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July 11 - July 21, 2025
Along with Capt. Hideki Tojo, who would later serve as Japan’s war minister and prime minister, Yamashita toured battlefields on the western front and visited Hamburg, witnessing first hand the crippling inflation and food prices that resulted from Germany’s defeat. “If Japan ever has to fight any nation,” Yamashita confided in Tojo, “she must never surrender and get herself in a state like this.”
had 30,000 men and was outnumbered more than three to one. I knew that if I had to fight long for Singapore, I would be beaten. That is why the surrender had to be at once. I was very frightened all the time that the British would discover our numerical weakness and lack of supplies and force me into disastrous street fighting.”
The gravity of the situation hung over Percival. Not since Gen. Charles Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781 during the American Revolution had the British suffered such a significant defeat. “We were,” as Gen. Sir Henry Pownall noted in his diary, “frankly out-generalled, outwitted and outfought.”
Yamashita’s stunning battlefield victory, however, was marred by a series of atrocities his forces committed, a barbarism that would echo three years later during the general’s desperate fight to hold the Philippines. Near the town of Parit Sulong, Japanese forces killed about 150 wounded Australian and Indian troops, beheading some and shooting others before dousing them in fuel and setting them ablaze.
Over several weeks, troops rounded up and transported Chinese residents—mostly military-aged men—outside the city and slaughtered them in what became known as the Sook Ching Massacre. Japan would later admit to killing five thousand, though leaders of Singapore’s Chinese community would place the number closer to fifty thousand.
Japan’s capture of the British citadel reverberated around the world. Winston Churchill called it “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history” while Australian prime minister John Curtin warned the defeat jeopardized the “fate of the English-speaking world.” For the first time, the American press speculated that the Allies might lose the war. “There can now be no doubt,” observed a New York Times reporter, “that we are facing perhaps the blackest period in our history.”
After the Marianas fell in the summer of 1944, putting the Japanese homeland within range of American bombers, many knew the war had moved into a deadly new phase, best summarized by the four words Fleet Adm. Osami Nagano muttered. “Hell is on us.”
Yamashita likewise battled gasoline, vehicle, and rice shortages, the latter a paramount problem considering American submarines and bombers had destroyed as much as 85 percent of the rice shipments from Bangkok and Saigon. He drilled his supply officers on the desperate need for food. “Rice,” he harped. “It is rice that we want.”
Just as Yamashita feared, Leyte proved a disaster. The epic sea battle that opened the campaign cost the Japanese Navy a third of its surface ships, including four aircraft carriers, three battleships, nine cruisers, and nine destroyers. Of the fifty thousand troops Yamashita sent to Leyte, barely half ever made it to the island as American bombers and submarines obliterated the transports en route. “The waters of the sea around us,” recalled one Japanese officer, “were tinted with blood.”
Twenty-five-year-old Pacita Pestaño-Jacinto, a journalist and graduate of the University of the Philippines, shared her fears in her diary, which would become one of the best chronicles of life in the Philippines under the Japanese occupation. “Now danger will not come from the skies,” she wrote. “Now danger will be living among us. With us.”
The most hated of the Japanese guards, Lt. Nanakazu Abiko, appeared moments later. Abiko had prided himself on humiliating the internees. He had slapped them, forced them to stare for hours at the sun, and to bow even when starvation had left them so weak that many could no longer climb stairs or stand through daily roll call without fainting. Now this despicable guard stood before armed American soldiers. The troops ordered him to raise his hands, but instead he reached into a pouch strung over his shoulder. Maj. James Gerhart grabbed a rifle from a soldier and fired from his hip. A bullet
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An internee burst into the room. “Hey, you people hear about Lieutenant Abiko? He’s been shot. Maybe he’s dead already, I hope!” He gleefully related the story of Abiko’s refusal to surrender, his shooting, and the attack by internees. Many of those in the clinic sounded off on Abiko. “I can’t say I’m sorry,” someone said. “Got what he deserved,” added another.
Stevenson listened to the stream of vitriol from his colleagues. “War makes animals out of any of us,” the doctor finally muttered.
To San Juan’s horror, the soldiers began to bayonet the children and even the infants, including two-month-old Celia Fajardo, wrapped in a gray flannel sleep suit. “Some of the babies were grabbed from the arms of their mothers and were held by their two hands in mid air by one of the Japanese soldiers,” he later told investigators. “At that instant the executioner would stab them in that position.”
“That baby of mine,” San Juan recalled, “was thrown into the air and then caught with the point of a bayonet.”
few who managed to escape. A captured Japanese diary dispassionately described the fates of the thousands of men imprisoned in Fort Santiago. “150 guerrillas were disposed of tonight,” the unknown diarist wrote on February 7. “I personally stabbed and killed 10.” Two days later he put pen to paper again: “Burned 1,000 guerrillas to death tonight.” He concluded his diary on February 13. “While I was on duty, 10 guerrillas tried to escape. They were stabbed to death,” he wrote. “At 1600, all guerrillas were burned to death.”
What had started as a fight between two armies over one of Asia’s great cities devolved on February 9 into one of the worst human catastrophes of World War II. An examination of the timeline of the dozens of atrocities that occurred in Manila point to that date as the fulcrum on which the violence shifted from individual attacks against suspected guerrillas to organized mass extermination. That was the day Iwabuchi chose to abandon the city; that was the day he realized the fight was hopeless. And that was the day the true evil began.
“Mr. President,” he began, occasionally glancing at his notes, “more than three years have elapsed—years of bitterness, struggle and sacrifice—since I withdrew our forces and installation from this beautiful city that, open and undefended, its churches, monuments, and cultural centers might, in accordance with the rules of warfare, be spared the violence of military ravage. The enemy would not have it so, and much that I sought to preserve has been unnecessarily destroyed by his desperate action at bay—but by these ashes he has wantonly fixed the future pattern of his own doom.”
Alongside thousands of Filipinos, the Japanese had slaughtered Russians, Spaniards, Germans, and Indians, as well as two Supreme Court justices, the family of a senator, and scores of priests.
Hendrix then pointed out that the Philippine Constitution gave any person the right to due process under the law, a statement that drew a rebuke from Justice Ramon Ozaeta. “I don’t think the makers of our constitution had in mind a person like Yamashita,” he said, “who came to our country as an invader.”
On the key question of whether Yamashita could be held liable for the actions of his troops, the court noted that the laws of war presupposed that a commander’s duty included making sure his troops did not commit crimes. Failure of an officer to restrain his forces only invited the commission of such atrocities, while stripping a commander of that liability promised to further undermine laws designed to protect civilians.
What happened in Manila in February 1945 was not an isolated outbreak of barbarity but part of a pattern of Japanese brutality that played out across Asia, from the Rape of Nanking to the slaughter of an estimated 250,000 Chinese civilians in the aftermath of Jimmy Doolittle’s April 1942 raid on Tokyo. Yamashita’s own troops had committed similar atrocities earlier in the war in Malaya, and had America not hanged him, in all likelihood, either the British or Australians would have.
