World War II Day by Day

Manila, Philippines · February 3, 1945

On this date in 1945, 35,000 soldiers of the U.S. Sixth Army under Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger, sup­ported by 3,000 Filipino guerril­las, began entering Manila, capital of the Philip­pines, and soon liber­ated nearly 6,000 Allied and Fili­pino pri­soners. Some of them, like the 64 U.S. Army nurses, were taken captive in 1942 when Ba­taan and Cor­regi­dor fell to Japa­nese in­vaders. Back then Manila had been quickly over­run after Gen. Douglas Mac­Arthur declared it an “open city” to pre­vent its destruc­tion and the mas­sacre of its one million resi­dents. But this year, 1945, the battle for Manila would stretch into a month, ending on March 3, when the city was declared totally secure. Most of the city was de­stroyed, a thou­sand Amer­i­can sol­diers lost their lives, and over 5,500 were wounded. Killed too were more than 16,000 Japa­nese defenders (sailors, marines, sol­diers, and civil­ians) cobbled to­gether by Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, who vowed to defend the capi­tal to the last man. Worse yet were the huge num­ber of Manila’s resi­dents—100,000, or one-tenth of the city’s popu­la­tion—who lost their lives in the nastiest urban fighting in the Paci­fic Thea­ter. Many of them were killed in their homes or shelters as the Amer­i­cans fer­reted out the enemy, unfor­tunate vic­tims of U.S. in­fan­try­men armed with flame­throwers, gre­nades, and ba­zookas. Others were vic­tims of direct shelling from tanks and tank destroyers or killed in aerial bom­bard­ment. Some of the dead were among the 4,000 civil­ian hos­tages Iwa­buchi had taken or were vic­tims of Japa­nese looting, rape, and murder in what would later be called the Manila Mas­sa­cre. The city’s even­tual cap­ture, along with that of the jungle-covered Ba­taan Penin­sula oppo­site Manila and the island for­tress of Cor­reg­i­dor in Manila Bay, capped Mac­Arthur’s victory in the cam­paign to retake the Philip­pines. Oddly enough, as the Battle of Manila raged, the gene­ral’s staff was busy planning his vic­tory parade. With over 230,000 Japa­nese troops dis­persed on the islands, if no longer in Manila itself, months of hard and costly fighting lay ahead. Yet one thing was now crys­tal clear: the loss of the Philip­pines meant the end of the Japa­nese sea lifeline to the East In­dies—sources of food, oil, metals, and rubber. It was the final blow to the survival of Imperial Japan.

[amazon_carousel widget_type=”ASINList” width=”600″ height=”200″ title=”Recommended Reading” market_place=”US” shuffle_products=”False” show_border=”False” asin=”0440236959,0891417710,1410224953,0786465700,1848610106,038549565X,1933909137,1849080755,0312338341,0820321176″ /]

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 and the his­toric core of the city of Manila. The quarter-square-mile district was heavily damaged during the battle to retake Manila from the Japanese, which ended almost three years of Japa­nese mili­tary occu­pation of the Philip­pine capital. After Poland’s Warsaw, Manila was the most heavily damaged of all Allied capitals during the war.

Right: Burned-out, battle-scarred Manila, as U.S. engineers and thou­sands of Filipinos begin the huge task of recon­struc­tion. This aerial view looks south­west across the Pasig River toward the hulks of sunken ships in the harbor. Buildings in the fore­ground are gutted. Across the river are the burned-out general post office and the Metro­politan Opera House in ruins. The battered walls of Intra­muros and the destroyed buildings inside occupy the rectan­gular area beyond the post office. The streets have already been cleared of rubble.

Left: Santo Tomas Internment Camp, on the campus of the Univer­sity of Santo Tomas in Manila, was the largest of sev­eral camps in the Philip­pines in which the Japa­nese interned more than 4,000 enemy civilians, mostly Amer­i­cans, from January 1942 until Febru­ary 1945. This photo, taken on Febru­ary 5, 1945, shows hun­dreds of camp internees in front of the univer­sity’s Main Building cheering their release. Evacua­tion of the internees began on February 11. Sixty-four U.S. Army nurses interned in Santo Tomas were the first to leave that day and board air­planes for the United States. Flights and ships to the States for most internees began on February 22.

Right: Emaciated internees at Santo Tomas Intern­ment Center, February 1945. Male internees lost an average of 53 pounds during the 37 months of their cap­tivity at Santo Tomas. Forty-eight people died in the camp in Febru­ary due to the lingering effects of near-star­vation for so many months. Most internees could not leave the camp because of a lack of housing in Manila, almost com­pletely destroyed in the battle to retake the city. In March and April 1945 the camp slowly emptied out, but it was not until Septem­ber that Santo Tomas finally closed and the last internees boarded a ship for the U.S. or found places in Manila to livea.

Left: Civilian survivors of the Battle for Manila, February 3 to March 3, 1945. During lulls in the battle for con­trol of the city Japa­nese troops reputedly took out their anger and frus­tra­tion on the civil­ians caught in the cross­fire. An estimated 100,000 civil­ians died during the battle, but the propor­tion of casual­ties due to Allied artillery and heavy aerial bom­bard­ment versus Japanese troops is not known.

Right: Refugees from war-torn sections of Manila, particularly the Intra­muros section where heavy fighting still con­tinued, cross a pon­toon bridge over the Pasig River to safety. The fighting for Intra­muros, where Rear Admiral Sanji Iwa­buchi held around 4,000 civil­ian hos­tages, continued from Febru­ary 23 to Febru­ary 28. Already having deci­mated the Japa­nese forces by bombing, Amer­i­can forces used artil­lery to try to root out the Japa­nese defenders. How­ever, the centuries-old stone ram­parts, under­ground edi­fices, the Sta. Lucia Barracks, Fort Santiago, and villages within the city walls all provided excellent cover.

Left: Refuges from Manila’s Walled City stream out 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 sol­diers and sailors killed 1,000 men and women, while the other hos­tages, including approx­i­mately 600 Amer­i­can POWs being held in the dungeons at Fort Santiago, died during the American shelling.

Right: Bleeding, bruised, and half starved, this little Filipino boy sits on a box in the rubble of Manila’s Walled City with two friends who were also orphaned.

Newsreel of U.S. Army Battle for Manila, Philippines, 1945