Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [165]
It quickly became plain that murders on such a scale represented not spontaneous acts by individual Japanese, but the policy of local commanders. If their own men were to perish, the victors were to be denied any cause for rejoicing. A captured Japanese battalion order stated: “When Filipinos are to be killed458 they must be gathered into one place and disposed of in a manner that does not demand excessive use of ammunition or manpower. Given the difficulties of disposing of bodies, they should be collected in houses scheduled for burning, demolished, or thrown into the river.” Oscar Griswold of XIV Corps459 was bewildered to read a translation of a diary found on a dead Japanese, in which the soldier wrote of his love for his family, eulogised the beauty of a sunset—then described how he participated in a massacre of Filipinos during which he clubbed a baby against a tree.
It seems purposeless further to detail the slaughter, which continued until early March. The incidents described above are representative of the fates of tens of thousands of helpless people. A child emerging from a hospital saw a Japanese corpse and spat on it. His father said gently: “Don’t do that460. He was a human being.” By now, however, few Manileros were susceptible to such sentiments. In considering the later U.S. firebombing of Japan and decision to bomb Hiroshima, it is useful to recall that by the spring of 1945 the American nation knew what the Japanese had done in Manila. The killing of innocents clearly represented not the chance of war, nor unauthorised actions by wanton enemy soldiers, but an ethic of massacre at one with events in Nanjing in 1937, and with similar deeds across Asia. In the face of evidence from so many different times, places, units and circumstances, it became impossible for Japan’s leaders credibly to deny systematic inhumanity as gross as that of the Nazis.
Yet the U.S. Army took little pride in its own role. To overcome the Japanese defences, it proved necessary to bombard large areas of the city into rubble. Before the Philippines landings, MacArthur dispatched a message to all American forces, emphasising the importance of restraint in the use of firepower. Filipinos, he wrote, “will not be able to understand461 liberation if it is accompanied by indiscriminate destruction of their homes, their possessions, their civilization, and their lives…this policy is dictated by humanity and our moral standing throughout the Far East.” In consequence, and much to the dismay of his subordinates, MacArthur refused to allow air power to be deployed over Manila. Only after the 37th Division suffered 235 casualties in one day on 9 February did the theatre commander reluctantly lift restrictions on the use of artillery. “From then on, to put it crudely462, we really went to town,” said the 37th’s commander. A hundred American guns and forty-eight heavy mortars delivered 42,153 shells and bombs. The U.S. official historian shrugged: “American lives were undoubtedly far more valuable463 than historic landmarks.”
One post-war estimate suggests that for every six Manileros murdered by the Japanese defenders, another four died beneath the gunfire of their American liberators. Some historians would even reverse that ratio. “Those who had survived Japanese hate464 did not survive American love,” wrote Carmen Guerrero. “Both were equally deadly, the latter more so because sought and longed for.” Artillery killed four hundred civilians around the Remedios Hospital. A local man, Antonio Rocha, approached a U.S. mortar line and told its officer that his bombs were falling on civilians, not Japanese. The American impatiently gestured him away. The columns of the neoclassical Legislature Building collapsed into heaps of rubble. On 14 February, MacArthur’s headquarters announced: “The end of the enemy’s trapped garrison