“The old Walled City of Intramuros this morning was
a man-made hell.”
—GEORGE E. JONES,
NEW YORK TIMES, FEBRUARY 23, 1945
AMERICAN FORCES READIED AT DAWN ON FEBRUARY 23 FOR the assault on Intramuros. The ancient fortress that for more than three centuries had stood against Chinese, Dutch, and Portuguese invaders had become one of the last major strongholds for the Japanese in Manila. An estimated two thousand enemy troops occupied the 160-acre citadel, protected by two and a half miles of towering stone walls that rose in places as high as twenty-two feet. Japanese troops had all along prepared to make a final stand in the Walled City, eliminating an estimated four thousand male civilians in recent weeks who might pose a threat during the fight. MacArthur’s generals understood the challenges that awaited them. “The entire area,” one army report noted, “was medieval in structure and its defense combined the fortress of the Middle Ages with the fire power of modern weapons.”
In an effort to secure the northeast approaches to the Walled City, American troops the day before had seized Manila’s City Hall in what had proven a dogged fight as Japanese defenders repeatedly repelled the infantrymen. “Tremendous fire was placed on the target,” noted the 716th Tank Battalion report, “until the entire northeast corner of the four-story building collapsed.” Troops finally stormed City Hall with bazookas and flamethrowers, battling the enemy room by room before securing the municipal building at 2:50 p.m. and at a cost of 206 Japanese dead. A similar fight had played out nearby at the five-story General Post Office, where American forces trapped the last of the enemy in the basement. “The tedious process of eliminating this fanatical group with flamethrowers, burning oil, and demolition charges,” the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division’s report noted, “continued throughout the rest of the day.”
War planners expected another protracted fight for the Walled City. Civilian escapees had described elaborate tunnels the Japanese had dug to move troops throughout Intramuros and even within the stone walls. Escapees further relayed that most of the enemy’s fortifications aimed toward the south and the east, including tank traps, mines, and barbed wire designed to snare infantrymen. Complicating any fight, war planners realized, were the hordes of women and children, some of whom the Japanese had shanghaied to serve as human shields. Furthermore, many of the civilians, who had faced starvation even before the battle began, now hovered near death. In the hope of preventing unnecessary bloodshed, General Griswold had attempted days earlier to convince the Japanese to release the residents of the Walled City.
“Your situation is hopeless—your defeat inevitable,” the XIV Corps commander broadcast. “I offer you an honorable surrender.”
Only silence, however, answered him.
“So,” he wrote in his diary, “it is a fight to the death!”
To limit American casualties, the Sixth Army commander General Krueger again pleaded to use bombers, but MacArthur refused. “The use of air on a part of a city occupied by a friendly and allied population is unthinkable,” the general said. “The inaccuracy of this type of bombardment would result beyond question in the death of thousands of innocent civilians.” MacArthur’s decision frustrated his commanders, including Griswold, who rationalized the potential civilian deaths because the Japanese were already burning, shooting, and bayoneting thousands. “Horrid as it seems,” he wrote in his diary, “probably death from bombing would be more merciful.” Despite that, Griswold was loath to risk his troops. “I understand how he feels about bombing people—but it is being done all over the world—Poland, China, England, Germany, Italy—then why not here! War is never pretty,” he wrote. “I am frank to say I would sacrifice civilian Filipino lives under such circumstances to save the lives of my men. I feel quite bitter about this tonight.”
The plan for the seizure of Intramuros was multipronged, with assaults on two sides of the Walled City so as to throw the enemy off balance. Six days earlier on February 17, artillery had begun blasting openings in the north and northeastern walls, where Japanese fortifications were the weakest. The north proved particularly vulnerable; the enemy had concluded that the Pasig River would serve as a natural barrier to an invasion. The artillery attacks would build up to a ferocious hour-long bombardment shortly past daybreak on the morning of the assault that would be rivaled only by the pummeling of Lingayen Gulf six weeks earlier. Afterward troops with the 129th Infantry would paddle across the muddy river in boats, while soldiers with the 145th Infantry would charge overland from the General Post Office. The First Cavalry Brigade, meanwhile, would prevent any escape by the Japanese to the south or the west.
War planners had debated a nighttime assault but ultimately decided that in a dense urban environment, it would be easier and safer to coordinate the artillery and infantry during the daylight hours. The tides proved another concern. Crossing the river at high tide would have been ideal, making the off-loading of troops and equipment easier. But high tide that day would occur in the dark predawn hours and not again until the early afternoon. Commanders were reluctant to begin the assault so late in the day, leaving troops only a few hours of light. If Japanese defenses proved fierce and troops had to withdraw, doing so after dark could result in a disaster. “The element of surprise was not a factor of great importance in choosing the time of attack, for the ring about the Walled City was growing smaller day by day,” noted the XIV Corps report. “Furthermore, the enemy had been told that the American troops were coming.”
At seven-thirty a.m., as the sun inched skyward along the eastern horizon, American artillery opened fire on the Walled City. “The huge guns were jacked up on their supports to permit point-blank fire,” wrote headquarters staffer Paul Rogers. “The first rounds used were high-explosive shells. Then smoke and white phosphorous shells were sent over.” News reporters, many camped out in General Griswold’s command post atop a burned-out hotel just north of the Pasig River, watched the opening salvos. “I have witnessed naval bombardments,” reported Bill Dunn of CBS, “but nothing to match the concentrated fury of this barrage.” George Jones of the New York Times focused on the walls. “Forty feet thick at the bottom and 20 feet at the top, this century-old wall dissolved in great geysers of black smoke, showering rubble and shrapnel,” he wrote. “The air filled with smoke and dust and quickly Intramuros was obliterated from sight. The only thing to be seen through this curtain were flashes of exploding shells.”
Ten minutes passed.
Then twenty.
The guns still thundered, one after the other, each of the 120 artillery pieces an instrument in this morning’s symphony of destruction. In one hour, artillery would fire a staggering 7,896 rounds—a total of 185 tons of ordnance. That was combined with another nineteen hundred mortars. Every second of the bombardment saw an average of three shells fired, creating a continuous rolling thunder that rendered telephones worthless, forcing observers to fall back on visual communications. “The old soft stones,” recalled Major Henne, “were no match for the gunpowder of modern artillery.”
For the refugees held hostage inside the Walled City, the bombardment was pure terror, like being trapped underneath a roaring freight train. Shells pounded the ancient walls, pulverizing the stone and filling the air with thick dust, making it hard not only to see but to breathe. Inside the dark and smoky San Agustin, the Japanese forced refugees to drag all the furniture out of the corridors. Troops mounted a machine gun at the front door and passed out grenades, while Formosan guards attached bayonets to bamboo poles. Over in the ruins of Santa Rosa College, flying shrapnel wounded and killed several refugees. “We could not even see each other because of the smoke,” said Benita Lahoz. “We thought that we were all going to die.” Father Belarmino de Celis, who had escaped being buried alive, huddled inside the Department of Justice Building, choking on dust as the windows, walls, and doors began to collapse around him. “The firing became intense,” he later said. “It seemed a very inferno.”
At eight-thirty a.m. a cloud of red smoke rose over the south wall of Intramuros, the signal for the artillery attack to end and the ground assault to begin. “The ensuing silence,” Dunn recalled, “seemed even louder than the bombardment.”
“Now there’s nothing more I can do but sweat,” Griswold told Dunn. “I’ve given them all I’ve got and they’re under a higher command.”
Down below, the assault boats pushed away from the muddy bank to begin the crossing. All eyes focused on the troops, the sun reflecting off the wet paddles. “It was a breathless moment,” Dunn recalled. “Not a shot was fired at them,” remarked Jones of the New York Times. “The bombardment had been a tremendous success.”
At the same time troops began to cross the river, artillerymen fired smoke mortars in front of the Legislature, Agriculture, and Finance buildings—all in Japanese hands—so as to prevent any counterattacks on the ground forces. Infantrymen charged from the General Post Office, Metropolitan Theater, and City Hall, darting across the burned and pockmarked golf course to reach the eastern wall at 8:33 a.m. Artillerymen laid down a heavy concentration of smoke across the middle of the Walled City, blocking any enemy view of where troops entered and preventing reinforcements.
At 8:36 a.m., troops debarked from the assault boats and scrambled up the bank and over the rubble into the Walled City. “A lone sniper under Jones Bridge opened up with a machine gun and was immediately silenced. It was the only opposition,” Dunn reported. “As dazed, half crazed civilians moved out of the north wall toward the boats, our troops moved in and the fighting within the walls began.”
Dunn watched Griswold, who stood beside him, wipe the sweat from his hands and face. “God bless them!” the general muttered. “God bless them!”
The Americans pushed into the Walled City, using flamethrowers, grenades, and bazookas to destroy enemy pillboxes. “Retaking the Intramuros,” one report noted, “developed into a small-arms duel.” Jones witnessed the same. “A short rattle of machine guns and sharp clash of rifles,” the reporter wrote, “told the story of the only opposition that had survived the bombardment—the greatest and heaviest seen and heard in Manila.” Behind the walls, troops found a wasted city, whose narrow streets and alleys were now packed with the rubble of homes, shops, and churches, forcing the infantrymen to pick through the debris. Father Belarmino de Celis, who was nearby in the Department of Justice Building, heard the advancing troops.
“Come on, come out,” one of the soldiers shouted.
“I knew by the voice and the manner of speaking that it was truly an American—and my joy knew no bounds,” he later said.
The exhausted priest limped outside, leaning against one of the walls. He saw several nuns from the Santa Clara Convent emerge as well. Fires and artillery had reduced the convent to ruins, forcing nearly a dozen clergy to hide in the basement. Japanese patrols had missed the few stragglers, who had survived off rice and water, unsure in the dark underground of how much time had passed. Father Belarmino told the Americans where to find his companion Julio Rocamora, the only other survivor from the air raid shelter. The priest watched troops carry him out on a stretcher.
Infantrymen opened a can of meat for the refugees and gave them chocolate and water before loading them in assault boats and sending them across the river. Jones watched the first boats arrive, noting the bare feet and bloodstained habits of the nuns, who clutched photographs, rosaries, and crucifixes. The sisters stepped onto the north bank of the river and fell to their knees in prayer. “The soldiers,” Jones wrote, “bared their heads in embarrassment, unable to face such a pathetic scene.”
Other civilians arrived in later boats, including one man who clung to his wife with one arm and held his twelve-month-old daughter in the other. “I don’t know where my sister is,” he repeated.
Sporadic street fighting erupted as the Americans pressed deeper into the Walled City. Staff Sgt. Maynard Mahan ducked behind a concrete block, while Japanese rounds buzzed overhead. He lit a cigarette and waited, closing his eyes for a break as he inhaled. A mortar exploded nearby, raining stone down around him. He realized then that his cigarette had vanished, stolen by a piece of flying shrapnel. “Damn it,” he shouted. “That was my last butt.”
Around eleven a.m. troops reached the scorched ruins of Santa Rosa College. There among the makeshift shelters made of burned timbers and corrugated sheets of metal, soldiers discovered eleven-year-old Rosalinda Andoy, whom the Japanese had bayoneted thirty-eight times. Nurses in the ruins had bandaged her wounds, including the hole in her stomach that had exposed her intestines. Rosalinda had miraculously survived twelve days. Another unlikely survivor was Rosa Calalang. Convinced she would die, nurses had summoned a priest to hear her last confession, yet she, too, had lived. Soldiers this morning hustled those who could walk out to the foot of the Jones Bridge, while litter bearers came for the wounded, carrying them to waiting ambulances.
On a later sweep through the ruins, troops heard an unmistakable sound. “That sounds like a baby!” one announced.
The Americans began tearing apart the rubble. Underneath the ruins of a staircase, they found a recently deceased mother still clutching an infant girl to her breast. The soldiers pried the baby free and carried her to a battalion aid station, where medics administered blood plasma and warm broth. Others bathed her and swaddled her in fresh clothes made from an old pair of military fatigues. Medics turned her over to civilian authorities. “How do you like that?” Staff Sgt. Harry Bulfer complained. “We get a real souvenir and right away we have to give it up. What an army!”
A few blocks away at San Agustin Church, refugee leader Dr. Sebastian Siguenza told the others it was no longer safe. Not only had the Japanese fortified the church, but troops now fired mortars from the remains of the tower and the rear of the convent, making the entire property a potential target of American artillery. “We had better leave this place,” he informed the others.
Refugees pleaded with the officers to allow them to leave. The Japanese finally relented, ordering those who were able to line up single file by a side door. The refugees gathered up small bundles of food and prepared to leave. Siguenza fastened a white flag to a pole. The Japanese opened the door just wide enough to allow one person out at a time. The doctor led the group, each step taking them farther away from the hellhole of San Agustin, where unburied bodies filled several wheelbarrows on the patio.
“Don’t be afraid,” Siguenza told the others. “Go peacefully.”
The refugees navigated the debris-cluttered streets, while smoke and dust wafted through the air. Siguenza pushed ahead, flag gripped in his hand.
“We are Filipinos!” the refugees cried out.
A Japanese rifle roared.
Siguenza toppled over dead.
Some of the refugees wanted to turn back.
But back to what—a squalid church filled with dead Filipinos and doomed Japanese? Or should the group press ahead, hoping to reach the Americans?
“Go forward,” someone shouted. “Walk straight ahead.”
Isabelita Moreno reached down and grabbed the flag from the rubble beside Siguenza’s body, leading the group. “She too, was shot,” Lourdes Lecaroz later testified. “Other people were shot, both women and children. It was terrible.”
Yet the refugees pressed on despite Japanese sniper fire, eventually reaching Letran College. Up ahead in the road rumbled a tank: safety at last. “American soldiers embraced us,” Mary Tormey recalled. “We walked out from there.”
American forces hurried to erect a rudimentary footbridge over the river made of pontoons and boards to help with the outward flow of refugees, a scene captured by Jones in his dispatch that day. “Over it streamed what was left of the civilian population of Intramuros. Those who weren’t emaciated from starvation bore wounds and cuts from bullets,” he wrote. “At intervals in this pitiful procession came Chinese carrying litters on which lay sick, wounded or dying men, women and children. But this apparently unending column was merely an indication of the horror of Intramuros.”
Thirty-five-year-old Henry Keys, a correspondent with the London Daily Express, would be one of the first reporters to experience the horror of the Walled City. “Come along,” one lieutenant told him, “if you really want to see something.”
Keys set off that afternoon with the officer and several litter bearers to visit San Agustin, navigating the narrow and mined streets. The only occupants left inside the church were the dead and those too wounded to escape. In one courtyard, around a battered statue, Keys saw shelters made of corrugated iron. “I knelt down and I looked inside and the first thing I saw was a dead girl,” he said. “One of her feet was crushed to pulp and her mouth was broken and a lot of blood had come from it.”
Keys followed the lieutenant, passing behind the statue and into the columned veranda of the convent. He looked to the right and saw the emaciated body of a kneeling boy, a bullet hole through the base of his skull. To his left, Keys noted a pile of bloodied bodies, a tangle of arms, legs and torsos, many showing stab and shrapnel wounds. A layer of gray ash had settled over everything, like a dusting of snow.
The reporter continued deeper into this death chamber, where he found another lieutenant kneeling next to a wounded young woman. Keys could see that her jaw had been shattered, likely smashed, he suspected, by a Japanese rifle butt. “She bore other wounds on her body and was barely breathing,” Keys later testified. “The lieutenant gently patted her lips and was dropping water into her mouth.”
In another nearby room an enlisted man hovered over a beautiful young woman, her legs covered up by a blanket. “Look at this!” the soldier said.
The enlisted man lifted the blanket. Keys let his eyes wander down, stunned to see two bloody stumps tied with what appeared to be handkerchiefs.
“She told us that a Jap hacked her feet off,” the soldier said.
The scene made him feel sick. The reporter looked away, only to spot a dead Japanese soldier nearby on the ground. The enemy’s remains, unlike all the rest, were not mutilated. “He was the only decent, whole piece of humanity in the place; the only clean piece of humanity,” Keys said. “He was dressed in a white singlet on the shirt and some pants. He was lying there like an animal and I was told that he had been there some weeks, having been brought in when he was ill and cared for by the nuns.”
Keys walked back out into the corridor.
“Come here!” the lieutenant called. “This is alive!”
On the ground amid the toppled bricks and crumbled mortar, he saw a girl so emaciated that she did not look human. She lay still as though dead, but every so often her entire body shuddered. “The flies were all over her as they were all over all these other wounded and dead,” Keys said. “We brushed them away.”
The reporter had seen more than enough. He returned to the footbridge, instructing a few litter bearers to go retrieve the young woman with the severed feet. A little while later, the men returned, carrying her. As she passed, Keys noted she held up her left hand and with two fingers flashed the victory sign.
The few remaining Japanese troops—some discovered dressed in American uniforms and sporting U.S. rifles—retreated behind the towering walls of Fort Santiago. American soldiers pursued them, battling them around the burning remnants of the ancient citadel. “Every building,” said Capt. David Conner, “was completely gutted and destroyed by fire and bombing.” Beyond the fires, troops found yet more scenes of horror, including a body hanging by the neck from a wire, a look of extreme pain and terror frozen on the face. “The hands,” Conner said, “were clutching the wire.”
The Americans found only three refugee survivors, all former patients from San Juan de Dios Hospital that the Japanese had grabbed from the ruins of Santa Rosa College. Two of them proved so badly injured that neither could speak, but the third related his story. “He said that he had a little rice two weeks ago,” said Tech Sgt. Frank Pitchek. “Since that time he had been eating bugs and drinking his own urine.”
The Japanese vanished underground into Fort Santiago’s labyrinth of tunnels and damp dungeons, forcing the Americans to ferret them out. “Every thinkable method was employed including gasoline and oil,” noted one Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division report. “It was effective for when things cooled and men entered these chambers, Japs were found piled high having suffered just as horrible a death as they inflicted on the thousands of innocent civilians they massacred.”
The battle for Intramuros was finally over.
Four hundred enemy dead were counted just inside Fort Santiago. In recent weeks, American soldiers had grown accustomed to witnessing the barbarity of Japanese massacres. But even those could not prepare them for what they found inside Fort Santiago. “When the Japanese realized that Manila was lost,” one report noted, “they engaged in a final orgy of mass murder by shooting, bayonetting and burning alive of all prisoners remaining inside the fort.” As the buildings still smoldered, American soldiers swept the fort, where Japanese troops at the start of the battle had executed thousands of Filipino males. Infantrymen discovered one dungeon that appeared to have been used as a crematorium. “There were ashes and bones scattered on the floor,” Conner recalled, “and the entrance to the dungeon was badly blackened and charred.”
In the frenetic final days of the battle, the enemy had failed to torch all the evidence of war crimes. In a room that measured twelve by fifteen feet, U.S. soldiers found a warehouse of the dead. “These bodies were piled on each other, in some places four deep,” recalled Maj. Frank Middelberg. “All of their feet pointed to the only doorway into the room. I noted that their hands were tied behind their backs.” Staff Sgt. Jacob Klein likewise witnessed the scene. “The bodies, shriveled and bony, were at least partially clothed,” Klein later testified in an affidavit. “They were blood-spattered and bullet-riddled and some showed signs of having been bayonetted.”
Eleven more dead were found in a nearby room and hall, all shot in the back; thirty others were located in a stone building, many seared by fire. “Bodies in the rear part of the building appeared to have been placed side by side, some face up and some face down,” stated one report. “Near the doorway the bodies were in a state of disorder, being strewn over each other in a grotesque mass. It appeared the bodies nearer the only doorway had been thrown inside indiscriminately and hurriedly.”
None of this compared to what awaited troops underground.
A horrid stench of decay drew soldiers down the damp stone steps into the dungeons in the northwest corner of the fort near the Pasig River. There the troops faced a set of steel doors. “These double doors were bolted from the outside by means of an ancient-type one inch steel bar that was operated by means of a long steel handle,” one report said. “It had been further secured by wrapping lengths of wire so that the bolt could not be moved.” The concussions from the artillery had jammed the door. “Some enlisted men assisting me cut the wire to the boltlike latch,” recalled Middelberg. “With considerable effort, we were able to slide the bolt and kick open the door. As the doors opened a terrific stench seemed to blast from the inside.”
Several dozen bodies were piled near the front door, but those proved only a prelude to the horror. The darkened dungeon was filled with hundreds of dead, layered several deep. The decomposition of so many had heated the air inside the dungeon and filled it with the smell of ammonia. “So thick were the walls and roof that the room had not been disturbed on the inside by artillery or bombing,” one report stated. “Those near the entrance were piled up and from their positions indicated they had died in an instinctive effort to go toward the only exit despite the fact it was closed.”
The army’s report noted that unlike the other rooms full of the dead, all of whom showed signs of being mercifully shot or bayoneted, evidence in the dungeon made this “a more diabolical, cruel and premeditated atrocity than the others.” Middelberg summed it up in his affidavit. “All indications,” he said, “pointed to the fact that the civilians were locked in the cell, the steel door bolted and left to die of starvation.” The medical officer agreed; the bodies in effect had been mummified. “The starved and dehydrated condition of the people before death,” the investigative report noted, “would account for the fact their bodies were not bloated and swelled when found.”
The grim scene made it impossible for Americans to calculate a precise tally of the dead. The 129th Infantry report estimated the dungeon held about three hundred bodies. Major Binkley, the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division’s sanitary inspector, put the tally at five hundred, while a Manila undertaker later estimated more than a thousand. In the end, no one would ever know for certain. “The total number of bodies could not have been ascertained because they were piled several deep,” testified Col. John Frederick, commander of the 129th Infantry Regiment. “The stench from the bodies was virtually unbearable and the stage of decomposition precluded detailed investigation.”
For General Griswold, who had watched the fight from a battered hotel north of the Pasig, the successful capture of the Walled City came at the relatively low cost of twenty-five Americans killed and 265 wounded. He could now focus on the few remaining government buildings that ringed the Walled City and housed Admiral Iwabuchi and the last of his men. “God has been good to me this day—and I am very grateful,” the XIV Corps commander wrote in his diary. “I am sure that the battle for Manila will soon be history. It has been a great strain and responsibility.”
AS AMERICAN FORCES BATTLED for the Walled City on February 23, MacArthur prepared to return to the Manila Hotel, where soldiers wrapped up the fight for the general’s old home. It had been a hectic day for American forces. Not only had the infantry assaulted Intramuros, but forty miles south of Manila, soldiers had stormed the internment camp at Los Baños. In a daring seven a.m. raid timed to catch the Japanese during morning calisthenics, troops killed 243 guards and rescued 2,147 internees, liberating the last of the four Manila area prisoner of war and internment camps.
Throughout the fight for the capital, MacArthur had kept tabs on the fate of the Manila Hotel, information he dutifully cabled to his anxious wife back in Australia. The family had fled in such a hurry three years earlier that MacArthur had been forced to abandon almost forty boxes of medals, decorations, and insignias along with three shotguns, a dozen sets of cufflinks and watches, and his wardrobe of 216 linen and silk handkerchiefs. Jean had left behind five pearl necklaces, more than a dozen brooches, and a locket with hair. Even young Arthur had been forced to surrender his beloved toys, from drums and trumpets to his play tank, fire engine, and train set.
On February 14 the general had welcomed the news of the recovery of his father’s silver, which the Japanese ambassador had planned to spirit out of Manila. One of the servants in the ambassador’s home had recognized Arthur MacArthur’s name engraved on the top of the silver chest. During the ambassador’s hurried evacuation, the servant hid the chest, which included the original 1909 invoice from Tiffany.
U.S. soldiers later found another stash of the family’s silver, which had been labeled as medical supplies. “House still unharmed but not yet in our hands,” MacArthur cabled his wife on February 16. “Have recovered all of our silver which had been removed from the hotel to the Watson Building near Malacañan, apparently prepared for shipment to Japan.” The general closed: “Be Patient.”
Two days later, after artillery observers at the National City Bank of New York spotted the Japanese troops hoisting ammunition up to a third-floor balcony, the grand hotel had become a target. “I saw the Manila Hotel in flames,” General Fellers wrote to his wife. “It was a tragic fight. Flames thousands of feet high.”
MacArthur had relayed the news to Jean. “Do not—repeat not—be too distressed over the house,” he cabled “It was a fitting end for our soldier home.”
The general had prepared Jean for the worst though he had personally remained optimistic he might be able to salvage at least some of the many belongings the family had left behind when forced to escape to Corregidor at the start of the war.
At six a.m. on February 23, MacArthur departed his headquarters for the trip into Manila, accompanied by his aides colonels Roger Egeberg, Lloyd Lehrbas, and Andres Soriano. The general watched the fighting for the Walled City and visited the High Commissioner’s Residence and the Army and Navy Club, both of which the Americans had secured just a few days earlier. By eleven-thirty a.m. that Friday, MacArthur looked across the wide-open Luneta Park at the Manila Hotel. At this distance, the damage appeared minimal. The facade around some of the upper windows was scorched, but the five-story hotel still stood intact, a prominent feature on the city’s skyline.
Five hundred yards was all that separated the general from the home he had made with Jean and their young son Arthur, the place where for the first time in his life he had escaped the loneliness that had long plagued him. There in his penthouse he had surrounded himself with mementos of his rich family history and awards of a successful life, from his father’s artifacts from the Civil War to his own medals earned on the muddy battlefields of France. He had spent evenings in his grand library surrounded by the works of William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, and Joseph Conrad, enjoyed Manila’s famous sunsets over the bay from the terrace, and played with Erector Sets on the floor of his son’s playroom. And now, after living in exile for three years, one month and thirty days, MacArthur was at last coming home.
American troops only the day before had fought a ferocious battle to retake the hotel as Japanese troops retreated into the basement. “300 lbs explosive plus flame throwers have failed to clear them out,” one report noted. A few hours later, however, dogged American soldiers killed the last of the enemy and captured the famous landmark.
Fighting remained fierce throughout the morning around the hotel. Machine guns rattled, and mortars rained down. MacArthur’s sedan could not make it across the Luneta, forcing him out on foot to make the last dash across the park accompanied by cavalrymen.
He was close.
So close now.
Suddenly his home erupted in flames. Japanese troops had likely reentered the hotel the night before—as had often proven the case throughout the battle—and torched his residence. “I watched,” MacArthur wrote, “with indescribable feelings, the destruction of my fine military library, my souvenirs, my personal belongings of a lifetime.”
Troops charged the hotel, climbing through the rubble and ash toward the penthouse with the general in tow, flanked by soldiers armed with submachine guns. Gunfire erupted as the Americans passed every floor, littering the landings with dead Japanese. “The higher the stairs, the warmer the bodies were,” Egeberg recalled. “I was afraid one of them might be just wounded, or shamming.”
Finally MacArthur reached his home. A dead Japanese colonel sprawled across the threshold, surrounded by the emperor’s two shattered vases that Jean had placed by the door in hopes that the enemy might spare the home. She had sadly been wrong. “Nothing was left,” MacArthur noted, “but ashes.” Egeberg explored the ruins of the home. “The books were still on the bookshelves,” he said. “You could read the titles on their spines, but when you touched them, they just disintegrated.”
A young lieutenant stood over the dead Japanese colonel; smoke wafted from the barrel of the American’s gun, and a smile stretched across his face.
“Nice going, Chief,” he said to MacArthur.
“But there was nothing nice about it to me,” the general later said. “I was tasting to the last acid dregs the bitterness of a devastated and beloved home.”