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For centuries visitors had been inspired by Manila, from the old Spanish city of Intramuros with its narrow cobbled streets, churches and fort built on the site of an old Muslim stockade, to the broad avenues and Luneta, a great greensward where fiestas were held. By 1945, however, Manileros had little scope for partying. The price of rice had soared. Almost everyone was hungry, including the Japanese, some of whom were reduced to supplementing their rations with wild grasses. Dysentery and typhus were rife. The city’s Mayor Guinto urged the starving to take to the countryside, and some did so. Repression intensified: there were roundups of suspected American agents, identity parades at which “secret eyes”—hooded informers from the makapili, the 5,000-strong quisling militia—denounced hapless people who were removed to Fort Santiago’s old Spanish dungeons.

Manila’s Europeans were prime suspects. On 28 December 1944 the Japanese kempeitai descended on the Malate Church, arrested Fathers Kelly, Henaghan and Monaghan, and took them away. What was left of the priests after torture was eventually returned. The people of Manila had plentiful warning of the occupiers’ intention to turn their city into a battlefield, which makes it all the more curious that no such intelligence reached MacArthur. Sailors laboured at building strongpoints and barricades, felling the palm trees on Dewey Boulevard so that aircraft could land there. Artillery was manhandled onto the upper floors of office buildings. Mines improvised from shells and bombs were laid at road junctions, machine guns emplaced to cover them.

The American advance was repeatedly checked by cheering crowds of local people. Troops entering northern Manila were greeted with flowers, fruit, beer. Some Filipinos doffed their hats and bowed. Progress was delayed when troops found that the Japanese Balintawak Brewery was undamaged. For several hours, GIs filled and emptied helmets again and again, until the beer vats ran dry. “Throngs of Filipinos441 filled the streets as though celebrating a jubilee,” wrote Captain Bob Brown of the 5th Infantry. “In places they were so many I could not pick out my men. When Jap mortar shells came in they disappeared like mist in hot sunshine, but when the firing stopped they returned just as quickly to resume the celebration.”

“The fighting became a shoot-out442, Wild West style,” said Captain Labin Knipp. “Japs popped out of alleys and buildings trying to escape the fires. We were ready and shot first.” There were strange encounters. Maj. Chuck Henne of the 3/148th Infantry found himself invited into a house by an immaculately dressed Chinese woman, who offered refreshments in perfect English, clapping her hands for a servant despite the fires and detonations only a few streets away. “Not many men were ever privileged443 to sit on a balcony with a beautiful woman, partaking of tea and cakes and looking out on a burning city,” marvelled Henne.

The stage was now set for one of the ugliest battles of the Pacific war, the only one in which American forces found themselves contesting possession of a conurbation. For the next month, Sixth Army found itself committed to a street-by-street, often house-by-house struggle against suicidal Japanese resistance. American encirclement denied General Yokoyama the option of withdrawal, even had he been able to persuade his naval counterpart to accede to this. The Japanese knew they were trapped, and fought accordingly. The battle’s principal victims were not combatants, but the civilian population, which suffered appallingly. Instead of a triumphal parade through the streets for which MacArthur had made elaborate preparations, he found himself presiding over Manila’s martyrdom.

As so often in his campaigns, the general was slow to perceive the gravity of the struggle. “Our forces are rapidly clearing444 the enemy from Manila,” announced a bulletin from his headquarters on 6 February, followed next day by another: “The 37th Infantry and 1st Cavalry Divisions continued mopping-up operations in north