“Burned 1,000 guerrillas to death tonight,” the diarist wrote on Feb. Elsewhere, they crammed hundreds of men into a sweltering stone dungeon, locked the iron door and let them starve to death.Ī Japanese soldier’s diary relayed the horrors at Fort Santiago, an ancient citadel. In one charnel house, they cut a hole in the second floor and then led scores of blindfolded civilians upstairs, made them kneel by the edge and decapitated them with swords. Marauding Japanese troops burned people alive in convents, schools and prisons. Patients and doctors were stabbed at hospitals, nuns and priests hanged at churches, children tossed into pits with grenades. Countless women were raped and tortured, their babies tossed in the air and bayoneted. The frenzy of Japanese massacres defies imagination. Although some of those stories are familiar, he adds a heart-rending portrayal of the brutal life they endured.īut Scott breaks new ground by mining war crimes records, after-action military reports and other primary sources for the agonizing testimony of Philippine survivors and witnesses of more than two dozen major Japanese atrocities during the battle - and the ferocious American response. Scott, who was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Target Tokyo,” focuses in part on the 7,500 or so Americans and others held as prisoners of war or civilian internees in squalid conditions, and their dramatic rescue by U.S. Worse, they cruelly tortured and killed thousands of men, women and children. Sanji Iwabuchi instead ordered his marines to “fight to the last man.” They methodically dynamited Manila’s business, government and religious landmarks, obliterating the city’s cultural heritage, and torched thousands of wooden homes, sparking a deadly firestorm. Once Yamashita withdrew, however, Rear Adm.
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He ordered subordinates to destroy Manila’s bridges and port, and then to follow him to the mountains. His orders now were to bog MacArthur’s forces down in the Philippines and give Japan time to prepare for the expected U.S. Tomoyuki Yamashita, had stunned allies early in the war by seizing Malaya and Singapore, capturing a much larger British force. Most commanders saw “no need to risk American lives on a costly invasion of the Philippines” when the fall of Japan appeared imminent, Scott writes. Navy had steadily clawed its way back across the Pacific and bombers were already striking Japanese industrial centers. MacArthur famously vowed to return as he was evacuated to Australia. Japanese bombers destroyed his planes on the ground and American and Philippine forces were soon overwhelmed. colony in the Philippines, was caught woefully unprepared when the war began. Douglas MacArthur, the egotistical military commander of the U.S. It is powerful narrative history, one almost too painful to read in places but impossible to put down.
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Scott remedies that gap with “Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila,” the first comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters of the Pacific War. Like the Rape of Nanking, or the siege of Stalingrad, the tragedy of Manila deserves far greater understanding and reflection today.
JAPANESE IMPERIAL ARMY VICTORY MARCH NANKING TRIAL
It’s hard to imagine that a major monthlong battle from World War II - one that devastated a large city, caused more than 100,000 civilian deaths and led to both a historic war crimes trial and a Supreme Court decision - should have escaped scrutiny until now.īut history has somehow overlooked the catastrophic battle for Manila, capital of the Philippines, in the waning months of the war.