That was the Philippines at peace. In October 1944 more than two hundred thousand of MacArthur’s troops began their assault on the Philippines, shutting down sea-lanes and storming the beaches. MacArthur himself waded ashore on the island of Leyte, south of Luzon, on October 20, 1944.
“I have returned,”108 he announced to the Filipino people by radio. “Rally to me.”
“I have returned”: Douglas MacArthur, in front, stepping back on Philippine soil. Carlos Romulo, wearing a helmet, is behind him.
MacArthur’s goal was Manila. And, finally, he had the planes to take it. One Manilan remembered them screaming through the city like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, “winging very low but fast,109 skimming the top of buildings.” They aimed for anything of military value: highways,110 railroad tracks, trucks, and (yet again) bridges.
Japanese commanders faced a momentous decision. Should they abandon the city, as on Kiska? Or stay and fight, as on Attu? General Yamashita Tomoyuki, commander of Japan’s 14th Area Army, saw the writing on the wall. Supplies of all sorts were running low, and with sea and land approaches to Manila cut off, it was hard to see how they could be replenished. Yamashita’s army had already reduced its food rations from three pounds a day to nine-tenths of a pound.111 What is more, Manila was impossible to hold. A large city, inhabited by more than a million hostile civilians, full of flammable buildings, on flat ground—to defend it would be suicide. Just as MacArthur had done in 1941, Yamashita ordered the army out.112
But the army was not the only Japanese force in the area. As Yamashita moved his troops out, Rear Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji, commander of the Manila Naval Defense Force, moved sixteen thousand men into the city. He regarded himself duty-bound to protect Manila’s military installations.
Iwabuchi must have known that, in the end, MacArthur’s forces were going to take Manila. But he could force them to do it the hard way. His men set explosive mines throughout the city. They erected pillboxes at critical intersections and made fortresses of the larger concrete structures in the city. They stockpiled their ammunition.
Yamashita, once he realized what had happened, angrily ordered Iwabuchi to leave Manila. Iwabuchi replied, accurately, that he couldn’t. By then, MacArthur’s forces had the city surrounded.
“We slammed the back door shut before we began to fight”113 is how the official history of MacArthur’s leading division put it. A group of military historians judged this enclosure of the city to be “the strategic blunder of the Philippine campaign.”114 Having cut off Iwabuchi’s escape route, MacArthur practically guaranteed that the admiral would make his final stand in a densely populated city.
The battle for Manila would be a fight to the death.
*
When Allied troops arrived in Manila,115 whatever tenuous truce existed between the Japanese forces and the city’s inhabitants broke down entirely. Iwabuchi’s command ordered that all non-Japanese on the battlefield be killed. Japanese troops set about destroying the city. They took out the power and water systems. They dynamited factories and warehouses, and the flames predictably spread toward residential areas. As Filipinos fled into the streets (or, as the soldiers no doubt thought of it, the “battlefield”), they were shot down.
Technically, Iwabuchi’s men were fighting only “guerrillas.” But in the hungry, vengeful, and chaotic days of the U.S. invasion, the line between guerrilla and civilian blurred badly. Excerpts from a captured diary of a Japanese soldier in Manila give a sense of the scale of violence:116
Feb. 7: 150 guerrillas were disposed of tonight. I personally stabbed and killed 10.
Feb. 10: Guarded approximately 1,000 guerrillas.
Feb. 13: I am now on guard duty at Guerrilla Internment Camp. When I was on duty, approximately 10 guerrillas tried to escape. They were stabbed to death. At 1600, all guerrillas were burned to death.
The pretense that all victims of the Japanese were guerrillas was easily dispensed with, as when troops rounded up hundreds of young women for sexual predation. Large hotels, including MacArthur’s Manila Hotel, became the site of organized mass rapes. Diaries kept during the Battle of Manila are replete with other stomach-churning atrocities: pregnant women disemboweled, babies bayoneted, whole families slaughtered. Prepared to die, Iwabuchi’s men felt few moral restraints.
This was the first and, as it happened, the only time that U.S. and Japanese forces would fight in a major city. MacArthur’s men entered the bloodbath with caution. Dislodging Iwabuchi’s forces while protecting Filipino lives was a delicate operation. When assessing the area of Intramuros, where the Japanese were particularly well entrenched, MacArthur’s air commander suggested using napalm to “bomb the place until it was completely destroyed.”117 But MacArthur refused. Intramuros was inhabited by a “friendly” population,118 he reminded the commander. Aerial bombing was “unthinkable.”
Maybe to MacArthur. But within the first days of the battle it grew more thinkable to those under him. The Japanese were holed up in buildings throughout the city. Storming those emplacements one by one using small arms was treacherous. It would be easier to simply bomb or shell entire buildings.
In the approach to the Philippines, when MacArthur’s men were fighting the Japanese on isolated islands or in jungle clearings, bombs and artillery fire had worked wonders. They had minimized U.S. casualties and let the United States put its overwhelming industrial capability to use. And it finally had that capability. If, in 1941, MacArthur’s forces had been poorly equipped, by 1945—with the European war winding down and the U.S. economy in overdrive—they had all they needed. There were lots of explosives on hand.
The 37th Infantry Division, in particular, believed in the “use of heavy firepower to the maximum,”119 as its commander, General Robert S. Beightler, put it. The 37th was known as the most wasteful division in the theater for its use of artillery ammunition. “This reputation has certainly never bothered us,” Beightler explained, “for we only point to the fact that we fought for more than two years and lost fewer men than other divisions with comparable fighting.”
Manila, 1945
The 37th handled most of the combat in Manila. On February 9, six days into the battle, it saw nineteen of its men killed and more than two hundred wounded. That was nothing compared with the thousands of Filipinos who were being daily slaughtered, but to Beightler it was “alarming.”120 The division reverted to its tried-and-true tactic. Rather than engage Iwabuchi’s men in direct combat, it would simply destroy any buildings in which they might be hiding. “Putting it crudely,121 we really went to town,” Beightler reported. “To me, the loss of a single American life to save a building was unthinkable.”
That’s a sentence worth reading twice. In Beightler’s mind, he was facing a trade-off—and not a particularly difficult one—between lives and architecture. But, as he well knew, those buildings were inhabited. Some by enemy soldiers, of course, but many by civilians. Those civilians were “Americans,” too, even if no one treated them that way.
The other divisions attacking Manila also turned up the heat. Though Intramuros was spared aerial napalming, it was nevertheless, with MacArthur’s approval, comprehensively destroyed. During one manic hour on February 23, the closely packed (and still inhabited) section of the city had three tons of explosives hurled at it per minute. Shells struck, more than one per second,122 “hurtling like lightning bolts from the hands of an angry god,”123 as one observer wrote.
“We made a churned-up pile of dust and scrap out of the imposing,124 classic government buildings,” Beightler boasted.
Within a week of fighting, U.S. shelling of the whole area in front of advancing troops became, as one report put it, “the rule rather than the exception.”125 Any structure suspected of containing Japanese troops was a target. “Block after bloody block was slowly mashed into an unrecognizable pulp,”126 recorded the 37th’s official history.
That included refugee centers, such as the Philippine General Hospital
(a Parsons-built landmark),127 where a few Japanese soldiers were holed up—and more than seven thousand civilians. The 37th fired at the hospital for two days and nights. These were “days of terror,”128 remembered a Filipino trapped inside. “I can still hear the screams of the wounded clearly to this day.” Other refugee shelters—the Remedios Hospital, the Concordia Convent—met similar fates.
*
U.S. shelling and Japanese slaughter combined in a concoction of ghastly lethality. The politician Elpidio Quirino got his own taste of it.129 Quirino had been one of the delegates who wrote the commonwealth constitution. He’d been a member of Manuel Quezon’s cabinet, and later, after the war, he would become president of the country. He lived in the affluent enclave of Ermita (506 Colorado Street) with his wife, Alicia, his sons Tommy and Dody, and his daughters Norma, Vicky, and Fe Angela (who was two).
Quirino’s “darkest hour”130 began with the fires Japan had set. Ermita was particularly in peril, all the more so because the Japanese had taken up fortified positions at the main intersections and were shooting anyone who walked into the street. On the morning of February 9, a U.S. shell crashed into the Quirino home. The family decided to brave Japanese bullets and flee to the home of Alicia’s mother, Doña Concepcion Jimenez de Syquia, who lived down the street. Alicia led four of her children out, while Elpidio and Dody stayed behind to gather food. But when Alicia reached the corner where her mother’s house stood, a Japanese machine-gun nest opened fire, killing Alicia and Norma. A Japanese marine hurled the infant Fe Angela into the air and impaled her on his bayonet. Only Tommy and Vicky made it to their grandmother’s house.
Elpidio left Dody at home and tried to carry food to Doña Concepcion’s house. But he was held down by Japanese fire and U.S. shelling and didn’t make it until the next day. When he arrived, he discovered that his wife and two daughters were dead. Dody, who had sought to retrieve the bodies of his mother and sisters,131 was also killed—a shrapnel wound to the temple.
The shelling continued. The Quirinos and the Syquias, fourteen in all, ran back out into the street, darting amid the shells and gunfire from one insecure shelter to another. At night, a U.S. shell struck the house where they had taken refuge, cutting the body of Elpidio’s sister-in-law nearly in two. Doña Concepcion had a fatal heart attack during the barrage.
The family fled again. It had to. The house was on fire.
Sanctuary was hard to find. “If you escaped the shells of the Americans,132 you could not escape the machine guns or bayonets of the Japanese,” Elpidio remembered. After stashing his dwindling family in yet another temporary shelter, he went out again in search of safer ground. Soon after he stepped out, a U.S. shell hit the building, striking five members of his clan and Doña Concepcion’s cook. Three died, and three were injured, including his son Tommy. Once again, the Quirinos fled. This time they reached safety.
The Quirinos’ neighbors in South Manila flee to U.S. troops for protection.
In four days, Elpidio Quirino had lost eight members of his family, including his wife, his mother-in-law, and three of his five children. A woman who saw him at the end of this remembered Quirino staggering around Manila in his undershirt,133 smeared with mud, a vacant stare in his eyes—a latter-day Lear.
*
Admiral Iwabuchi took his stand on the Luneta, in the cluster of governmental buildings Daniel Burnham had planned. The very architectural qualities Burnham prized—large, solid concrete structures, commanding views of the city—made them ideal fortresses.
Juan Arellano’s Legislative Building served as the headquarters of Iwabuchi’s Central Force.134 Some 250 Japanese troops waited inside. With all approaches to the building on open ground, dislodging them would be difficult. A U.S. battalion tried but was driven back. An attempt to smoke the Japanese out failed, too. So the 37th Infantry Division did what it did best: fired its howitzers and tank guns point-blank into the building for two unrelenting hours, bringing the massive edifice crashing to the ground.
The pride of the colonial state, built by a Filipino to a mainlander’s plan, lay in ruins. The symbolism was hard to miss.
Manila wasn’t short on symbols. The sixth-largest city in the United States—substantially larger than Boston or Washington,135 D.C.—had for a month of fighting been converted into an abattoir. South Manila, where Quirino lived, had been leveled. Bodies decomposed everywhere, many bearing the marks of torture or execution. The stench was unbearable.
“The largest buildings had been transformed into mere piles of rubble and debris.136 Over areas, miles square, hardly one stone was left on top of another. It was as if all the forces of destruction had operated together, and that even this had been exceeded,” wrote a local journalist. “This seemed demonic work.”
Demonic, maybe, but not indiscriminate. The “better to lose a building than an American life” logic succeeded in protecting mainland soldiers. In the month of fighting,137 1,010 of them died. Compare that with the 16,665 Japanese troops who perished. And compare that with the 100,000 Manilans killed. For every “American life” lost, 100 Manilans died.
Juan Arellano’s Legislative Building after two hours of point-blank shelling by the 37th Infantry Division
Or so we think. As usual, mainland lives lost were counted with to-the-last-digit precision, while Filipino fatality numbers were at best informed guesses. The 100,000 estimate, accepted by the U.S. Army, was extrapolated from figures submitted by undertakers after the war.138
At any rate, Manila wasn’t the only place hit. Smaller towns and cities were bombarded as well. “The whole city of Baguio was razed to the ground,”139 lamented Jose Laurel, the Philippine president. Laurel himself had barely survived the attack there. U.S. planes repeatedly bombed his residence, destroying it entirely. Those planes dropped 466 tons of bombs and nearly five thousand gallons of napalm during the Baguio campaign.140
“We levelled entire cities with our bombs and shell fire,”141 admitted the high commissioner. “We destroyed roads, public buildings, and bridges. We razed sugar mills and factories.” In the end, he concluded, “there was nothing left.”
Senator Millard Tydings surveyed the colony after the war.142 He estimated that 10 to 15 percent of its buildings had been destroyed, and another 10 percent damaged. After the war, Filipinos submitted claims to the government on behalf of 1,111,938 war deaths.143 Add Japanese (518,000)144 and mainlander fatalities (the army counted slightly more than 10,000)145 and the total climbs to more than 1.6 million.
The Second World War in the Philippines rarely appears in history textbooks. But it should. It was by far the most destructive event ever to take place on U.S. soil.
*
Oscar Villadolid, a boy at the time, remembers a familiar scene from the aftermath of Manila’s “liberation.” A GI came down his street handing out cigarettes and Hershey bars. Speaking slowly, he asked Villadolid’s name. When Villadolid replied easily in English, the soldier was startled. “How’d ya learn American?”146 he asked.
Villadolid explained that when the United States colonized the Philippines, it had instituted English in the schools. This only compounded the GI’s confusion. “He did not even know that America had a colony here in the Philippines!” Villadolid marveled.
Take a moment to let that sink in. This was a soldier who had taken a long journey across the Pacific. He’d been briefed on his mission, shown maps, told where to go and whom to shoot. Yet at no point had it dawned on him that he was preparing to save a U.S. colony and that the people he would encounter there were, just like him, U.S. nationals.
He thought he was invading a foreign country.
PART II
THE POINTILLIST EMPIRE
13
KILROY WAS HERE
“War is hell,” the saying goes. The more scientifically inclined might put it differently: War is entropy. Atoms split, buildings tumble, people die, and things fall apart. As wars go, the Second World War was the big one—a giant, planetwi
de entropic pulse that converted whole cities to rubble and some fifty-five million living humans into corpses. No war has ever killed more or even come close.
From Dresden, Warsaw, Manila, Tokyo, and Hiroshima, that’s what the war looked like: a vortex of carnage. Yet, ironically, producing destruction on that scale took a lot of organization. Factories had to work overtime to make trucks, tanks, planes, ships, bombs, uniforms, rations, guns, and spare parts. All that stuff, plus the men to go with it, had to be hauled to distant battlefields. And when the men arrived, they needed bases outfitted with barracks and bakeries, water plants and warehouses, mechanics shops, mess halls, runways, and laundries.
The counter-entropic side of the war was the less glamorous side. Think of a GI, and you’re more likely to imagine a soldier on the front lines than a construction worker. But in the case of the United States, the construction worker is the better mental image. During the war, fewer than one in ten U.S. service members ever saw a shot fired in anger.1 For most who served, the war wasn’t about combat. It was about logistics.
The novelist Neal Stephenson got it right when he described the U.S. military in World War II as “first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks,2 secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization.”
How to Hide an Empire Page 24