1 “The Death of Manila” in World War II and its Postwar Commemoration Satoshi NAKANO Graduate School of Social Sciences Hitotsubashi University nakano.satoshi@r.hit-u.ac.jp I: Introduction and Summary The Battle of Manila (3 February to 3 March 1945) was the single most devastating instance of urban warfare fought between the United States and Japan in the Asia- Pacific Theater of World War II. 1 The battle transformed a plan to liberate the city and its inhabitants from Japanese tyranny into a massive slaughter of non- combatant civilians and the total devastation of downtown area. While the U.S. strategy of carpet shelling the center of Manila has come under increasing criticism in recent years as a major cause of the city’s destruction and associated civilian casualties, it is the atrocities and indiscriminate massacres by Japanese Army and Navy defense forces remaining in Manila that have been primarily blamed for causing both the bulk of civilian deaths there—allegedly amounting to one hundred thousand—but also emotional trauma to the survivors and the bereaved. It is these victims and those who commemorate them who have remembered the battle as “the Death of Manila” with an accompanying sense of loss from which they have not fully recovered despite the city’s postwar physical reconstruction. Japanese war crimes in the Philippines, particularly during the Battle of Manila, were once given considerable publicity in the early postwar years both internationally and even in Japan. The Philippine government assumed the role of a main critic of Japan’s return to the international community. The deep animosity 1 Richard Connaughton, John Pimlott and Duncan Anderson, Battle for Manila. London: Bloomsbury, 1995; 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 Arts, 1994.