Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila

by James M. Scott

“Arthur MacArthur was the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen,” his aide Col. Enoch H. Crowder once remarked, “until I met his son.”

In a sign of how insular America was,

President William McKinley confided in a friend that when he received the cable from Rear Adm. George Dewey that the Philippines had fallen, he had to look up the nation’s location on a globe: “I could not have told where those darned islands were within two thousand miles.”

One time a captured American soldier was buried alive up to his neck. Guerrillas had propped open the soldier’s mouth with a stick and sprinkled a trail of sugar into the woods. “Millions of ants,” one report noted, “had done the rest.” American troops retaliated, unleashing a reign of terror upon Filipinos that would mirror the horrors executed by the Japanese a half-century later. Soldiers waterboarded suspected guerrillas, herded them by the thousands into concentration camps, destroyed food supplies, and torched villages and towns, the latter referred to by Hughes as “black paint.” “You know what ”black paint’ is?” the brigadier general queried gunboat commander Yates Stirling. “I hope you use plenty of it.”

“The U.S. conquest of the Philippines had been as cruel as any conflict in the annals of imperialism,” historian Stanley Karnow observed, “but hardly had it ended before Americans began to atone for its brutality.” Under the leadership of MacArthur and his successors, the United States began building railways and roads, overhauling the court system, and improving public health, from digging sewers to vaccinating villagers. In addition, more than a thousand teachers arrived from the United States, fanning out across the archipelago. “The educational work under the American military occupation of the Philippines is one of the most romantic chapters in Philippine history,” the younger MacArthur later said. “While some countries conquered by means of the Cross, or subjugated by means of the sword, it remained for the United States to colonize through the agency of education.”

Other prisoners charged the Japanese. One managed to wrestle a rifle away from a soldier and shoot him just before a second Japanese serviceman ran a bayonet through him.

“The American knew his fate and began begging to be shot and not burnt, in such a high voice that I could hear,” McDole later testified. “Then I could see them pour gasoline on one foot and burn it, then the other until he collapsed. Then they poured gasoline over his body and set it off.”

The flagship Wasatch, which carried senior navy commander Vice Adm. Thomas Kinkaid and General Krueger of the Sixth Army, broadcast the news. “The first wave has landed!” Troops charged ashore first on the beaches near San Fabian at nine-thirty a.m., followed three minutes later by the arrival of soldiers at Lingayen. The massive naval guns began firing again, aiming at the flanks of the invasion beaches and inland targets. Similar reports of a lack of enemy troops poured in from the other beaches.

British internee Elsa Colquhoun feasted on a special birthday dinner comprised exclusively of rubbish. “Such a wonderful meal,” she wrote in a thank you card, “all gathered from the Japanese garbage dump!” Medical officer Maj. Samuel Bloom roasted his pet guinea pigs, while many others choked down everything from stray dogs and cats to snails. Even rats could fetch as much as eight pesos apiece on the camp’s black market. “One man,” Eva Anna Nixon wrote in her diary, “pioneered in rat cooking and others followed.”

“Poached toad was the one delicacy I could provide, but mother strictly insisted that toads caught in the latrines must be thoroughly washed.”

A medical survey conducted by the camp doctors in January 1945 revealed that the average male had lost fifty-one pounds and the average female thirty-two. More than half of that weight was lost just since August 1944. “I was worried about a lump in my stomach,” Goldthorpe, the nurse, confided in her diary on January 5, 1945. “Then I found it was my backbone. I never expected to feel that from the front.”

“Just pray to God,” Father Tanquilot told him. With brutal efficiency, the Japanese led teenagers and even grandfathers into the kill room, like sheep to the slaughter. The executioners worked with the competence of an assembly line—kneel, chop, fall; kneel, chop, fall. The sweat Bayot noted that soaked the executioner testified to the physical stamina required to decapitate so many men, to wield a sword over and over again with the power to cut bone. Down below in the dark, the handful of survivors moaned in agony; others gurgled and choked. “This is my house,” one of the victims cried out, “and this is the place my head was cut.” Twenty-seven-year-old Pablo Martinez called out for his cousins Ubaldo Magtal and Pedro Cruz, both of whom were in his same group of ten men. “I am here,” Magtal replied. But Cruz did not answer. Ricardo Esquerra, the undertaker, spotted his friend Teodoro Valdez. “Teodoro!” he cried. His friend remained silent. Esquerra reached over and grabbed Valdez’s foot, pulling him toward him. Only then did he realize that his friend’s head was separated from his body. Twenty-five-year-old Felix Plata experienced a similar horror as the dead dropped around him. “I saw one head roll away,” he said. “That was the head of one of my neighbors.” The executioners interrupted their murderous rhythm to swig wine or howl with laughter. “Banzai!” the survivors heard them shout amid chops. “Banzai!” More bodies fell. And the pile grew, a tangled pyramid of arms, leg...

For the survivors, the misery had only begun. With the Japanese encamped around the building, no one dared leave in search of help. The only option was to pretend to be dead and wait for the Americans to arrive, which could be days or even a week. The Japanese knew that some of the victims feigned death, going so far as to place a glass of water beside each body so that the troops could check if the person had sipped it. “Don’t drink from your glass,” Fernando Vasquez-Prada’s father warned him. “Drink from someone else’s whom you are sure is dead.”

Juanita Tamayo, whose finger was blown off, responded. She climbed up from the stairwell landing and pulled Cojuangco closer to his son-in-law. Aquino begged for water, and she gave him some, which he gulped despite his father-in-law’s warning that it was dangerous to do so with chest wounds. “I preferred death,” Aquino later said, “rather than suffer thirst.” Asela asked for water, which she drank, and soon thereafter she died; so, too, did Aquino’s maid, Fortunata. Aquino tried to sit up but fainted. He tried two more times and each time passed out. “I wanted to faint because I found out that one does not feel any pain when he faints,” he said. “It was easier to die this way.”

Those still alive pretended to be dead as troops moved through the first and second floors, kicking the bodies to see if anyone stirred. To Aquino’s horror, the Japanese tried to rape his fourteen-year-old maid, who at this point had been dead for almost ten hours. Troops tore the dead teen’s panties off but found rigor mortis prevented them from parting her legs. “She was dead. She was cold,” Aquino later testified. “No sane man would do that.”

Helen Vasquez-Prada, who had long feared she would die by the sword, began to slip into madness, cursing the troops who had wiped out most of her family. “Bastards!” she wailed. “Son-of-a-bitch!” Her painful cries carried all the way upstairs, where even Aquino could hear them on the ground just outside the chapel. Japanese troops, no doubt tired of her howls, finally silenced her with a bayonet. “My mother lasted three agonizing days,” Fernando later said. “She screamed day and night from the pain of her wounds.”

“We wished we were dead.” Out on the street, survivors listened to the clatter of trucks rolling through the rubble. “Every minute we were expecting the Americans to come up,” Aquino testified. “We could hear voices and then they would vanish. We did not know whether it was the Japanese, Americans or Filipinos.” Around noon on February 15—seventy-two hours after the massacre—the survivors heard voices outside of the school, this time speaking English. “Father,” Aquino said to Cosgrave, “I think they have come.” “When I see Americans, I will go out and wave at them,” replied the priest, who kept watch out the windows. “But the Japs are still around.” The survivors had endured too much to risk being killed now. Rather than dart out, the refugees huddled and waited as minutes turned to hours. Around five p.m. that afternoon, American soldiers entered the bloodied downstairs of De La Salle. “Anybody alive?” one shouted. Up the same staircase where Helen Vasquez-Prada’s painful cries had once echoed, now came the familiar twang of an American accent. For the exhausted survivors crouched behind the chapel altar, liberation had at long last arrived. “Yes,” Cosgrave shouted. “We are alive. We are here.”

“I am overwhelmed with shame for the many casualties among my subordinates and for being unable to discharge my duty because of my incompetence. The men have exerted their utmost efforts in the fighting. We are very glad and grateful for the opportunity of being able to serve our country in this epic battle. Now, with what strength remains, we will daringly engage the enemy. ‘Banzai to the Emperor!’ We are determined to fight to the last man.”

Around eleven a.m. troops reached the scorched ruins of Santa Rosa College. There among the makeshift shelters made of burned timbers and corrugated sheets of metal, soldiers discovered eleven-year-old Rosalinda Andoy, whom the Japanese had bayoneted thirty-eight times. Nurses in the ruins had bandaged her wounds, including the hole in her stomach that had exposed her intestines. Rosalinda had miraculously survived twelve days. Another unlikely survivor was Rosa Calalang. Convinced she would die, nurses had summoned a priest to hear her last confession, yet she, too, had lived. Soldiers this morning hustled those who could walk out to the foot of the Jones Bridge, while litter bearers came for the wounded, carrying them to waiting ambulances.

The Americans began tearing apart the rubble. Underneath the ruins of a staircase, they found a recently deceased mother still clutching an infant girl to her breast. The soldiers pried the baby free and carried her to a battalion aid station, where medics administered blood plasma and warm broth. Others bathed her and swaddled her in fresh clothes made from an old pair of military fatigues. Medics turned her over to civilian authorities. “How do you like that?” Staff Sgt. Harry Bulfer complained. “We get a real souvenir and right away we have to give it up. What an army!”

The judge’s question floored members of the prosecution. “Imagine,” Mountz wrote in a letter to his father, “the Judge asking the defense counsel what the law is.” The defense could only object, so often, in fact, that it prompted an unusual query one day from Yamashita’s former chief of staff, Muto. “Who is this Mr. Jackson?” he asked. The defense lawyers realized that he had mistaken the word “objection” for “Jackson.” The lawyers joked that his last name was “Not sustained.”