On the evening of 3 February 1945 a motorized column of the US 1st Cavalry Division broke into Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and drew up at the gates of Santo Tomas University, where the Japanese held thousands of American and Allied civilians. The internees were freed that night. It was the first day of the Battle of Manila, a month of street fighting that destroyed much of the city and cost an estimated 100,000 Filipino civilians their lives.
A race for the capital
Manila had been in Japanese hands since 2 January 1942, when Japanese troops entered it unopposed after General Douglas MacArthur declared it an open city. American forces came back to Luzon on 9 January 1945, landing at Lingayen Gulf, and pushed south across the Central Plains toward the capital.1
Two American divisions raced for the city. The 37th Infantry Division came down the main highway from the north and was held up at one destroyed bridge after another. The 1st Cavalry Division, according to the US Army's official history, formed two motorized “Flying Columns”, each with a cavalry squadron, a company of medium tanks, a battery of howitzers and enough trucks to carry every man, and put them under Brigadier General William C. Chase. The same history says the cavalrymen, determined to beat the infantry into Manila, hardly slept on the night of 2 to 3 February.2
On 3 February the columns forded rivers, brushed aside small Japanese groups and at times drove at up to fifty miles an hour. South of Novaliches the Japanese had wired a stone bridge over the Tuliahan River for demolition. The official history credits Lieutenant (jg) James P. Sutton, a Navy bomb disposal officer with the division, with running onto the bridge under fire and cutting a burning fuze, which saved the columns at least a day.3
The gates of Santo Tomas
The leading column crossed the city limits at about 19:00 and, guided by Filipino guerrillas, reached Santo Tomas University at about 19:30, sniped at along the way. The official history names it as the column of the 8th Cavalry, while the National WWII Museum, reviewing James M. Scott’s book on the battle, speaks of elements of the 5th Cavalry; both put the arrival on the evening of 3 February. The university had been an internment camp for nearly three years, holding about 4,000 foreign civilians, many of them Americans, who were by then short of food and medicine.4
A medium tank of the 44th Tank Battalion broke through the gates. The Japanese guards put up little fight, and the official history says some 3,500 internees were freed within minutes. In another building the camp commander, Lieutenant Colonel Toshio Hayashi, held 275 more internees, mostly women and children, as hostages, and released them only after Chase agreed to give him and his men safe conduct out of the grounds. By 4 February the Americans had also freed the prisoners held at Old Bilibid Prison nearby.5
A battle no one had planned
General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commanding the Japanese army on Luzon, did not mean to defend Manila. The official history quotes his own testimony: the city of about a million people could not be fed, its buildings would burn, and it lay on flat ground, so he had planned to leave it outside the fighting. The navy saw it differently. Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi commanded nearly 17,000 men in and around the city, about 12,500 sailors and 4,500 soldiers, and chose to fight for it. The museum review says he did so against orders, block by block and house by house.6
What followed lasted a month. Japanese troops killed civilians on a mass scale, a story the museum review describes from Scott’s research. American artillery broke into the old walled city of Intramuros on 23 February, and on 3 March General Oscar Griswold reported that organized resistance in Manila had ended.7
The cost
The official history counts more than 1,000 American soldiers killed and about 5,500 wounded between 3 February and 3 March, while warning that the unit records it drew on are contradictory. It puts the Japanese dead in and around the city at some 16,000. The heaviest loss fell on the people of Manila: an estimated 100,000 Filipino civilians died. Origins, a history publication of Ohio State University, notes that a postwar investigation found only Warsaw more devastated.8
The whole month is told in our article on the Battle of Manila, 1945.
Also on this day
- 1509: Battle of Diu. A Portuguese fleet attacked the allied fleets of Gujarat, Mamluk Egypt and Calicut in the harbor of Diu, on India's west coast.
