Unlike those who lived in south Manila in 1945, we were safer in north Manila.
On that historic evening of Feb. 3, 1945, we saw from our windows the flares lighting up the University of Santo Tomas, and heard the sound of voices carried in the still night air, the cheers of the newly liberated internees.
Two days later the main body of the 1st Cavalry Division drove along España Street downhill from the Quezon City Rotunda. Cheering crowds lined the street, ignoring seven dead Japanese who had been mobbed that morning. Their pants had been pulled off and their private parts kicked in an outburst of the people’s fury.
The Americans asked: “Where is Manila?” We pointed to the huge columns of smoke obscuring the afternoon sun. That was how it would be in the next weeks. Day after day we watched as sheets of flame and billows of smoke rose from the agony of south Manila.
Since I cannot add to the eyewitness accounts of those in south Manila, I decided to discuss what I termed “the mysteries of the Manila massacres.”
The first mystery is whether there was a Japanese plan to kill the internees. People feared this but hoped it would not happen. There are witnesses who testified that there was such a plan but that it was aborted by the timely arrival of the Flying Column at UST.
One of these is ex-internee Herman Strong in his book “A Ringside Seat to War” (N.Y.: Vantage, 1965). He wrote:
“… [A]ll male internees between the ages of 18 and 50 were to be executed on Sunday, February 4, 1945! This was revealed by documents under a Tokyo Military dateline found in the commandant’s office the night we were liberated. … Stanley (a British interpreter) translated this document to the American commander. ‘So that’s why we were supposed to get here before midnight,’ the American commander said. He stuffed the document in his pocket and told them not to mention it to anyone. Why did he want it kept secret?” (p.89)
The other somewhat different story comes from another ex-internee, Joan Bennett Chapman. Her story is that the Japanese planned to vacate the camp and head for the hills, taking with them some women for “breeding purposes” and able-bodied men to serve as human shields. The remaining internees were to be seated at the staircase of the main building and blown up on Feb. 5 (Inquirer, 2/9/15 p. C4).
There are discrepancies between the two stories and no posterior corroborating evidence, the only point in common being that a massacre of internees was planned for early February and that MacArthur was notified, prompting the sending of the Flying Column.
As against them, there is the experience of the Halsema brother-and-sister team, James and Betty (Foley). They had been interned in Baguio, but all internees were sent to Manila and lodged in Bilibid in December 1944.
No one knew they were there, and no one would have been the wiser if they had been killed. But their guards left quietly on Sunday, Feb. 4. The liberating forces were surprised to find internees in Bilibid.
So the mystery remains: Was there a Japanese plan to massacre the internees or not?
The second mystery is who ordered the massacres of civilians and the destruction of civilian facilities. There is a written field order prescribing ways of executing civilians and disposing of corpses, and Gen. Carlos P. Romulo, in a movie made by a Marine officer, says there were orders from Tokyo. But those orders have never been found. If there were any such, they might have been destroyed in the two weeks between surrender and actual occupation.
In the mutual finger-pointing between overall commander General Yamashita, Manila naval commander Admiral Iwabuchi and Vice Admiral Okochi, what is mentioned is only the removal or destruction of military supplies from Manila, not the killing of civilians.
But these are brazen lies. Military supplies were not being removed from Manila, they were being brought in. The 37th Division found six months of supplies in the Finance Building, and the walls of Intramuros were studded with guns of all kinds, including heavy naval guns.
The Japanese garrison in Manila included nearly 4,000 of Yamashita’s army troops. Rather than evacuating supplies, they were planting bombs in the buildings of the business district, and they committed the first massacres north of the Pasig. They also took part in the Intramuros killings later.
Filipino occupation officials asked Yamashita to declare Manila an open city, but he refused. Obviously he was preparing military action, not evacuation. At Yamashita’s trial, Okochi laid the blame for the whole Manila debacle on Yamashita (thus conveniently absolving himself, and avoiding prosecution).
Yamashita’s most flagrant lie is his claim that he did not know what was happening in Manila because communications were cut—hard to believe in an age of radio communication. Yet on July 30, 1945, from Kiangan deep in the Cordillera he was able to communicate with Marshal Terauchi in Saigon 1,000 miles away.
American lawyers put much credence on statements made at war-crimes trials. But Yamashita’s chief of staff, Gen. Akira Muto, instructed his fellow officers in captivity: “In the trials … what we should do is not to name any others … You should never say, for the sake of Japan, for the sake of the Japanese Army, that anyone who graduated from the Imperial Military Academy had ever ordered killing noncombatants … The high-ranking officers meticulously followed this policy—unanimously repeating, I have nothing to do with the case. I know nothing about it.” In effect, they were ordered to lie. This is reported in Capt. Toshimi Kumai’s book, “The Blood and Mud in the Philippines: Anti-Guerrilla Warfare on Panay Island” (Iloilo City: Malones, 2009, p.126).
So Yamashita claimed doing one thing but actually did the opposite. Iwabuchi claimed to follow Okochi’s orders. Okochi blamed the whole mess on Yamashita. We are going around in circles.
The third mystery is what military objectives would be accomplished by the defense and destruction of Manila and the killing of civilians. If it was to tie up US forces, this was better done through holding out in the mountains. In Manila only about 1,000 Americans were killed and 5,000 wounded.
If it was to negate the use of the port of Manila, MacArthur already showed the effective way to do it in 1942: Block the entrance to Manila Bay by holding Corregidor and Bataan. At that time he denied the use of Manila Bay to the Japanese for four months, whereas in 1945, with Bataan lightly defended and Corregidor taken by combined air and sea assaults, US ships were sailing into the bay a month after the entry into Manila. Yamashita would have done better to deploy his Manila forces in Bataan and employ them in a battle for the bay entrance.
It would mean that Manila was sacrificed to the exigencies of a faulty military strategy. It is insulting to call the atrocities committed in Manila as bestial—insulting to beasts, who never behave that cruelly.
Benito Legarda Jr. is a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of the Philippines, former alternate executive director of the International Monetary Fund (Washington, D.C.), former trustee of the National Museum and former member of the National Historical Institute. He is the author of books on economics and history. This piece is an edited lecture delivered at the Ayala Museum on Feb. 14, 2015.