Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [162]
“MacArthur has visions445 of saving this beautiful city intact,” wrote Griswold of XIV Corps on 7 February. “He does not realise, as I do, that the skies burn red every night as [the Japanese] systematically sack the city. Nor does he know that enemy rifle, machine gun, mortar and artillery fire are steadily increasing in intensity. My private opinion is that the Japs will hold that part of Manila south of the Pasig river until all are killed.” Griswold added two days later: “Army commander [Krueger] dissatisfied with progress, as usual. Damndest man to serve with I ever saw!” American intelligence about enemy deployments was almost non-existent. Some fifteen hundred Japanese were killed in clashes north of the Pasig, but these were only an overture. As Krueger’s men began to force the river crossings on 7 February, they discovered how hard the enemy was willing to fight.
The 3/148th Infantry crossed the river in amphibious tractors and assault boats. “Leaving the near bank446,” wrote an officer, “the I company boats were making good progress, moving in a ragged crescent, when the Jap fire stormed through them—machine guns and cannon. This fire, coming from the west, ripped through the formation scattering boats, turning the move into a mad dash for the cover of the far bank. It was spellbinding to watch pieces of paddles and splintered chunks of boat plywood fly through the air while men paddled with shattered oars and rifles. On reaching the far bank, the men jumped out of their boats and scrambled up the bank taking their dead and wounded comrades with them. What seemed to last for hours was over in ten minutes.”
“The sky was a447 copper-burnished dome of thick clouds,” wrote a senior officer of the 37th Division, an Ohio National Guard formation. “So great was the glare of the dying city that the streets, even back where we were, were alight as from the reflection of a reddish moon. Great sheets of flame swept across the rooftops, sometimes spanning several city blocks in their consuming flight…We saw the awful pyrotechnics of destruction, spreading ever faster to encompass and destroy the most beautiful city in the Far East.”
The U.S. Army in the Philippines possessed none of the extensive experience of street fighting acquired by Eisenhower’s forces in Europe. In Manila, they learned hard lessons. The city’s principal buildings were designed to be proof against earthquakes. Paco police station, for instance, defied repeated assaults by infantry supported by artillery and heavy mortars. Two tanks were lost to mines before the armour suppressed Japanese fire sufficiently to allow a final assault: “Even then448,” declared a Sixth Army report, “the Japanese did not withdraw and the last of them were destroyed in sandbagged emplacements dug deep in the floor of the basement.” Against large public buildings, it proved necessary to use 155mm howitzers firing at point-blank range, six hundred yards. Assaulting the Finance Building, 155s and tanks bombarded lower floors only, lest high-trajectory shells burst in civilian areas beyond. Shells systematically demolished the structure until the defenders retreated to its basement. Americans fighting their way up the stairs of the Manila Hotel found the enemy reoccupying the lower storeys behind them. Some two hundred Japanese were finally driven into its basement air-raid shelter, which became their sealed tomb.
Guards fled from Bibilid Prison, leaving behind 447 civilian and 828 military prisoners, most American. Some were men whom MacArthur had left behind on Corregidor in 1942. It was a merciful surprise that they were left alive, but beyond their emaciation, all the prisoners liberated in the Philippines proved traumatised. The world had changed