February 1945

This is for the generations of young Filipinos who have never known the difficulties, the deprivations and the horrors of war.

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On Sept. 2, 1945, aboard the US battleship Missouri, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the Instruments of Surrender, formally ending World War II. In the euphoria of victory, not many people remembered that six months earlier, Manila, once the proud “Pearl of the Orient,” was completely destroyed in a battle that some historians considered unnecessary. And if there was a rape of Nanking, there certainly was a rape of Manila.

During the last few months of the Pacific War, our family stayed in Ilocos Norte, while my father, Modesto Farolan, remained in Manila where he served as the general manager of the Philippine National Red Cross. At that time, the Red Cross offices were on Isaac Peral St. (now UN Avenue) corner Taft Avenue. It was a modest two-story building that was built in 1932 and was now converted into an emergency hospital. In February 1945, it was the only building left standing in the area. Most others had been destroyed by American shellfire or were burnt by Japanese marines defending the city.

In his book “By Sword and Fire,” Alfonso J. Aluit provides a graphic account of some of the events that took place in Manila from Feb. 3, 1945 (when a column under Gen. William Chase reached Santo Tomas internment camp to free American prisoners) up to March 3 (when the Battle for Manila officially ended). The account includes my father’s experiences during this period.

After the war, my father would relate to us what happened to him on a Saturday in February that year: In the afternoon of that day, he was in his office with a volunteer nurse Marina de Paz, when Japanese Marines entered the Red Cross premises shooting and bayoneting everyone in sight despite protestations that it was a Red Cross Hospital. One of the victims was Corazon Noble, a popular movie star of the pre-war era, who was stabbed several times in the chest, abdomen, back and other parts of her body while protecting her 10-month-old baby in her arms.

As soon as one of the Japanese soldiers opened his door and went on a shooting rampage targeting anyone in the room, my father ducked underneath his desk and luckily was partially covered by the falling body of one of the doctors who got hit in the first volley of fire. Author Aluit continues that “the Japanese peered under the desk where Modesto Farolan crouched and fired twice. The bullets passed between his feet. The Japanese turned to the others in the dispensary, killing a mother with her 10-day-old baby and the baby’s grandmother as well. Under his desk, Modesto Farolan froze. He could hear shooting from all over the building. He could hear screams of terror and pain, the agonized cries of women and children, and the sound of feet scurrying in panic every which way.”

One of the more pitiful accounts in Aluit’s book, which reads like a page from a Holocaust story, concerns the rounding up of families in the Ermita section of Manila. The residents were gathered at Plaza Ferguson and the young women and girls, some 400 out of 1,500, were brought to the Bayview Hotel fronting Dewey (now Roxas) Boulevard, while the men and children were dispersed among other buildings in the area.

“The group of young women and girls brought to the Bayview Hotel was composed of many nationalities. Aside from Filipinas and Chinese, there were caucasians, mestizas of Spanish, American, Russian, French, Portuguese parentage.

“Some of the ladies were assigned rooms in the hotel but the big mass of them was confined in the main dining room on the second floor.

“From this night, Bayview became a joro house, a brothel for the Japanese military. Singly or in groups, Japanese soldiers, sometimes intoxicated, would come into the rooms where the women were held. They would shine flashlights, lighted candles or kerosene lamps at the faces of the women and by force and violence take away the ones they would fancy into any of the rooms in the hotel.”

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Another book, “The Battle for Manila” by three writers Richard Connaughton, John Pimlott, and Duncan Anderson, dwells more on the details of the battle. But the authors also bring up some interesting points.

Why was the battle fought? One of the reasons given was “General MacArthur’s personal obsession with Manila as a symbol of his promised return. Until he could hold the victory parade in the city and publicly hand power back to a Filipino Commonwealth government, his self-appointed task was incomplete… he viewed the capture of Manila as the key to victory, deciding to surround the enemy leaving them no avenue of escape. When this decision was carried out, Manila was doomed. As the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu pointed out more than 2,400 years ago, it is an integral aspect of the art of war to ‘leave a way of escape to a surrounded enemy’.”

Even before the city had been secured, there were detailed “Plans for Entry of the Commander-in-Chief and Official Party into the City of Manila,” issued by General Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Area, dated Feb. 2, 1945.

It was only on March 3 that Manila was completely in American hands and the organized resistance ended. A few days earlier, General MacArthur, speaking at Malacañang Palace, formally announced the reestablishment of of the Commonwealth government.

The tally of fatalities involved in Manila’s recapture was: 1,010 Americans, 16,665 Japanese (counted dead), and approximately 100,000 civilian inhabitants. In the fire raid on Tokyo in March 1945, 84,000 were killed. In the Hiroshima atomic bombing, casualties came up to 78,150. The destruction of Manila was on the same scale as the destruction of Warsaw, Poland, and slightly less than that of Berlin or Stalingrad.

The authors point out that “the manner in which hospitals and residential areas were systematically bombarded by US artillery is really indefensible. The desire of any commander to protect his men’s lives is understandable; it is what is expected of him. Where the line is drawn is when the guns of war are loosed upon inhabited areas where the enemy is either not present at all or present in such small numbers as not to justify carpet bombardment. There comes a time when the civilian population, even when it is not of one’s own nationality [they were friendly civilians—Filipinos], has to be a key consideration in deciding on the means employed.”

As Carmen Guerrero Nakpil narrates in her book “A Question of Identity: Selected Essays”: Those who survived Japanese hate did not survive American love. Both were equally deadly; the latter more so because it was sought and longed for.

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Liberation can have many meanings. Death and destruction are two of them.