Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  With Clark Field and Fort Stotsenburg in American hands, XIV Corps gathered its strength for the final push into the capital. The reserve 1st Cavalry Division, under Major General Verne D. Mudge, was landed in Lingayen Gulf and trucked south to the front lines, where it would form one of two prongs of XIV Corps’s southern offensive. In a morning visit to Mudge’s command tent in the town of Guimba on January 30, General MacArthur said he expected the “ 1st Cav” to move quickly: “Go to Manila, go around the Nips, bounce off the Nips, but go to Manila.” Plentifully supplied with jeeps, trucks, tanks, and trailers, the whole division rolled down Highway No. 5. A spirit of competition fired their spirits. Mudge was eager to outpace Major General Bob Beightler’s 37th Infantry Division, which was converging on the city along the route of Highway No. 3 to the west.

  Scattered Japanese units had prepared ambushes along the road, and a few American soldiers were felled by snipers. The advancing column repeatedly ground to a halt, as personnel in the exposed jeeps dismounted and took cover in roadside brush, and tank-infantry teams went ahead to destroy the enemy or drive him to retreat. Rivers and streams also slowed the column’s progress. Many of the bridges had been blown, and even when a bridge had been left standing, it had to be checked carefully by demolitions experts to confirm that it was not mined. When small Japanese units fired on the passing convoy, the Americans fired back in greater volume—rifles, machine guns, and light artillery, often without dismounting from their vehicles. Life magazine correspondent Carl Mydans reported: “We shot them up with racketing fire of everything from everyone in our train, firing both sides of the road, and kept moving.”14 In many places, the column left the main highway and traveled by dirt roads, or blazed a new trail through pasturelands. Scouts looked for “fords” where heavy vehicles could drive across a stream. Long cavalcades of jeeps, trucks, and trailers drove across, with brown water surging above their axles and sometimes even their hoods. At the Angat River, the water was found to be too high for most wheeled vehicles. The problem was solved by creating “trains,” with a tank serving as locomotive and a file of trucks and jeeps towed behind. Afterward, the vehicles had to pause for an hour as their engines dried in the sun.

  As American forces passed through villages, they were greeted by crowds of jubilant Filipino civilians. Barefoot boys ran alongside the jeeps and trucks, arms held above their heads in triumph. Men held their hats above their heads and wept with joy. American flags were already flying above houses and public buildings. Filipino guerilla units were drawn up in ranks under American and Philippine colors. In the little city of Baliuag, recalled Bill Dunn, the 1st Cavalry Division was met by thousands of Filipinos “who thronged the streets, screaming, singing, and dancing around our column, oblivious to danger, until it became almost impossible to move. In the heart of the city our jeep finally was completely surrounded and we were forced to stop. As soon as we did, women and children threw flowers at us and fought to touch our hands, and the same was true of every vehicle in the column.”15 The Americans were offered fruit, fish, eggs, and roasted yams. Two young Filipinos had climbed to the top of the church tower and were pounding the bell with stones. General Mudge’s “flying column” was brought to a complete halt while local police and troops worked to move the crowds out of the streets so that the advance could resume.

  Anticipating the problems of sanitation and drinking water for the city of nearly one million inhabitants, the U.S. commanders took steps to secure Manila’s water supply. XIV Corps was ordered to seize the vital reservoirs, dams, and aqueducts on the city’s northern outskirts—the Novaliches Dam, the Marikina Dam, the Balara Water Filters, and the San Juan Reservoir. U.S. commanders also intended to secure the major electrical power installations, including the steam power plant on Provisor Island in the Pasig River.

  On February 3, the 1st Cav reached Novaliches, on the north bank of the Tullahan River. An advance squadron reached the main bridge crossing just as the Japanese were preparing to dynamite it. In the midst of a fierce firefight, a navy lieutenant and demolitions specialist rushed out onto the bridge to cut away the burning fuse. That intrepid action saved the bridge, gaining at least a day for the advance. Once across the river, the division encountered very little resistance at all. Later that afternoon, the cavalrymen met the 37th Division at the junction with Highway No. 3 and joined forces. The combined force crossed into the Manila city limits on February 4.

  Three battalions moved to surround Santo Tomas University, whose walled campus had been converted into an internment camp for some 4,000 American and other Western civilians, including the U.S. Army nurses known as the “Angels of Bataan.” A Sherman tank smashed through the front gates and led an infantry battalion into the grounds. The Japanese guards, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Toshio Hayashi, were not inclined to put up a fight. After a few shots were exchanged, Hayashi signaled that he was willing to release most of the internees. More than 3,000 liberated Western civilians, emaciated but elated, began streaming out of the gates. But Hayashi had ordered the remaining 221 internees into a single large building near the center of the campus, intending to hold them as hostages and to bargain for their lives. Fearing a massacre, the U.S. commanders offered a ceasefire and parley. Hayashi agreed to free the internees in exchange for a guarantee of safe conduct to Japanese lines. In a scene that was not repeated at any other point in the Pacific War, Hayashi led his prison guards out of the building and through the university’s main gates, directly past the glowering stares of thousands of American soldiers. Civilian internees hurled verbal abuse at the Japanese as they marched. “Small bands of men and women followed them through the encampment jeering and hooting—the women loudest of all—until the Japanese plodded out of the camp and the gates clanged shut.”16 But the contract was honored. No shots were fired on either side, and Hayashi’s men were permitted to head south, where they would join the main concentrations of Japanese ground forces. As they parted ways with the Americans, each Japanese officer and soldier either saluted or bowed.17

  General MacArthur visited Santo Tomas later that afternoon. He was mobbed by a grateful, tearful crowd. They pressed toward him from all directions. He greeted those he knew by name. Some of the younger children, having spent three years in the camp, remembered little of their prewar lives. “One man threw his arms around me, and put his head on my chest and cried unashamedly,” MacArthur recalled. “It was a wonderful and never to be forgotten moment—to be a life-saver, not a life-taker.”18 As the prisoners were interviewed, the stories they told vindicated MacArthur’s insistence upon speed in liberating the camps. The food allocations to the prisoners had declined sharply in the past month, and many were verging on starvation. If the liberators had arrived thirty days later, said Bill Dunn, the CBS radio correspondent, “the results might have been completely tragic.”19

  As American forces advanced into the built-up districts of northern Manila, an ominous pall of smoke hung over the city. Retreating Japanese units had started more than a hundred fires in the northern business and commercial districts. Lacking tools to do the job properly, they did it like two-bit arsonists, with gunny sacks, matches, and 5-gallon cans of gasoline. Entire city blocks were gutted by fire. On the bayfront to the west was the densely populated residential neighborhood known as the Tondo, where the close-built wood-frame stucco houses burned like tinder. The XIV Corps report noted, “the smoke and the dust were so intense, and the heat from burning structures so terrible, that little progress could be made.”20 Forlorn refugees streamed north on the major boulevards, passing the American soldiers headed in the opposite direction: young mothers carrying babies, families with belongings piled into pony carts, children begging the American soldiers for food or cigarettes. Looters were hard at work stripping everything valuable from the ruins of burnt-out buildings and houses abandoned by their owners.

  General Griswold sent the 2nd Squadron, 5th Cavalry to secure control of the Quezon Bridge, the last remaining
bridge spanning the Pasig River, which ran through the heart of Manila. But at the intersection of Quezon Boulevard and Azcarraga Street, between the large edifices of Old Bilibid Prison and Far Eastern University, the Americans came under heavy machine gun and antitank gunfire. The squadron was pinned down in a deadly crossfire from several directions, including windows on upper floors of the university, a sandbag emplacement on the street to the south, and an improvised battlement comprising four derelict trucks wired together and guarded by steel spikes pounded into the pavement. The Americans retreated quickly, intending to return with reinforcements. Meanwhile, other units of the 1st Cavalry Division cleared out the streets and alleys to the east, along the north bank of the Pasig, and occupied Malacañang Palace.

  In the Tondo District, advancing patrols came upon hideous scenes of civilian massacres. Hobert D. Mason of the Medical Corps discovered forty-nine bodies strewn across the floor of a cigarette factory, including many women and children as young as two years old. Their wrists had been tied tightly behind their backs. Most had been butchered by bayonets and samurai swords.21 Nearby, at the Dy-Pac Lumber Yard, U.S. soldiers counted 115 murdered civilians. Children and even infants had been beheaded. In a sworn affidavit provided to war crimes investigators, Major David V. Binkley described what he took to be a mother who had tried to save her two children: “A woman lay face down with an arm around each child. This woman had been slashed to death by a sabre-like weapon. One child had part of its skull sliced off.”22

  Filipino guerillas, who could move freely through the streets disguised as ordinary Manileños, had risen up as U.S. forces approached the city. They had ambushed Japanese units, sabotaged equipment, blown up trucks and railcars, cut phone lines, and transmitted valuable intelligence to the invading army, right down to the locations of individual pillboxes, armories, and mines. Guerilla bands brazenly radioed information from Manila to MacArthur’s headquarters, often in plain English. The Japanese intercepted these broadcasts, but they could rarely pinpoint their origin. In China, Manchuria, Malaya, and elsewhere, the Japanese army had summarily wiped out entire communities suspected of aiding guerilla or enemy forces, a practice known as Genju Shobun (“Harsh Disposal”) or Genchi Shobun (“Local Disposal”). For more than three years, Japanese forces in the Philippines had given proof of their capacity for wanton violence and sadism directed against innocents. But the stinging humiliation of defeat, combined with signs of jubilation among ordinary Filipinos, incited an unprecedented series of savage reprisals.

  Scattered and intermittent firefights continued in pockets of north Manila, and the rattle of machine gun fire could be heard here and there, but by February 6 it was evident that the Japanese were only fighting delaying actions to cover their withdrawal south of the river. U.S. tanks and infantry units worked to clear each barrio of enemy, block by block and even house by house. That afternoon, the Americans resumed their drive on the Quezon Bridge, this time with tanks and heavy artillery support. The Japanese staged a fighting retreat across the bridge and then blew it up. This development brought the 1st Cav up short. With no remaining bridges spanning the Pasig, they had no means of driving trucks and tanks directly across the river. The advance would have to pause until a new plan could be devised.

  Meanwhile, a thousand U.S. and Allied POWs were liberated from Bilibid Prison, including many troops captured on Bataan and Corregidor in 1942. MacArthur was there to meet the prisoners as they exited the compound. “As I passed slowly down the scrawny, suffering column, a murmur accompanied me as each man barely speaking above a whisper, said, ‘You’re back,’ or ‘You made it,’ or ‘God bless you.’ I could only reply, ‘I’m a little late, but we finally came.’ ”23

  To the south, the 11th Airborne Division had seized Nichols Field and was advancing into the city’s southern precincts. Manila was bracketed by superior forces to both north and south, and on both sides the invaders had arrived within the city limits while encountering only scattered resistance. XIV Corps had thundered into Manila with orders to liberate Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees before they could be harmed, and to secure the city’s water system. The two divisions had completed both missions with commendable speed and efficiency.

  Suddenly in possession of the entire city north of the Pasig, General Griswold had no clear idea of how many enemy troops remained on the opposite bank, or whether they intended to put up a last-ditch fight. At this uncertain moment, General MacArthur decided to declare victory. His headquarters, still located well north of the city in San Miguel, issued a statement implying that the fight for Manila was in its closing phase: “Our forces are rapidly clearing the enemy from Manila. Our converging columns . . . entered the city and surrounded the Jap defenders. Their complete destruction is imminent.”24 Across the world, the following day, newspapers heralded the triumphant recapture of Manila. MacArthur’s staff began planning a victory parade through the heart of the city. In fact, another month of hard fighting lay ahead.

  Subordinate field commanders were irked by the rash announcement. This was not the first time that MacArthur’s press operation had jumped the gun. In his diary, Griswold recorded his view that MacArthur was “publicity crazy.” Eichelberger, more tactfully, called the announcement “ill advised.” Men who had yet to fight the largest and fiercest urban battle of the Pacific War did not like to be told that they were only “mopping up.”25

  MANILA WAS A CONTRAST of old and new, rich and poor, grand and humble, Asian and European. Many rated it as the most beautiful city in Asia. It was a college town, with more than a dozen secular and Catholic universities. Its many modern hospitals provided the best medical care in Asia. Before the Japanese invasion, it had been a banking and commercial hub, where leading international firms had maintained major offices. It had broad boulevards, verdant parks, first-class hotels, grand public buildings, spacious plazas, and the spires of many Gothic churches. Manila had a Spanish character, with something of the grace and grandeur of Madrid or Seville.

  As XIV Corps took possession of the tall commercial and residential buildings along the north bank of the Pasig, the Americans set up observation posts on high floors and rooftops. Griswold’s command post, on the eighth story of a partly burned-out hotel, offered a sweeping view to the south. An evil pall of smoke hovered over the skyline and blocked out the sun. The city was burning, north and south alike. The bodies of fallen soldiers and civilians roasted as the fire advanced, and the stench of burning flesh wafted on the air. At night, the domes and spires of churches and cathedrals were illuminated by a spectral, copper light thrown off by sheets of flame. The Japanese perimeter included several of the capital’s major government buildings, including the Legislature, the Departments of Finance and Agriculture, city hall, the post office headquarters, the Manila Police Department, and the Metropolitan Water District Building. These colossal neoclassical edifices, built of steel, masonry, and concrete, were designed to withstand major earthquakes. The Japanese had converted them into fortresses. Their doors and windows had been sandbagged, and Japanese artillery and mortars were mounted on the rooftops.

  Studying these defenses through binoculars, General Griswold concluded that his forces had a long and brutal fight on their hands. The Japanese were going to fight to the end, as usual, and it was difficult to see how the city could be saved. If MacArthur believed otherwise, he was delusional. “He does not realize, as I do, that the skies burn red every night as they systematically sack the city,” Griswold told his diary on February 7. “Nor does he know that enemy rifle, machine gun, mortar fire and artillery are steadily increasing in intensity. My private opinion is that the Japs will hold part of Manila south of the Pasig River until all are killed.”26

  The Pasig was not really a river, but a placid estuary connecting Laguna de Bay to Manila Bay. It was a deep, wide basin, a chasm in the heart of the city, with the “river” usually running about 20 feet below street level. Six bridges had recently spanned the Pasig, but t
he Japanese had destroyed them all. XIV Corps would have to cross in boats. It was to be another amphibious invasion, but in the heart of one of the largest cities in Asia.

  General Yamashita, from his isolated headquarters in the mountainous north, had ordered Japanese forces to evacuate Manila after destroying or carrying away all stockpiles of supplies and ammunition. But due to a combination of factors—spotty radio communications, the press of time, a fragmented command, service rivalries—those instructions were not carried out. The transport situation was so retrograde that no more than a trickle of supplies could be moved up into the mountains. Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, the garrison commander in Manila, had earlier activated plans to demolish all installations that might be put to profitable use by the invaders, including wharves, warehouses, factories, fuel tanks, and power stations. Derelict ships had been sunk at the city’s piers, in order to prevent U.S. ships from berthing. All buildings and installations at Cavite Naval Base had been burned or blown up. An order of February 3 had specified that the destruction should be done discreetly, in secret if possible, “so that such actions will not disturb the tranquility of the civil population nor be used by the enemy for counter-propaganda.”27 Japanese communiqués subsequently blamed the explosions and fires on U.S. aircraft or artillery, or Filipino guerillas.

  Lieutenant General Shizuo Yokoyama, whose headquarters was at Montalban in the mountains east of Manila, was subordinate to Yamashita. But he told the garrison to stand and fight: “They must revenge their countless comrades in arms who have perished since Guadalcanal, and must block the hated enemy’s plans for a northward advance. . . . We must believe in the power of the gods until the very end.”28 Yamashita may not even have known that these contradictory orders had been issued by Yokoyama; there are indications that he did not even know that a Japanese force remained in the capital. But when President José P. Laurel of the collaborationist regime begged Yamashita to declare Manila an open city, as MacArthur had done in 1941, Yamashita refused. He explained that it would reflect poorly on the fighting reputation of Japanese forces.29