The end of the Battle of Manila

On 3 March 1945 infantry of the US 37th Infantry Division cleared the last Japanese soldiers from the ruins of the Finance Building in the centre of Manila. Late that evening the commander of XIV Corps, General Oscar Griswold, reported to the commander of the Sixth Army, General Walter Krueger, that organised resistance in the Manila area had ceased. So ended the battle that had begun on 3 February when American cavalry drove into the city’s northern suburbs – the only urban battle on such a scale fought by the US Army in the Pacific, and one of the most destructive urban battles of the whole war.

The chroniclers’ formula says that Manila was fully liberated on this day. It is accurate with one reservation: the last organised centre of resistance fell on 3 March, but Krueger passed the report to General Douglas MacArthur the following day, which is why some accounts give 4 March as the date on which the battle ended. Individual Japanese soldiers hiding in cellars and rubble were still being rounded up in the city for several weeks, and east of the capital fighting with the Japanese Shimbu Group went on until the end of May.

Three buildings

After the fall of Intramuros, the old walled Spanish city that the 37th Division had been assaulting since 23 February, three government buildings south-east of the walls remained in Japanese hands: the Legislative Building – seat of the parliament of the Commonwealth of the Philippines – and the buildings of the Ministry of Finance and of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. They were modern, earthquake-proof structures of thick reinforced concrete, built in the American period on the model of the congressional buildings in Washington. They could be approached only across open squares and wide streets, and sailors of the shattered Manila Naval Defence Force had barricaded the doors and windows with sandbags and set up machine guns in them. Their commander, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, was already dead – according to the official American history he committed suicide at dawn on 26 February – and Japanese command in the city had practically ceased to exist. How many men were defending the buildings is not known; in the Legislative Building alone there may have been more than 250.

According to the official US Army history by Robert Ross Smith, the headquarters of XIV Corps and the 37th Division at first considered starving out the defenders, but concluded that this would take too long: escaped hostages and prisoners testified that the Japanese had enough ammunition, food and water for a long siege, and from the upper floors of the buildings their riflemen commanded much of the city. Griswold and the commander of the 37th Division, Major General Robert Beightler, therefore decided to take the buildings by assault, preceded by fire at point-blank range. From 24 February 155 mm howitzers emplaced just 150–800 metres from their targets, self-propelled guns, tanks, tank destroyers and mortars methodically battered down the walls. Smith concedes that this meant severe damage to, if not the complete destruction of, all three buildings, but the corps saw no alternative.

The Legislative Building was attacked on 26 February by the 1st Battalion, 148th Infantry Regiment. The defenders fought so stubbornly that after several hours the Americans withdrew under cover of smoke. The next day, after another two-hour bombardment that brought down the north wing and damaged the south wing beyond repair, the infantry broke into the building again and had taken it by evening; on the morning of 28 February they wiped out the last pockets of resistance in the basement. The Agriculture Building was assaulted by the 5th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division. After a failed attack on 26 February and the clearing of the neighbouring San Luis Terrace apartment block, the cavalrymen entered the ruins on 28 February following a three-hour bombardment that collapsed much of the building onto its ground floor; on 1 March, after their call to surrender had been rejected, they killed the last defenders hiding in the basement with explosive charges and burning petrol.

The last was the Finance Building, shelled from all sides on 28 February and 1 March. On the afternoon of 1 March the fire was halted and the defenders were called upon by loudspeaker to surrender; 22 Japanese came out – an exception in a battle in which only a handful of defenders were taken prisoner. On 2 March, as the infantry moved in after a further bombardment, three more soldiers came out under a white flag, while the rest used the lull to open fire on the exposed Americans. After a final barrage of artillery and tank fire the 148th Infantry had taken almost the whole building by nightfall. On 3 March the last group on the top floor was wiped out. About 75 Japanese died in the building over those last two days.

The toll of a month’s fighting

According to Smith, XIV Corps lost 1,010 killed and 5,565 wounded in the fighting for Manila between 3 February and 3 March – of the dead, about 300 belonged to the 37th Infantry Division, about 250 to the 1st Cavalry Division, about 210 to the 11th Airborne Division, which attacked from the south, and the remainder to corps units. The author cautions that unit reports are contradictory and the figures should be treated as approximate. The Japanese lost about 16,000 killed in and around the city (other tallies give 16,665): at least 12,500 men from Iwabuchi’s garrison of some 17,000, and the rest from units of the Shimbu Group destroyed in the suburbs and during a failed counter-attack in mid-February. About 3,500 sailors and soldiers managed to escape across the Marikina River before the ring closed.

Civilian losses were far greater. The figure most often cited – accepted by American and Filipino historians, Smith among them, and inscribed on the Memorare Manila 1945 monument in Intramuros – is about 100,000 inhabitants killed, although this is a rough estimate and both lower and higher figures appear. Most of them were murdered by Japanese sailors and soldiers in a series of atrocities that went on throughout February, known as the Manila massacre; the last killings took place in the final days of the fighting. Some of the victims, however – by some estimates as many as about 40 per cent – died in artillery fire, chiefly American, and in the fires. These proportions cannot now be established; it remains the case that several times more civilians died than soldiers of both sides put together.

A city in ruins

Manila, which in 1941 had been one of the most modern cities in South-East Asia, lay in ruins. Smith lists the damage: public transport no longer existed, the power stations were out of action, the water and sewerage systems needed thorough repair, and 39 of more than a hundred bridges had been destroyed, including all six over the Pasig River. The University of the Philippines and the Philippine General Hospital were largely beyond repair, the poor districts north of the river and the wealthy ones south of it had been razed, and the port and the industrial districts of Paco and Pandacan were heavily damaged. The government centre of the Commonwealth of the Philippines was in ruins, and Intramuros, with its cathedral, monasteries, archives and libraries accumulated since the sixteenth century, had been almost entirely destroyed; in effect only the Church of San Agustín survived. Manila is often named alongside Warsaw among the most devastated capitals of the Allied nations. “The economic, political, and social life of Manila would have to start over almost from scratch,” Smith concluded.

The ruins of the three buildings in which the battle ended were rebuilt after the war. The Legislative Building served the Philippine Congress until 1972, and today all three buildings belong to the National Museum of the Philippines.

MacArthur had restored civil government in the city – where fighting was still going on a few kilometres from Malacañang Palace – as early as 27 February, handing it over to the President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, Sergio Osmeña. The new authorities, supported by American civil affairs units, had to contend with hunger, a lack of water and of shelter for hundreds of thousands of people, and with the reckoning over collaboration with the occupation authorities.

Its place in the war

The capture of Manila gave the Americans what MacArthur had been striving for since the landing on Leyte in the autumn of 1944: the capital, the largest port in the archipelago and the airfields of Luzon. After the recapture of Corregidor at the end of February, engineers and the navy began clearing Manila Bay of mines and wrecks; the last Japanese garrisons of the forts at the mouth of the bay were destroyed in April. Manila became one of the main bases in which the planned invasion of the Japanese Home Islands was prepared, and in August 1945 it was here that a Japanese delegation flew to receive instructions for the surrender.

The end of the battle for the city did not mean the end of the fighting on Luzon. East of Manila the Shimbu Group held out in the mountains until the end of May, controlling the dams on which the capital’s water supply depended, while General Tomoyuki Yamashita with the main forces of the Fourteenth Area Army held on in the mountains of northern Luzon right up to Japan’s surrender. At the same time General Robert Eichelberger’s Eighth Army, which had landed on Palawan at the end of February, was retaking the southern islands of the archipelago.

In the autumn of 1945 the Battle of Manila returned in the courtroom. The massacre of the city’s inhabitants became the main charge against Yamashita before an American military commission in Manila, even though the general had not wanted to defend the city and the crimes were committed mainly by sailors over whom – as the defence argued – he had no real control. On 7 December 1945 the commission found him guilty of failing to restrain his subordinates and sentenced him to death. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld the sentence on 4 February 1946, with Justices Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge dissenting on the grounds that the trial had been hasty and had violated the right to a defence. Yamashita was hanged on 23 February 1946 at Los Baños, not far from the camp from which internees had been freed a year earlier. The case gave rise to the principle of a commander’s responsibility for the crimes of his subordinates, known as the “Yamashita standard”, which lawyers still dispute today.

In the Philippines, February and early March 1945 are remembered above all as a tragedy for the people of the capital. Liberation came to Manila at the price of its near-total destruction and the lives of some hundred thousand people – murdered by Japanese sailors and soldiers or killed in the fire of the battle for the city.