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.
