The Destruction of Manila - A Scourge or Blessing?

“Thank God it’s done”, I sighed in relief as I put down the book[1] that told a gripping and poignant story of the month-long battle for Manila by American and Japanese forces in 1945 during World War II.

I was born more than a decade after that momentous and tragic episode in the annals of Philippine history. Though I had heard or read war-time stories before never did I come to grips with the grim and somber reality of war in all of its lurid details - until I came across this book’s soul-stirring pages.

Really, it is a far-cry from the sketchy tales I heard as a child from kin and friends alike. My immediate family fled to the mountains of Bicol province down in the southern part of Luzon Island, away from the ire of the retreating Japanese forces.

My doctor uncle survived the brutal Death March from Bataan to Capas, Tarlac at the war’s inception, yet he never quite got around to telling me the whole story of his horrifying ordeal. Perhaps it was just too painful for him to relive the hard privations and depredations of war. Besides, he had swallowed another bitter pill as he watched in anguish how his younger brother died of malaria and dysentery within the loathsome environs of the brutal Japanese prison camp.

Pre-war Manila with all its charm and grace teemed with a pulsating and vigorous social and commercial life even under the humidity of the warm tropical sun. Elegant houses and fine edifices dotted its calm and serene avenues. Both Filipino and Spanish elites called it their home. The national government had its executive, legislative and judicial offices there while various religious and secular educational institutions shaped it to be the prime center of higher learning in the islands. Its ports and harbors, some of the finest in the Orient, maintained a thriving commerce with the rest of the world. Rightfully, the Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legaspi bestowed upon it the title, “Distinguished and Ever Loyal City”.

One cannot separate Manila’s colorful history from the evangelizing and civilizing influence of the Spanish friars who laid the foundation that helped shape it into the only Christian city in Asia – a fact proud Manilenos like to remind us. Indeed, this also holds true for the entire Philippine archipelago. The institutions that those friars established played a decisive role in the formation and progress of the country in the cultural, socio-political and religious realms. Knowing this, it appalled me to see recently a Filipino-American newspaper columnist describe them with venomous intent as Taliban-like. Surely, I expect more historical knowledge and objectivity from someone who holds the title of “dean”.

With the advent of American rule, Manila benefited from the technology that built America into a great nation. Infrastructure and communication facilities were upgraded. Public education and a free press that molded public opinion were introduced. And consequently, the Philippines were ushered into the era of American democracy. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1941, the nation was caught in the transition period to self-rule known as, The Commonwealth of the Philippines, with Manuel M. Quezon as its first president.

“The twenties brought a new medium – the movies. Now Hollywood would impose its will on a populace quite literally mesmerized. Probably no other medium would succeed in molding taste and opinion in this country, for better or for worse, than American movies……Some wag would thereafter characterize the Filipino of the time as the product of 300 years in a convent and 40 years in Hollywood.”[2]

The American observer Gleeck writes, “American culture had triumphed almost to the point of embarrassment to its own citizens. Originally promoted by government through the schools, by the end of the First World War, it was American technology, primarily the automobile and the media industry – first the newspapers and next films – which it seemed had almost liquidated Spanish-Malay culture.”[3]

Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon initiated a system of national defense upon the approval of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935. The American president sent no other than the then-retired U.S. Army General Douglas McArthur with junior officers Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Col. James B. Ord as his aides to help organize Quezon’s defense plan.

On the eve of the war in the Pacific, General McArthur was recalled to active duty and commissioned as the commanding general of the U.S. Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) into which all U.S. military forces in the Philippines were incorporated. War plans hastened the building of military installations. Thus, fortifications were set up in Bataan and the island of Corregidor, the last bastion of Filipino-American resistance until the fateful ninth day of April, 1942.

Manila was declared an open city but that did not spare its treasured landmarks from destruction by indiscriminate Japanese bombing sorties.

Under insistent orders from Washington, McArthur left Corregidor to General Wainwright, while he proceeded to Australia in order to organize the defense of the country. When he arrived in Australia he made his famous, “I shall return” declaration. With the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, the Philippines was left to Japanese rule.

The Japanese had their hands full. The Catholic population never quite submitted to their pagan overlords. Though both oriental peoples, a great religious and cultural chasm separated them into two distinct worlds and “never the twain did meet.” Under these circumstances, the Filipino guerrilla movement succeeded far more than those in any other Japanese-dominated country during the war.

Upon McArthur’s return in October, 1944, the American forces immediately began their campaign to re-conquer the Philippines. On February 3, 1945 they were knocking on the doors of Japanese-controlled Manila.

From there on unfolded deeply moving stories of hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire between the advancing Americans and the defiant and deeply-entrenched Japanese. Heavy and incessant shelling from a wide array of American cannons and howitzers coupled with the systematic barbarity of the Japanese forces took an atrocious toll on Manila’s civilian population. Survivors lived to tell their horrifying stories.

Families were summarily executed, houses and buildings routinely torched and razed to the ground and grenades lobbed into locked rooms or prison cells filled with humans. Men including religious were gathered and lined up for execution by firing squad or decapitation by sword. Hundreds of women, both Filipino and Caucasian, were billeted in hotels only to be forcefully subjected to the lust of drunken soldiers.

People boarded up their homes but were forced to abandon by American shell fire or Japanese torches. And once they headed for the streets, they were either mowed down by machine gun fire or targeted by indiscriminate sniper shots. Many succumbed to further shelling. Others were bayoneted to death. The Japanese simply treated both civilians and combatants as their enemy. They worked themselves into a satanic frenzy reminiscent of the reign of terror during the French Revolution. Like a cornered rat with no chance of escape the Japanese fought to the last man.

Many people lost their bearings when they were forced out into the streets since landmarks and edifices were obliterated. The carnage and ruin went on agonizingly for a month until March 3, 1945. And in the end, charming Manila, the Distinguished and Ever Loyal City; of fine and elegant buildings; home of the elites; and the center of culture and higher learning, was reduced to humiliating rubble.

The wanton destruction was utterly stupefying to observe. In fact, it ran neck-and-neck with Warsaw, Poland for the unflattering title of “most destroyed city of World War II.” Coincidentally, the devastation of these Catholic cities was rivaled in the Orient only by that wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the homes of the two largest concentrations of Catholics in Japan.

Mac Arthur described Manila at this point, thus: “As I passed through the streets with burned-out piles of rubble, the air filled with the stench of decaying unburied dead, the tall and stately trees that had been the mark of a gracious city were nothing but ugly scrubs pointing broken fingers in the sky. Once-famous buildings were now shells. The street and familiar landmarks were gone. One moved by sense of direction rather than by sight.”[4]

In a speech that McArthur gave on February, 27, 1945 while turning over the Philippine government to Sergio Osmena, the second president of the Philippine Commonwealth, his voiced cracked and faltered. He covered his face with his hands and wept[5].

In Reminiscences he later recalls, “My voice broke. I could not go on. To others it might have seemed my moment of victory and monumental personal acclaim, but to me it seemed only the culmination of a physical and spiritual disaster.”[6]

All told, the death toll included 1,010 Americans dead, an estimated 100,000 Filipino civilians and 16,000 Japanese killed. Second only to the government in terms of property losses, the Catholic Church suffered an estimated $125 million (1945 values).

At the book’s end the author poses several interesting questions that I quote here verbatim:

“Why did Sanji Iwabuchi[7] defy the orders of Yamashita and Yokoyama? Why were the outrages against the civilian population perpetrated? Were there orders from higher authority to this purpose?

“Why did the Americans resort to the destruction of Manila as a means to their ends? Was it any one man’s, or any single group of men’s decision? What value did America place on a victory that destroyed 100,000 non-combatants?”

The author offers plausible and logical answers to these haunting questions but it goes well beyond the confines of this article for me to devote time and space to them. Rather, I recommend this book for our readers to peruse and judge for themselves the merit of the author’s hypotheses and answers.

But I, too, have pressing questions to pose. St. Augustine taught that wars are God’s means of punishing nations here on earth since nations as such do not exist in the afterlife. It is also well-worth recalling here what Our Lady of Fatima said in the second part of the Fatima secret, “ Behold, a night illuminated by an unknown light will be the great sign that God shall give you that He is going to punish the world by means of war, hunger and persecutions of the Church and the Holy Father.”[8]

On the night of 25 January 1938 (from 8:45 p.m. to 1:15. a.m. with brief interruptions) an extra-ordinary light illuminated the skies of Europe which Sister Lucy took to be the sign that Our Lady prophesied.[9] Since the Filipino nation also suffered immensely during World War II, wouldn’t it be logical to conclude that God punished it for its sins?

Did God punish the Filipino nation because of a particular sin? Then, what sin was it? Is it because it took on the Hollywood spirit and declined in the love of sacrifice and devotion to the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ? Is it because it forgot that it is a most beloved nation endowed with the True Faith and neglected its duty of spreading it throughout all of Asia?

I search for answers. Perhaps those Filipinos of the past were remiss in their Christian duties. But what I can say with certainty is that in the span of my lifetime Filipino Christian values, morals, customs and mentalities have deteriorated considerably.

Look and see. The disastrous consequences are before us: neuroses, psychoses, monstrous sexual perversions, progressivism, liberalism, communism, evolutionism, feminism and various other “isms’: the cacophony of the great confusions and errors of our days. If this trend continues, I fear that a catastrophe far worse than the evils of the Second World War awaits the Filipino nation.

Behold Japan, a nation of Oriental traditions and culture, the land of so many Catholic martyrs yet it rejected the Faith! Behold China, a land of ancient civilization which the great St. Francis Xavier longed to evangelize, it also rejected the Faith!

Then consider that the Philippines, groups and clusters of islands, inhabited by primitive warring tribes of divers ethnic groups and dialects and yet it united into a single nation under the banner of the True Faith! Yes, the same Catholic Faith that gave and preserved the Filipino his national identity, his character and his culture. Such was the work of the ‘Taliban-like Spanish friars’ as our learned “dean” called them with scorn.

The Filipino people ought to thank God for their undeserved privilege. Further, they must learn from the bitter lessons of World War II. As Sacred Scriptures say, God chastises those whom He loves.[10] There is a World Revolution that is relentlessly attacking what is left of Christian Civilization today, both here and the rest of the world. The tyranny of the media, the chaos in government, the Muslim and Communist insurrections, the surge of criminality, the crisis in the Church, all warn of impending disaster.

On December 28, 1958 John XXIII addressed the following words to the population of the city of Messina in Italy:

We tell you furthermore that in this terrible hour, when the spirit of evil seeks every means to destroy the kingdom of God, we must exert ourselves to the utmost to defend it, if you do not wish to see your city lying in immensely greater ruins than those left by the earthquake of fifty years ago. How much more difficult it would be then to raise up the souls, once they had been separated from the Church or enslaved to the false ideologies of our times![11]

To overcome the overwhelming tide of sin and vice, we must recognize the primacy of the spiritual over the physical so as to put order and harmony back into our lives and society. The message of Our Lady Fatima is more urgent than ever. Filipinos must heed Her now if they are to avert a terrible chastisement much worst than that of World War II.

Footnotes:

[1] Alfonso J. Aluit, By Sword and Fire, The Destruction of Manila in World War II, 3 February- 3 March, 1945. Makati, Metro Manila: Bookmark, c1995.
[2] Quoted in work cited, p.127
[3] Ibid
[4] Aluit, p.367
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid, p.368
[7] Japanese Naval officer left with the charge to defend Manila who later defied orders to evacuate it.
[8] Antonio A. Borelli, Our Lady of Fatima, Prophecies of Tragedy and Hope? The Philippine Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, Inc. Makati, Metro Manila. 2002, pp. 48-51.
[9] Ibid. p. 51
[10] Hebrews 12:6
[11] John XXII, radio message to the population of Messina, on the fiftieth anniversary of the earthquake which destroyed that city, L’Osservatore Romano (weekly French edition), January 23, 1959.
Apud. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, 1993) p. 43.