Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  It appears that Admiral Iwabuchi never intended to leave Manila, whatever his orders. He had been captain of the battleship Kirishima when she was sunk at the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal more than two years earlier. Some among his colleagues deemed it less than honorable to survive such an event, and that may explain the admiral’s determination to keep his forces in place until the city came down around their heads. A gyokusai fight for Manila offered a chance for redemption, or payback, or both. His Manila Naval Defense Force consisted of four battalions of naval base troops, another four battalions of provisional infantry troops, and a sundry assortment of other army and navy units, amounting altogether to about 16,000 fighting men. Iwabuchi seems to have lingered in the capital on the pretense that more time was needed to complete the destruction of installations, until the Americans arrived and evacuation was no longer possible. During the delay, he oversaw the construction of strong fixed defenses in the heart of the old city, south of the Pasig River. Roadblocks and steel barricades were set up in the streets; mines and booby traps were laid in the pavement and among the ruins. The forbidding ancient masonry of Intramuros, the Walled City on the south bank of the river, was honeycombed with tunnels, pillboxes, and artillery emplacements. The Japanese would fight block to block, building to building, room to room; there would be no escape, no surrender, and no survival.

  The first U.S. patrols across the Pasig drew intense Japanese mortar and small arms fire from the massive stone walls of Intramuros. So Griswold decided to land his XIV Corps forces farther east, in a flanking maneuver. At dawn on February 7, two battalions of the 148th Infantry crossed the river between the Malacañang Palace and the San Miguel Beer Brewery Company, and took the fortified southern embankment by direct assault. Fighting off fierce counterattacks, the Americans consolidated their foothold south of the river, and began expanding it rapidly as troops moved across. Elements of the 1st Cavalry Division followed. The plan was to strike south into the once-serene neighborhoods of Pandacan and Paco, then launch a westward attack on the Walled City.

  Meanwhile, elements of the 129th Infantry stormed Provisor Island in the Pasig, home to the largest power plant in the city. A Japanese garrison had converted the facility into a fortress. A ferocious three-day fight ensued, involving room-to-room fighting in the dark interior of the facility. The battle claimed 285 American casualties, including thirty-five killed and ten missing. The steam turbine plant was completely destroyed in the fighting, guaranteeing that most of the city would be without electrical power in the weeks ahead.

  On February 8, combat raged through the burning streets of Pandacan and Paco. Japanese forces in the area staged a fighting retreat to the Paco Railroad Station, a neoclassical edifice built in 1915.30 The 148th Infantry closed the ring around the station. Three companies of elite Japanese army troops had prepared their defenses with care. Machine gun nests, antitank guns, and heavy mortars were protected by sandbag walls. Pillboxes commanded sweeping fields of fire on all the street approaches. Field artillery took the beautiful old station down stone by stone, but the Japanese were resilient, and reinforcements managed to slip through the U.S. lines to enter the station on foot. A platoon (of Company B) was pinned down on a broad boulevard about 100 yards north of the station. Two privates, Cleto “Chico” Rodriguez and John N. Reese Jr., advanced into heavy enemy fire and took cover in a house about sixty yards from the station, and then took turns providing covering fire as they advanced to within thirty yards of the nearest pillbox. In an hour of extraordinary combat, the two soldiers killed about thirty-five Japanese soldiers and wounded many more. Running low on ammunition, they staged a fighting retreat back to the American lines. Reese was killed by a burst of machine gun fire. Later that night, their battalion stormed the station and killed all remaining enemy soldiers in the vicinity. In recognition of their outstanding valor, both Rodriguez and Reese received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  As U.S. forces turned west toward the Walled City, they encountered some of the most vicious urban fighting of the entire Second World War. Every structure in their path, every half-collapsed ruin, had to be searched and cleaned out. They encountered a variety of fiendish defenses, including barricades improvised by steel spikes driven into pavement, overturned trucks and automobiles, stacks of fuel drums filled with rubble, coils of barbed wire, and antitank and anti-personnel mines. Pillboxes of concrete guarded the approaches to those barriers. Snipers’ perches were set up on rooftops and on the high floors of buildings. The infantrymen employed small-team tactics to advance upon and destroy those formidable defenses. The location of every mine was detected and mapped, and it was hauled out of the ground with a chain attached to a Sherman tank or half-track. Light mortars threw smoke shells to blind the enemy. Machine guns provided suppressing fire as the squads advanced and attacked pillboxes at point-blank range with grenades, explosive charges, and flamethrowers. When a team entered a house or building, they rushed up to the roof and the top floors first, then descended the stairways and searched each room carefully. When in doubt, they threw hand grenades ahead, or filled a room with flames and roasted their enemies alive. They blew holes in walls rather than passing through doorways. If enemy resistance was too severe, they withdrew and knocked the entire structure down with artillery and demolitions.

  On February 12, a remaining core force of six Japanese battalions (four naval, two army) were corralled into an area of about one square mile, bounded by the Pasig River on the north, a line running between Luna, Paco Market, and Paco Creek to the east, and a line running from the Polo Club to the bay front on the south. Japanese defenses between Fort McKinley and Nichols Field had collapsed under the relentless pressure of the Eighth Army, and remaining Japanese forces in the area were cut off in isolated pockets. “Destruction and chaos marked the path of our drive into Manila,” wrote Edward Flanagan of the 11th Airborne Division. “Houses and shops, flanking both sides of the highway which leads to the heart of the city, were torn up by both Jap and American artillery. Tin-roofed houses looked as though a giant can-opener had sliced through them, while once pretentious mansions gauntly displayed charred chimneys and trash piles of rubble.”31

  But the hardest fighting of the battle for Manila still lay ahead. The enemy pocket included several of Manila’s major government buildings, whose steel-reinforced concrete walls stood up to all but the heaviest artillery. The doors, porticos, and windows were sandbagged, and gun emplacements swept all approaches. They were surrounded by broad plazas, parks, and boulevards—which meant that they could only be approached over open ground, where the attacking U.S. infantry would find little natural cover. A belt of well-camouflaged and interconnected pillboxes guarded each building. In the interiors, the corridors, stairwells, and rooms had been barricaded with sandbags and ordinary furniture, with a few feet of clearance left at the top, so that grenades could be lobbed at the attackers. These strongpoints together formed an outer ring of defenses around the old Spanish walls of Intramuros.

  Hoping to spare the city, both its physical infrastructure and its inhabitants, MacArthur strictly prohibited aerial bombing of Manila. For the same reasons, he had restricted the use of heavy artillery; in the early stages of the battle, the big guns were limited to counterbattery fire (shooting back at enemy artillery) and to “observed fire on known enemy strong points.”32 But the enemy’s formidable defenses left the U.S. ground commanders with limited options. As their casualty rates climbed, they fell back upon their tried-and-true practice of pulverizing all structures from which enemy fire was detected. As the infantry advanced against Japanese strongpoints in the heart of the city, prolonged heavy artillery barrages razed entire blocks. Civilian refugees streamed out of the stricken areas and passed through the American lines, desperately trying to get to safety.

  Some major buildings could be isolated and bypassed, but others had to be totally destroyed before U.S. forces could advance past them safely. They were shelled by 105mm and 155mm howitzer
fire until they began to crumble to the ground, slab by slab. The regimental commander of the 148th Infantry told a reporter, “I can see little hope of saving many of Manila’s famous buildings. This is a full-scale artillery battle and you know what that does to a city.”33 Tanks closed to within point-blank range and added their guns to the cumulative punishment. Mortars were showered down on the outer walls and arcades. Eventually, the structural integrity of the great buildings failed, and their roofs caved in. Infantry squads then entered through breaches in the walls (not through the doors, as these would be guarded by rifle, machine guns, and booby traps) and killed all remaining enemy soldiers.

  The National City Bank of New York Building, north of the Pasig River, served as an artillery observation post. Officers armed with binoculars studied the fall of their shells and spoke to spotters on the ground and in spotting planes circling overhead. City maps were spread out on tables, and coordinates were passed on to the gunners. In a suite on the sixth floor, journalists sat in comfortable armchairs while eating canapes and drinking cold beer. They watched the spectacle in open-mouthed awe, shaking their heads in sorrow at the obliteration of the old city center. One by one, Manila’s major landmarks crumbled under the onslaught. The Japanese had lashed Filipino civilians to the outer walls of strategic buildings, perhaps expecting them to serve as human shields. The American guns did not spare them. The 155mm gun, nicknamed the “Long Tom,” threw a 95-pound shell to a maximum range of 9 miles. The correspondent John Dos Passos was jolted by the concussive shockwaves made by the weapon, even at a distance of several hundred yards: “Each time the Long Tom shoots, it’s like being hit on the head with a baseball bat.”34 Bill Dunn, the radio broadcaster, believed that he suffered permanent damage to his eardrums. From that day forward, he wrote, he was “increasingly hard of hearing.”35

  The Rizal Memorial Baseball Stadium, near Harrison Park and La Salle University, hosted a fierce battle on the morning of February 16. U.S. artillery blasted an opening in the outer walls near right field. Sherman tanks advanced into the overgrown outfield, with infantrymen of the 5th and 12th Cavalry Regiments advancing in a crouch behind them. Three or four companies of well-armed Japanese troops were dug into the stands, dugouts, and tunnels behind home plate and the first base line. All openings had been barricaded with sandbags, and firing slots had been cut into the walls. The visiting team advanced into the infield behind their tanks, firing mortars and bazookas. A daylong firefight ended when every Japanese soldier in the ballpark was killed.

  Japanese troops had been ordered to stem the tide of civilian refugees toward the American lines. Soldiers were systematically destroying all boats and canoes that might carry people across the Pasig or into the bay. Sentries were posted at each of the four arcaded gates of Intramuros. As the battle for Manila entered its terminal phase, Japanese soldiers began rounding up civilians all over the city. They began with men and teenage boys above the age of eleven or twelve. Innocent Filipinos and expatriate civilians were kept as hostages against U.S. airstrikes. This brutal practice accomplished its purpose, inasmuch as MacArthur never acquiesced to aerial bombing in Manila. In the end, however, massive and sustained artillery barrages did the same work that the bombers would have done. No one knows how many innocent souls perished in the Battle of Manila, but the figure was certainly enormous—perhaps more than 100,000. Some were buried under the rubble of their dwellings, hiding places, and prisons, but many more—again, reliable statistics are elusive—were murdered by the Japanese in one of the most iniquitous atrocities of the twentieth century.

  Mass execution orders were distributed in writing to Japanese troops. Roundups and executions of “guerillas” became steadily less discriminate as U.S. forces had crossed the Pasig River. Documents captured on the battlefield refer to “disposals” on a large scale. A Japanese soldier’s diary, translated and submitted to a postwar tribunal, included the following entries:

  Feb. 7, 1945: 150 guerillas were disposed of tonight. I personally stabbed and killed 10.

  Feb. 8: Guarded over 1,184 guerillas which were newly brought in today.

  Feb. 9: Burned 1,000 guerillas to death tonight.

  Feb. 10: Guarded approximately 1,660 guerillas.

  Feb. 13: Enemy tanks are lurking in the vicinity of Banzai Bridge [Jones Bridge]. Our attack preparation has been completed. I am now on guard duty at guerilla internment camp. While I was on duty 10 guerillas tried to escape. They were stabbed to death. At 16.00, all guerillas were burned to death.36

  On February 13, Admiral Iwabuchi directed his army forces to kill all civilians remaining in the Japanese lines: “Even women and children have become guerillas. . . . All people on the battlefield with the exception of Japanese military personnel, Japanese civilians, and Special Construction Units will be put to death.”37 Two days later, a Manila Naval Defense Force order added more detailed instructions, with an eye toward conserving manpower and ammunition. Civilians to be killed should be rounded up and driven into houses or buildings which could then be burned or blown up. This would alleviate the “troublesome task” of disposing of corpses. For the same reason, “They should also be thrown into the river.”38

  Between February 11 and February 15, the reign of terror turned darker and more feral. Mass murder escalated into a wild abandon of pillage, arson, rape, torture, and mutilation in churches, universities, hotels, and hospitals. The city’s Spanish and mestizo elite were especially targeted, as were expatriates of various nationalities who had lived and worked in the heart of the international capital. Entire families were wiped out. Disposal squads targeted anyone who had once worn a police or military uniform, or had shown compassion to Western civilian internees or prisoners of war.

  Many of Manila’s most famous religious, medical, and educational institutions were host to notorious war crimes. Priests, nuns, and other Christian ecclesiastics were murdered in their churches and on their altars. Hundreds of civilians were driven into the cathedral at the corner of Santo Tomas and General Luna Streets. Bands of drunken soldiers roamed the aisles and pews, bayoneting innocents and dragging young women and girls from the arms of their sobbing families to be raped in a nearby chapel. In a lecture hall at La Salle College, according to the testimony of Father Francis J. Cosgrave, twenty Japanese soldiers entered and “began bayoneting all of us, men, women, and children alike.” The dead and wounded, including children as young as two years old, were piled in a heap at the foot of a stairway. A woman’s breasts were cut off. The soldiers departed for an hour and were heard drinking in a courtyard outside. Later they returned, and “laughed and mocked at the sufferings of their victims.” Cosgrave, bleeding from two bayonet wounds, crawled among the dying and administered the last rites. He noted with approval that some of the victims were “actually praying to God to forgive those who had put them to death.”39

  Walter K. Funkel, a professor at the University of the Philippines, kissed his wife farewell as they and six others were bound in the center of a room and doused in gasoline. She was killed instantly by a hand grenade, and “I was thankful in my heart that my beloved wife was spared from being burned alive.”40 Dr. Funkel was one of two in the room who managed to escape after the Japanese left the scene. In a classroom at Saint Paul’s College, Cayetano Barahona tried to shield his family as a band of soldiers began bayoneting everyone in the room. A soldier wrested a baby boy from his mother’s arms and tossed him in the air. “Another Japanese with a fixed bayonet came in and just stuck the baby right in the middle of his stomach,” said Barahona. He noted in horror that the infant did not immediately perish: “I could see how the baby dangled moving his hands.”41

  At the Philippine General Hospital, some 7,000 civilians were herded into the wards and corridors and kept there as hostages. At night, drunken Japanese soldiers prowled through the crowds, shining flashlights into faces, and dragged young women and girls away to be raped. Atrocities continued even while the hospital was under attack by U.S. artil
lery and tanks, and the walls began to come down around the captors and captives alike. At St Paul’s College, Japanese soldiers separated the men and boys from the women and girls. The females were driven through streets at the point of bayonets to the Bayview Hotel on Dewey Boulevard. Terrified and sobbing, clinging to one another, they were forced up the stairs to the third floor. Groups of fifteen or twenty were placed in separate guestrooms and forced to sit on the floor. There they remained for days without water or food. Again and again, Japanese naval troops entered and inspected each of the women. Victims were dragged away to be raped elsewhere in the hotel. The women did their best to make themselves unattractive, or to hide their faces. “Everyone in the room knew what was going to happen to us,” one victim recalled. “Everyone in the room was crying and trying to hide under mattresses and nets.”42

  Manila’s German inhabitants, being citizens of an Axis ally, had been left alone during the three-year occupation. As U.S. forces drew closer, many took refuge at the German Club in the Ermita district. But if the Germans had supposed that their national status would shield them from the rampaging Japanese, they were mistaken. A squad of soldiers stormed into the club on the morning of February 10. The occupants frantically explained that they were allies. A woman with an infant in her arms stepped forward to beg mercy, perhaps believing that the child would deter the intruders’ aggression. A soldier plunged his bayonet through the infant’s body and into that of his mother. Others began tearing young women away from their families, ripping their clothes off and dragging them away. The club was later set on fire, and crowds rushed to the doors in panic, to find themselves barricaded from the outside.