1 DID 100,000 CIVILIANS DIE IN THE BATTLE OF MANILA IN 1945? - ROBERT ROSS SMITH’S TRIUMPH IN THE PHILIPPINES AND THE STORY OF A NUMBER By R. B. Meixsel General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower learned the fate of wartime Manila from an American journalist who passed through the Philippine capital in April 1945, soon after the battle that liberated it from three years of Japanese occupation. “`You would be horrified at the thoroughness of its destruction,’” wrote correspondent Merrill Mueller, who had travelled with Eisenhower’s headquarters before being reassigned to the Pacific. Manila was “in far worse condition than Bizerte, Naples, or Cherbourg,” cities in the Mediterranean and European theaters of war seized by the Allies in 1943 and 1944. As it happened, Eisenhower had lived in Manila from 1935 to 1939 serving as “senior military assistant” on then-retired Maj. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s prewar military mission and knew the city well, but he had come a long way since playing second fiddle to the Philippine Army field marshal, spending his time, as he told a friend, “teaching school boys” how to be soldiers. By the time Mueller’s letter reached him, the Third Reich lay in ruin. What could possibly have happened in places like New Guinea, or Leyte or Luzon that remotely approached the experience of war in Europe? “I can well imagine what Manila looks like from your description,” Eisenhower responded to Mueller, but “nothing in the Mediterranean Theater” could compare “in the way of destruction” to “at least a dozen of Germany’s largest cities.” Berlin, he thought, was unlikely ever to be rebuilt. In late September 1945, a few weeks before putting Europe behind him to return home to become army chief of staff, Eisenhower accepted an invitation to visit the Polish capital of Warsaw. Now, at last, Eisenhower saw the remnants of a major city subjected not only to aerial bombardment but fought over several times, its buildings deliberately razed, its population purposely put to the sword. After the ten-weeks’ 1944 uprising alone, Polish dead—“men, women, and children”—would surpass 200,000. “Long before we had completed our melancholy tour,” the American Ambassador to Poland, Arthur Lane, remembered, “General Eisenhower’s customary smile had vanished [and] he observed grimly that of all the great cities of Europe that he had lately visited none had been so completely wiped out as Warsaw.” When Eisenhower made a flying trip to the Far East in May 1946 and spent several days in the Philippines, he could appreciate what had taken place in Manila, over which one army, hopeful of keeping down its own casualties, fought another determined to inflict
2 savage punishment upon the civilian population on its way to inevitable defeat and death. “[A]fter riding down Dewey Boulevard, viewing the residential and devastated downtown section of Manila,” reported New York Times correspondent Ford Wilkins, who had himself spent the war years interned at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila’s Sampoloc district, “the general said no city in Europe was worse devastated by war except Warsaw, where the destruction also was deliberately accomplished by a retreating enemy.”1 American officials quibbled over how to calculate the losses—the United States Philippine War Damage Commission repeated in its semiannual reports the words Eisenhower was “quoted as saying” but put the damage to the city only at “more than 50 percent destroyed”; the High Commissioner countered with the figure of “more than 80 percent”--but the extent of the ruination was obvious to all. As the authors of one history of Manila wrote: “Official reports, photographic evidence, and statements of those who had seen the ruin and destruction are unanimous in asserting that of all the war-ravaged areas of the world, Manila was most utterly devastated from the standpoint of the ratio of functional construction still intact to functional construction damaged or destroyed, the effect of destruction on functional economy, social facilities of the nation, and the effect of the war damage on the capacity of the nation to rebuild and repair.”2 Still, buildings could be rebuilt. Those artillery-bludgeoned public facilities the Japanese had turned into strongholds in 1945 had been reconstructed by 1949 under the auspices of the American-funded War Damage Commission. Of course, the destruction of irreplaceable historic structures or the endless blocks of burned-out buildings and crumbling walls are not what make the wartime fates of cities like Nanking or Hamburg or Dresden memorable. The loss of human lives conveys the ultimate and unrecoverable tragedy of war. The number of soldier dead in the battle was known, the 1 Alfred D. Chandler et al., eds., The Papers of Dwight Eisenhower, vol. 6 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 88-89; Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948), 4; Theodore Friend, Between Two Empires (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 194; Arthur Bliss Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1948), 176-78; New York Times, May 5, 1946. The Warsaw deaths’ figure is from Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York, NY: Penguin, 2009), 622. Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to be Won (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 419, draw attention to the disdain “senior U.S. commanders” in Europe showed for “`anything that had happened in the Pacific.’” On the public perception that America’s naval and air forces had won the war against Japan—that it was “not clear how much the Army [ground forces] had contributed to victory”—see James McNaughton, The Army in the Pacific (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2012), 42. 2Seventh and Final Report of the High Commissioner to the Philippines (Washington, DC, 1947), 11, 42; Seventh Semiannual Report of the United States Philippine War Damage Commission (Washington, DC, 1950), 1; Department of History, Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila, Manila Since Independence (Manila: National Historical Commission, 1974), 29.
3 Americans having lost 1010 killed and the Japanese “some 16,000 . . . in and around Manila,” but how many civilians had died? “Many were killed but estimates vary greatly” was the answer an army lawyer recently returned from Manila gave when asked that question by an Office of Strategic Services interviewer in April 1945. Some Americans thought the figure to be not more than three thousand, Maj. A.E. Ekdale explained, but “[m]any Filipinos put the figure up to 30,000.” And there the matter stood for nearly two decades—no one claimed to know--until the publication in 1963 of Robert Ross Smith’s Triumph in the Philippines. A volume in the “United States Army in World War II” series prepared in the Office of the Chief of Military History, Triumph is still, after six decades, not just the single authoritative account of the army’s campaign in the Philippines in 1945 but the only such account. Smith devoted one hundred pages of the book’s 650-pages of text to describing the army’s approach to Manila and the struggle to take possession of the city. The book’s focus was of course on military operations, but, as the author acknowledged, “the cost of the battle [could] not be measured in military terms alone.” Manila was “a shambles,” the city’s demolition so complete that its “economic, political, and social life would have to start over almost from scratch.” And, as if “up to 30,000” was not bad enough, Smith revealed “a final shocking note of tragedy” to what had had taken place in Manila: “an estimated 100,000 Filipino civilians had lost their lives during the battle.”3 Finally, there was a number, an authoritative and unexpectedly large number, from a seemingly unimpeachable source. Only well into the 1970s did Smith’s revelation that the “Rape of Manila” was one of the leading but least-acknowledged horrors of the war begin to get noticed in books about World War II. The decade started with a Pulitzer Prize winning history of the Pacific War, John Toland’s best-selling The Rising Sun, but while Toland listed Triumph in the bibliography, he devoted only a single paragraph to the battle of Manila in which, Toland acknowledged, “thousands of civilians had died, many as a result of atrocities committed by the Japanese.” Then, in 1975, the second of D. Clayton James’s foundational three-volume The Years of MacArthur appeared, and in it James wrote—the first time anyone had done so in a major work since the publication of Triumph a dozen years earlier-- that “[a]n estimated 100,000 or more Filipino civilians would die in Manila 3“Interview with Maj. A.E. [Arch Everett?] Ekdale,” April 5, 1945, box 88, OSS Washington-Pacific Field Station Files, Record Group [hereafter RG] 226, U.S. National Archives, College Park, Maryland [hereafter NA]; Robert Ross Smith, Triumph in the Philippines (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1963), 306-307. (Smith acknowledged [e.g., Triumph, 307, source note for table 5] that when it came to army casualty figures, unit reports “as usual, provide contradictory and irreconcilable information.”) For “before and after” photographs of reconstructed or repaired buildings, see the Semiannual Report[s] of the United States Philippine War Damage Commission (Washington, DC, 1947-50).
4 before the battle ended.” He did not directly attribute the number to Smith; none of the sources he listed in endnotes at that point of the text include the figure, but James cited page 240 of Triumph a few endnotes earlier and page 329 a few endnotes later. Presumably he read the pages in between, which include, on page 307, Smith’s civilian deaths estimate. Three years later, in his “block buster” American Caesar, William Manchester explicitly stated that during the battle “[n]early 100,000 Filipinos were murdered by the Japanese” and pointed to James as his source.4 That was not quite what James had written; nonetheless, these books publicized Smith’s now-fifteen-years’ old claim. Thereafter, authors began to draw a direct line from the assertion that 100,000 civilians had died in Manila to Triumph in the Philippines.5 Others took the number to be so widely known and uncontroversial that there was no need to note its source.6 These authors then became the once- or twice-removed sources for other authors.7 4John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (1970; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 2003), 677; D. Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 642, 644; William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 18801964 (1978; New York: Dell Publishing, 1979), 483, 872n78. Manchester cites only page 644 of James’s book, but the 100,000 figure appears on page 642. On page 644, James writes that 16,665 Japanese were reported killed in the battle and 1171 American soldiers. He then writes that for each soldier killed, “at least six Filipino residents of Manila” died. 5E.g., Carol Morris Petillo, Douglas MacArthur: The Philippine Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 223-24, 281n22; Alfonso J. Aluit, By Sword and Fire: The Destruction of Manila in World War II, 3 February-3 March 1945 (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 1994), 393, 448n93; Peter Schrijvers, The GI War Against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 248; Richard B. Frank, MacArthur (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 111, 185n19; Alec Wahlman, Storming the City: U.S. Military Performance in Urban Warfare from World War II to Vietnam (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2015), 114; Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio, Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 19441945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 260; James M. Scott, Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), 422. The first post-Triumph book, that I know of, to use the one hundred thousand figure is James H. and William M. Belote, Corregidor: The Saga of a Fortress (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 202. The book does not include notes and Triumph is not mentioned by title, but the authors write (260) that the “official histories [including] the survey of Robert Ross Smith, covering . . . the recapture [of the Philippines] in 1945, [was] indispensable.” There are authors who cite Smith as a source but do not actually repeat his figure, e.g., Richard Lael, The Yamashita Precedent (Wilmington, DE.: Scholarly Resources, 1982), 37, who gives a figure of thirty to forty thousand civilians “slain by the Japanese during the struggle for Manila and for southern Luzon.” Lael mistakenly claims that this figure is “based on data” found in Smith’s book. Army historian Thomas M. Huber, “The Battle of Manila,” in W.G. Robertson and L. A. Yates, eds., Block by Block: The Challenges of Urban Operations (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 2003), 109-110, turns Smith’s 100,000 “civilians had lost their lives” into “100,000 civilian casualties of varying degrees of seriousness.” 6E.g., Edward J. Drea, MacArthur’s ULTRA: Codebreaking and the War against Japan, 1942-1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 198; Geoffrey Perret, Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of
5 Some authors got confused about the figure’s origin. In the second of his two studies of Douglas MacArthur’s relationship with his chief of staff Richard Sutherland, Paul Rogers, who was with MacArthur’s headquarters at the time of the fighting, imagined “Ernie King” sitting at his desk in Washington, reading that a city had been destroyed and “`an innocent population [of] one hundred thousand’” had died. “`I tried to tell them,’” Rogers quotes the navy commander in chief as saying to himself, that seizing Luzon “`would make a London out of Manila.’” There is no source for the story. (The closest endnote references Triumph.) It happens to be an anecdote from Adm. William Halsey’s 1947 autobiography, minus the 100,000 figure for which there is no contemporary authority. Rogers was repeating an exchange found in Halsey’s book that, in arguing in favor of attacking Formosa rather than Luzon, “Ernie”—as Halsey referred to Adm. Ernest J. King--had asked Halsey’s chief of staff, Vice Adm. Robert Carney: “`Do you want to make a London out of Manila?’” Halsey wrote nothing about the destruction of Manila. He recounts visiting the city in June 1945—the first time he had seen it since 1908—and lunching with MacArthur, who, he observed, was pleased to have found that his “house in Manila was only slightly harmed, instead of wrecked, as [he] had expected.” Halsey took an “air tour of the harbor” and exulted at the large number of Japanese ships sunk. Beyond the comment about the house in which the Douglas MacArthur (New York: Random House, 1996), 451; Mary Ellen Condon-Rall and Albert E. Cowdrey, Medical Service in the War Against Japan (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1998), 336; Ikehata Setsuho, “The Japanese Occupation Period in Philippine History,” in Ikehata Setsuho and Ricardo Trota Jose, eds., The Philippines under Japan (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999), 17; Max Hastings, Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 194445 (2007; New York: Vintage, 2009), 238-39; Arthur Herman, Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior (New York: Random House, 2016), 595. “In all,” Hastings wrote, “a million Filipinos are estimated to have died by violence in the Second World War, most of them in its last months.” Four years later, in Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 556, Hastings kept the “up to 100,000” figure for deaths in Manila but without explanation halved the overall total: “The Filipino people whom MacArthur professed to love [he now wrote] paid the price for his egomania in lost lives—perhaps half a million, including those who perished from famine and disease—and wrecked homes.” 7E.g., Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 524, citing James; Christopher Thorne, The Far Eastern War (London: Counterpoint, 1986), 258, citing Petillo; Anthony Beevor, The Second World War (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 695, citing Spector; Greg Huff, World War II and Southeast Asia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 385n31, citing Ikehata. Huff further confuses the issue by including, in the same note, the comment that John Dower, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 296-97, “gives a total figure of 90,000 deaths.” Dower did not use any source mentioned in this essay for his account of Filipino deaths in World War II. He wrote (ibid., 296) that “[h]uman losses in the Philippines amounted to almost 30,000 Filipino battle deaths as well as civilian losses of over 90,000, most of whom were killed in the sack of Manila in 1945.” His sole source (ibid., 362n4) is a statement by Assistant Secretary of War Howard Petersen, in New York Times, July 29, 1946, which put the civilian death total at 91,184. But that figure covered the entire country for the entire war; the article makes no mention of Manila.
6 MacArthur family was living, however, he wrote nothing whatsoever of damage to the city or its population. As for Admiral King’s supposed despair over the fate of Manila? Neither his autobiography nor the most-authoritative biography even mentions the battle of Manila. But MacArthur biographer Mark Perry repeated Rogers; Francis Pike, author of a big, thick history of World War II in Asia, repeated Perry.8 Not until the fiftieth anniversary of the Liberation approached did the first, and for many years only, substantive account of the battle of Manila appear, Alfonso J. Aluit’s painfully detailed and emotionally moving By Sword and Fire. Unable to make extensive use of American archival resources and not an authority on military operations, Aluit acknowledged his indebtedness to Smith’s “definitive work,” which, he wrote, was “basic to any understanding of American operations in the Philippines during the battle for liberation from the Japanese.”9 For casualty figures Aluit also relied on Smith. “The Americans,” Aluit wrote, “placed the number of civilians killed . . . arbitrarily it seems, at 100,000 in a population of one million.”10 8Paul Rogers, The Bitter Years (New York: Praeger, 1991), 264; Mark Perry, The Most Dangerous Man in America (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 323; Francis Pike, Hirohito’s War: The Pacific War, 19411945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 956. Perry’s book lacks citations, but he mentioned Rogers in the text and confirmed in an email that Rogers’ book was his source. The Halsey anecdote is included in both Cannon, Leyte, 5, and Smith, Triumph, 10 (see also the comments of Aluit, Sword and Fire, 394). On Halsey, see William F. Halsey and J. Bryan III, Admiral Halsey’s Story (New York: McGraw Hill, 1947), 195, 255. For King, see Ernest King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King, A Naval Record (New York: W.W. Norton, 1952), and Thomas Buell, Master of Seapower (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1980). 9Aluit, By Sword and Fire, vi. The book was not easily obtained when it first came out. Reprints made it more widely available, but Worldcat shows only about two-dozen library copies in the United States. 10Aluit, By Sword and Fire, 398. One million is a commonly accepted “ball park” figure for the population of what Smith referred to as “Greater Manila” at the time (e.g., see Smith, Triumph, 23740, and A.V.H. Hartendorp, History of Industry and Trade of the Philippines, revised ed. [Manila: American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines, 1958], 154.) Army Service Forces Manual M3651, Civil Affairs Handbook: Philippine Islands, Section 1 (April 1944), 35, cites Japanese sources as putting the city’s population at “more than double” its prewar figure, 1.3 to 1.5 million by early 1944. But these numbers are not accepted by all authors, and the leading academic authorities are not agreed on the war’s impact on the city’s demographics. Ricardo T. Jose, “The Rice Shortage and Countermeasures during the Occupation,” in Philippines under Japan, 211, observed that increasing violence in the provinces sent “more and more people” into the city until, “despite government efforts to depopulate Manila,” the prewar population of “around 600,000” rose to and “remained above 1 million.” On the other hand, Daniel F. Doeppers, Feeding Manila in Peace and War, 18501945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 334, 418n1, concluded that “the evidence is clear that the bulk of net migration, early and again late in the war, was from the city to the countryside.”
7 In sum, all published claims that one-hundred thousand civilians were killed in the battle of Manila in 1945 can be traced to Triumph in the Philippines. There are no exceptions. The number did not appear in print before 1963 and the publication of Smith’s book. If an author used that figure (not all did) and had an alternate source for the figure, it was either not cited in that author’s work, or the author was simply wrong about the number’s source.11 What was the source of Smith’s figure? Triumph in the Philippines was noted for its remarkable level of primary-source documentation. To quote from the late University of Kansas History Professor Grant Goodman’s review of Triumph: “Sources for the data utilized by Mr. Smith are provided throughout with an itemization which can only be described as being in the highest tradition of historical scholarship, and a most stimulating critical note on the nature of the sources used is helpfully appended.” At one point, Smith even cited a telephone call he had made to verify injuries and deaths to merchant seamen serving aboard ships subjected to Japanese aerial attacks. Numerous footnotes document casualty numbers throughout the volume, and the book includes two appendices, H-1 and H-2, summarizing American and Japanese losses (even a comment about Japanese civilian losses) in the campaign. But the book includes nothing that documents Filipino casualties. For whatever reason, Smith could not or would not publicly reveal the evidence supporting his claim that 100,000 civilians had died in the battle for Manila.12 Alfonso Aluit tried to fill in the gap. He suggested that the number was “based on extrapolations from figures” found in undertakers’ reports.13 Aluit stands alone in not simply repeating the 100,000 deaths’ figure but offering an analysis of how Smith could have arrived at it, something, ironically, Smith 11To my knowledge, Jose Victor Z. Torres, now at De La Salle University in Manila, is the only historian to suggest in a published (print) writing that Smith’s figure was probably wrong. In a critical review—“Haste Makes Waste”--of Richard Connaughton et al., The Battle for Manila (London: Bloomsbury, 1995) that appeared in the now-defunct Bulletin of the American Historical Collection 24, no. 4 (October-December 1996): 107-113, Torres included as “an example of a fact still to be studied is the doubtful casualty estimate of 100,000 civilians.” My review of the book in the same journal edition (“Substituting Opinion for Research,” 103-106) drew attention to Connaughton and his co-authors’ lack of familiarity with either primary sources or the literature on the war in the Philippines, but like most everyone else I accepted the 100,000 deaths figure without further comment. Unfortunately, this book—commissioned to take advantage of the fiftieth anniversary of the battle--was published in Britain, the United States, and the Philippines and was thus far more easily obtained than Aluit’s book. It remains, five years after the publication of James Scott’s superior and more widely available work, the lead source for the Wikipedia entry on the “Battle of Manila (1945),” which will be read by far more people than will read this essay or any of the books mentioned in it. 12Grant Goodman, in The Journal of Asian Studies 23, no. 3 (May 1964): 486-87; Smith, Triumph, 6566n51; 692-93. 13Aluit, By Sword and Fire, 398-99.
8 himself did not do. Smith had ready access to a wealth of army documents, at the time unavailable to outside researchers. He could presumably have consulted graves registration unit records, contracts with local officials for the recovery and disposition of remains, and so on. If he did, he chose not to say so.14 Aluit’s mistake was to assume that the same sort of data that buttressed Smith’s conclusions about American and Japanese losses in the campaign existed to sustain Smith’s casualty figure for Filipino civilians, too, but that for some unknown reason Smith had failed to include it. Smith provided no source—no source mentioned in the text, not a single footnote, nothing listed in the bibliography in which the figure can be found—and Aluit did not know that Smith, in the one unpublished revelation he made about the number’s origin, claimed that it came not from “the Americans”—but from the Philippine government. * * * Triumph was a second effort to complete a history of the American army’s defeat of the Japanese army in the Philippines in 1945. Smith wrote that the book began “as the joint effort” of himself and M. Hamlin Cannon, who had authored the Office of the Chief of Military History’s account of the 1944 Leyte campaign; OCMH records in the national archives reveal that Cannon fell behind in his share of the work -- which initially bore the working title “Luzon and the Southern Philippines” -- and Smith completed most of the draft manuscript. What Cannon did complete fell short of expectation. Unlike Smith, who had been a junior staff officer during the war and had spent most of 1945 in Manila, the older Cannon had served as an enlisted man with the navy in the Southwest Pacific and was unfamiliar with army operations; he paraphrased too closely the official reports; and at 1400 pages the manuscript was far too long. Too, in Smith’s view, his doctorate-holding colleague was just not a very good writer. About this time, Cannon moved on to a job at the air force academy; Smith proceeded to reexamine the documentary evidence and rewrite much of the manuscript. In 1957, OCMH sponsored a trip to the Philippines so that Smith could “revisit the battlefields of Luzon.” He found it to be “an 14Smith (Triumph, 699) wrote that he made “little use of service forces records.” Had he looked he might not have found much. Alvin P. Stauffer, The Quartermaster Corps: Operations in the War Against Japan (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1956), covers the activities of graves registration units in the Philippines and makes no mention of civilian dead in 1944-45. Nor do more specialized works such as Edward Steere, The Graves Registration Service in World War II (Washington, DC: Office of the Quartermaster General, 1951) and Edward Steere and Thayer M. Boardman, Final Disposition of World War II Dead, 1945-51 (Washington, DC: Office of the Quartermaster General, 1957). The ASF has its own “green book”: John D. Millett, The Organization and Role of the Army Service Forces (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1954). For a more succinct description of ASF’s broad responsibilities, see Annual Report of the Army Service Forces for the fiscal year 1943, xi-xii. Annual Report of the Army Service Forces for the fiscal year 1945, 27-28, provides an overview of some ASF activities in the Philippines in 1945.
9 invaluable” experience and thereafter made rapid progress on the book. The “preface” in which Smith offered some of these comments is dated March 1961, but the manuscript had been more or less complete since 1958, its publication delayed by (stories vary) a lack of funds, or difficulty in finishing the maps, or changing OCMH publishing priorities. The book finally saw print in 1963. One portion of the original text to which Smith made little change was the part that summed up the destruction of Manila, but the original manuscript’s “some 5,000 Filipino civilians had lost their lives during the battle” later, without explanation, became “an estimated 100,000 Filipino civilians had lost their lives during the battle.”15 15Smith, Triumph, ix-x; Smith, Memo for Chief, Pacific Section, February 1, 1954, box 5, OCMH Records [all dated citations from entry 51 of the records collection, unless otherwise noted], RG 319, NA. Cannon’s earlier book was Leyte: The Return to the Philippines (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1954). “Luzon and the Southern Philippines” is found in box 7, OCMH Records, RG 319, NA. The biographical sketch appearing in Leyte, viii, reads that Cannon had served in Australia and New Guinea during the war; at the panel discussion held to evaluate the pre-publication Leyte manuscript, the chief historian stated that Cannon had landed on Leyte as a Seabee.
10 What the original manuscript read . . . (Source: OCMH Background papers for Triumph in the Philippines, entry 51, box 7, RG 319, NA) Neither Cannon nor Smith documented those numbers in the original typescript copies that remain in the archives; it is possible that neither wrote that portion of the manuscript. The official history volumes have named authors,
11 and those authors naturally took responsibility for their work. Smith himself was an archetype for what the army wanted in its historians. “I am convinced,” wrote an early chief historian of the official history project, “that unless history is written promptly it cannot be written either correctly or adequately,” and that given the mass of documents available – some “17,120 tons of records” in addition to much that was not written down and would need to be recovered through a “prompt and systematic” interview program – only “the generation that had created the records and knows how to use them selectively” could succeed in writing the army’s wartime history. Smith held a master’s degree in history (Duke University, 1941) and had completed infantry officers’ candidate school before spending two years assigned to the G-3 Historical Division of GHQ SWPA and GHQ U.S. Army Forces Pacific. During that time, he had coauthored a volume of the “so-called MacArthur History” which covered the war in the Southwest Pacific “from the opening of the Japanese offensive through the surrender of Japan.” He knew well both the people and the papers that would be used to write Triumph.16 He did not work alone, however. He inherited Cannon’s portion of the work, of course, and other historians took a hand in examining the manuscript. Usually a panel of experts – or including possibly someone who was purposely not an authority on the topic in order to draw attention to things that might be unclear to a lay reader – critiqued the manuscript to suggest improvements going forward. Smith also benefited from highly qualified research assistants, foremost among them Stanley L. Falk. Falk had joined the army at the age of eighteen in 1945, completed the army’s Japanese language program at the University of Michigan and subsequently spent two years as an army historian and “language officer” in Japan. He joined the military history office, then at the 16Kent Roberts Greenfield, The Historian and the Army (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 6-8; Smith, Triumph, 707. He is referring to the volumes later published under the title Reports of General MacArthur (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1966). On the origin of the history project, see also Stetson Conn, “Preparing the Army’s History of the Second World War,” in James O’Neill and Robert Krauskopf, eds., World War II: An Account of its Documents (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1975), 215-23. I am grateful to Edgar F. Raines, Jr., who worked as an army historian from 1980 to his retirement in 2011, for a lengthy and invaluable memorandum, written to address issues raised in this article. Dr. Raines provided significant details about Smith’s work and how OCMH went about preparing the World War II history series. Smith himself retired in 1983 and died in 1990. Army History (Fall 1990), 48, noted his passing but gave few details of his service. He is said to have left behind “papers” of some kind; his family declined my request to provide access to them for this project. There was another historical work with the title “Triumph in the Philippines” of which Smith makes no mention. A much less detailed volume, it was prepared by a different team of officers working in the Combat History Division, G-1 Section, U.S. Army Forces Western Pacific, and covered the entire war in the Philippines. Cannon, Leyte, 385, noted its existence but thought little of it. It was eventually published as Triumph in the Philippines (Metro Manila: National Book Store, 1978), part of an “Historic Documents of World War II in the Philippines” series edited and with additional material by Celedonio A. Ancheta.
12 Pentagon, in 1949. Louis Morton found Falk’s abilities invaluable when preparing the manuscript that became The Fall of the Philippines. “Without Mr. Falk’s special knowledge of the enemy’s records and operations,” Morton acknowledged, “this volume would have been less precise and far longer in preparation.” Smith was equally laudatory. Falk’s “skill as research assistant, especially in the field of enemy materials, eased my burden [he wrote] and saved countless hours of digging.” Falk himself wrote several popular works of history in the 1960s that dealt with World War II in the Philippines. In fact, one of the earliest post-Triumph books to use Smith’s figure (but did not include Smith’s book in its very brief bibliography) was Falk’s Liberation of the Philippines, a volume in Ballentine Books’ once well-known paperback “Illustrated History of World War II” series. Asked about that number years later, Falk—who may well have written that portion of the manuscript describing the fate of Manila—responded that there was no way to know how many civilians had been killed. The number, he thought, was probably meant to be representational of the cost of battle to the civilian inhabitants of the city.17 17“National Archives Oral History Project: Oral History Interview with Stanley L. Falk, March 4, 1985”; Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1953), ix; Smith, Triumph, x, 706; Falk, Liberation of the Philippines (New York: Ballentine Books, 1971), 109. The book was first published in 1970 in Britain. The first of Falk’s Philippine books—it remains the starting point for all studies of its topic--was Bataan: The March of Death (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), followed by Decision at Leyte (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966). Dr. Falk read an early draft of this article. He recalled that he did write an account of the battle but could not say for certain that it was what ended up in the manuscript. For the review panel evaluation of Triumph, see Clifton Semmens, Memorandum for Chief Historian, January 4, 1957, box 11, OCMH Records, RG 319, NA.
13 Robert Ross Smith, from The Chanticleer 1940 Triumph displayed all the usual elements of contemporary history – primary documents, interviews, what few secondary works there were, back then, to consult – but in addition the prepublication manuscript was read by officers who had “been there.” “All or parts of” what became The Approach to the Philippines, for example, had been shared with “almost fifty officers (or exofficers, now civilians) who participated in the events described, or otherwise had some intimate knowledge of some of those events.” A larger number of officers or former officers – seventy-five – had been asked to read Triumph, in all or part, and in the book’s “critical note” on sources, Smith elaborated on their contributions in a way he had not in the earlier volume. They “often supplied valuable additional information” and insights that “in some cases, . . . stimulated revisions.” “The vast majority,” he wrote, “brought to their task a refreshingly objective and helpful point of view.” That served as a back-handed salute to the “few officers who . . . had an ax to grind,” and that was a jab at Maj. Gen. Robert S. Beightler, the commanding general of the 37th Division.18 A national guard officer who did not hold a regular army commission until after the war, General Beightler had taken command of the Ohio National Guard’s recently mobilized 37th “Buckeye” Division in October 1940. The 18Robert Ross Smith, The Approach to the Philippines (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1953), 591; Smith, Triumph, 706.
14 division had been intended for Philippine service in late 1941; it arrived in Fiji in June 1942 and subsequently saw lengthy action in the New Georgia and Bougainville campaigns. It did not fight on Leyte but landed at Lingayen on January 9, 1945. In the approach to Manila, it held the XIV Corps’ right (west) flank. Elements of the division crossed into the city on February 4; the corps commander would declare “organized resistance” to be at an end on March 3, 1945. Of the seven medals of honor won by the division’s soldiers during the war, four would be earned during the twenty-eight days of fighting that constituted the Battle of Manila for the 37th Division. Of the 6575 American soldiers killed or wounded fighting in Manila, more than half came from the Thirty-Seventh. The published division history states that of the 16,665 Japanese soldiers “wiped out” in the battle for Manila, the 37th Division killed 13,006 of them.19 General Beightler, his late biographer John Ohl wrote, “was especially interested in how history recorded the wartime exploits of [his division].” Naturally, given the division’s prominent role in the liberation of the Philippines, Beightler was one of those asked to read the prepublication manuscript. Smith’s treatment of the division’s actions “particularly irritated” him. Beightler thought that the official history did not give his division the combat credit it deserved, a fact that he attributed to regular army animus toward the national guard. His criticisms got little traction, and he remained dissatisfied with the finished work. Smith inserted some of Beightler’s complaints into Triumph’s notes but unmentioned in either Triumph or Beightler’s biography, though amply documented in OCMH records, was Smith’s determination to publish evidence that during the battle Beightler had let it be known that he saw no need to take prisoners. Beightler vehemently denied that he had encouraged the killing of enemy soldiers who might otherwise have surrendered, but it took the intercession of the Secretary of the Army to excise the offending passage. This may be, in part, what Smith was referring to when he wrote that “the only limitation on access to or use of records concerned questions that could be shown to have an obviously and directly adverse effect upon national security and national policy”; that is, on America’s relationship with Japan.20 19Smith, Triumph, 307 (for U.S. Army casualties); Stanley A. Frankel, The 37th Infantry Division in World War II (Washington, DC: 37th Division Veterans Association, 1948), 250, 295-96. 20See, e.g., Smith, Triumph, 217n18, 288n20, 293n3. On the POW issue, see letters, Smith to Col. William Morr, October 25, 1960, and to Brig. Gen. Cecil Whitcomb, October 24, 1960. For a summary of Beightler’s complaints, see his letter to Secretary of the Army Wilbur Brucker, November 2, 1960, and Brucker to Beightler, December 5, 1960, all in box 11. In 37th Division, 387, Frankel notes that the division took 459 prisoners in Manila; in his memoir of wartime service, Frankel-y Speaking, About World War II in the South Pacific, Frankel writes that “many of our boys kill . . . Japanese that they could very easily take prisoner.”
15 It was Beightler’s detailed critique of the manuscript that forced Smith’s revelation about the source of his claim that one-hundred thousand civilians had died in the battle. On the back of the relevant page of the manuscript he was sent for evaluation, Beightler wrote that the real figure “should be less than 10,000 not 100,000.” No other reader appears to have questioned the number, nor its lack of documentation. Smith’s terse response to Beightler provides the only “documentation” for the number: “My figure [he wrote] is that provided by the Philippine government.”21 Smith, therefore, made no claim that he had attempted to determine the number of civilian dead in the battle for Manila. Understandably, in the context of the book’s depth of detail reflecting Smith’s and his researchers’ special access to then-restricted documents, readers would have assumed that he had done so. If the Philippine government provided Smith with documentary evidence to support the number, it is not found in the relevant OCMH boxes in the national archives. Nor, apparently, anywhere else. And if Smith made an effort to verify the information that he claimed to have been provided by the Philippine government, he left nothing behind saying so that has yet come to light. How could Smith have learned from the Philippine government what well-informed others could not? As it happened, Theodore Friend was in the Philippines for fifteen months in 1957-58 carrying out the research that would lead to his Bancroft Prize-winning Between Two Empires, published in 1965. Though Friend made use of the official army histories and mostly accepted the army’s estimates for American and Japanese dead in the islands, he did not repeat Smith’s figure for civilian dead in Manila; rather, he opined that by war’s end “at least . . . 500,000 Filipinos had died on Philippine soil.” In a footnote, Friend provided no sources for the conclusion but wrote that he was “preparing an article in which I will explain and perhaps amend these estimates.” The article was apparently never published, but Friend returned briefly to the topic a quarter-century later in The Blue-Eyed Enemy: Japan Against the West in Java and Luzon, 1942-1945. He repeated his earlier claim that “at least 500,000 Filipinos died” during the war and now explained that he included losses as a direct result of the military campaigns of 1941-42 and 1944-45 and those resulting from “malnutrition, illness, or hostilities occasioned by conditions of occupation.” Did he believe 20 percent of those deaths occurred in the city of Manila over a four-week period in early 1945? Again, he offered no specifics: Oddly enough, the 37th Division was left out of the numerical list of U.S. Army infantry divisions found in Triumph’s index (738). 21John Kennedy Ohl, Minuteman: The Military Career of General Robert S. Beightler (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001), 195, 242-43, 268n30. The copy on which Beightler’s comments are found is in box 12, OCMH Records, RG 319, NA. Smith’s response, dated July 22, 1957, is found in box 11.
16 “Total deaths,” he wrote in a note, “are my estimates, based on a variety of [unnamed] sources.”22 David Joel Steinberg spent 1959 as a Fulbright scholar in the Philippines but either lacked the contacts to learn what Smith had learned or did not accept the accuracy of the figure. His own work, completed as a Harvard dissertation in 1964 and published in 1967 as Philippine Collaboration in World War II did use Triumph as a source and, like Smith, underlined the catastrophic nature of the city’s fate, “not only the tragic sacrifice of human life,” but the incalculable effect of the destruction “of the modern sector of the economy [and] precious resources of the nation, including universities, hospitals, libraries . . . all sorts of vital operations unappreciated until they are destroyed.” But Steinberg did not repeat the 100,000 figure either, writing instead that “tens of thousands of Filipinos perished in this savage struggle.”23 Around the same time two important works were published in Manila. First, Teodoro A. Agoncillo, widely acknowledged as the leading Filipino historian of the postwar era, completed The Fateful Years: Japan’s Adventure in the Philippines, 1941-45, a two-volume history of World War II in the Philippines. The author, entering his thirties in the early 1940s and thus a few years too old to have been caught up in the prewar conscription system (which 22Friend, Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1929-1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 267n7; Blue-Eyed Enemy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 242n8. Standard library databases reveal no such article, nor is one listed in Morton J. Netzorg’s nearly 1600 pages’ long two-volume compilation, The Philippines in World War II and to Independence (December 8, 1941-July 4, 1946): An Annotated Bibliography, rev. ed. (Detroit: The Cellar Book Shop Press, 1995). A further issue that requires clarification is Friend’s silent rejection of what was, by the 1950s, a commonly cited figure of one-million Filipino deaths as a result of the war, of which Friend must surely have known. The number—one-million deaths—apparently derived from a Philippine government document, “Indemnity for the loss of human lives during the war,” dated November 26, 1946, which gave the remarkably precise figure of “1,111,938 casualties.” A copy of the document can be found in Hartendorp, History of Industry and Trade, 156-57, 164 (originally printed in the March 1953 issue of the American Chamber of Commerce Journal), and in Takushi Ohno, War Reparations and Peace Settlement: Philippines-Japan Relations, 1945-1956 (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1986), 193-94. At the Conference for the Conclusion and Signature of the Treaty of Peace with Japan, San Francisco, California, September 4-8, 1951: Record of Proceedings (Washington, DC: US Department of State, 1951), 225, Philippine Foreign Minister Carlos P. Romulo highlighted the claim that “at the hands of Japan . . . [o]ut of a population of eighteen million [the Philippines] lost more than a million lives.” I was unable to obtain a copy of the original report to examine its full text. “Casualties” does not normally equate to “loss of human lives,” but by the early 1950s, at least, that is how the word was being defined. See, e.g., the comments in Jim Austria, “Breakfast Talk Scheduled as P[hilippine] I[slands] Stand Firm [in reparations demands against Japan],” Manila Times, July 17, 1951, and in J.M. Elizalde, “The Case for the Prompt Ratification of the Japanese Peace Treaty,” 5, Speech Delivered before the Manila Rotary Club, May 15, 1952. 23Steinberg, Philippine Collaboration in World War II (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 113-14.
17 commenced with the registration of twenty-year-olds in 1936), had spent much of the war in Manila. He witnessed the American assault on the city from the top of the Insular Life Building (north of the Pasig River, just off the Escolta on Plaza Moraga). “In Manila’s south districts,” Agoncillo wrote, “the Japanese marines and naval personnel began a series of atrocities that led to the death of thousands of inhabitants.” Then, “Intramuros, where thousands were trapped, withered from the deadly bombing and bombardment of the Americans who could not persuade the Japanese to surrender in the name of humanity and history.” Agoncillo possessed a detailed knowledge of his topic. In addition to having been an eyewitness to wartime events, as he “delved deeper into the subject [of the war years in the Philippines],” he found himself “buried in mountains of documents.” “Scores of friends and acquaintances . . . too numerous to cite” provided him with material. Once-senior government officials and army officers consented to interviews and read portions of his manuscript. Academics in both the United States and the Philippines offered him resources, advice, and assistance. Not one mentioned to him that the Philippine government was claiming that 100,000 civilians had been killed in the battle of Manila? If so, he chose not to repeat it.24 Next, in 1967, A.V.H. Hartendorp’s two-volume opus, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, made its appearance. Hartendorp, a resident of the islands since 1917 and one-time press spokesman for Philippine Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon, had written much of his manuscript while interned at Santo Tomas and completed it soon after the war ended. Twenty years went by before the work was published in its entirety, but he left the text largely unchanged so that it remained, he explained, “a contemporaneous record written under stress; an authentic human as well as historical document.” But he did note new information. His, in fact, was one of the very few books that offered civilian death figures for the battle of Manila. An undertaker whose firm had a burial contract with the army (Mr. Mariano del Rosario of the Funeraria Quiogue), informed him that the firm’s workers had “buried some 4,900 civilians, mostly Filipinos.” The figure “did not include several thousand more corpses that had to be cremated where they were found.” “Later reports,” Hartendorp continued, suggested that the Japanese may have murdered as many as ten thousand civilians in Intramuros.25 But Hartendorp did 24Agoncillo, The Fateful Years (1965; reprint, Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), I, xi-xii, xvi-xx; II, 817-18, 838n36. Agoncillo made use of the “green books,” and it is possible that Triumph was not yet available when Fateful Years went to press or he would have used it. But Agoncillo repeated much the same language in later Philippine history books (e.g., A Short History of the Philippines [1969; reprint, Manila: National Book Store, 1975]); he never added Smith’s figure. 25A.V.H. Hartendorp, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines (Manila: Bookmark, 1967), I, xiv; II, 556-57, 606, 610. Much of this could also be found in the same author’s History of Industry and Trade, 147n18.
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