himself before Brown or Henne could grab him, a bullet thudded into his chest.

“I’ve been hit,” Stauffer said.

Dazed yet still standing, the sergeant turned to walk off, when Brown stopped him and pulled up his shirt to examine Stauffer’s wound. “The bullet hit center of his chest and exited the center back,” Brown recalled. “Nice clean holes; the bullet apparently passing through his body not touching a bone.”

Stauffer would survive.

At nine a.m. the Second and Third Battalions drove south side by side through the district of Pandacan to seize the Paco Railroad Station, which marked the infantry’s southern border. The soldiers swept through the open rice fields, hustled along by Japanese mortar and artillery fire, toward the edge of the barrio. Infantrymen lined up and moved block by block through Pandacan without a single shot fired.

But the ease of the advance ended as troops closed in on the railroad station, a neoclassical structure fronted by a facade featuring four columns. Some three hundred Japanese marines had turned the elegant 1915 train station into a fortress protected by a series of pillboxes, 20 mm cannons, mortars, and a 37 mm gun. American troops probed the outer defenses for weakness, but the Japanese proved fierce fighters. “Very limited progress was made and in no part of the sector was an advance of over a few yards made,” recorded the 148th Infantry’s report. “Very stubborn resistance consisting of machine guns, light and heavy mortars, rocket and artillery was encountered.”

February 8 rolled into the ninth.

And the standoff continued.

Artillery pounded the station, but even the monsoon of shells that would later reduce much of the building to rubble failed to dislodge the defenders. Some one hundred yards—roughly the length of a football field—separated the American infantrymen and the Japanese marines. But those yards might as well have been miles, except in the eyes of twenty-one-year-old Pvt. Cleto “Chico” Rodriquez. Raised by an aunt and uncle after his parents died, Rodriquez had fought just to survive as a youth in Texas, where he delivered copies of the San Antonio Express to earn money, sleeping most nights on a cot at the newspaper. During his down time, he flirted with street gangs. “At least during the war,” he once said, “I knew the enemy was in front of me.”

Rodriquez was joined by Pvt. John Reese, a Cherokee Indian who grew up on a reservation in Oklahoma. Despite the spray of enemy bullets, the two automatic riflemen crept forward, reaching a railroad shed about sixty yards from the station. Once inside, the infantrymen took up a position by the window that afforded them a view of the enemy. To their surprise, the Japanese charged. “It’s either you or them,” Rodriquez said, sighting the enemy and squeezing the trigger. “I just knocked them off.”

One reloaded, while the other fired.

“A little bit more to the left, Johnny,” Rodriquez hollered.

Reese swiveled and fired.

“You got him!”

The minutes ticked past. One after the other, the infantrymen sighted the enemy and fired, sighted and fired, with a pace reminiscent of a shooting gallery at a county fair. By the end of an hour, the two men had killed an estimated thirty-five Japanese.

Rodriquez spotted more enemy marines racing to reinforce several pillboxes, a move that promised to drag out the fight. The two men again unleashed their machine guns, killing forty more.

Rodriquez and Reece had come this far. Why not go farther?

The men darted out of the shed toward the railroad station, a direct charge straight into the enemy’s line of fire. Sixty yards fell to fifty.

Then thirty.

And twenty.

The infantrymen dove for cover. Japanese guns roared and bullets zinged past as the men hunkered down. A few moments later, the enemy’s guns quieted.

“Cover me, Johnny,” Rodriquez yelled.

The Texan charged the entrance, pulled the pin, and lobbed a grenade inside the railroad station. Rodriquez yanked the pin from a second and tossed it, too. A hundred yards back, his fellow infantrymen watched in amazement as he hurled three, four, and then five grenades into the heart of the enemy’s lair. The bombs exploded in succession, filling the air with hot shards of razor-sharp shrapnel that killed another seven Japanese marines and destroyed a 20 mm cannon that had menaced the infantry.

Rodriquez fell back with Reese twenty yards from the station’s entrance, the danger far from finished. The two men raced to retrace their steps across the no-man’s-land. Reese would dart ahead a few yards while Rodriquez covered him. The men would then flip-flop, each protecting the other.

The Japanese recovered and began firing again. The bullets whizzed past, but the men pressed ahead, each step carrying them closer and closer to safety. “Watch it, Johnny,” Rodriquez hollered at one point. “That one nearly hit me in the nose.”

“I got the S.O.B. sighted,” Reese replied. “Don’t worry.”

The distance between the men and the station widened.

Safety was close at hand.

Another round zinged past, this one striking Reese in the forehead. He dropped to the ground. Rodriquez knew instantly his friend was dead.

He had no choice but charge those final yards alone.

Rodriquez and Reece, both of whom would later receive the Medal of Honor, broke the impasse that led to the capture of the railroad station the next day. Their heroic efforts were reflected in Reece’s medal citation. “The intrepid team, in 2½ hours of fierce fighting, killed more than 82 Japanese, completely disorganized their defense and paved the way for the complete defeat of the enemy at this strong point.”

AT THE SAME TIME American soldiers battled Iwabuchi’s Central Force for the Paco Railroad Station, the 129th Infantry prepared to capture Provisor Island. Bounded by the Pasig River on the north, the Estero de Tonque on the east, and the Estero Provisor on the south and west, the tiny island housed five buildings and multiple sheds, including the Manila Electric Company’s power plant, the largest single unit provider of electricity for the Philippine capital. The Japanese recognized America’s desire to protect the city’s power system, setting up what promised to be a ferocious fight.

The island offered Iwabuchi’s defenders clear lines of sight in all directions. The Japanese likewise controlled the only bridge, making it easy for them to reinforce the garrison, while the Americans would all have to come by boat.

But setting foot on the island proved only part of the challenge.

The reinforced concrete buildings were difficult to destroy from the outside, while the power plant’s heavy machinery and equipment made for a mechanical labyrinth inside, one that the Japanese marines were not only familiar with but also had plenty of time to mine and booby-trap. Adding to the peril, Iwabuchi’s forces had even constructed machine-gun nests inside many of the buildings. American infantrymen dubbed it “Battleship Island.”

The first troops prepared to assault the power plant at eight a.m. on February 9; their objective, the boiler plant on the island’s northeast corner. Under the cover provided by smoke pots, eight infantrymen slipped a boat into the water at the mouth of the Estero de Tonque. Everyone anxiously watched and waited as the troops stroked out into the canal. Ten more soldiers climbed into a second boat behind.

“I’ll fire three bursts when we get across,” one lieutenant said.

The boats closed in on the island when the wind wafted away the smoke. Then Japanese machine guns and 20 mm cannons opened fire. Troops in the first wave scrambled ashore, leaving the boat in the water to drift away. Japanese guns zeroed in on the second wave, killing two of the men and wounding several others. The survivors managed to haul the boat to shore and remove the wounded before the craft sank.

The infantrymen charged inside the boiler plant, repelling two attacks that morning before the Japanese drove them out at eleven a.m. The soldiers retreated behind a pile of coal twenty yards from the plant’s entrance, a position that offered only limited cover as the Japanese gunners could shoot down on them from above and from the corners of the building. The Americans were trapped. As the hours ticked past, two of the infantrymen tried to swim the canal to retrieve help. Japanese snipers felled both. Obscured by the smoke from a burning oil tank, a third finally made it.

Not until nightfall could U.S. forces hope to recover the trapped men or send reinforcements across the canal. To stave off an attack, mortar teams targeted the far side of the boiler plant, forcing the Japanese to hunker down and preventing additional troops from joining them. Capt. George West finally swam across the Estero de Tonque, towing an assault boat behind him. He helped load the eight wounded survivors aboard. West attached the tow wire to his belt and began to swim back, planning to pull the troops across once he reached the far bank. Halfway there, the tow wire snagged on an underwater obstruction. West had no choice but to return the wounded men ashore, telling them to paddle as fast as possible. The men did, but the Japanese spotted them and opened fire with 20 mm cannons, killing three of the infantrymen.

At one-thirty a.m. five more assault boats set out in the darkness. The moon slid through the clouds, illuminating the small flotilla on the water just as the boats closed in on the island. The Japanese again let loose with machine guns, cannons, and mortars. The first two boats landed, but Iwabuchi’s marines sank the last three, forcing the infantrymen to grab the wounded and wade ashore. Then Japanese set an oil tank ablaze, lighting up the island and forcing the infantrymen to take cover again behind the coal pile. Minutes turned to hours. Finally at five a.m. the flames died down, and the soldiers charged inside the boiler plant. The battle for the island resumed. “The doughboys fought from panel to panel, from door to door, from inside and outside boilers, around turbines and from the rafters,” wrote Royal Arch Gunnison of Collier’s magazine. “It was a nerve-shattering battle, with the enemy ten or twenty feet away.”

For American troops accustomed to battle in the jungles of New Guinea, the fight for the boiler plant proved dark and claustrophobic, a game of hide-and-seek with deadly consequences. The infantrymen paired off, wriggling through the machinery. At times, the troops could hear the enemy marines scurrying just a few feet away.

“Hey, Joe,” some of the Japanese hollered in English, the echo bouncing off the walls and machinery, disguising the enemy’s location. “I’m over here.”

American troops resorted to similar tactics, dangling helmets so as to draw enemy fire, the muzzle flash illuminated in the darkness. “There was no escape for either outfit,” Gunnison wrote. “This was kill or be killed. Food was short and there was no water. There was no outlasting the enemy. He had to be dug out.”

One day turned to two.

Then three.

No one dared sleep in such close quarters with the enemy, who had placed machine guns inside boilers and hoisted them up in the rafters. The Americans resorted to using grenades and even bazookas inside the buildings. “Inch by inch,” Gunnison wrote, “foot by foot, these Americans combed every hole, every fallen timber, and lifted and searched under every strip of galvanized-iron roofing, ducking, dodging, throwing back unexploded Jap grenades, patching wounds, swearing softly—since conversation would draw fire from the Japs five, ten, twenty feet away.”

Finally, on February 11, the battle ended. The fight to take the ten-acre island resulted in 285 American casualties, including thirty-five killed and ten missing. In the end, as the Sixth Army’s report lamented, it had all been for nothing. “The large steam turbine plant,” the report stated, “was rendered completely useless by the destruction of all six of the generator units and some of the steam turbine ends.”

For the soldiers, the fight had proven a terrifying ordeal. “It was the damnedest three-day nightmare I ever had,” one infantryman later confided to Gunnison. “We had to take the chances. We had to come out in the open. The Nips were like termites in the woodwork. They’d have sat in those culverts and those boilers and behind those dynamos till they starved. We couldn’t wait for that. So we just went in after ’em.”

ON THE CITY’s SOUTHERN BORDER, General Eichelberger’s Eighth Army likewise faced tenacious resistance, braking the dash from Nasugbu to Manila. “We had almost begun to wonder what had happened to the Nips,” quipped Edward Flanagan, the Eleventh Airborne Division’s historian. “We knew they were around because we could see Manila burning. We soon found out where they were.”

Eichelberger’s army had collided with the formidable enemy defenses known as the Genko Line. The Japanese had originally anticipated an American invasion from the south, building a defensive line of reinforced concrete pillboxes, antiaircraft guns, and machine-gun nests that stretched from Nichols Field near Manila Bay northeast to Fort McKinley. American Intelligence estimated that reinforcements had swelled Capt. Takesue Furuse’s Southern Force to more than six thousand soldiers and marines.

Those troops now manned twelve hundred pillboxes, many mutually supporting and some two and even three stories deep. Others were constructed of stone with domed roofs planted with sod and weeds that effectively camouflaged them. The Japanese arsenal counted forty-four heavy artillery pieces, including 120 mm coastal defense guns. Americans likewise encountered five- and six-inch naval guns, 150 mm mortars, and 20 mm, 40 mm and 90 mm antiaircraft cannons. Adding to the challenge, the Japanese converted almost three hundred depth charges and hundred-pound bombs into land mines. These complemented five-hundred-pound aerial bombs with low-pressure detonators the enemy buried in the highways leading into the city. Other rudimentary roadblocks included old tractors and steel rails sunk into the pavement. “From now on our advance was not measured in miles,” Flanagan wrote. “It was measured in yards.”

American artillery blazed a trail for the infantrymen, who battled house by house, assaulting pillboxes and bunkers with flamethrowers and demolitions. Japanese 90 mm antiaircraft shells exploded overhead, producing a rain of steel that pockmarked homes and stripped leaves and branches from trees. Troops saw leveled warehouses and even an apartment building with its walls ripped off, allowing infantrymen a glimpse of the homes inside. “Destruction and chaos marked the path of our drive into Manila,” Flanagan wrote. “Houses and shops, flanking both sides of the highway which leads to the heart of the city, were torn up by both Jap and American artillery. Tin-roofed houses looked as though a giant can-opener had sliced through them, while once pretentious mansions, gauntly displayed charred chimneys and trash piles of rubble.”

The fight for Nichols Field was fierce. The expansive open area gave the Japanese clear lines of sight on any advancing Americans. Marines had fortified airplane revetments, encircled the area with barbed wire, and dug tunnels linking gun emplacements and concrete pillboxes, one of which was three stories deep and found to have a mahogany bed. The defenders had lined the outer perimeter of the airfield with five-inch naval guns stripped off destroyed warships, prompting one company commander to fire off a note to his headquarters: “Tell Halsey to stop looking for the Jap Fleet,” he said. “It’s dug in on Nichols Field.” The battle for the airfield would ultimately drag on until February 13. “The Japs,” Flanagan wrote, “defended Nichols Field as if the Emperor’s Palace itself were sitting in the center of the runway.”

ELSEWHERE IN MANILA FAMILIES grew frantic. Around the Garcia home off Taft Avenue, Japanese troops holed up in pillboxes and sniped civilians who dared trespass in public. Neighboring families, using breaches in backyard fences and walls, congregated in the Garcia backyard. “We were trapped within the parameters of our urban block,” recalled Jack Garcia. “There was no way we could get out without being seen, stopped, or shot. The edict was very clear. No one was allowed onto the streets.”

The fires made it impossible for the Garcia family to await the arrival of American forces. The family’s vegetable garden provided the only firebreak, and it was far too small to protect them from the intense heat and rain of ash. Each family member packed clothes and food in bundles made from bedsheets, while Ramon Garcia prepared a black valise of jewelry, medicine, and important papers. The flames grew so intense that Jack could close his eyes and still see the fiery brilliance. “Every night the glow grew redder and appeared to cover more sky. The brightness of the blaze now stretched for miles and spread directly overhead,” he recalled. “It was frightening.”

Similar fears gripped the Lichauco family in the district of Santa Ana. On the morning of February 9, an American artillery round tore through the roof and lodged in the kitchen table. “Luckily it failed to explode,” Lichauco wrote in his diary. “As my mother would undoubtedly say were she in our house today—only to the Holy Virgin Mary and the Blessed Saints in Heaven can we attribute this miracle.” Japanese and American artillery fire shook the city day and night, forcing residents to shelter indoors. Absent electricity and running water, conditions throughout the city deteriorated. “Tomorrow it will be a week since American armored cars successfully entered the north side of the city,” Lichauco wrote. “The Pasig is less than a hundred yards wide but we here on the south banks of the river have yet to see an American soldier.”

Nick Reyes and his teenage daughter Lourdes likewise felt the crawling pace of the battle, watching from the third-floor tower as the fires closed in on the family’s home near Taft Avenue. On the night of February 8, Lourdes spotted Japanese marines armed with torches emerge from a house in the nearby neighborhood of Leveriza. Moments later the home erupted in a blaze. The troops then entered another home and another, each one soon engulfed in flames. Over the crackling fires, she heard screams. Lourdes watched as the Japanese rounded up the men from each residence. She looked up at her father; the color suddenly drained from his face. Fire was no longer the only fear. “My knees turned to water,” she later wrote, “and my heart throbbed in my head.”

“It will be our turn soon,” Nick Reyes whispered to his daughter. “Do not alarm your mother. It is only the men that they want.”

ADMIRAL IWABUCHI FACED A CRISIS.

The American infantry had crossed the Pasig River just four days after reaching the capital, penetrating the districts of southern Manila largely held by his Central Force. The cavalry now closed in from the east, while the Eighth Army charged up from the south, threatening to bust through his formidable Genko Line.

In response, Iwabuchi ordered his marines to strengthen the south bank of the Pasig. “Units must be especially watchful against enemy infiltration by boat.” He likewise demanded Colonel Noguchi’s Northern Force, the survivors of whom had fallen back to the Walled City, to penetrate and disrupt the American lines. To Capt. Takesue Furuse, he ordered the city’s southern boundary secured. Despite the tenacious fighting of his troops on Provisor Island, at the Paco Railway Station, and on Nichols Field, it was clear to the admiral that Japan’s defensive bulkheads threatened to collapse.

If that happened, Iwabuchi would be trapped.

On the morning of February 9, the admiral abandoned Manila for Fort McKinley just south of the city, afraid that retreat might prove impossible if he waited much longer. From there, if needed, he could orchestrate the withdrawal of his forces.

Just as he had done several years earlier in the dark waters off Guadalcanal, Iwabuchi elected at the last moment to forgo death and save himself.

The admiral had radioed daily battle reports to General Yokoyama, who was at the Shimbu Group headquarters near Montalban about ten miles east of the capital. Since American soldiers rolled into the city on February 3, Yokoyama had watched each day as dark smoke hovered over the capital.

The night of his arrival at Fort McKinley, Iwabuchi summoned naval staff officer Koichi Kayashima, instructing him to travel to Montalban and brief the Shimbu Group commander on the state of the fight. Kayashima arrived the morning of February 10. Kenichiro Asano, chief of staff of the Shimbu Group, attended his briefing. “I sensed,” Asano said, “that the Naval units were fighting against hopeless odds.”

Those deteriorating odds coupled with the city’s crumbling defenses had led Iwabuchi’s forces in recent days to escalate attacks against civilians in Manila suspected of guerrilla ties, targeting former military officers, constables, and even a few priests known to be friendly with American internees. In each case, no trials were held nor evidence presented. Death was announced by a knock on the door. The lucky ones earned a bullet, the less fortunate a saber. The list of those attacked during those first few days of the battle read like a who’s who of local law enforcement:

Constable Col. Jose Guido and his three teenage sons, the youngest fourteen;

Fellow constable Col. Alejo Valdes, his son, and his brother-in-law;

Manila police officer Jose Herman, his son, and nephew;

Father Patrick Kelly and three other Malate priests.

But those early, targeted assassinations paled compared to the tsunami of barbarity that would soon descend upon the Pearl of the Orient. Not only had troops begun killing the first of thousands of males trapped inside the Walled City, but marines now swept through neighborhoods south of the Pasig, seizing men and even teenagers, while setting entire blocks ablaze. Captured Japanese orders found on the smoldering battlefield—some mere fragments, others signed and dated—would later reveal that the atrocities were not random acts of unrelated violence but rather part of a systematic plan to destroy the city and annihilate all its inhabitants. “The Americans who have penetrated into Manila have about 1000 artillery troops, and there are several thousand Filipino guerrillas. Even women and children have become guerrillas,” stated a February 13 order. “All people on the battlefield with the exception of Japanese military personnel, Japanese civilians, and special construction units will be put to death.”

That battlefield, of course, was the city.

But Japanese commanders went farther, issuing precise instructions on how best to eliminate civilians. This was spelled out in an undated Manila Naval Defense Force battalion order. “When Filipinos are to be killed, they must be gathered into one place and disposed of with the consideration that ammunition and man power must not be used to excess,” the order mandated. “Because the disposal of dead bodies is a troublesome task, they should be gathered into houses which are scheduled to be burned or demolished. They should also be thrown into the river.”

What had started as a fight between two armies over one of Asia’s great cities devolved on February 9 into one of the worst human catastrophes of World War II. An examination of the timeline of the dozens of atrocities that occurred in Manila point to that date as the fulcrum on which the violence shifted from individual attacks against suspected guerrillas to organized mass extermination. That was the day Iwabuchi chose to abandon the city; that was the day he realized the fight was hopeless.

And that was the day the true evil began.