World War II Day by Day

Manila, Philippines • March 3, 1945

On this date the monthlong Battle of Manila ended when U.S. and Fili­pino forces cap­tured Manila’s Finance Build­ing. It was the last set of govern­ment offices in the Philip­pine capi­tal still occu­pied by a scrum of Japa­nese sai­lors and sol­diers serving under the fanat­ical ex-Rear Adm. Sanji Iwa­buchi, a sui­cide the week before. Iwa­buchi was nom­i­nally part of Japa­nese Gen. Tomo­yuki Ya­mashita’s Four­teenth Area Army, which had been tasked with defending the Philip­pine archi­pel­ago from the pre­dicted Amer­i­can inva­sion. Iwa­buchi, however, had received the blessings of the naval staff in Tokyo to defend the cap­i­tal with his 12,500-strong 31st Naval Special Base Force aug­mented by 3,750 remaining army security troops. Army general Ya­mashita never once con­tem­plated sitting tight in Manila for fear of his and his men being trapped in nasty urban war­fare in a city with close to a mil­lion resi­dents. Instead, with­out declaring Manila an “open city,” meaning a bel­lig­er­ent may enter the city unop­posed by his oppo­site num­ber, Ya­mashita simply vacated the Philip­pine cap­i­tal and settled on forward-deploying his 262,000 defenders north and east of Manila to engage the enemy head-on. The general’s depar­ture gave Iwa­buchi all he needed to move into the vacuum despite Iwa­buchi’s receipt of Ya­mashita’s direct order to with­draw from Manila without combat.

The liberation of the Philippines from Imperial Japan com­menced with Sixth U.S. Army amphib­ious landings sup­ported by naval and air units on the East­ern Philip­pine island of Leyte on Octo­ber 20, 1944. (That was 10 days after Ya­mashita had assumed com­mand of the Four­teenth Area Army.) Similar landings on pop­ul­ous Luzon Island at Lin­gayen Gulf on Janu­ary 9, 1945, and a second one on Janu­ary 15 roughly 45 miles/­72 kilo­meters south­west of Manila formed a vice to squeeze Manila’s Japa­nese defenders. The Amer­i­cans were wel­comed and assisted by mem­bers of the under­ground Philip­pine Common­wealth Army and the Philip­pine Constab­u­lary and hun­dreds of guer­rillas. On the evening of Febru­ary 3 the Amer­i­cans and the Fili­pinos had advanced into the cap­i­tal. The Battle of Manila (aka the Manila Massacre) turned truly grisly as Iwa­buchi’s troopers fought with a deter­mi­na­tion, feroc­ity, and bes­ti­al­ity rarely matched else­where in the war between the U.S. and Japan.

Murder and mayhem committed by Iwabuchi’s thugs began the moment U.S. Gen. Douglas Mac­Arthur’s forces charged into Manila. The ren­e­gade admiral pre­sided over the slaughter of tens of thou­sands of Mani­lenos—men, women, and chil­dren—in some of the most cruel and horri­ble ways imag­in­able. In an early engage­ment, U.S. infan­try­men drove toward Manila’s Pasig River and Bili­bid Pri­son where 1,275 in­ternees were freed. As they did, Iwa­buchi’s men dragged scores of Fili­pino civil­ians to the Pasig’s es­tu­aries, where they bound them, bay­o­neted them, shot them, and slashed their throats and bellies. More than 100 civil­ians were either left to rot or had their bodies burned. In a later engage­ment in Manila’s oldest district of Intra­muros, Iwa­buchi’s butchers sepa­rated neu­tral Spanish citi­zens—mostly priests—from 3,000 Fili­pinos and gunned down the latter while impri­soning the former with­out food or water. Sensing they would all die any­way, Japa­nese troops burned down buildings, raped women and girls, and slaugh­tered ump­teen thou­sands of Fili­pinos in a lethal replay of the Rape of Nan­king (China, mid-December 1937 to early February 1938).

Manila was the first large city the U.S. Army retook in the Pacific War. A thou­sand Amer­i­can sol­diers lost their lives and over 5,500 were wounded. Killed too were more than 16,600 Japa­nese occu­piers. Worse yet was the mas­sive num­ber of Manila’s resi­dents—100,000, or one‑tenth of the city’s popu­la­tion—who perished. Most were killed by a fanat­i­cal enemy who made a fetish of mur­dering Fili­pinos. Other Mani­lenos, unfor­tu­nate casual­ties of war, died in their homes or shel­ters as the Amer­i­cans fer­reted out the enemy. The Allied victory was devastating.

Scenes of Manila’s Liberation, February and March 1945

Left: Aerial view of the destruction of Manila’s Intra­muros (“Walled City”) in May 1945. Intra­muros was the oldest dis­trict, the his­toric core of the city of Manila built during the Spanish Colo­nial Period. The quarter‑square-mile/­0.65‑sq.‑km mini-city was heavily damaged during the battle to retake Manila from the enemy, which ended almost 3 years of Japa­nese mili­tary occupation of the Philippine capital.

Right: American troops move into devastated Intra­muros, Febru­ary 23, 1945. As GIs forced their way through rubble they had created during the preceding 7 days of con­stant bom­bard­ment, Mani­lenos reportedly were happy to see them. They sang “God Bless Amer­ica” and kids shouted “Victory Joe!” while sol­diers handed out candy and Hershey bars. After Poland’s Warsaw, Manila, renowned as the “Pearl of the Orient,” was the most heavily damaged of all Allied capitals during the war.

Left: Taking partial cover behind a stone wall, U.S. sol­diers fire at Japa­nese troops en­sconced with­in the con­fines of the his­toric Spanish for­tress of Intra­muros with its mas­sive walls (40 ft/12 m thick at the base and 20 ft/6 m at the top) and giant dun­geons. The cen­turies-old stone ram­parts, under­ground edi­fices, the Santa Lucia Bar­racks, Fort San­ti­ago, and vi­llages with­in the city walls all pro­vided excel­lent cover from which to direct rifle fire at MacArthur’s men.

Right: A Filipino resident of Manila, confronted with the hellish sight of civil­ian corpses sprawled on a side­walk, attempts to iden­tify some of the victims. Earlier the fallen had been taken into “pro­tec­tive” cus­tody by Iwa­bushi’s men and then killed as they tried to escape from the Ermita section of the city.

Left: Civilian survivors of the Battle for Manila, Febru­ary 3 to March 3, 1945. During lulls in the fighting Japa­nese troops reputedly took out their anger and frus­tra­tion on civil­ians caught in the cross­fire. An esti­mated 100,000 civil­ians perished, most vic­tims of ghastly Japa­nese atroc­ities, during the month­long battle, but the true pro­por­tion of civil­ian deaths due to heavy Amer­i­can tank and artil­lery shell­fire versus at the hands of Japanese troops remains uncertain.

Right: Refugees from war-torn districts of Manila, par­tic­u­larly the Intra­muros enclave where heavy fighting took place, cross a pon­toon bridge over the 150‑yard/­137‑meter-wide Pasig River to safety. The fighting for Intra­muros, where Iwa­buchi’s men held around 4,000 civil­ian hos­tages, con­tinued from Febru­ary 23 to Febru­ary 28. Having largely deci­mated Japa­nese forces by point-blank artil­lery and tank fire (air sup­port was banned), GIs used close-combat flame­throwers, ba­zookas, Thomp­son sub­machine guns, Browning auto­matic rifles, gre­nades, and satchel charges to root out and exterminate Japanese defenders.

Left: Intramuros evacuees stream out of the walled city to the safety of Amer­i­can lines. Less than 3,000 civil­ians escaped the U.S. siege and assault of Intra­muros, mostly women and chil­dren whom the Japa­nese released on Febru­ary 23. Japa­nese naval person­nel and sol­diers killed 1,000 men and women, while the other hos­tages, including approx­i­mately 600 Amer­i­can POWs being held in the dun­geons of colo­nial Fort Santiago, died during the American shelling.

Right: The bodies of Japanese troopers killed in the heavy fighting in Manila lie in a heap where they fell on February 22, 1945. On the main island of Luzon where Manila is located, Japa­nese sol­diers and sai­lors suf­fered roughly 214,585 casual­ties, consisting of 9,050 captured and 205,535 dead.

Asian Stalingrad: U.S. Army’s Battle of Manila, February–March 1945