The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
Oliver Teves / The Associated Press
Seventy years have not dulled the memories of survivors of the month-long Battle of Manila. The mass killings by Japanese forces, the loved ones lost and the desperation are etched in their minds, as is the elation when American forces finally rescued them in the closing months of World War II.
The US liberated Manila from the Japanese, but not before it was destroyed and more than 100,000 civilians killed. About 16,000 Japanese soldiers and 1,000 US troops also died in the fighting from Feb. 3 to March 3, 1945.
The Philippines’s was the second-most devastated city in World War II after Warsaw, Poland, said historian Ricardo Jose of the University of the Philippines. He called the city “one of the worst battlefields in the world.”
When the Japanese invaded the Philippines, then an American colony, in 1941, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the US forces there, declared Manila an “open city” to spare it from destruction. But when the Americans returned, the Japanese decided to fight to the last man, from building to building, and burned entire city blocks.
Civilians died from malnutrition and American shelling, but mostly, historians agree, at the hands of Japanese troops. Survivors shared their stories with The Associated Press:
Roderick Hall was 9 when the Japanese occupied Manila. The British boy and his family lived in a home in the Malate district, although his father was interned with thousands of foreigners at the University of Santo Tomas.
In late January 1945, before American forces closed in on the capital, the Japanese barged into the family home, searched every room and found what the raiders claimed was an illegal radio transmitter. Hall, now a business investor, said it was just a short-wave radio the family listened to for news outside Manila.
All members of the household—including Hall and his brother, his mother, his grandmother, an uncle, and aunt and the family’s helpers—were brought to Manila’s Masonic Temple.
Hall, then 12, and his brother and the house helpers were later released. They were allowed to bring food to their mother and the others for several days. Then the Japanese stopped the visits.
About 200 people were massacred at the temple, but Hall learned only recently from a war document that his mother was listed among dozens executed at Fort Santiago, a centuries-old Spanish garrison used by occupation troops to torture and kill suspected guerrillas.
For a while, Hall had hoped that his mother somehow escaped and was safe with the guerrillas.
“About two years later, I was away in school. My father wrote and said, ‘I am going to marry again.’ And that’s when I started to cry and broke down and had to admit to myself that this hope that my mother was alive somewhere was no longer the case.”
For someone who was 4 when the Japanese began bombing raids on Manila in December 1941, Juan “Johnny” Rocha remembers a lot from the war. Perhaps because, when those first bombs were falling, he was being rushed for an appendectomy—not in the operating room, but to the hospital basement, where it was safer.
Rocha, who later would become the Philippine ambassador to Spain, once saw a man hanging dead from a telephone pole, with a sign that said he was a thief. He remembers his family using huge wads of devalued Japanese wartime currency to buy basic commodities, and privately singing “God Bless America,” and “I Love My Own, My Native Land” at home.
“The most remarkable thing was whenever we passed in front of a Japanese sentry we had to all bow, and if we didn’t bow, he would slap us or kick us or whatever,” he said.
As fighting in Manila intensified, his family decided to flee, but tragedy struck before they could. When a shell landed on a neighbor’s house, shrapnel cut through an adobe wall and sliced off the top of his mother’s head, killing her.