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.
