“This is a doomed and tragic city.”
—ROBERT SHAPLEN,
NEWSWEEK, FEBRUARY 26, 1945
AMERICAN FORCES RUSHED TO OPEN MORE HOSPITALS ON the city’s outskirts to treat the growing roster of wounded soldiers and civilians. The 29th Evacuation Hospital, made up of twelve officers and eighty-seven enlisted men, had rolled into Manila on February 5, taking over the Washington Elementary School near the San Lazaro racetrack in Santa Cruz. The hospital opened the next day and within twelve hours admitted 157 patients, including 115 battle casualties that required surgery. The lack of space prompted the hospital to relocate on February 7—the same day MacArthur toured Santo Tomas—to the former Legarda Elementary School in Sampaloc, providing enough room for 650 beds. All told, from the middle of January through the end of March, medical staff treated 5,558 patients, many suffering from wounds of the upper extremities. “The types of casualties received required more surgery than in any other campaign this hospital participated in,” the hospital’s report stated. “This no doubt was caused by the larger number of artillery, mortar and rocket bombs employed by the enemy.”
The 71st Evacuation Hospital had set up on February 6 in a former slaughterhouse and tannery, made up of a single building and three large sheds. “It had been used,” the hospital’s report noted, “as a Japanese Ordnance Repair Shop and was littered with vehicles, motor parts and a captured American tank.” Not only had the complex once housed enemy forces, but for the first thirty-six hours, medics shared the space with troops from the 140th Field Artillery, who rained shells down on targets inside Manila. Medics used one shed for administrative work, pre-op, X-ray, and surgery. The other two served as surgical wards, each able to house one hundred patients. The rest of the hospital was spread out under tents. Casualties soon soared. Thirty-two patients arrived on February 7, a figure that jumped to 525 in three days. By February 14, just one week after opening, the hospital counted 1,046 patients. From February 7 through March 14, the hospital averaged 122 admissions each day, a figure that spiked to 293 on the afternoon American forces crossed the Pasig. During those five weeks doctors completed 916 surgeries, including twenty-two amputations and twenty-two craniotomies, and treated 107 compound fractures. Sixty-three patients died, all but four in surgery.
The 54th Evacuation Hospital was the newest to open, accepting its first patient at three p.m. on February 11 at the Quezon Institute, including many internees transferred from Santo Tomas. Troops converted the ground floor into officer quarters, a mess hall, and storage. Medics used the second floor for surgery, X-rays, a laboratory and pharmacy, and wards. The third-floor rooms, which had not been burned or destroyed, became additional wards and housed a dental clinic. Nurses set up quarters in the fourth-floor day room, while enlisted men pitched tents behind the hospital. Generators provided power, and pit latrines served as toilets since there was no running water. The eight-hundred-bed hospital even boasted an outdoor movie theater and a recreation room that enlisted men used to hold dances. The fierce Battle of Manila, however, kept the doctors and medics busy, as evidenced by the hospital’s records. From January through March, medics exposed 6,546 X-ray films, performed 960 surgeries, and treated 346 fractures.
As doctors raced to treat the thousands of wounded, intelligence forces focused on deciphering the enemy’s battle plans, including determining what units Japan employed and assembling the names and backgrounds of senior officers. To do so, soldiers sifted through abandoned Japanese supply dumps. Troops learned of one enemy unit after discovering it painted on the side of a destroyed truck. Another time soldiers read it off the helmet of a dead tank crew member. Captured enemy documents revealed a combined Japanese fighting force of around seventeen thousand, a ragtag gang that included stevedores, torpedo assembly teams, and sailors shanghaied from sunken ships. American intelligence reports characterized the enemy as “polyglot,” “puny opponents,” and a “potpourri” infantry. “It is a hastily organized group,” one report observed, “including personnel drawn from the hospitals, and ordered to be sparing of its short supply of ammo.”
American forces seized records from the homes of the Japanese consulate and president Jose Laurel, who evacuated to Baguio before MacArthur’s arrival. Major Henne marveled at how untouched Laurel’s house was in the otherwise ransacked city. It was as though the president had left just moments before the infantry arrived. “All of the essentials of living were present including dishes, flatware, pots and pans, and linens,” Henne said. “One deep closet was boarded shut but quickly opened to reveal a hoard of food stuff. The house was rich in souvenirs but the food, excepting some canned salmon, was given to the Filipinos in the neighborhood.” After battling through the fires that ravaged the districts north of the Pasig and then crossing the river, Henne enjoyed a real treat that evening. “I spent the night in Jose Laurel’s house sleeping in one of the beds which may have belonged to the man himself, but I doubt that he slept there fully clothed with his boots on.”
Soldiers interrogated Manila police chief Col. Antonio Torres, singled out in a 1944 intelligence report as the “only official to welcome the Japanese occupation army.” Valuable records turned up in unlikely places, including naval codes found in a Manila theater. In a seminary, soldiers discovered an order from Admiral Iwabuchi demanding that his forces conduct suicide attacks. Troops rifled through the pockets of dead Japanese soldiers and marines, recovering dog tags, address books, ration cards, notebooks, photo albums, postal savings books, and postcards. On a suicide squad soldier killed on February 11, troops found his final letter home, dated the day of his death. “This life of mine has been previously presented to the Imperial Highness and to avoid disgrace I shall not return alive without accomplishing my mission,” he wrote. “To the family remaining, it is very regrettable to have caused anxiety. Be joyful even if I should die in battle as I have only died for loyalty to the Emperor and filial piety.”
On the battlefield, American soldiers had almost encircled the Japanese, who in their retreat left behind not only valuable intelligence but massive amounts of weapons and ammunition, from tanks and airplane engines to thousands of rolls of barbed wire, machine guns, and eighteen cases of hand grenades. The Thirty-Seventh Infantry had come from the north, crossing the Pasig near Malacañan Palace and turning toward the Walled City. The First Cavalry, meanwhile, had enveloped the city from the east before crossing the river using native bancas or skiffs that could hold only three to five men at a time. The Eleventh Airborne charged up from the south. The Japanese troops battling inside southern Manila risked entrapment as American forces tightened the noose. To help in the fight, tanks on the north bank of the Pasig blasted enemy barges and targets in the city. “The platoons were alternated every four hours throughout the day and night,” noted the 754th Tank Battalion’s report, “in order to keep a continuous rate of fire.”
The Japanese put up a ferocious fight. “Massed artillery south of the Pasig River has harassed our installations north of the river, destroyed pontoon bridges and hindered the advance of our troops,” a February 14 intelligence report stated. “This artillery has been skillfully emplaced in buildings and behind walls.” Enemy troops proved just as fierce in direct combat, at one point dragging two wounded Americans off the battlefield. “Unable to restrain himself any longer, Sgt. Templeton, shouting for the platoon to follow him, rushed forward, firing his M1 from the hip as he moved,” the cavalry report noted. “Two Japs dropped dead, the third, no doubt believing a devil was after him, started to run. His retreat was quickly ended with a bayonet thrust delivered by Templeton.” A few lucky troops enjoyed a brief reprieve on February 9 when soldiers camped for the night at the Wack Wack Golf and Country Club. “In the peaceful setting of this once beautiful club the rigors of war seemed far away until work on the following day’s mission began.”
The lack of air support exacerbated the challenges faced by the cavalry and infantry. Despite requests from his senior officers, MacArthur ruled out bombing, fearing it would endanger too many civilians, who, he argued, “will not understand liberation if accomplished by indiscriminate destruction of their homes, their possessions, their civilization, and their own lives.” The general later relented and allowed artillery, but only after troops suffered heavy casualties crossing the Pasig River. “From then on, putting it crudely,” recalled General Beightler of the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division, “we really went to town.” In the end, artillery would prove equally destructive. Over the course of the battle, American forces would fire more than 42,000 mortar and artillery rounds, including 27,680 shells from 105 mm and 155 mm big guns. Errant projectiles at times crashed through the roofs of homes, churches, and bomb shelters. “Some districts of the city,” the Sixth Army commander General Krueger later wrote, “were completely destroyed.”
Residents south of the Pasig were trapped day and night in the crossfire of American and Japanese artillery. “It was like a bowling alley over our heads,” wrote John Dos Passos, “guns shooting first from one side then from another.” Between Japanese demolitions and American artillery, Manila was being destroyed from the inside and out. Men, women, and children retreated belowground, like rats, where conditions inside cramped air raid shelters devolved as the hours turned to days. Bunkers built to house a single family at times held multiple families, leaving little room for anyone to lie down, sit, or even stand. With so many bodies pressed together, the air inside stagnated and the heat soared. Austrian Hans Steiner, in a letter to his mother, recounted his experience. “We lived like dogs,” he wrote. “All around us there were fires and explosions; it was the best imagination of hell one could get.” William Brady recalled his family’s struggle. “The shelter was filled with refugees. Everyone was crying and praying,” he wrote. “One or two persons had vomited. Somebody was squatting and defecating from fright or dysentery just outside. Kids were urinating inside.”
Artillery set fire to a home on General Luna Street in Paco, where members of the Kishinchand family had sought refuge, trapping ten-year-old Mira, thirteen-year-old Pari, and three-year-old Radhi. “I came out with my brother and my mother,” recalled nineteen-year-old Sundri Kishinchand. “My three sisters were burned by the fire.” A similar tragedy occurred in the yard at the Malate Catholic School, which at the time served as an emergency hospital. Francisco Ramis dove across his two nephews as artillery rained down. “When the shelling stopped there was wailing all over the place,” recalled his nephew Benjamin Ramis. “I tried to get up and felt the heaviness of my uncle. He was dead. Hit by shrapnel on the left temple.” Another projectile exploded atop a shelter in Intramuros where Sancho Enriquez’s children hid. His wife had stepped out moments earlier to fetch water from a well. “When she came back,” Enriquez said, “she found the mutilated bodies of our four children almost beyond recognition.”
Japanese troops compounded the challenge, holing up in schools, cathedrals, and government buildings. Col. Lawrence White, regimental commander of the 148th Infantry, seized a church, only to discover machine guns hidden under the altar. The Japanese likewise planted big guns and snipers in commercial towers and hotels, forcing the Americans to hammer them with artillery before sending in troops. “I can see little hope of saving many of Manila’s famous buildings,” White told a reporter. “This is a full-scale artillery battle and you know what that does to a city.” Assaulting such strongholds proved equally as perilous for the infantry. “The reduction of each large building was a small battle in itself,” noted the 112th Medical Battalion’s report. “Progress for a single 24 hour period was sometimes not more than 300 yards.” American soldiers couldn’t help but marvel at the enemy’s willingness to die. “The only Japs to yield ground,” noted the First Cavalry’s report, “were dead Japs.”
The enemy had effectively turned the urban landscape against advancing American soldiers, who were more accustomed to fighting in the jungle than battling house by house and building by building across a major city. Japanese troops dropped Molotov cocktails and even aerial bombs from upper-floor windows and barricaded interior stairwells with broken glass and barbed wire. Their creativity went beyond just obstacles. “A double-barrel shot gun equipped with bayonet,” a 145th Infantry report stated, “is a very dangerous weapon in hallways and room to room fighting.” American forces resorted to twelve-man assault teams armed with bazookas, explosives, and flamethrowers, the latter of which was extremely effective but could ricochet in tight spaces and even suck up all the oxygen in a room. “The heat had glued the Japs to the wall,” one soldier bragged. “They looked like wall paper.”
Each block American forces gained revealed more of the enemy’s cunning. On Gilmore Street troops counted 182 mines, including several dozen made from five-hundred-pound depth charges. Electric mine detectors proved worthless given all the metal in the rubble, slowing America’s advance. “Tanks attempting to negotiate this sector were hard put to find a road, five being destroyed and many crew killed,” noted the Eighth Cavalry’s report. Pvt. First Class Deane Marks witnessed a tank hit a mine that, from the size of blast and subsequent thirty-foot crater, he suspected was either a buried aerial bomb or depth charge. “For a split second I saw the tank upside down as high as the telephone wires,” Marks said. “Debris started landing, mostly dirt, asphalt, and equipment from the tank. When the dust cleared, there it was, all thirty tons lying on its back.” Lt. William Swan came upon a similar scene soon after several tanks hit mines, including one that was totally destroyed. “The turret was off on one side of the road and the tracks off on the other side,” he remembered. “At my feet lay an American steel helmet absolutely flattened with a crushed head inside.”
In another case, troops found a dead Japanese soldier, whose body had been rigged with an incendiary bomb. The enemy likewise filled pickle, pear, and peach cans with explosives, careful not to remove the labels. Other times the Japanese booby-trapped woven figurines on store shelves and even religious relics. Even condoms were used to secure blasting caps shoved inside bamboo sticks. Soldiers discovered similar creativity at La Loma Cemetery, where the Japanese booby-trapped the chapel and stashed ammunition, mines, and grenades in mausoleums. Troops planted 120 depth charges in rows among the graves and dug in pillboxes. “Outwardly these pillboxes resembled large mounds of earth covering tombs,” one report stated. “They were sodded completely with flowers growing over them and crosses mounted above them.”
Between the National Psychopathic Hospital in the eastern suburbs and the Pasig River, American troops discovered a network of eight caves connected by tunnels. Inside, soldiers found an underground munitions factory—powered by generators and equipped with American drill presses—that included workshops to build booby traps, bombs, and mines. The Japanese likewise navigated the city’s water mains for attacks. Elsewhere troops discovered enemy forces disguised in civilian clothes and even dressed as women. “In his physical resemblance to the Filipino,” one intelligence report noted, “the enemy possesses a powerful weapon of deception.” Other signs, however, pointed to difficulties the Japanese faced. Near Fort McKinley, Americans found an abandoned aid station filled with blood-soaked blankets, while the bodies of dead enemy soldiers and marines often sported homemade bandages, indicating a shortage of even basic medical supplies. “Enemy morale,” one intelligence report speculated, “is apparently low.”
The torching of Manila, meanwhile, continued, much to the frustration of officers who had hoped to spare the Pearl of the Orient. The fires north of the Pasig had largely subsided, leaving the smoldering ruins of some of Manila’s great buildings, including the city’s Opera House, the Ideal, Avenue, and State theaters, and Heacock’s department store. “The old Escolta—Manila’s Fifth Avenue—is gone—completely gone. There are blocks where not even a stone stands atop another,” Bill Dunn reported. “The bank which used to handle CBS business in the Far East has been gutted by flames so fierce that window panes hang like icicles.” General Griswold vented his hostility to reporters. “A lot of this destruction is wanton and of no military purpose,” the XIV Corps commander said. “We are doing all we can to stop it, but we are up against a needle in a haystack job.” General Fellers wrote to his wife of MacArthur’s misery. “Mac,” he explained, “is very depressed over the destruction.”
American troops on the front lines not only battled the enemy but treated hordes of starved and wounded civilians, many with infected gunshot and bayonet wounds. “Day after day the destruction of the city went on and the stream of casualties was ceaseless,” observed a 112th Medical Battalion report. “The Battalion drove itself to the limit to keep pace with the pitiful human traffic.” Displaced residents, having suffered for years under the Japanese, swarmed mobile kitchens set up to feed the advancing troops. Other refugees resorted to looting to survive. “Not only furniture,” observed Filipino journalist Felipe Buencamino, “but even walls and floors are being carted away.”
“They killed my father and they killed my mother,” one rescued boy told troops. “I want to get these wounds fixed; then give me a gun and a lot of bullets.”
The promise of safety forced desperate residents, like thirty-four-year-old Elsie Hamburger, on an odyssey across an apocalyptic wasteland toward American lines, her path illuminated by the fiery red glow. Along the way the German immigrant had seen her husband killed by shrapnel, a toddler speared on the end of a bayonet, and more than a dozen bound men pushed into an inferno. “The Japanese seemed to be absolutely wild,” she recalled. “I could hear the screams and moans of those being burned.”
Finally she reached the dividing line between the two forces. On one side she spied two Japanese troops, who opened fire on her with a machine gun. Across the street she saw an American soldier—and the hope of rescue. “I arose on my hands and knees, tore off my clothes, and crawled across the street,” Hamburger testified. “Before I passed out I took this American soldier in my arms and kissed him.”
“God bless America,” she said.
IN SANTA ANA, Marcial Lichauco and his wife Jessie welcomed the appearance of American cavalrymen south of the Pasig on February 10, an arrival broadcast by the tolling of church bells, long forbidden by the Japanese. “We ran up the street and met a platoon of soldiers,” Lichauco wrote in his diary. “Jessie had a hard time suppressing her tears as she greeted the men, and so, for that matter, did most of the women around us.” The family returned home, where Lichauco scooped up his two-year-old daughter Cornelia. Unable to resist the historic moment, he carried her back to introduce her to the Americans, who he noted all hailed from Texas. “They gave Cornelia some chewing gum and I have been having quite a time since then explaining to her how to enjoy it.”
The excitement proved short-lived. Battered refugees began arriving that afternoon, fleeing the district of Malate, some crawling on hands and knees. By the morning of February 11, thousands clogged the streets, overwhelming the nearby convent and school. “From their incoherent account of what they had seen and experienced,” Lichauco wrote, “it was apparent that the entire district was being razed to the ground by the Japanese.” Aided by two household servants, Lichauco set off to find his relatives, threading his way amid the parade of refugees. “I met thousands of them painfully making their way towards Santa Ana,” he wrote. “Many were wounded, and nearly all were dazed from fatigue and lack of sleep.” He ran into a friend, whose daughter had been shot through the leg by a Japanese sniper. Lichauco pressed on with his search. “Farther up the road,” he wrote, “I saw my mother who could walk no more but as I had taken the precaution to bring a pushcart we were able to carry her safely home.”
Absent any relief agencies, Lichauco and his wife converted their home and an adjacent property into a makeshift aid station, where, over the course of the battle, the family would ultimately help more than twelve hundred people. “I never realized,” he wrote, “how much punishment the human body could endure.” A local doctor volunteered to assist along with several women who could wash wounds and offer first aid. With no electricity, running water, food, or even fuel for cooking, the challenge proved daunting. The wounded patients sprawled out on the bare cement floor without pillows, mattresses, or mosquito nets. Not only did the makeshift aid station lack toilets, but Lichauco had no bedpans, soap, or towels; the only water came from wells. Those unfortunate souls who passed away were simply wrapped in old paper or cardboard and buried in a nearby churchyard. “The stench of blood is sickening and as nearly all the patients we have accommodated were able to get away with only the clothes they had on their backs you can well imagine the odors that permeate the infirmary,” Lichauco wrote. “The suffering of the men, women and children quartered here is indescribable.”