“South of the Pasig Manila was a city of death and of horror.”
—SGT. OZZIE ST. GEORGE,
YANK, APRIL 27, 1945
THE GARCIA FAMILY SET OUT FOR SANTA ANA AT FIVE P.M. on February 14, climbing over the rubble of the wall U.S. tanks had toppled. The Japanese had made almost no effort to hold Santa Ana, one of Manila’s more inland districts, sandwiched between Paco to the west and Pasig River to the east. The community had served as the welcome mat for the First Cavalry, who after enveloping the capital had crossed the river on February 10 to find hundreds of cheering manileños, including Marcial Lichauco and his family. Since then, as the field of battle had shrunk to the Walled City and a series of strongholds along Taft Avenue and around Intramuros, Santa Ana’s location on the sidelines of the fight had made it a haven for the thousands of displaced refugees.
Ramon Garcia hoped his family might make it at least to Paco before nightfall, a distance of several miles to the east. No sooner had the family set out than everyone realized even that might be an ambitious goal. This was no simple walk but an arduous hike through the tangled debris of a wrecked city. “We encountered barbed wire barriers, burnt out vehicles, and upturned wooden carts,” his son Jack recalled. “Twisted fragments of roofing sheets flew about and large trees blocked the streets.”
The dead populated this urban wasteland with bodies and body parts littered along the streets, buried in the rubble, and even a few dangling in trees, victims of land mines. The family stumbled that Wednesday afternoon across four dead Japanese marines whose rotting remains blocked the path forward. “There was no way we could get around them. We had to step over them!” Jack recalled. “I tread carefully over the first corpse with great apprehension. With a handkerchief pressed hard over my nose and mouth, I struggled to hurdle over the others.” Each block revealed more of the same, a mix of both enemy troops and civilians. Fires had blistered and blackened many of the dead. Other times the clustered corpses hinted that the deceased were members of a family.
No one spoke as the group trekked east, afraid of drawing the attention of any lurking Japanese troops. “We moved slowly through a heavy pall of smoke that engulfed the area,” Jack said. “Only the crackling sound of fire curling circuitously around timber frames broke the silence.” The afternoon began to fade as the family closed in on the Singalong Church, the twin spires of its belfry silhouetted against the red sky. “The stone building,” Jack said, “stood out majestically amid the ruins of thousands of homes that once surrounded it.” Closer inspection revealed the shell holes in the roof, shattered stained-glass windows, and pockmarked plaster, the remains of which covered the floor. Hundreds of refugees crowded inside. Ramon Garcia steered his family toward a side door only to be blocked by other refugees who claimed the church was full.
“We wouldn’t want to go in there anyway,” Garcia huffed, noting the battered ceiling. “It’s not only packed, but the place is downright dangerous.”
Garcia made his way across the yard toward the presbytery with his family in tow, climbing the steps to the porch and walking through the open doors. The day’s waning sunlight filtered through the smashed windows to reveal an empty room, stripped by looters. Jack took a few steps inside when his father stopped him.
“Don’t look!” he demanded. “Stay outside.”
His father’s admonition came too late.
Jack looked up in horror. Dangling by the neck from the rafters was a priest in a ripped brown robe. Two nuns in bloodied habits—and with hands still bound behind their backs—swayed nearby. Jack noted their cowls hung down on their shoulders, revealing the thick rope that dug into their throats. “I could not move. I wanted to run but my legs wouldn’t budge. I tried to scream, but no sound was forthcoming. My jaw dropped and trembled. I attempted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t do that either!”
His father ushered him out of the door, marching past the rest of the family. “No, not in there,” he barked, making no mention of the dead. “Let’s get out of here.”
At the main gate Garcia stopped, rummaging in his pocket for the burnt butt of a cigarette. Night fast approached, and Garcia and his family were adrift in a sea of smoldering ruins. “Where the hell do we go from here?” he mumbled.
Jack saw what his father did not. Up ahead, sandwiched between the rubble of several large homes and hidden by avocado trees and banana plants, stood a traditional two-story nipa hut with walls made from woven palm and coconut fibers. Shells had torn holes in roof and shrapnel in the sides, but the hut had survived.
The family knocked on the door, but no one answered. Repeated rapping finally prompted a voice inside to demand in Tagalog what the family wanted.
Ida Garcia described the family’s escape from Malate, begging for the owners to allow them inside just the night. The woman refused.
Garcia continued to plead until a gravelly voice from an upstairs window interrupted her: “Show them in.”
An elderly gentleman came down the stairs. Ida again recounted her family’s saga and asked permission to spend the night. The owner agreed. “But only for the night,” he said. “It is important you move out early tomorrow morning.”
The owner apologized for a lack of food, but he provided them an earthenware jug to draw water from a well in the yard. Japanese snipers, he warned, hunted at dawn and dusk. “Don’t stand in front of open windows and keep well below window-sill level,” he cautioned. “Please, don’t light up any cigarettes in the dark.”
Evening settled over the home. Ten-year-old Jack, who had once enjoyed carefree afternoons playing with his friend Arthur MacArthur, was distraught. He had seen his home destroyed, his friends killed, and clergy hanged. He cuddled up next to his father, while his mother prayed aloud the rosary. “The sound of rifle shots and short bursts of machine gun fire interrupted the moments of prayer, but Mum did not stop,” he recalled. “She prayed on and we responded. There was nothing else we could do. We were again in God’s hands.”
The next morning the light filtered through the hundreds of holes that peppered the walls and ceiling of the home. Jack let his eyes follow the rays, noting the shrapnel and bullet fragments still dug into in the wooden beams and floor. The Garcia family set out on the morning of February 15, the same day American forces finally reached De La Salle and discovered the slaughter of Ida Garcia’s sister, husband, and three sons, leaving five-year-old Fernando the sole survivor of his immediate family.
Ramon Garcia led his wife and sons east along San Andres Street, continuing inland and away from the bay. The family had to navigate roadways littered with metal sheets and timbers, circumventing unexploded shells. Broken glass and concrete crunched beneath their feet. “Block after block, the scene remained unchanged,” Jack recalled. “Everywhere you looked, one saw ruins and more ruins, burnt-out vehicles and the harrowing sight of more dead people.”
The dead both repulsed and fascinated Jack. “No two corpses lay the same way,” he observed. “Each grotesque figure told a different story. A story that accentuated the last moments of their lives.” Those moments were filled with terror, facing the razor-sharp blade of a Japanese bayonet or the muzzle of a rifle. He passed one charred body face down on all fours, killed while trying to crawl away. Others the youth noted had died alongside loved ones, the bodies locked in a final embrace with hands around one another’s waists and necks. “A very poignant scene,” Jack remembered, “was that of a person lying on his back with a stiff right arm pointing to the heavens.”
The family pressed on through the rubble. The artillery that had whistled overhead for days fell farther behind with each block gained in the eastward journey out of the battle zone. The family reached Paco late that morning. While ravaged, it was now occupied by American troops who patrolled the streets. Gone were the bodies that for two days had lined the family’s route, like silent spectators in the marathon to safety. Alongside the removal of the dead, residents picked through the rubble of flattened homes and businesses. “Unlike the other areas that we had passed by in the previous days the streets of Paco were full of people moving around freely,” Jack observed. “They no longer had to look over their shoulder, worried they’d meet a crazed Jap pointing a rifle with a fixed bayonet at them. Cold fear no longer showed in their faces.”
The bridge across the Paco River—a narrow tributary of the Pasig that marked the start of Santa Ana—had been destroyed. A toppled coconut tree stood in its place, offering the only passage over the filthy black water. Ramon led the family followed by Ida. Halfway out she turned and motioned for her two sons. Jack and his older brother moved out on the log. The duo had not traveled more than a few paces when Jack heard a splash. He looked up to see his mother bobbing in the squalid stream. Furious, she waded ashore unhurt, where her anger gave way to relief at the realization that the family’s arduous journey neared its end. Santa Ana had endured. Homes and shops still stood, spared the hurricane of destruction that leveled Paco, Ermita, and Malate.
In the plaza in front of the Church of Santa Ana, Ramon Garcia ran into his dear friend Jose Sansó Pedret, a fellow Spaniard. The owner of an ironworks business, Sansó Pedret’s home had survived the battle. After learning of his friend’s losses, he immediately invited the Garcia family to stay at his home.
“It’s not the Ritz,” he said, “but we’ll make you as comfortable as possible.”
His spacious home resembled a Spanish villa with a red tile roof, but he had sheltered so many refugees that the only accommodation left was a ground-floor room used to store hay for horses. For the exhausted Garcia family, it was perfect. The Garcias had lost everything, but unlike so many less fortunate souls, every member of the family had survived the battle and the perilous hike out of the war zone. The family had no sheets or blankets to lay over the hay, but would bed down that night under the cover of safety provided by the U.S. Army. “I was so weary,” Jack remembered, “that I dropped on the bed of straw like a sack of potatoes.”
THE FIFTH AND TWELFTH CAVALRY regiments readied for the assault on Harrison Park and Rizal Memorial Stadium on the morning of February 16. No sooner had soldiers ushered the refugees out of St. Scholastica than the cavalry moved into the property, setting up a command post for what promised to be a fierce fight on one of the most unlikely of battlefields—a baseball diamond. The massive park and sports complex stretched from Taft Avenue some twelve hundred yards west to Manila Bay. It was bound on the south by Vito Cruz Street, which marked the edge of Manila’s city limits. Harrison Boulevard served as the northern boundary, doubling as the dividing line between the Thirty-Seventh Infantry and the First Cavalry divisions. In addition to a baseball field, the sprawling sports complex housed a track and field stadium, coliseum, tennis courts, swimming pool, and the wide-open expanse of Harrison Park.
The day before, the cavalrymen had liberated the survivors of the massacre at neighboring De La Salle on Taft Avenue and cleared the school for use as an observation post for this morning’s assault. Other cavalrymen meanwhile had advanced up the bay front, driving the Japanese defenders from Harrison Park east and into the stadium. Heavy sniper fire this morning signaled the looming fight. American mortars and artillery opened fire at seven-fifteen a.m., targeting the coliseum and baseball stadium, both made from reinforced concrete and offering ample places for Iwabuchi’s marines to seek refuge from the shellfire. General Fellers watched the opening salvos from atop De La Salle, including a Long Tom strike on a group of Japanese marines on the baseball diamond. The 155 mm shells from the heavy field weapon obliterated the enemy. “When the smoke died down there was not the slightest sign of any of them,” the general wrote his wife. “This may seem horrible, but in view of the atrocities these beasts have committed, it is impossible to sympathize with them.”
Cavalrymen seized the coliseum in just fifteen minutes, which guarded the entrance to the more heavily fortified ball diamond. Sherman tanks punched a hole in the stadium’s east wall and then climbed the rubble into the outfield. Japanese marines retreated into bunkers dug into the field, while snipers took aim at the American cavalrymen from the rafters above the stands. At one point, American troops held the outfield, while the Japanese occupied home plate. “During the lull in fighting, a Japanese officer, wearing a sword, blithely walked out into clear view to third base,” an Associated Press reporter wrote. “When the firing started the Japanese officer made a dash for home. He was out—for keeps—by the proverbial mile.” The battle dragged on for two hours before the few surviving Japanese marines retreated beneath the grandstand. American soldiers had little interest in a close-quarters fight in the dark. “Those Japs remaining in the heavy barricaded dungeons of the grandstand,” the Fifth Cavalry report stated, “were quickly dispensed with by flame throwers and dynamite.”
American troops expected more of the same in the assault on the Philippine General Hospital, where Japanese marines held an estimated seven thousand men, women, and children hostage, and the neighboring University of the Philippines. These two sprawling complexes—located on Taft Avenue just a mile and a half to the north—stood among the last major strongholds south of the Walled City and its defensive ring of fortified government buildings. Despite red crosses painted on the roofs of all of the hospital buildings as well as the front of the administrative building, the Japanese had fortified the hospital in violation of the Geneva Convention. Iwabuchi’s troops had stacked sandbags in the windows and doors and built machine-gun nests along the foundations of various hospital buildings. The Japanese used the medical center as cover to fire artillery on American positions north of the Pasig, stashing ammunition among the shrubbery. The enemy had gone so far as to set up a cannon inside the building just a few yards from the office door of the hospital director. Snipers dressed as doctors took aim on the streets from the windows of wards occupied by civilians.
For the thousands of refugees, conditions inside proved atrocious; most packed the first floor to avoid the artillery. “The halls of the hospital were so crowded that it was impossible to go through them,” remembered American missionary Ann Keily. “Bombing and shelling went on continuously.” None of the toilets worked, which left the air filled with the stench of human waste. The rotting bodies of dead patients and refugees—it was too dangerous to venture outside to bury them—only added to the misery. At night Japanese troops prowled the rooms and corridors with flashlights and matches, hunting young women to rape. Other times enemy forces took potshots at people who tried to draw water at the well. Refugees cowered in silence, listening to the hobnail boots in the corridors. “Every Japanese soldier or sergeant, any one with a sword, was giving orders and counter orders,” recalled Dr. Antonio Sison, director of the hospital. “They would speak to me with bayonets pointed at my breast.”
Sixteen-year-old Edgar Krohn, Jr., had seen just how dangerous it was both inside and outside the hospital. Along with his mother and father, the German youth, whose family ran a textile remnant importation business, had bounced around southern Manila for days before finally reaching the hospital on February 14. Even then, the family’s arrival during a mortar attack was traumatic. “A man in front of us had been hit; a razor sharp piece of shrapnel had sliced open his abdomen, exposing his intestines,” Krohn recalled. “As we ran past him, he was trying to stuff his intestines back into his body.” But the carnage had only continued. During a lull in fighting, Krohn had gone to the artesian well in the yard, when a shell exploded steps away. A piece of shrapnel dug into his right temple, a minor wound compared to the refugee in front of him who absorbed most of the blast. “He turned around,” Krohn said, “blood was flowing from his wounds and one of his eyeballs was hanging out of the socket.”
Krohn’s father rushed the teen to the emergency room, where doctors soaked in blood hovered over patients, hacking off infected limbs without anesthesia; the only bandages were made from shredded bedsheets and curtains. “In a corner I caught sight of a pail containing amputated arms and legs,” Krohn recalled. “There was no place to dispose of them.” After doctors bandaged his wounded temple, the family settled into a hallway off one of the wards, moving again each day throughout the hospital in search of a safer space. At one point during an artillery attack, his mother grew hysterical, prompting his father to slap her, the only time he had ever witnessed him strike her. Another time the family hunkered down in a white-tiled room when Japanese troops barged in and dragged a woman out; she was later found raped and murdered in the yard. “I have always looked back on this incident with anguish and I have always asked myself why no one among the many in the room interceded on her behalf.”
The Krohns weren’t the only ones desperate for safety. That quest had led eleven-year-old Jim Litton and his family into the anteroom of the hospital’s elevator shaft. Like the Krohn family, the Littons had barely made it to the medical center alive. The family of five had approached via Florida Street on February 9, which was littered with debris from the wrecked buildings. Litton’s mother had led the way, while to her left walked fifteen-year-old Narda Pangan, a part-time domestic helper from Bataan who lived with the family while she studied in Manila. Jim was daydreaming when the family came within a block of the hospital. An explosion rattled him. Ears ringing, he looked to his left and saw his older brother George, covering his face with both hands. Jim looked ahead and saw the legless body of a girl with long dark hair. Her left arm had been ripped off just below the shoulder. The dazed youth struggled for a moment before he realized it was Narda. “She lay moaning,” he recalled, “blood flowing from the stump of her lower torso.”
Jim spotted his mother unconscious on the ground nearby, her left arm riddled with shrapnel from the land mine explosion. His cousin Anselmo Salang scooped her up and the family fled to the hospital, where doctors went to work on her. Jim saw his mother again a few days later. “She was bandaged,” he recalled, “her face blackened by burns. She was in pain and moaning. The whole ward smelled of rotting flesh and of death.” Like the Krohns, the Litton family had roamed the hospital in search of a safe place to hide. At one point, Jim bedded down in a room filled with brains, hearts, and livers preserved in glass jars. The increased shelling finally drove the family into the anteroom of the elevator shaft in the hospital’s basement. From there, Litton could climb into the crawlspace under the hospital. For five days he and his family survived in the dark below, waiting for American troops to liberate them. “From a peep hole in the crawl space,” he said, “we could see American tanks on Taft Avenue.”
The end of the struggle fast approached. On the morning of February 16, the Americans blasted the hospital and surrounding buildings with Sherman tanks and M10 tank destroyers after earlier efforts to drive out the Japanese with machine guns, rifle grenades, 3.2 inch rockets, and 37 mm cannons had failed. “This direct fire was employed as a last resort,” the 148th Infantry’s report noted, “and every caution possible was taken to prevent casualties among civilian prisoners.” American infantrymen assaulted the neighboring Bureau of Science Building along with the Nurses Home and the Chemical Laboratory at ten-thirty a.m. “Fighting continued in these buildings through the day,” the infantry’s report stated. “A withdrawal was made from the Bureau of Science at dark, but the occupation of the others continued.”
American forces resumed the fight the following morning with the successful assault of the Bureau of Science Building. The infantry’s report logged the outcome: “All resistance was destroyed.” Capture of the science building coupled with the Nurses Home allowed gunners to place both frontal and flanking fire on the hospital. Inside the battered medical center, refugees took cover. The Krohn family holed up in the crawlspace beneath one of the elevated walkways, while the Littons remained sheltered in the basement anteroom of the elevator shaft. Refugees could hear the click of hobnail boots on the floors overhead as the Japanese retreated through the hospital. “By midmorning, the barrages came in quick succession. Machine-gun fire from both sides suddenly opened up in a deafening duel,” recalled Miguel Avanceña, another youth who hid in the elevator shaft with his family. “Showers of sparks from exploding shells and shrapnel so terrified us that prayers asking God to save us filled the basement.”
Edgar Krohn crawled out and popped his head up, peering over the edge of the walkway. Dead ahead he spotted a soldier crouched on one knee, his rifle pointed at him. “How many are you in there?” the infantryman barked, lowering his gun.
“Many,” the teenager replied.
“Get out of there fast,” he ordered. “You’re covered.”
What started as a whispered rumor among refugees in the darkened basement soon rose to a roar. “Amerikano!” people hollered in Tagalog. “Amerikano!”
Litton, who never thought he would live through the siege, felt a sudden relief wash over him. Not only had he survived, but so, too, had his family. “I am alive,” he wanted to cry. “I am alive.”
The eleven-year-old’s euphoria was shared by the thousands of other men, women, and children who poured out of the blasted hospital, flooding the American lines. Thirteen-year-old fellow refugee Luis Esteban spotted a dead Japanese marine sprawled out in the driveway. As payment for all he had endured, Esteban spat on the marine. “Don’t do that,” his father gently admonished him. “He was a human being.”
The torrent of patients and refugees not only hindered the assault but overwhelmed American medical services. An emergency assembly area east of Taft Avenue counted more than two thousand refugees by late that afternoon, with more streaming in by the hour. “Casualties ran into the thousands,” stated a 112th Medical Battalion report. “The Battalion ambulances, jeeps and trucks formed an endless chain of evacuation through the debris-littered and shell-pocked streets. All hospital facilities in the city were used to receive the casualties but even these were inadequate.” Convoys of trucks and ambulances hauled the wounded through battered blocks to a hospital just outside Manila. “The evacuation continued through the night,” the Thirty-Seventh Infantry’s report noted. “An estimated total of 7000 were eventually rescued.”
But the Battle of Manila was far from over.
American forces turned next to the University of the Philippines, for a fight that would drag on for several days as troops battled to clear the various buildings. “The area we are moving into is a cauldron of complete wreckage,” observed the Fifth Cavalry’s report, “with the ever present litter of battle and the stench of enemy dead.”
Each night as America’s grip tightened, enemy troops attempted to slip through the lines and escape. A few Japanese conducted suicide charges, lured by the promise of a posthumous promotion to second lieutenant. Many others blundered into American outposts. U.S. soldiers shot sixty-four Japanese on the evening of February 20. “A fair bag for one night’s work,” bragged one cavalry report.
The Japanese managed to capture cavalryman Sgt. Henry Clark two nights later. His mutilated remains, found the next day, revealed that the enemy had sliced the first two fingers off of each hand. Coagulated blood around the wounds proved he was alive at the time. “Both of the deceased’s ears were partially cut off,” reported Capt. John Amesse, a surgeon. “Bayonet perforations of chest and abdomen were present. Lack of blood around these areas is consistent with post mortem mutilation.”
The battle for Rizal Hall, the largest building on campus, proved typical of the ferocious fight American troops faced throughout Manila. Like much of the city’s architecture, the three-story concrete building was designed in an elegant neoclassical style with towering columns and an open internal courtyard. Japanese marines had fortified the building, hacking gun slits in the walls, barricading windows and entrances, and mounting pillboxes on the roof with open lines of sight on all approaches. A small team of American cavalrymen stormed the building at eleven-thirty a.m. on February 20, fighting room to room. After two hours, troops had made it only to the second floor, the Fifth Cavalry’s report noted, “with the rain of lead still heavy.”
The Americans finally reached the third floor by five p.m., but they had little time to celebrate. “A terrific explosion rocked the building from one end to the other and gray clouds of pulverized cement and dust covered the entire structure,” the report stated. “Those observing the scene could well imagine what had happened; as the dust slowly drifted away, they saw the entire center section had been blown.” Tensions soared as everyone outside awaited word about the fate of the platoon. The radio soon crackled as the lieutenant relayed the news. The blast miraculously had killed only one American soldier; the rest, including a few wounded, prepared to evacuate for the night. “Their complete disregard for human life enabled them to attempt destruction of buildings housing our troops in spite of the presence therein of their own.”
The next morning American forces blasted Rizal Hall for two hours with tanks, tank destroyers, and two self-propelled 105 mm howitzers borrowed from the Thirty-Seventh Infantry. “Numerous holes were opened in the sides of the building,” according to the cavalry’s report. “From external appearance it did not seem possible anything alive could remain within.” The Americans assaulted the building at 2:35 p.m., securing part of the structure by nightfall before continuing the fight on February 22. The inside of Rizal Hall had been reduced to rubble and dust. Many of the stairs proved impassable, while others were a challenge to navigate. Troops likewise had to overcome primitive Japanese barriers, including spools of rope and boxes filled with asphalt. Cavalrymen inched from room to room, backs pressed up against the walls, hurling grenades ahead to drive out the enemy. “Looking through a crack of a door the platoon leader saw the heads and shoulders of four men and the hunched backs of several others,” Master Sgt. Robert King, commander of the Second Platoon, Troop C, wrote in his report afterward. “A grenade was tossed into this group.”
As dusk settled over Manila on February 22, the cavalrymen prepared to hunker down. Neither side wanted to surrender ground after such a battle, so the Americans and Japanese would share the wrecked building for the night. After several sleepless nights, American morale sagged. But the Japanese were not finished fighting. Iwabuchi’s marines launched an eight p.m. assault on the Americans on the second floor, firing machine guns and tossing grenades. “The holding force was engaged in the fire fight for about thirty minutes, then the Japs let up for about ten minutes before launching a second attack,” the cavalry’s report noted. “This next attack was repulsed in twenty minutes, whereupon the Japs withdrew and no more fire was received from them.”
The Americans remained on alert in the darkened building, expecting another assault as soon as the moon set and the light faded. The soldiers fell silent with nothing to do but wait, listen, and worry. There was little doubt that the battle for Rizal Hall was nearing its climax, a fight that had already claimed the lives of 166 Japanese.
Around one-thirty a.m., cavalrymen heard enemy voices at the far end of the building. Ears perked up, and the men listened to the Japanese. “At first they seemed to be conversational tones but gradually increased into a weird chant until there was a full chorus of singing,” recorded the cavalry’s report. “This commotion went on for about forty-five minutes culminating in a final burst of song and loud shouting, immediately followed by many reports of exploding grenades and dynamite charges.”
The cavalrymen continued to listen.
More grenades exploded.
Then silence.
More detonations went off at half-hour intervals until around four a.m., at which time a lasting silence settled over the wrecked building until morning. No imagination was needed to envision what the doomed Japanese troops had done. An assault team moved in the next morning, clearing each room. In the first room, soldiers counted nineteen bodies, all dismembered by grenades in what the cavalry’s report described as “an appalling sight.” But the carnage did not stop there. “In the five adjoining rooms and at the foot of the staircase were more bodies showing the same manner of death,” the report stated. “A total of 77 had completed the ritual which our troops had listened to during the early morning hours.”
THE FIGHT for the University of the Philippines set the stage for the last act in the Battle of Manila. MacArthur’s forces, having encircled the city on February 12, had in the ten days since compressed the Japanese into a roughly one square-mile area in the heart of Manila. The remnants of Admiral Iwabuchi’s Central Force defended the handful of government offices surrounding the Walled City—the Legislature, Finance, and Agriculture buildings, plus a few others—while Colonel Noguchi’s Northern Force hunkered down behind the towering stone walls of Intramuros.
For the surviving civilians still trapped inside the Walled City, the days were apocalyptic. Fires had destroyed much of the ancient citadel, and artillery rained down on it. The dead bodies of Filipino men, some naked, dangled from lampposts. Sister Nelly de Jesus Virata watched the Japanese strip the clothes off two men and bind them to a post next to an engulfed building. “They were burned alive,” she later told war crimes investigators. “Their bodies were just like charcoal.” Rosa Calalang likewise witnessed the burning, noting how the smell of roasting meat had attracted a hungry audience. “The dogs,” she recalled, “were already biting the cooked flesh.”
Inside the Church of San Agustin—one of the Walled City’s last refuges—misery prevailed. Women and children slept on benches, in corridors, and atop the stone floor. Absent running water and toilets—and with an outbreak of dysentery—feces littered the sanctuary. Starvation claimed others, whose withered bodies were buried in the orchard behind it. With most of the men killed at Fort Santiago, Japanese troops prowled at night in search of women. Twenty-four-year-old Pacita Siguenza plucked out her dentures to look less attractive. “We could never sleep,” recalled twenty-eight-year-old Conchita Huerta, who was assaulted by the Japanese. “They came every night.”
“Rape won’t hurt,” she was warned, “if you don’t fight back.”
Forty-five-year-old Andrea Lopez, whose husband and son were both marched off to Fort Santiago, ran out of food on February 12. To survive, she and others ate, not just the fruit from banana and papaya trees, but the leaves and even stalks. The wealthier Spanish families offered up pets to the hungry. “My family killed four dogs,” Lopez said. “As the people were fighting to get a piece we had to eat it raw most of the time.”
The anguish increased as American artillery targeted the towering walls of Intramuros along with potential sniper nests in preparation for the eventual assault. San Agustin’s tower fell victim, leaving the hands of the clock frozen at seven-thirty p.m. “Sometimes, as twilight fell, there would be a pause in the barrage. Observation planes would be heard overhead,” recalled Tony Trinidad, who was eleven years old. “Up in the sky, small parachutes with bright lights would be seen hovering. Immediately we would stuff our ears with cotton and place a piece of wood between our teeth. The deafening shelling would resume, to continue all night.”
More than once, errant projectiles blasted the church, killing refugees. Trinidad recalled seeing a woman cooking over a large caldron when a shell exploded. “We found her torso in the cauldron,” he said, “but the head was missing.” Another time a shell hit the crowded room his family shared with others, filling the air with dust. “The two kapok mattresses we had set up as partitions had saved our lives; we found them spiky with shrapnel,” he said. “The families to our left and right were all dead or dying.”
Survivors could offer little more than prayers for the injured. “We tried to help the wounded,” recalled Ester Aenille, “but there was no medicine, so we put wine on the wounded and made bandages of our clothing. The dead were everywhere.”
The Japanese at one point forced all the refugees outside the church as a ploy to pilfer watches and other valuables refugees had brought with them—petty theft against the backdrop of doom. Dr. Antonio Gisbert experienced another surreal moment when a Japanese officer summoned him simply to practice his English. During the two-hour conversation, the officer asked whether Gisbert thought America would win the war. The doctor replied that he was too busy with patients to even think about it.
“I think Japan will win eventually,” the marine replied.
It was clear to most others, however, that the end was near. A drunk Japanese officer played with a hand grenade one night, telling refugee Lourdes Godino that when the Americans came through the walls, he planned to pull the pin.
“We will all die,” she responded.
“If I die, you also die.”
Godino pleaded that the refugees were innocent civilians.
“I am innocent, too,” he said.
“We want to die with our families,” she begged.
“I, too, want to die with my family.”
Colonel Noguchi’s soldiers and marines continued to execute civilians who might prove problematic when the Americans breached the walls. On February 17 troops showed up in the ruins of Santa Rosa College, one of the only other places where the masses gathered, rustling Rosa Calalang awake in her makeshift shelter at three a.m.
“How many are you?’ the Japanese demanded in Tagalog.
Troops had seized Calalang’s husband Jesus from the Manila Cathedral on February 6. Now eleven days later marines had come for the rest of the family. The Japanese grabbed Calalang, her mother Victorinia, and her three children, along with four others, marching them across the street to Santo Domingo Church.
“What are they going to do to us?” Victorinia asked.
“Mother,” Calalang replied, “we better pray.”
“What are they going to do?” her mother pleaded.
“I do not know.”
Calalang’s daughters started to whimper. “Mammy,” one cried, “why did you wake me up?”
In the ruins of Santo Domingo, the Japanese again attacked the civilians with bayonets, this time without any ruse of leading them inside the church. One of the marines stabbed Calalang’s nine-year-old daughter Aurora in the hip.
“You’ve hit me,” the girl cried and started to run.
The Japanese gave chase, but Calalang pounced, striking him. Another marine bayoneted her twice in the back, knocking her to the ground. Enraged troops stabbed her five more times in the breast, groin, abdomen, and thigh. Calalang watched helplessly as the Japanese marine caught up to her daughter and plunged his bayonet into her again and again until she died. Troops then killed her mother, Victorinia.
The Japanese returned to the ruins of Santa Rosa College and brought back a second group of civilians, followed by a third, each one suffering the same fate. In addition to women and children, Japanese targeted some of the medical staff from San Juan de Dios Hospital, who until now troops had spared.
“Doctor, doctor,” one Japanese marine shouted amid the ruins, summoning the few surviving physicians before marching them across the street.
Troops then returned to the ruins. “All nurses come out,” the Japanese ordered.
Calalang lay amid the debris, watching this parade of victims in the final hours before dawn. “I could see the people running,” she said, “and the Japanese chasing them.” Many of the women and children were friends and acquaintances. Calalang watched marines bring in a young woman she knew only by her first name Sally. In her arms Sally held her younger brother. “The Japanese bayonetted her and her brother, while she was pleading and pressing her brother close to her,” Calalang later testified. “We found Sally the next morning dead, clutching her dead brother.”
On the ground near Calalang, Dr. Leandro Coralles suffered from bayonet wounds. “Somebody please put up my head,” he cried. “I can’t breathe.”
Calalang listened as he moaned.
“God,” the dentist begged. “I can’t breathe.”
Finally his voice fell silent.
Those who were able crawled back to the ruins, where the few remaining nurses from San Juan de Dios Hospital tried to help them.
Calalang was rescued by friends who had come in search of her. Her wounds, however, proved so severe that the nurses summoned a priest, who administered confession. One of the nurses told her that her misery would soon be over.
“We don’t know,” the sister added, “if we will be next.”
“Pray,” Calalang replied, “that the Americans are coming.”
In an effort to cover up the slaughter before the Americans arrived, the Japanese gathered some survivors, forcing them to bury the dozens of dead in the ruins of Santo Domingo Church. Many of the bodies, exposed for days to the hot tropical sun, had ballooned. The dresses of others were hiked up to the waist. The Japanese had gone so far as to bayonet one woman through her genitals. The survivors battled nausea to drag the remains into foxholes and bomb craters before shoveling dirt over the bodies. “One of the women that we saw,” recalled Benita Lahoz, “was beheaded.”
The Japanese hunted down the last few men alive inside the Walled City. On February 18 marines seized the remaining hospital patients from Santa Rosa College, marching more than fifty off to the ruins of the University of Manila.
“What are you doing?” one cried when the Japanese attacked them.
“We are only killing pigs.”
That same day marines grabbed the last Filipino men out of San Agustin Church, including scores of sick and elderly along with thirty-four priests. The Japanese herded them into a warehouse for the night before prodding them the next evening to the Plaza McKinley, at the corner of Aduana and General Luna streets, in front of the ruins of the Manila Cathedral. There they forced seventy men into the larger of two underground bomb shelters and the remaining seventeen into the smaller.
“Don’t sit down,” one of the officers barked as troops fired a pistol in the air. “Just stand up and all will be able to go inside.”
The smaller shelter measured roughly six feet wide and ten feet long. After the last man climbed inside the dark dugout, the marines rolled an oil drum in front and shoveled dirt along the sides. “There was no room we were packed in so tight,” recalled Epifanio Gutierrez, Jr., an eighteen-year-old Spaniard. Troops paced atop the shelter seconds before several grenades rolled down the two ventilation shafts. One of the priests asked what it was. He began to repeat his question when the bombs exploded. “Those killed,” recalled Father Jose Barullo, “were mutilated beyond recognition.”
Seventeen-year-old Spaniard Emilio Carceller, who was crammed inside with his twenty-year-old brother Eduardo and forty-five-year-old father, kicked the oil drum away from the entrance. A marine outside opened fire into the dugout.
“I am hit in the eye,” Emilio cried as he collapsed dead.
A bullet tore into his father, killing him, too.
The Japanese tossed in more grenades. The explosions deafened the few dazed survivors and filled the air with dust and the acrid smell of gunpowder. The marines departed. Throughout that night, the survivors listened to explosions and rifle shots as the Japanese attacked other shelters filled with refugees. “The worst part of it,” recalled Father Barullo, “was that we could hear the Japanese laughing.”
The next morning the marines returned, pouring sand down the ventilation holes to suffocate the survivors. Even after the captives dug small air holes, the men inside struggled to breathe, conditions made all the worse by the tropical heat and the press of bodies. The men guzzled bottles of Jerez wine that the Japanese had stashed inside the dugout, while a priest that afternoon took confession. Several of the refugees decided that the only hope was to slip out under the cover of darkness. “We made up our minds that night that if we were going to die we might as well die outside in the open,” Barullo said, “breathing fresh air, where we could see the heaven and see the sky.”
A similar horror unfolded nearby inside the larger bomb shelter, where the Japanese had crammed seventy men in a dugout that measured barely five feet wide and fifty feet long. The Japanese likewise dropped grenades inside and shot those who tried to escape. Marines then shoveled earth in front of the entrances to bury alive the few survivors. Father Belarmino de Celis, injured by shrapnel, tore his habit to make a bandage. The air inside was thick, and the thirty-seven-year-old Spanish priest feared he might suffocate. He pulled himself through the tangle of bodies toward the shelter entrance where he dug with his fingers. “I was able to make a small hole,” he said, “and then I lay down there with my mouth near the hole for respiration.”
The sun finally rose, but dawn brought no relief from the misery. “Many were still breathing and almost all of them were asking for water,” Father Belarmino recalled. “Nobody was asking for food.” Artillery shook the shelter, and dirt dropped inside through the overhead timbers. One by one the others began to die. Day turned to night and then day again. Conditions inside the dugout deteriorated as the bodies began to rot. “A profound silence prevailed,” recalled Julio Rocamora, the only other survivor. “There were no other signs of life; nothing but darkness and flies and stench.” The two survivors dug a hole out on the night of February 22, after enduring three days in the earthen tomb. The men crawled to the nearby ruins of the Department of Justice, where Father Belarmino set off to find food and water for them. “I did not find food, but I found water in the tank of a toilet,” he said. “As I drank I could feel my strength coming back.”
INSIDE SANTO TOMAS, American troops set up a screen near the Main Building, where at night internees spread out on the lawn atop blankets and chairs and watched Donald Duck cartoons, newsreels, and movies as the Japanese slaughtered men, women, and children just a few miles beyond the camp’s gate. The rattle of distant machine guns and artillery occasionally drowned out the dialogue and music, while the flash of flares obscured the images that paraded across the screen. Hartendorp marveled at the odd juxtaposition during Rhapsody in Blue, a film about the life of George Gershwin starring Robert Alda as the famous composer. “A representation of theatrical and musical life on Broadway, to the accompaniment of an avalanche of death thrown upon America’s enemy on the other side of the world!” the camp historian wrote. “Surely, no picture of the kind was ever shown under more bizarre circumstances.”
The newsreels proved a highlight for many of the internees, an opportunity to catch up on the hurried progress of the war that so many had missed.
“We won’t be satisfied until Manila is taken!” one of the news commentators announced at the end of one such a reel.
“We cheered madly,” Tressa Roka wrote. “The goose pimples that crept over my skin felt like heady wine coursing through my veins and capillaries.”
Robin Prising befriended a young Filipino boy who sat near him on the lawn, the duo laughing at actor Al Jolson until the horror of war intruded. “I saw, under the army blanket thrown carelessly over his lap, the bandaged stumps of his knees,” Prising recalled. “His laughter is the only full, free laughter I have ever heard.”
Internees who only two weeks earlier had hovered near death continued to obsess over food. “We consumed vast quantities of coffee mixed with all the sugar and canned milk that we wanted,” Roka wrote in her diary. “We wouldn’t believe that it would last, so just as quickly as we had drunk the coffee we would rush back to the mobile coffee kitchen with our empty Lactogen cans for more.”
“Give the poor bastards all they can drink at all hours of the day,” Roka’s fiancé Lowell Cates heard the sergeant in charge of coffee declare. “Pretty soon when they realize it’s there for the asking, they won’t be slopping it up all the time!”
“It was the same way with our food,” Roka wrote. “We took more food than we could eat and we were always hoarding it.”
Fellow internee John Osborn described in a letter a similar fascination with the parade of extravagant meals. “The food still seems wonderful. Fresh beef. Fresh pork, and big fresh eggs flown from the States. Bread cut into generous slices; a can of evaporated milk every day for each internee,” Osborn wrote. “I have gained 16 lbs. Gradually the wrinkles in my abdomen are being smoothed.”
Just as starvation had disfigured bodies in odd ways, so, too, did the sudden and uneven return of weight. Roka noted how one nine-year-old had packed on the pounds just around her abdomen, making her belly appear swollen atop her skinny legs. As the camp’s children grew stronger, the youthful energy that had vanished in the months before the liberation returned. “The camp children had ceased to be the little old men and women,” she wrote. “They were normal kids again, and they began to annoy us with their running, screaming, and general rowdiness. The soldiers were spoiling them horribly. When they weren’t stuffing their mouths with candy, chewing gum, and chocolates, they were riding the jeeps and trucks in the camp with the soldiers.”
To outsiders, however, the internees looked terrible. “They haven’t any idea what poor condition they really are in,” General Fellers, who visited the camp each day, wrote his family. “They are so happy they’re in a daze, and nearly everyone has eaten so much and so fast he has suffered from upset stomach.”
The cacophony of artillery fire day and night served as a reminder that the internees lived on the sidelines of the fight for Manila. “We had to shout to each other to be heard above the terrific noise of the detonating shells,” Roka wrote. “We wanted to get away! We had had enough of killing and warfare!” Internee Robert Wygle echoed Roka in his diary. “The guns still crash and the shells still swish over our heads,” he wrote. “We still get a Jap show now and then, but it seems they are about through now and are slowly being churned to hamburger in the old Walled City.”
Roka and her fiancé climbed in a jeep on one afternoon for a tour of northern Manila, an area now cleared of all enemy forces. “The last time I had been out, I had seen many Japanese soldiers and civilians, and the business section of the city was still standing,” she wrote in her diary. “Today it was completely leveled, and there were no Japs.” Roka visited the Plaza Goiti near the Escolta, Manila’s once-prominent shopping avenue. “We looked to the north, east, south and west, as far as the eye could see,” she wrote. “There was nothing but crumbling walls, and in some blocks there was absolutely nothing—everything had been leveled off by dynamiting and shelling. We passed the devastated areas and came to crowded streets filled with hungry and ragged Filipinos who were lined up for blocks to receive their food rations.”
Internees did not have to venture outside the walls to experience the horror of the fight, which still materialized even in the relatively safe enclave of Santo Tomas. Sgt. Ozzie St. George, a correspondent with Yank, described one such scene. “There was a soldier, half dazed by shellfire, who entered the main lobby of Santo Tomas University with a bundle of something wrapped up in a sheet,” the reporter wrote. “He asked what he should do with it, and they asked him what it was, laundry? He said no and lifted the sheet and it was the upper half of his best friend’s body.”
St. George noted that a new lexicon arose among the troops to describe the fight now raging on the opposite side of the Pasig:
“South of the River.”
“The other side.”
Refugees meanwhile continued to stream across the Pasig, a scene captured by CBS reporter Bill Dunn in one of his broadcasts. “The stories that come out of south Manila, borne on the drooping shoulders of homeless refugees, are both harrowing and unbelievable,” he reported. “The Japanese, in his dying frenzy, seems determined to take as many innocent civilians with him as possible.”
The bloodshed overwhelmed the veteran newsman, who finally vowed that he would no longer report on the atrocities. “But I do want to testify to the truthfulness of the stories you have already heard,” he told listeners. “As unthinkable as many of them may appear, they have been completely verified by official army circles and by personal observations of the war correspondents. A friend of mine who spent nearly a quarter century in Japan sized up the situation perfectly.‘Just as we underestimated their preparedness,’ he said, ‘we over estimate their civilization.’ ”
Fellow reporter Henry Keys of the London Daily Express interviewed Dr. Josephina Bulatao, a physician from the Philippine General Hospital who was nearly killed in Paco. “I cannot understand why they are doing these terrible things to my people,” she said as she broke down in tears. “They are not human beings at all.” Bulatao could at least communicate. The horror had left others so shell-shocked that interviews with reporters proved impossible. “It was painful to probe into the shattered minds of the refugees who crept to safety,” wrote Newsweek’s Robert Shaplen. “Most of them were so dazed that they were unable to speak. Several times when I started to ask a question, the only response I could draw was a stare and a torrent of tears. After a while it seemed wiser not to try.”
Keys struggled to contain his outrage over what he witnessed. “At last the Japanese have matched the rape of Nanking,” he wrote in one dispatch. “In Manila they have piled outrage on outrage, infamy on infamy, until it has become a city of nightmarish horror.” MacArthur’s aides likewise fumed over the destruction. “The Jap is a fiend. He is burning and murdering indiscriminately,” Fellers wrote his family. “It takes all one’s strength to see the refugees. They haven’t the slightest idea which way to go. Their homes are destroyed; many are wounded; most of them have not slept for days, and if they had slept it would be on the ground in dangerous areas. The suffering, the mental torment, and the losses which these people endure are indescribable.”
Fellers related the story of a young mother he met, her clothes tattered and her beautiful face covered in filth. In her arms, she cradled a baby. “Thank you for saving us,” the woman said to him.
“How she could be grateful for anything was beyond me,” Fellers wrote. “I asked her if her home was gone and she said, yes, a direct hit had destroyed it immediately but it was most fortunate that she and her child were outside. Where this girl went and what happened to her I don’t know, but I can never forget her face.”
Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans experienced a similar encounter when he stumbled upon a wounded woman in the doorway of a torched shop, her dress shredded and a swollen and crusty black injury on her thigh. The reporter asked how long she had been in the doorway. “Since yesterday,” she muttered.
“Has no one helped you?” Mydans asked. “Have you had any food?”
“No,” she replied.
The photographer set off in search of help. Unable to locate a litter, he tore down a bamboo gate. Along with several Filipinos, Mydans hoisted her atop his jeep, carting her to a nearby aid station.
The medic sized up her injuries. “All right,” he finally said, “put her into that ambulance.”
The corpsman loaded the woman, but then the medic turned to Mydans. “No good,” he told the photographer. “She’s done for.”
The medic closed the door of the ambulance. Mydans watched as he shook his head, too. The woman was one of countless victims. “All morning we had seen the long files of people walking mutely rearward past advancing infantry,” Mydans said. “Some of them limped with improvised wound dressings. Many of them walked, heaven knows how, with open wounds. Some were empty-handed; some carried pitiful little bundles or struggled with little carts or staggered under loads on bamboo poles.” To Mydans’s surprise, none of the victims complained; few even asked for help. Most moved like zombies, one foot after the other—the pilgrimage of the damned, all headed away from the war zone. “Everything you ever had or hoped for is gone,” Mydans recalled. “Your mother is dead, your father is dead, your son is dead, your baby is dead. There’s black dust and ashes where your home was. There’s no water and no food.”
To American reporters, many were nameless faces. But to Filipino journalist Felipe Buencamino, the refugees were friends, colleagues, and prominent Manila citizens and socialites. Amid the ash-covered streets, he encountered doctors, lawyers, judges, and bankers. He saw former senator Elpidio Quirino, whose wife Alicia had been machine-gunned along with the couple’s son Armando and two daughters, Norma and Fe. Three of Quirino’s five children were gone. “He was not the same man I had seen so many times in the past, banging the gavel in the rostrum of the Senate,” Buencamino wrote. “Senator Quirino had aged in ten days and his face had a lost expression.”
The reporters learned that amid the fighting and chaos there was no time for proper burials or even to identity the dead, who were collected in piles and interred in mass graves, a scene witnessed by Walter Simmons of the Chicago Daily Tribune. “At a spot where bodies lie a bulldozer with an armored cab is scooping out a hole,” the journalist wrote. “This done, it pushes the bodies in, backs up with a jerk, then surges ahead, leaving a gash of fresh, leveled earth in its wake.”
American journalists accompanied by troops crossed the Pasig to pick through the worst of the city’s ruins. Scattered amid the smoldering debris stood the occasional gutted office, lone facade, or even home miraculously untouched by the battle. Over it all hung the caustic smell of smoke mixed with the stench of rotting dead. At the pontoon bridges built by the army—covered with steel and wooden decks—military police sorted out the bottleneck of refugees, troops, and ambulances. Newsweek’s Shaplen watched the tragic parade one day. “Mothers and children were dripping with blood, their heads bandaged, broken limbs dangling,” the reporter wrote. “And along the streets and in the grass, bodies of shot and bayoneted Filipinos lay unattended. A human foot was lying on the road.”
“It’s plenty hot up there today,” a military policeman warned Simmons one day as the reporter prepared to cross. “Better get your tin hat on.”
Bill Gray, the Time magazine journalist who replaced Bill Chickering after he was killed in a kamikaze attack en route to Lingayen Gulf, cabled his editors detailed notes of what he saw south of the Pasig. “Americans have formed only the meagerest image of the devastation and tragedy which the Japs have chosen to leave in Manila. The city’s misery goes on and on,” Gray wrote. “How many hundreds or thousands of civilians already have died by fire or shell outside the Intramuros nobody knows.”
Gray visited the Singalong Church, the same one the Garcia family had passed a few days earlier en route to Santa Ana. The reporter found the inside crowded with about two hundred refugees, some stretched out atop benches, others lying on the floor between piles of salvaged household items, chicken cages, and tethered goats. A three-legged dog hobbled amid the wounded. The reporter let his eyes wander, noting how artillery shells had shattered the stained-glass windows. The occasional sparrow fluttered through the shell holes, while the shards of glass littered the marble floor. A cracked glass case stood in one corner, displaying a dusty wax figure of Jesus Christ. “A Filipino woman in a yellow-flowered dress lay in a wooden cart where the ambulances came to take away the wounded,” Gray wrote. “Somebody had placed a gold crucifix beside her.”
For the journalists who covered the battle, the realization crystallized that the fight would end only when the last Japanese marine died. “Progress is slow because of the necessity of prying the suicidal maniacs out of their every hiding place, one by one or group by group,” reported Bill Dunn. “They are not trying to retreat, withdraw or reinforce. They are just staying put until such time as we kill them off.” New York Times reporter George Jones noted that much of the death and destruction was punitive. “A beaten enemy is wrecking his vengeance on Manila and its people and we are obtaining a glimpse of the same wanton cruelty and pillage that the Japanese military visited upon other oriental cities,” he wrote. “The evidence is not pretty to see.”
Reporters at times experienced bizarre moments, including a discovery Simmons made one day of a street carpeted with Japanese occupation bills. “That bank’s full of it,” a soldier told him.
Simmons stepped through the doors of a nearby bank and confirmed. “The floor is covered ankle deep with worthless paper money,” the reporter wrote. “Here is the elegy of dashed enemy hopes—peso notes for the Philippines, guilders for the Dutch East Indies, shilling and pounds for Australia, rupees for India, $5 and $10 bills—for what? Hawaii or Alaska, maybe. Or maybe for the United States.”
Others who had lived in Manila before the war struggled to match up memories of the once-vibrant city with the new wrecked reality. “It was heartbreaking to inch along with one of the fighting outfits into buildings, hotels, offices, banks and homes in which you had stood freely and happily, meeting your friends, dining under slowly revolving fans,” wrote Royal Arch Gunnison, a reporter with Collier’s. “Today these places are either razed to the ground or they are so gutted by fire and so completely looted by the Japs that nothing but shattered memories and desolation remain.”
Accompanied by John Dos Passos, Gunnison explored homes littered with torn dinner jackets and slashed family portraits, personal mementos of peaceful times and lives destroyed in the fury of battle. Inside one such residence, as troops searched out a hidden enemy machine-gunner, Gunnison pushed open a door, dropping to the floor in fear of what he found. “There,” he wrote, “propped up in bed, on second glance, I saw a Jap soldier, dead—an automatic weapon across his lap, a hot-water bottle behind his head. A shell had burst against his window an hour or so before and had taken care of him.”
Like Gunnison, George Jones of the New York Times explored one of the few standing apartment buildings south of the river that overlooked the bay and the Manila Hotel. Without power, the elevators did not work, so he climbed the stairs. Inside a third-floor apartment, Jones found the floors covered with Japanese envelopes and shattered teacups. Glass crunched beneath his feet as he climbed up to another apartment. “Here we saw oriental and western clothing strewn on the floor,” he wrote, “drawers emptied, mattresses removed from beds, beautiful silverware and pewter thrown into a corner and phonograph records—strangely intact—scattered over the room. Farther up in another apartment we came across beautiful oriental furniture, richly carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Here the departure had been violent, for table legs and chair legs were broken and a statue of Buddha had been smashed against the floor.”
The windows framed a view of the bay, where Jones counted dozens of sunken ships, whose masts pointed like skeletal fingers at the smoky sky. To the north, he saw the Manila Hotel, still in enemy hands, as American forces crouched low and approached. “Block after ruined block marks the progress of the battle for Manila, and any building with intact walls stands defiantly alone in the midst of ashes and concrete rubble,” he wrote. “Horrible charred bodies lie unheeded along the streets and sometimes only a blackened grinning skull remains. Looking at them, one knew that Manila as we once knew it is dead. No victory parade can bring back old Manila.” MacArthur realized it, too, abandoning his celebratory plans. “I understand,” General Eichelberger wrote to his wife, “the big parade has been called off.”
MacArthur’s premature announcement of the capital’s liberation meant that news editors back in the United States had little interest in stories or broadcasts out of Manila. After all, according to the general, the battle had been won. That made stories out of Manila a tough sell for reporters in a busy war competing for precious airtime or front-page real estate. This de facto censorship infuriated journalists, prompting Bill Dunn to complain in vain about it to Eichelberger. MacArthur more actively censored the press after reading news accounts that described the death of Manila. The general ordered his press officer Col. LeGrande Diller to strike such phrases from any reporter’s story. “MacArthur was shattered by the holocaust,” headquarters staffer Paul Rogers recalled. “He had gone to great lengths in 1941 to prevent needless destruction of the city he loved. Now his own forces were killing it ruthlessly and methodically.”
Other senior commanders privately lamented the erroneous assumption that the enemy would abandon the capital—even though guerrilla reports before the battle had pointed to just such a scenario. “I do not believe anybody expected the Japs to make a house-to-house defense of Manila,” Eichelberger wrote to his wife. “They are raising hell up there.” In a follow-up letter four days later, he returned to the subject. “I must say that I never heard anybody predict that any such fight would ever take place,” he wrote. “We knew that a lot of defenses had been erected, but it was generally expected that the Japanese would declare Manila an open city or would evacuate.” General Fellers wrote to his wife that the fight for the capital had been for naught. “The long drawn-out battle was caused by a rather futile effort to save Manila and the civilian population,” he concluded. “If anything should happen to Tokyo, the Japanese have asked for it.”