The United States captured the Philippines along with Cuba during the Spanish-American war. To truly appreciate the tragedy of the Battle of Manila, it’s important rewind to the turn of the twentieth century. Not only did the battle give American war planners a glimpse of what an invasion of the Japanese homeland might involve but those brief weeks in 1945 forever transformed the city once known as the Pearl of the Orient – and decimated generations of Filipino families, the ripples of which still echo lives even today, nearly 75 years later. An estimated 100,000 civilians were slain in a massacre as heinous as the Rape of Nanking. Landmarks were demolished, houses torched, countless women raped and their husbands and children murdered.
The end result was the catastrophic destruction of the city and a rampage by Japanese troops that terrorized the civilian population. The 29-day battle to retake Manila in February 1945 proved a fight unlike any other in the Pacific War, a bloody urban brawl that forced American soldiers to battle block by block, house by house and even room by room. This is the untold story of his homecoming.
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