“The Japs have murdered wholesale and retail. To call
them beasts would be to slander the beasts; to call
them fiends would be to slander the fiends.”
—JOHN OSBORN,
LETTER, FEBRUARY 25, 1945
GEN. DOUGLAS MACARTHUR DEPARTED HIS HEADQUARTERS at eight a.m. on February 27 for another trip down to Manila. This morning he planned to officially hand over power to Philippine president Sergio Osmeña in a ceremony at Malacañan Palace. The sixty-six-year-old Osmeña had served as the nation’s vice president under Manuel Quezon when the war began. He had evacuated to Corregidor on Christmas Eve 1941, eventually escaped via submarine and plane to Australia, and later settled in Washington, home of the exiled Philippine government. Quezon’s death had elevated Osmeña to president, who returned to the Philippines alongside MacArthur.
The windows of the dark sedan framed a view of the desolation where desperate residents hawked anything to survive, from bootleg whiskey to 1941 magazines, offering a nostalgic snapshot of life before the war. “As I passed through the streets with their burned-out piles of rubble,” MacArthur recalled, “the air still filled with the stench of decaying unburied dead, the tall and stately trees that had been the mark of a gracious city were nothing but ugly scrubs pointing broken fingers at the sky. Once-famous buildings were now shells. The street signs and familiar landmarks were gone. One moved by sense of direction rather than by sight.”
The Battle of Manila still dragged on, though the fury waned. American forces had isolated Admiral Iwabuchi and the last of his troops, committed to fight to the death in several buildings that rimmed Intramuros. In the wrecked city, Malacañan Palace stood in comparatively good shape. Much of the damage to the presidential home was the work of American troops, hunting hidden treasures of the president Jose Laurel. “It had scarcely been touched by the war and its carved woodwork, crystal chandeliers, paintings, furniture, rugs and hangings were all intact,” recalled Lt. Gen. George Kenney, MacArthur’s air commander. “It was a real oasis in the midst of desolation.”
An American band kicked off the morning’s ceremony with “Ruffles and Flourishes” before MacArthur entered the state reception room through the crimson-brocaded draperies and strode across the thick, flowered rug. With his hat off and hair slicked in a part, MacArthur stepped up to a lectern draped in blue velvet and adorned with reporter microphones. Camera floodlights illuminated him. Behind him stood colonels Roger Egeberg, Lloyd Lehrbas, Lt. Col. Andres Soriano, and Brig. Gen. Basilio Valdes, the Philippine Army’s chief of staff whose own brother was murdered by the Japanese in the opening days of the battle. Steps away stood President Osmeña, members of his cabinet, and spouses, including the first lady, who wore a gauzy green dress and carried orange and yellow chrysanthemums.
In this palatial residence where MacArthur’s father had governed almost a half-century earlier—and from whose windows he could see the smoldering ruins of his own home across the river—the general reflected on his deep personal ties to Manila. “For me it was a soul-wrenching moment. Nearly every surviving figure of the Philippines was there, but it was the ghosts of the past—the men who used to be—who filled my thoughts,” MacArthur later wrote. “In this city, my mother had died, my wife had been courted, my son had been born; here, before just such a gathering as this, not so long ago, I had received the baton of a Field Marshal of the Philippine Army.”
“Mr. President,” he began, occasionally glancing at his notes, “more than three years have elapsed—years of bitterness, struggle and sacrifice—since I withdrew our forces and installation from this beautiful city that, open and undefended, its churches, monuments, and cultural centers might, in accordance with the rules of warfare, be spared the violence of military ravage. The enemy would not have it so, and much that I sought to preserve has been unnecessarily destroyed by his desperate action at bay—but by these ashes he has wantonly fixed the future pattern of his own doom.”
MacArthur went on in his short speech, which totaled fewer than five hundred words, to praise America’s allies who had helped battle the Japanese and make his long-awaited promise to return to the Philippines a reality. “On behalf of my government, I now solemnly declare, Mr. President, the full powers and responsibilities under the Constitution restored to the Commonwealth whose seat is here reestablished as provided by law,” he said. “Your capital city, cruelly punished though it be—”
The general’s voice broke, and he stopped. “His bronze features,” recalled Brig. Gen. Courtney Whitney, “blanched and whitened.” Whitney struggled to maintain his own composure. Tears filled MacArthur’s eyes. “I could not go on,” he later wrote. “To others it might have seemed my moment of victory and monumental personal acclaim, but to me it seemed only the culmination of a panorama of physical and spiritual disaster. It had killed something inside me to see my men die.” That statement would later draw fire from some Filipinos, who criticized MacArthur for singling out American war dead but making no mention of the untold slain civilians.
MacArthur regained his composure and finished his remarks: “has regained its rightful place—citadel of democracy in the East.”
The silver-haired Osmeña, dressed in military khaki, immediately remedied MacArthur’s lapse. “We mourn the destruction of our once beautiful capital city of Manila and the murder of thousands of innocent people by the Japanese vandals,” he said. “To General MacArthur, this campaign has been a crusade. Friend and defender of our race, he never lost faith in the spiritual strength of our people.”
“As Osmeña began speaking,” Time correspondent Bill Gray cabled his editors, “MacArthur seemingly sincerely embarrassed by tears, stepped out of the room and pulled himself together behind the drapes before returning.”
After the ceremony, MacArthur, his earlier embarrassment replaced by a broad smile, kissed First Lady Esperanza Osmeña on her left cheek. “I am so glad,” he told her, “you’re home.”
MACARTHUR HAD ABANDONED his plans for a victory parade through Manila, but he refused to forgo the opportunity to return to Corregidor, going so far as to borrow four patrol-torpedo boats from the navy to complete his symbolic redemption. He was joined the morning of March 2 by eleven of the fifteen original staffers who had evacuated with him on that dark night three years earlier. With his trademark Ray Bans on and his officer’s cap pulled low to block out the sun, MacArthur climbed aboard PT-373, christened “Hatches” after its canine mascot. “So this is the 373. I left on the 41,” MacArthur told to the boat’s skipper. “It has been a long time.”
Lt. Joseph Roberts pulled away from Pier 2 with MacArthur perched at the bow. Around him on deck stood General Krueger, Chief of Staff Dick Sutherland, military aide Carlos Romulo, and Navy Vice Adm. Daniel Barbey. The other three boats ferrying the rest of MacArthur’s aides fell in line astern. “We had departed in the darkness of a somber night,” the general recalled. “We came back in the sunlight of a new day.” Out in the bay, MacArthur settled into a deck chair. The last time he made the voyage from Manila to Corregidor was Christmas Eve 1941, the night he had buried his head in his hands as he evacuated the capital, the city on fire behind him. “Once the PTs were on their course,” Barbey later wrote, “he hardly took his eyes off the blue silhouette of the island, lighter in color than the thirty miles of water ahead.”
Some six thousand Japanese troops had holed up on Corregidor as the Battle of Manila raged just across the bay. MacArthur’s air commander George Kenney had proposed the general pound Corregidor and then let paratroops seize it.
“Go ahead,” MacArthur told him.
The 1,735-acre island suffered some of the most concentrated shelling and bombing of the Pacific War, first from the Japanese, then from the Americans. From January 23 through February 16, 1945, the Fifth Air Force flew 2,028 sorties against the Rock, pummeling it with 3,163 tons of bombs. MacArthur’s forces had followed up the bombardment by dropping two thousand paratroopers atop Corregidor at eight-thirty a.m. on February 16. Another thousand troops assaulted the island by boat. “The fight for the small island,” one army report noted, “was fast, vicious and bloody.”
U.S. soldiers armed with white phosphorous grenades, satchel bombs, and flamethrowers had to destroy Japanese troops hiding in tunnels and caves. The violence was such that one rattled enemy soldier fled the cave, bleeding from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Another time nine Japanese troops, all screaming and on fire, charged out of a cave. “In several instances,” the Sixth Army’s report noted, “the enemy resorted to mass self destruction.” American troops were not immune to the horror. “I sat down on a rock and burst out crying,” one medic said. “I couldn’t stop myself and didn’t even want to. I had seen more than a man could stand and still stay normal.”
MacArthur stepped onto Corregidor’s blasted cement dock around ten this March morning, pausing to let his eyes roam over the scorched rock. War had transformed this once-lush tropical island into a barren wasteland of rock, rubble, and rebar. All that remained of the verdant jungle and foliage that had blanketed the hills was the burned stubble of tree stumps. The bombing had managed even to eradicate color from the island, leaving only a pallet of brown, beige, and gray. “Corregidor,” MacArthur told Kenney, “is living proof that the day of the fixed fortress is over.”
The general made his way off the dock and into the front seat of a jeep for a tour of the Rock. “Malinta Hill, where the tunnels in which MacArthur and his staff worked during the early stages of the fighting on Bataan and Corregidor, was almost unrecognizable,” wrote Associated Press reporter Dean Schedler. “The General walked from his jeep and peered into the entrance, while soldiers with machine guns kept the guns trained against possible enemy sniper fire.” MacArthur stumbled at one point over the charred skull of a Japanese soldier. “They made it tough for us,” the general said as he turned the skull over, “but it was a lot tougher for them.”
MacArthur likewise visited Battery Wheeler and the destroyed Administration Building, wading through ankle-deep debris for a glimpse of his old office, now redecorated with a gaping shell hole over the area where his desk once sat. “The odor of long dead Japanese,” wrote George Jones of the New York Times, “permeated the route of the general’s itinerary.” Just as bad as the smell were the large bluebottle flies that swarmed the island, flies that had grown fat feasting on a buffet of dead. “They were so thick,” one lieutenant griped, “that they showed up in aerial photos.” MacArthur returned to the cement ruins of one of the houses he had occupied years earlier.
“I am home again,” reporters heard him murmur.
The jeeps began the final ascent up Corregidor to what was known as Topside, the highest point on the island that towered more than six hundred feet above sea level. “On the way up the hill we had passed details of soldiers who were disposing of the Japanese dead,” recalled headquarters staffer Paul Rogers. “The bodies had been piled into square pyres. I watched as soldiers poured gasoline on the bodies and then threw a match. The bodies burned like logs. The stench of burning flesh was added to the stench of decaying flesh still lying in the brush and debris. There was no exhilaration, just revulsion.”
At eleven-thirty a.m. MacArthur’s entourage reached Topside. Bulldozers had cleared the rubble around the parade ground’s flagpole made from an old ship’s mast, which was bent and pockmarked from shrapnel. The blasted remains of the Topside Barracks loomed in the background, while the occasional rifle crack echoed in the distance. “Corregidor’s dusty heights were festooned with red, white, blue, and the green and brown camouflaged parachutes of paratroopers who made the initial landing,” Time magazine’s Bill Gray observed. “Many chutes still hung on gaunt, broken limbs of trees or were snagged in dead foliage.” Thirty-three-year-old Col. George Jones, the 1936 West Point graduate who commanded the Rock Force, stood in front of several hundred American troops, many exhausted and clad in bandages from the fight.
“Sir,” Jones said, saluting, “I present to you Fortress Corregidor.”
“The capture of Corregidor was one of the most brilliant operations in military history,” MacArthur told Jones. “I see the old flag pole still stands. Have your troops hoist the colors to its peak and let no enemy ever haul them down again.”
Buglers began to play as the flag rose up the pole.
“Colonel,” MacArthur said afterward, “my heartiest congratulations.”
THE BATTLE OF MANILA was nearing its end. The seizure of the Walled City had left only three major strongpoints held by the Japanese—the Legislature, Agriculture, and Finance buildings, all just a few hundred yards east of Intramuros. The three neighboring structures formed a triangle, bound by San Luis and Padre Burgos streets and Taft Avenue. Not only had architects designed the concrete structures to withstand typhoons and even earthquakes, but the surrounding parks and wide streets promised to make a direct assault perilous. “The buildings had been laboriously converted by the Japanese into individual fortresses of the most formidable type with sandbagged gun emplacements and barricades in the doors and windows covering all approaches to each building as well as adjacent ones,” according to a XIV Corps analysis. “Machine guns within the buildings themselves were sited to fire down corridors, stairways, and even inside rooms.”
Unlike earlier battles, there were no civilians trapped inside, only an estimated seven hundred Japanese marines under the command of Iwabuchi: three hundred in the Finance Building and two hundred in each of the others, the last of the admiral’s Central Force. War planners had debated starving Iwabuchi out but ultimately ruled against it. The enemy was well provisioned, meaning such a siege could stretch out for weeks or longer. Furthermore, the location of the buildings in the heart of Manila meant snipers could continue to be a menace, a reality that would force the United States to cordon off several blocks and hinder clean-up efforts. The army had no choice but to hammer the Japanese with artillery and send in troops. The 148th Infantry would take the Legislature and Finance buildings, while the Fifth Cavalry would seize the Agriculture Building. “The reduction of these buildings was effected concurrently,” noted the XIV Corps report. “Each represented fierce floor to floor, room to room, and hand to hand fighting.”
The assault kicked off with a ferocious artillery bombardment, sighting the powerful Long Toms on the elegant buildings that had stood as symbols of America’s nearly half-century of influence on the islands. Of the three, the Legislature was the tallest, rising six stories above Padre Burgos Street and flanked by two four-story wings, while the Finance and Agriculture buildings were both five-story trapezoids, each built around internal courtyards. The heavy-caliber Long Toms packed a much greater punch than the smaller guns of tanks and tank destroyers, but artillerymen soon realized that when firing at point-blank range—at times as close as 150 yards—projectiles ricocheted or overshot the targets, landing among friendly troops. General Beightler of the Thirty-Seventh Infantry marveled at the destruction. “We made a churned-up pile of dust and scrap out of the imposing, classic government buildings.”
At five p.m. on February 25, two days after the assault on Intramuros, U.S. forces paused to broadcast a message to the Japanese troops holed up inside, including Iwabuchi who planned to make his final stand in the Agriculture Building:
Your life is yours to take or to keep as you desire, but is it true loyalty to the Emperor to throw away your life for a cause that is now hopeless?
Fate has given you three choices:
1. You can commit suicide.
2. You can hold out a few minutes and then be blown to dust.
3. You may come to an honorable understanding with us and live to serve the new Japan when the war is over.
If you surrender to us you will not be humiliated or disgraced. Our troops will not fire for thirty minutes during which time you may come over to us.
All eyes focused on the buildings. “The ranks were strained and tense as the thirty minute period of grace ended,” observed the Fifth Cavalry report. “None of the defenders gave up, and our troops were ready for any attempted treachery.”
Infantrymen stormed the rear of the Legislature Building the following morning at nine a.m., securing the first floor of the north wing and the first and second floors of the main structure. Japanese marines hunkered down in pillboxes set up in corridors and rooms poured lead on the infantrymen, killing two and wounding another fifty-two. The battle ground to a halt after five hours. To fight on only guaranteed more casualties. Mortar teams laid down a smoke screen, allowing the men to retreat. Artillery picked up the fight, pounding the north and south wings, leaving a scene best described by the army’s historian, Robert Ross Smith: “Only the battered central portion, roofless and gutted, still stood above its wings like a ghost arising from between toppled tombstones.”
At two p.m. on February 27, American troops assaulted what was left of the Legislature Building. By six p.m. infantrymen secured all but a few tunnels and dugouts in the basement, a job that officially ended at noon the following day.
The cavalry meanwhile pummeled the nearby Agriculture Building, where Iwabuchi directed the last of his marines. Initially he implored his troops to fight to the death, as evidenced by his directive, which Lt. Hoichiro Miyazawa recorded in his diary. “If we run out of bullets we will use grenades,” the admiral told his men. “If we run out of grenades, we will cut down the enemy with swords; if we break our swords, we will kill them by sinking our teeth in their throats.”
But Iwabuchi’s vigor withered under the onslaught of America’s merciless guns, which pulverized the columns and ripped gaping wounds in the concrete walls around him, exposing the building’s sinuous veins of rebar. To glimpse his own fate, Iwabuchi needed only to look west, where American artillery had reduced the ancient walls of Intramuros to gravel piles and killed Colonel Noguchi and the remnants of his Northern Force. The situation inside the Agriculture Building deteriorated by the hour. The well his troops had dug on the ground floor of the building was inadequate and ammunition ran low; in the Finance Building some of his troops were armed only with bamboo spears. Iwabuchi was outgunned, outmanned, and surrounded. The admiral knew he had reached the end. In the three weeks since MacArthur’s forces had charged into Manila, Iwabuchi had presided over one of the most barbaric massacres of World War II. His troops had wantonly slaughtered tens of thousands of men, women, and children in some of the most cruel and horrible ways. Survival was not an option.
And he knew it.
Iwabuchi summoned his last remaining forces inside the battered Agriculture Building. He apologized for leading them to doom. “If anyone has the courage to escape, please do so,” he instructed them. “If not please take your lives here.”
The forty-nine-year-old admiral retreated to his quarters on the main floor in the northwest side of the building. Armed with a knife, Iwabuchi slit open his belly.
Japanese marines attempted to escape under the cover of darkness, only to fall prey to American guns; seventy-five were killed on the night of February 27. Seven managed to slip through the lines and tried to swim out to a sunken ship but were also killed. Artillery meanwhile continued to hammer the Agriculture Building, including a three-hour barrage that began at eight a.m. on February 28. “After the number of rounds fired into this building during the past few days, it did not seem possible that any soul could be living in such a mass of rubble and twisted steel,” noted the Fifth Cavalry’s report. “The entire northeast corner had been blown away leaving a gaping hole.”
Troops firing bazookas and flamethrowers finally cleared it out on March 1, leaving only a few underground bunkers. American patience, however, was over. “A last minute appeal to surrender was made,” logged the cavalry’s report. “After waiting a few minutes without an answer, drums of gas and oil were poured into the opening and set afire. This last opening was then blown shut with satchel charges.”
Iwabuchi’s remains would never be found.
The Finance Building was all that remained. The same day the Agriculture Building fell, American forces repeated the earlier broadcast to the Japanese troops inside the final stronghold, giving them just thirty minutes to surrender. During that time, at five-minute intervals, the announcer prodded the trapped enemy. “The man who stood beside you a few hours ago is now dead—what is your choice?” American forces broadcast in Japanese.
The time ticked away.
“You have ten minutes left, do you want this to be your lifetime?”
All eyes focused on the crippled Finance Building as five minutes wound down to three and then just ninety seconds. “At this point one Jap came literally tumbling down over the rubble in front of the building,” one report noted. “He was followed almost immediately by twelve more who advanced to our lines and surrendered.”
More emerged from a nearby pillbox and foxhole, bringing to twenty-two the total who surrendered. American forces continued to blast the building for two more days, wiping out the last of the enemy troops on the top floor on March 3. “At the end,” concluded Robert Ross Smith, “the Finance Building was a shambles; the portions not knocked down seemed to be standing only from sheer force of habit.”
The Battle of Manila was over.