General MacArthur in Manila 1945 and Israel in Gaza today

I’m been reading The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War (Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College; published 2025 by Oxford University Press (i.e., a military work from a publisher in a country that can’t defend its own border)).

The loss of the Philippines in the first place was due to incompetence, similar to how Japanese success at Pearl Harbor was due to incompetence (failure to heed a radar warning of planes inbound from the NW). Having squeezed and provoked Japan, the U.S. expected attacks in Asia and yet the Japanese caught the Americans by surprise:

Recalled to active duty as the United States was on the verge of war, MacArthur wanted to defend the entire archipelago. “We are going to make it so very expensive for any nation to attack these islands that no one will try it,” he explained. On the first day of the war, the Japanese caught the air forces under his command on the ground and destroyed them. MacArthur then attempted to defend the entire island of Luzon. While his men did well tactically—fighting the Japanese to a standstill—their supplies were in the wrong positions, which sealed their fate as they retreated into the cul-de-sac that was the Bataan Peninsula.

The decision to fight in 1945 to take back the Philippines might also be said to have been an example of American military incompetence. Most of the senior officers wanted to ignore the Philippines and capture Formosa (present-day Taiwan) instead as a more useful base for bombing and invading Japan (USNI article). The Philippines would have been freed from Japanese rule in August 1945 when Japan unconditionally surrendered, though of course it was tough to know that in late 1944.

The book is about the fight for one city, Manila, and as such there are some parallels to the present-day fighting in Gaza. What the two battles have in common:

• a mostly urban environment
• the majority of people in the environment were/are not soldiers
• the army trying to take the city (US in 1945; IDF today) was trying to minimize the number of non-soldiers killed
• the army defending the city was indifferent to the number of non-soldiers killed and/or actually trying to increase the number of non-soldiers killed

The differences:

• the non-soldiers of Manila were hostile to the defending army (Japan) and, in fact, was an organized guerilla force against the army whereas the non-soldiers of Gaza are fervent supporters of the defending army
• the army attacking Manila (US) was trying to minimize damage to buildings and other infrastructure
• the army attacking Manila (US) wasn’t trying to feed the army defending Manila (Japan) and, in many cases, defenders had to surrender or commit suicide because they’d run out of food and/or water

The book reminds us that war is most glorious when seen in the rearview mirror:

One of the great myths of World War II is that the American public immediately rallied to the cause after Pearl Harbor. The truth is that men had to be drafted, and they did not want to be in either the Army or the Philippines. Willard Higdon was honest about his motivations: “I was 27 yrs old, with a wife and a 5 yr. old dtr. I did not want to go.”

The Japanese actually weren’t that excited about owning the Philippines:

The main reason for their invasion in 1941 and 1942 was geopolitical. The Philippines had few natural resources that the Japanese economy required. What they wanted was to drive the Americans out of the western Pacific and, once that was done, they wanted to liquidate their commitment to the Philippines quickly. The Japanese had little interest in turning the archipelago into a Japanese colony.

The enemy doesn’t always cooperate with one’s plans…

Even as late as February 5 [the battle was February 3-March 3], MacArthur had no plan for an urban battle. “I do not believe anybody expected the Japs to make a house-to-house defense of Manila,” Eichelberger told his wife. The general belief—at MacArthur’s headquarters, at Krueger’s headquarters, and with the press—was that the Japanese would evacuate without a fight. Thirty years later, when he sat down to write his memoirs, Chase could not understand why anyone had made this assumption. “It was counter to everything the Nips had done in previous campaigns.”

The U.S. had almost no experience with the kind of fighting that was to ensue:

Other than some short operations in World War I and a few in the European theater, the last time Americans had fought in cities had been in 1864 and 1865 with the battles of Atlanta and Richmond. There are seven major characteristics of urban warfare. The first is that artificial terrain features constrain and channel movement. Buildings become significant geographical objectives. Roads direct advances in certain directions. Both can be barriers. Depending on the material used in their construction, they might be quite vulnerable to military action or quite impervious. Some weapons have better utility than others in the city, and these issues often influence tactics. Another feature is that ground operations are compressed and decentralized. Engagements are between small, tactical units—squads, platoons, companies—for small, geographic objects—a room, a building, or a city block. A third factor is that combat usually becomes three-dimensional. Soldiers fight ground operations as in any other form of ground combat, but they also advance and fight in sewers and blast holes through basement walls. They also have to fight an opponent that might control the floor of a building immediately above or below them, and they might move from rooftop to rooftop. City combat always consumes more time than other forms of fighting. This factor is relative, though. How slow is slow? The month-long fight for Manila was significant compared to other ground operations fought in the Pacific, but nothing compared to the eight-month-long struggle for Stalingrad or the twenty-eight-month-long siege of Leningrad. A fifth factor in urban warfare is the presence of civilians. There are always non-combatant deaths in urban operations and their presence requires some effort at stability operations afterward, but sometimes also during the period of active combat. Civilians can be assets or liabilities when it comes to intelligence gathering, as both the Americans and Japanese would learn. The ready influence of the media is another factor. Cities by their very nature are media centers and always have resident journalists. Since urban areas are also important population, political, economic, financial, cultural, religious, trade, and transportation centers, their fate attracts the interest of reporters. A final dynamic of urban warfare is the outsized ramification of its outcomes. Location matters, and cities are always more important than undeveloped countryside, and engagements for their control have more influence than engagements in isolated areas. Each of these would be in play in Manila.

As in the Gaza fighting, the army trying to take the city owns the airspace:

The US forces also had total air superiority, and piper cub observation planes loitered over the city looking for targets.

(Note failure to capitalize Piper Cub!)

A civilian population that does not support the defending army makes a city tough to defend:

The Japanese were well aware that the Filipinos on Luzon were welcoming the Americans enthusiastically. They resented this and they had orders—which they implemented willingly—to make the Manileños pay. The Battle of Manila was defined by the methodical targeting of the civilian population. The Japanese historian Hayashi Hirofumi has argued, given where most of the incidents took place, that the majority of these killings were done by the Imperial Japanese Army.1 Their orders, though, came from Rear Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji. He made the determination that there was no difference between Filipino guerrillas and civilians. “When the enemy invaded Manila, the citizens were welcoming the enemy well and disrupted all of our fighting action,” he reported. “The number of citizens is estimated to be about seven hundred thousand, but on the front line north of the Pasig River between 3 and 5 February, the general public carried out the following guerrilla activities: communicate with U.S. troops before our attacks, shoot our soldiers, and report our locations to U.S. troops. As a result, our surprise attack was infeasible, and many of our troops were unable to achieve their objectives.”2 The attitude that all Filipinos were the enemy was widespread among the Japanese defenders. Taguchi Hiroshi, a Navy aviation mechanic who became a prisoner of war, explained to U.S. Army investigators in late March: “The enlisted men in the lower ranks, believed that, since the Filipinos indicated that they were cooperative toward Americans in their attitude and had ill feeling toward the Japanese, because prices of food and other articles during the period when we occupied the Philippines went very high . . . , higher officials ordered the destruction of Manila and the Filipinos.”

Some locals were more creative than others…

“The real heroines at San Agustin were the prostitutes, they were the ones that helped,” Gisbert declared. The Japanese had concentrated them in the Intramuros. Gisbert guessed that their numbers were in the hundreds. They were willing to serve as nurses. They were also quite good at scrounging. They could acquire clean linen, or whisky, which Gisbert used as anesthesia. All of which suggests that they had a way of influencing Japanese supply officers.

Even as American soldiers were getting killed, MacArthur refused to let them fight effectively (i.e., by using artillery) because he doesn’t want his former home trashed:

The general was genuinely horrified by what was unfolding in Manila, and seemingly unable to process it. “MacArthur was shattered by the holocaust,” Lieutenant Paul P. Rogers, the headquarters typist, observed. Everything he had done to spare Manila in 1941 was being undone by his own troops, and the major coup of taking the city intact with its port facilities undamaged was falling apart in front of him. Admitting to that kind of setback was not in him. Suddenly the general and his command had a vested interest in making sure there was as little coverage of Manila—positive or negative—as possible. A press report that declared, “Manila is dying” set him off. MacArthur ordered Diller to block any usage of that phrase. He also ordered the units under his command to refrain from using artillery in the city. “That was most unlike the General, who prided himself on winning victories with minimum loss of life,” Diller recalled.

Eventually the subordinate officers wear MacArthur down:

He appointed a three-man committee to talk with MacArthur about the artillery restrictions. After listening to the three, MacArthur, despite his vehement and emotional initial response changed course completely. His subordinates were making it clear that they were not only taking heavy losses, but at rates they could not sustain. With reporters now in the mix, he could ignore that consideration only so long. He removed all the limits on both the artillery and on the media. His public relations man was happy: “They did start using artillery, and it all worked out just exactly the way I wanted it to.” The removal of restrictions on artillery was the third major event that shaped the battle for Manila. Despite their reputation as being a bunch of “yes men,” the staff had pushed back against the general and gotten him to reverse himself. Robert S. Beightler was happy with this decision: “From this point on, we really went to town.” Beightler was advocating any means which he believed would speed up the tempo of combat and save both American and Filipino lives. After the battle ended, he reported to Krueger: “the fantastic defenses of small pockets of resistance which had been isolated required the employment of all available weapons.” Some of this argument is rather weak. The infantry used indirect fire as a crutch to avoid close combat. The problem: it resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians. Figuring the exact numbers killed in Manila is a tricky business. It seems that most casualties from artillery came from US tubes after MacArthur loosened his restrictions. The shells were indiscriminate.

(Potential applicability to the present fighting in Gaza: Israel may not be able to win unless it starts using its 155mm artillery.)

Don’t sell teenagers short as soldiers:

During this fight Richardson was promoted to corporal. He had lied about his age when he enlisted in 1944. He was now a fifteen-year-old non-commissioned officer.

As the Japanese prove to be more tenacious than expected, Americans eventually get comfortable with the possibility that all of Manila will be destroyed in order to save Manila:

MacArthur sent verbal orders to Beightler on February 15, limiting the use of his cannons. Beightler would not comply, telling Griswold he would rather be removed from command. In his own words: “he expected to be out of a job pronto and possibly court-martialed for refusing to obey orders.” MacArthur responded by sending General Richard Sutherland to investigate. Beightler had known Sutherland during their service on the War Department staff in Washington, DC, and expected that the chief of staff would listen to his argument. “This campaign,” as he explained “is a ‘toughie’ and is reminiscent of what I should imagine the fighting at Stalingrad and Cassino was like. It has developed into a slow, systematic elimination of a determined enemy, building by building, ruin by ruin.” Sutherland thought Beightler was correct, and he argued the division’s case with the theater commander-in-chief. After listening to his chief of staff, MacArthur reversed himself. Beightler’s attitude was a common one among the soldiers fighting in Manila. Ramon Echevarria saw this firsthand. He was part of a Filipino guerrilla group that was collecting detailed information on the location of Japanese defensive positions. When they made contact with the 1st Cavalry Division and shared the information, Echevarria told them they were shelling areas that were mostly residential and killing civilians. A US captain replied, “We will destroy a whole city and kill an entire population if it will save one American life.” This attitude was commonplace in the 37th Division. After the battle, the 129th Infantry Regiment recommended “all buildings that are possible strong points should be reduced to rubble.”

As in the Gaza fighting, hospitals are popular places for people who aren’t patients to hang out:

As they entered the building, they found that Callaghan had killed twenty-eight defenders. The regiment finally made its way into the main hospital building. It was only then that they realized just how many civilians were in the complex. There were seven thousand of them.

Americans and locals share some fun times:

Fernando J. Mañalac stumbled upon an American artillery unit that was shelling the Walled City. They let him fire a couple of rounds, fed him lunch, and then gave him bread and cans of Spam, corned beef, and fruitcake to take back to his family. “Arriving home, it was one of our happiest moments,” he remembered. “This day, the finest restaurant in Manila could never have satisfied my gastronomic grumblings as did this manna from heaven were I a connoisseur of culinary art.”

There were Jews involved, just as today!

There was also a revival in religious practices among the Jewish population of the city. Passover came three weeks after the battle ended. The San Lazaro Racetrack, three-quarters of a mile north of Santo Tomás, was the site of Seder. The bleachers were full of four thousand to five thousand people. Frank Ephraim called the size of the event “staggering.” The American servicemen, many of them still in dirty fatigues from fighting to the east, were surprised at the number of Jews in the Philippines. Their generosity was no less than that of their Christian comrades. “They gave us all their C-rations and K-rations, their cigarettes, and the ubiquitous small bars of Hershey ‘tropics proof’ chocolate,” Ephraim recalled. The numbers grew and on Rosh Hoshana and Yom Kippur services had to be held in Rizal Stadium because it had more seating.

The book notes that more Filipinos had been killed by the fighting than Japanese soldiers had been.

Another factor to think through is what happened to the people of Manila in 1945. Maybe as much as ten percent of the population—an estimated one hundred thousand people—died during the battle. As shocking and profoundly tragic as that figure is, it is worth considering what happened to the other ninety percent. They were essentially refugees. Few buildings survived the battle. Combat had de-housed the Manileños. Given that the population of Luzon in 1945 was eight million, that meant that more than ten percent of the population of the biggest island in the Philippines had become displaced. It was a logistical nightmare.

(An estimated 16,000 Japanese soldiers, mostly with little training or motivation, were killed while the 100,000 civilians died.)

There was also cultural damage:

Combat devastated many physical resources beyond just buildings. The holdings of the National Museum and the National Library were destroyed. Some historical records survived, but mainly in smaller collections. Two big exceptions were the National Archives and the archives of the archdiocese of Manila. The University of the Philippines lost its entire library during the fighting, a loss that would set back the educational missions of the university for decades.

Traditional sexual morality was destroyed:

Prostitution was a growth industry in Manila. According to memoirs from a number of soldiers, they believed that most of the women selling themselves were “mostly unprofessionals,” meaning they had just recently turned to prostitution out of desperation and were not particularly experienced sexually.

The author notes that the victory was a defeat:

Had the war continued longer than it did, the effects of this destruction would have become more obvious; it would have taken the U.S. Navy months and months to repair the harbor, and, even then, it would not have met the crucial requirements for a port of the kind that the United States needed as a supply point for the invasion of Japan. All those facilities had vanished in the battle. The vast majority of this destruction was the work of the Japanese, but a healthy percentage was the work of the Americans. The Japanese had actually gotten the U.S. Army to do its work for them. Instead of being a strategic asset in the march toward Tokyo, Manila was a liability. The battle had destroyed most of the civic administration and social services that normally exist in any municipality. The demands for medical care, food, sanitation, civil engineering, and law enforcement had to be met quickly. The only agency even remotely capable of making the effort at the time was the United States Army. Men and material that might have been used fighting the Japanese ended up in Manila.

The lesson of the book seems to be that it isn’t possible to win an urban fight without the use of artillery and without essentially destroying the city. That’s true even when the population is hostile to the defenders and presumably doubly true in the case of Gaza where the population supports the defenders. Also, it isn’t possible to win an urban fight without killing about 10 percent of the residents of a city.

More: read The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War.