Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [166]
Oscar Griswold of XIV Corps wrote on 28 February: “C-in-C refused my request465 to use air on Intramuros. I hated to ask for it since I knew it would cause death of civilians held captive by Japs. We know, too, that the Japs are burning large numbers to death, shooting and bayoneting them. Horrid as it seems, probably death from bombing would be more merciful…I fear that the C in C’s refusal to let me have bombing will result in more casualties to my men…I understand how he feels about bombing people—but it is being done all over the world—Poland, China, England, Germany, Italy—then why not here! War is never pretty. I am frank to say I would sacrifice Philipino [sic] lives under such circumstances to save the lives of my men. I feel quite bitter about this tonight.”
In the last days of February, the Americans began the final and most brutal phase of the struggle to overcome the defenders of the old city. Griswold wrote: “The assault upon Intramuros was unique466 in modern warfare in that the entire area was mediaeval in structure, and its defense combined the fortress of the Middle Ages with the firepower of modern weapons.” Granite walls twenty feet thick were breached with heavy artillery. The 145th Infantry then attacked, supported by a company of medium tanks, a company of tank destroyers, an assault-gun platoon, two flamethrower tanks and self-propelled artillery. Once inside Fort Santiago, American demolition teams sealed deep recesses, dungeons and tunnels, after throwing in white phosphorus grenades or pumping down gasoline and igniting it. To its end, the battle remained fragmented, confused, pitiless.
Only on 3 March could Manila be deemed secure. Some 3,500 Japanese escaped across the Marikina river. Weary and exasperated, Oscar Griswold wrote: “General MacArthur had announced [Manila’s] capture several days ahead of the actual event. The man is publicity crazy. When soldiers are dying and being wounded, it doesn’t make for their morale to know that the thing they are doing has been officially announced as finished days ago.” MacArthur picked a path through the debris of his old quarters in the penthouse of the Manila Hotel, where he found his library destroyed, a dead Japanese colonel on the carpet: “It was not a pleasant moment467…I was tasting to the acid dregs the bitterness of a devastated and beloved home,” he wrote later. It seems bizarre that he paraded his own loss of mere possessions in the midst of a devastating human catastrophe. He wrote to his wife, Jean, reporting the good news that he had recovered all the family silver. He took over a mansion, Casa Blanca in the smart Santa Mesa district, established residence, and defied widespread criticism by summoning Jean to join him there.
American soldiers were not merely exhausted, but also deeply depressed by all that they had seen, done and suffered in Manila. The 3/148th Infantry, for instance, had lost 58 percent of its strength. Many of the casualties were veterans of the Solomons campaigns. Among new replacements there was an outbreak of self-inflicted wounds, which caused the perpetrators to be court-martialled. To relieve his men’s gloom, the battalion’s colonel ordered an “organised drunk468.” Two truckloads of Suntory whiskey were procured, and issued at a rate of three bottles per man. One day was devoted to drinking, a second to “healing.” This may not have been a good answer to the battalion’s morale problem, but its officers were unable to think of better ones.
The victors counted 1,000 American dead, together with 16,665 Japanese—and 100,000 Manileros. In those days, other Luzon cities also suffered massacres by the occupiers: 984 civilians were killed in Cuenca on 19 February; 500 in Buang and Batangas on 28 February; 7,000 civilians were killed in Calamba, Laguna. In all, a million Filipinos are estimated to have died by violence in the Second World War, most of them in its last months. There