Crimenes De Guerra Japoneses.Filipinas

The Sack of Manila

Manila Destroyed: 1945

(This account of the wholesale destruction of Manila and its people is based on affidavits of victims and eyewitnesses of Japanese atrocities. Their testimony was collected by U. S. forces which liberated Manila. The affidavits were contained in a report made to the War Department by the Commander-in-Chief of the Southwest Pacific Area. For the sakeof brevity, the actual wording of the original affidavits has been in most cases condensed, but the stark facts are exactly as related under oath. For security reasons, many of the persons making affidavits must remain unidentified.)

Manila has been destroyed. The once proud city of the Far East is dead. Its churches, convents, and universities are piles of rubble, bombed and burned beyondrecognition. Its civilian population have been raped and burned, starved and murdered, its women mutilated, its babies bayoneted.

Killed by a Japanese Bayonet.

The order that brought this about came directly from Tokyo. Reliable evidence based on interrogation of prisoners of war, military personnel, Philippine officials and civilians, and Japanese documents reveals the staggering fact thatthe Sack of Manila and its attendant horrors were not the act of a crazed garrison in a last-ditch, berserk defense, but the coldly planned purpose of the Japanese high command. Early in December, 1944, the puppet President Laurel, made a futile attempt to have Manila declared an open city. General Yamashita made a vague promise and even drafted plans for that possibility, then flew to Tokyo. But onhis return, he moved his headquarters and the puppet government to Baguio. From that date, accelerated defense preparations in Manila forecasted its doom.

A Mother and Child Murdered on the Streets of Manila

In the first three weeks of February 1945, commencing with the liberation of Santo Tomas Camp, the Japanese began to burn and destroy, systematically, the churches, convents, andcharitable institutions of Intramuros, the old "Wall City." They destroyed all of its most sacred and historic properties. They reduced to a rubble heap the fine old Pontifical University of Santo Tomas, the greatest Catholic university in the Orient and the oldest under the American flag. Only the ruined walls are left of Manila Cathedral, the most beautiful church in the Far East. The Archbishop'sPalace, hospitals, convents, schools, libraries were bombed and burned. The cultural monuments that made of Intramuros a miniature Rome have been obliterated. Outside of Intramuros, the Japanese destroyed with the same cold calculation Spanish institutions belonging to the Sisters of Charity. In Looban Asylum, where the Japanese fired the convent, were more than a thousand refugees, mostly women andchildren. In Concordia College, there were more than 2,000 refugee-babies, orphans, and foundlings, sick

people and the insane who had been transferred from the hospicio de San Jose. Did the Japanese give these helpless people a comparatively merciful death by shooting? They did not waste their ammunition on these women and children, the sick and insane. They closed the doors with chains,surrounded the building with machine guns to prevent anyone from leaving the premises alive, then set the building on fire.

A Man Suffering from Burn and Bayonet Wounds

On 10 February 1945, a squad of Japanese soldiers entered the Red Cross Building and proceeded to shoot and bayonet everyone in the building, including staff doctors, patients and young babies, nurses, and refugees. Nursespleaded for the lives of mothers with new-born infants, but all were bayoneted or shot. Then the attackers ransacked the building for food and supplies. Modesto Farolan, Acting Manager of the Philippine Red Cross, escaped. Under affidavit, he has described these inhuman atrocities. On 12 February 1945, a Japanese officer and 20 soldiers forced their way into La Salle College where 70 people were...