DEFEAT OF JAPAN IN THE PHILIPPINES: BATTLES, FIGHTING, LEGACY

DEFEAT OF JAPAN IN THE PHILIPPINES

Balete Pass, Luzon

In October 1944, MacArthur fulfilled his promise by landing in the Philippines with approximately 200,000 American troops. Though fierce Japanese resistance and poor weather conditions slowed the campaign, U.S. naval forces achieved a decisive victory over Japan at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In February 1945, a devastating battle for Manila resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 Filipino civilians. The Philippines were finally liberated on July 5, 1945, near the end of World War II. [Source: Dictionary of American History, Gale Group Inc., 2003]

The Philippines was the site of some of the most vicious fighting in the Pacific theater. By the time the war ended, 320,000 Japanese occupation troops on the Philippines had died. Of an American force of 300,000 that occupied the archipelago, 15,000 died and 48,000 were wounded, The hardest hits were taken by the people of the Philippines. The Philippines lost more than five percent of its total population (1 million dead out of 18 million people in the Philippines).

Some scholars have argued that the Philippines could have been bypassed in a direct assault on Japan. But as one Filipino veteran of the Battle of Leyte told William Branigin of the Washington Post, "There would have been no fighting, no damage, no casualties. But who would dare contradict MacArthur? An American veteran added, "MacArthur wouldn't let us bypass the Philippines. He had a sacred pledge.”

By some estimates over 1.1 million Filipinos were killed during World War II. This is out of a wartime population of 17 million. "Every Filipino family was hurt by the war on a very personal level," one sociologist told the New York Times.

Battle of Leyte

The Americans and Allies surprised the Japanese by landing at Leyte, in the heart of the Philippines islands, on October 20, 1944, after months of U.S. air strikes against Mindanao.

The landing was followed by the greatest naval engagement in history from October 23 to 26. This battle is known by several names, including the Battle of Leyte Gulf and the Second Battle of the Philippine Sea. [Source: Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed., Columbia University Press]

It was a resounding U.S. victory that effectively destroyed the Japanese fleet and paved the way for the liberation of the islands. Luzon was invaded in January 1945, and Manila was taken in February. On July 5, 1945, MacArthur announced, "All of the Philippines are now liberated." The Japanese suffered over 425,000 casualties in the Philippines. The Philippine government was established in Tacloban on October 23.

On January 22, 1945, Time reported: “Strong were they had once been weak, advancing where they had once retreated, U.S. troops march toward Manila. They followed much of the same route taken n the heartbreaking retreat toward Bataan in 1941. MacArthur’s intention to free Luzon had been widely trumpeted, but the Japanese would not know just where he would choose to land.” On the way to Leyte the general “had an air of a man whose work was already done: the planning had been so complete that he had only a few short conferences with his staff. With satisfaction he told LIFE photographer Carl Mydans: ‘This the same route I followed when I came out of the Philippines in a PT boat...exactly that route.’”

Battle of Luzon

After the Battle of Leyte civilian government was restored in the Philippines. But at that time there were 350,000 Japanese still occupying the Philippines, most of them in Luzon, and about 180,000 Filipino guerilla fighting them. Fighting was fierce, particularly in the mountains of northern Luzon, where Japanese troops had retreated, and in Manila, where they put up a last-ditch resistance. Guerrilla forces rose up everywhere for the final offensive.

In an effort to take Luzon the U.S. army landed at Lingayen Gulf on January 9, 1945, Subic Bay on January 20 and Batangas on January 31. These attacks trapped the Japanese in giant pincers. The Japanese fought back fiercely in Manila, at Balete Pass and in the Cagayan Valley. Without authorization MacArthur "liberated the central and southern Philippines in a series of costly campaigns that some critics believed unnecessary." The Americans followed the same route the Japanese had used to drive them out. Organized Japanese fighting ended on June 28, but pockets of resistance continued fighting for months after that. American prisoners were freed at Santo Tomás, Cabanatuan, Los Baños and Baguio.

Ray Anderson, a gunner on a navy ship, wrote: Our second invasion was January 9th when an invasion force of more than 850 vessels entered the Lingayen Gulf north of Manila. Several days later our sister ship the LCI(M) 974 was sunk by a Japanese suicide torpedo boat. There were 29 survivors including Captain Brown with a broken back. One day we were lying to about 2,500 yards from the beach near the Cruiser Nashville, the one that took MacArthur to the invasion of Leyte, when two Jap fighters came out of the sun with machine guns blazing away. We opened fire and believed we hit one plane which then turned and went into a suicide dive hitting the Cruiser Nashville exploding in a great billow of flame. It was a horrible sight. The Nashville's flag went down to half-mast indicating that personnel had been killed. [Source: Ray Anderson's Eyewitness Account to World War II, The American Legion, legion.org/yourwords]

F. Sionil Jose wrote in the New York Times: I was in Manila during the first American air raid in September 1944. By that November, people in the city were starving; some were forced to eat rats. My mother, a cousin and I returned to Rosales — we walked all the way, passing empty towns. In the daytime, the skies were full of American planes flying so low we could see the pilots. At night, the Japanese marched — we could hear them as we camped in the abandoned houses along the highway. [Source: F. Sionil Jose, New York Times, August 13, 2010]

“We reached Rosales after a week and shortly after, the Americans landed in Lingayen. I immediately joined the U.S. Army as a civilian medical technician. Since our unit was with the combat engineers, we were often the first to reach liberated towns and villages. We would be met by grateful and starving Filipinos as we offered gifts of fresh eggs and live chickens.

Battle of Manila

The bloodiest fighting of the Philippines campaign occurred in the Battle of Manila between February 3rd and March 3rd, 1945. Manila residents suffered horrifically. Street fighting there left the capital in ruins. An estimated 100,000 to 150,000 Filipino civilians, in a city of 1 million, died. Many residents were killed by U.S. shells or slaughtered by Japanese marines "in a bloodbath that rivaled the 1937 rape of Nanking in China."

Much of Manila was destroyed during the final months of the fighting, making it the second most devastated city in World War II after Warsaw. By the time MacArthur marched into the city a city that had been one of the finest in Asia was a smoldering heap. The historian William Manchester wrote, "The devastation of Manila was one of the great tragedies of World War II. Of Allied cities in those war years, only Warsaw suffered more. Seventy percent of the utilities, 75 percent of the factories, 80 percent of southern residential district and 100 percent of the business district were razed."

Manila was captured by American forces through bloody street to street fighting. Fort Santiago, at the bayside end of Intramuros, gained notoriety in 1945 when Americans staged an eight-day siege. After pounding their way through dirt and concrete barriers two stories high and 40 feet thick, victorious GI's found the bodies of 600 Filipinos and Americans in the dungeons of Fort Santiago.

Legacy of World War II on the Philippines

Tapel Massacre

In early 1946 Japan's General Tomoyuki Yamashita was tried as a war criminal and hanged by order of MacArthur. In 1986, a salvage group located the wreck of a Japanese ship containing $500 million worth of treasure in Filipino waters. The ship was sunk in World War II.

In 1994, President Fidel Ramos had hoped to turn the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Leyte into a sort of an Asian version of the D-Day commemoration at Normandy. President Clinton and MacArthur's 92-year-old widow were invited to event but neither were able to attend. In their place came the U.S. Secretary of State William Perry and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Shalikashvili.

After World War II and independence, the United States Congress reneged on promised to give benefits to Filipino soldiers who fought on the Allied side against Japan. In 2009 Associated Press reported: “Men and women from the Philippines were promised recognition and benefits when they enlisted to fight alongside US troops during World War II. Many of those honors are only arriving now, 64 years after the war ended. The Fil-Am veterans are also set to receive long-awaited benefits that the United States pledged during the war. [Source: Associated Press, June 7, 2009]

“Some 250,000 Filipinos enlisted in 1941 to help defend the Philippines, a US commonwealth at the time. They were promised that they could become US citizens if they chose, and receive benefits under the G.I. Bill. The US Congress took away that offer in 1946 when the Philippines became an independent nation. Congress passed legislation in 2009 rewarding the soldiers for their service with $9,000 payments for non-US citizens and $15,000 for those with citizenship. In 2009, about 18,000 Filipino veterans, many in their 80s and 90s, were still alive. Ravaged by old age and disease, they were dying at the rate of 10 a day, officials said. “

Carlos H. Conde wrote in the New York Times, “Unlike in other countries where the war's end brought renewal and hope, there is a strong sense in this country that the war victimized Filipinos twice over, that its horrifying toll went beyond the destruction of its cities. If the war destroyed 80 percent of the Philippine economy, its consequences - the reparations, the ensuing relationship between Manila and Tokyo, the Cold War, the rise of Ferdinand Marcos, who exploited Japan's postwar penitence and benevolence and almost single-handedly repaired relations with the Japanese - damaged Filipinos even further, diminishing their sense of pride and their ability to appreciate their past and learn from it. [Source: Carlos H. Conde, New York Times, August 13, 2005 +=+]

“In short, World War II left the Philippines devastated long after it ended, historians and sociologists say. This damage, they say, defines the modern Filipino: poor and lost, perpetually wandering the globe for economic survival, bereft of national pride, and - like the women of Mapanique - forced to suffer, to this day, the indignities of their violation. "Filipinos have a very short historical memory," said Ricardo Trota Jose, the country's foremost scholar on Philippine-Japan relations, who teaches history at the University of the Philippines.” +=+

Legacy of World War II on One Small Philippine Village

Reporting from Mapanique, Philippines, Carlos H. Conde wrote in the New York Times, On November 23, 1944, Japanese soldiers stormed through this village, burning down houses and killing all the Filipino men they could find. They then herded dozens of women to a red mansion that had been turned into a garrison. There, the soldiers took turns violating the Filipinas; they raped a mother and her daughter at the same time in one of the many rooms. To this day, the women of Mapanique - many of those still alive are now in their 70s - talk about their ordeal with chilling clarity. "I will never forget that horrible day," said Maxima dela Cruz, 76, one of the survivors. [Source: Carlos H. Conde, New York Times, August 13, 2005 +=+]

“In other countries, remembering the atrocities of Japan is a matter of honor. In this village about 60 kilometers, or 37 miles, north of Manila, remembrance is at once cruel and bitterly ironic: Dozens of relatives of the women raped in the red mansion, many of them grandchildren, are toiling today in Japan - in its tofu factories, on its construction sites and in its homes. In many instances - and this is what the survivors find particularly outrageous - they work there as entertainers, which is often a euphemism for prostitution. +=+

"We did not have a choice. We're poor people," said Ruperto Quilantang, who worked for years as a construction worker in Japan. Quilantang's wife, 78-year-old Maria, was one of those raped inside the red house. "Of course it's painful," said one of the Mapanique women when asked about a grandchild who now works as a hostess in a Tokyo bar. "But we need this," she said, forming the money sign with her thumb and index finger. +=+

Surprising Friendliness of Filipino Towards Japan Despite World War II

Carlos H. Conde wrote in the New York Times, “But for a people wounded by Japan like no other in Southeast Asia, Filipinos are now very friendly toward Japan - a phenomenon that baffles many historians and sociologists considering that, in countries like China and South Korea, anti-Japanese sentiment still smolders and occasionally flares. "It's not just historical amnesia," said Michael Tan, a sociologist and anthropologist who has been studying the impact of conflicts on Filipinos. "A large part of the blame goes to the failure by our historians to remind our people of our past," Tan said. [Source: Carlos H. Conde, New York Times, August 13, 2005 +=+]

“He points out the case of textbooks, where many of the atrocities committed by the Japanese, among them the systematic rape of Filipinas who are now called "comfort women," are not even mentioned. As a result - and here Jose agrees - Filipinos are not as offended as the Chinese or the Koreans are, for example, about the fact that these atrocities are given only fleeting attention in Japanese classrooms, if at all. +=+

“A main factor in all of this is economic. "Beggars can't be choosers," Tan said by way of explaining why Filipinos, particularly those who suffered at the hands of the Japanese during the war, decided to forget the past and try to survive the present. According to officials in Manila, the majority of entertainers in Japan's nightclubs and bars are Filipinos. The number of Filipino entertainers there has increased over the years; today, at an estimated 80,000, they now comprise the biggest number of Filipino workers in Japan, the majority of them women. +=+

“These women, along with an estimated seven million Filipinos working in other parts of the world, send $8 billion a year to their families back home, thus helping to prop up one of the weakest economies in Asia, a country chronically saddled by huge foreign debts and budget deficits. Aida, a dressmaker in a Manila suburb who asked that only her first name be used, is unapologetic about the decision by one of her daughters to work as a bar girl in Japan. "Her children are growing up and my daughter was worried she could not feed them well or send them to school," said Aida, whose father fought the Japanese as a guerrilla. When asked what her father would think of her daughter, Aida replied: "My grandchildren cannot eat the past." +=+

Lack of Accounting and History in the Philippines on World War II

Carlos H. Conde wrote in the New York Times, “But another factor in what Tan calls "national historical amnesia" is a conscious effort by the Japanese to change the way Filipinos regard them and the creation by the ruling class of Filipinos of an ideology that, according to Tan, "convinces us that we have to be grateful to Japan." This class, he says, gained from collective amnesia and from the friendship of Manila and Tokyo after the war. According to Jose, the Philippines have never had an official history of the war. Most of the literature on the war was written by foreigners, many of them by American veterans and Japanese scholars. The first book on the Japanese occupation written by a Filipino was published in 1994, nearly half a century after the war's end. [Source: Carlos H. Conde, New York Times, August 13, 2005 +=+]

“Not surprisingly, Tan says, hardly anybody protested - except the group of women raped by the Japanese during the war - when the tourism office in the town of Mabalacat a few years ago put up a memorial for Japanese kamikaze pilots. There was a kamikaze air base at the town during the war. The town is in Pampanga, a province north of Manila that was the center of an anti-Japanese rebellion during the war. Among the pilots honored was a lieutenant the memorial hailed as the "world's first official human bomb!" +=+

“Nor did many find any irony late last year, when, while Filipino "comfort women" continued to lobby and demonstrate in search of justice and compensation from Tokyo, hundreds of young Filipino women held rallies in Manila protesting a move by the Japanese government to tighten rules in the hiring of Filipino entertainers. +=+

Japan’s Exploitation of the Philippine Economy After World War II

Carlos H. Conde wrote in the New York Times, “Historians point out that Japan never ceased trying to win back the Philippines' sympathy after the war. It poured in tremendous amounts of money and resources - more than any other country, including America - as part of its postwar diplomacy. To this day, Japan is the Philippines' top donor of so-called official development assistance. Japan is also the Philippines' top foreign investor. Japan is among the top countries in the world in sponsoring the education of Filipino scholars, while its cultural diplomacy is among the most extensive. "Our neighbors did not receive the same amount of aid and assistance from Japan," said the historian Manuel Quezon 3rd. [Source: Carlos H. Conde, New York Times, August 13, 2005 +=+]

“What is not widely discussed here, however, is that most of these resources from Japan were actually loans and were, in fact, linked to Japan's quest for export markets after the war. Japan tied these loans, which were mainly used for infrastructure like highways, to contracts with Japanese contractors and suppliers. On the Philippine side, only a small clique of influential Filipino contractors and businesses benefited from the postwar largesse. Most Filipinos thus did not benefit substantially from reparations. +=+

“According to one study, Japanese "reparation payments to the Philippines were relatively less efficient than in other countries." In fact, according to another study, the reparations "provided investment mainly to private-sector projects for reaping short-term profits, leaving long-term profitable key industries with insufficient capital." The result is that the Philippines did not develop its industries, a defect whose impact is still felt today. Worse, according to historians, the way the loans and reparations money and goods were utilized ushered in the era of bureaucratic corruption that is now so prevalent here. +=+

“Japan increased its engagement with the Philippines after Washington shifted its attention to the Cold War. During the Korean War, Washington actually gave more support to Japan than it did to the Philippines, because of Japan's strategic relevance, Quezon said, even though Filipino guerrillas had fought side by side with Americans against the Japanese. +=+

“While Tokyo had little success in repairing relations with Philippine presidents immediately after the war, things changed when Ferdinand Marcos took power in the 1960s. Marcos repaired relations with Japan, ingratiating himself with Tokyo, which was only too happy to pour in more loan money. Marcos, in turn, used the loans to prop up an economy that was becoming increasingly weak because of his mismanagement. Some historians even point out that the Japanese loans allowed Marcos to fatten his and his cronies' wallets and, perhaps more important, prolong his brutal regime. The loans Marcos incurred contributed to the foreign debts that are still choking the Philippines to this day. The debts prevent the government from developing industries and creating more jobs, thus pushing Filipinos to seek a better life abroad, even in countries their loved ones loathe.” +=+

Japanese Dead, Filipino Bones

It is said around 500,000 Japanese soldiers died in the Philippines during WWII, with the bodies of around 380,000 yet to be recovered. In the late 2000s reports began to emerge that the bones of Filipinos were being passed off as Japanese World War II dead. In 2011, AFP reported:Grave robbers have dug up the remains of Philippine tribesmen and passed them off as the bodies of Japanese soldiers killed in World War II, tribal leaders said Wednesday. The skeletons of hundreds of Mangyan and Ifugao tribesmen have been shipped to Japan since 2008 after being unearthed by looters paid by a Japanese group, they claimed. [Source: Agence France-Presse, February 23, 2011 ]

Aniw Lubag, a Mangyan leader, told a news conference his tribe briefly detained three people in 2008 as they stole bones from a burial cave on the central island of Mindoro. "They said they were hired by non-Mangyans. We heard other Filipinos ordered (the digging up of bones) and then gave them to Kuentai," said Lubag, referring to a Japanese group established to find and repatriate the bodies of fallen soldiers.

“Caesar Dulnuan, a head of the Ifugao tribal group, said skeletons had vanished from their northern mountain community after the Japanese group began searching for the remains of their war dead in the area. "We don't know who received the bones. There were a lot of people and they paid them 500 pesos (11.40 dollars) per (skeleton) recovered," he said. The looters said they were paid by others to bring bones to Kuentai, whose website says it is a "non-profit organization" seeking to repatriate the remains of half a million Japanese soldiers killed during the occupation of the country.

“Koji Nakamura, a spokesman for a group of Japanese war veterans and relatives, urged the Philippine government to investigate. "If this is true, it is unscrupulous and profane," Nakamura told the news conference. He said Kuentai had not checked whether the remains were those of Japanese soldiers, emboldening impoverished residents to dig up and sell Filipino bones. "All they need is an affidavit from some Filipino people, saying 'We found these Japanese bones here and there,' and have it signed by a village official so the Japanese government has no reason to doubt them," he said. The bones were later cremated and sent to Japanese national cemeteries for burial, making it impossible to bring them back, Nakamura added. Nakamura said Philippine National Museum staff had taken part in Kuentai's retrieval program but told him they had no way of checking if the bones were Japanese.

Kyodo reported: A group of former Japanese soldiers and Philippine tribal leaders formally sought a permanent ban on the collection of remains of World War II Japanese soldiers in the Philippines by a Japanese nonprofit organization, alleging the skeletal remains of Filipinos are being passed off as those of Japanese soldiers. In a petition letter, retired Japanese soldier Toshio Kawamura and Wataru Kamei, son of a missing Japanese soldier assigned in a northern Philippine province during the war, asked President Benigno Aquino to ''immediately ban Kuentai's retrieval activities in the Philippines.''[Source: Kyodo, February 23, 2011 ~]

“The increase in the number of retrieved bones during the Kuentai missions compared with previous years and missions has raised doubts as to the authenticity of the remains recovered, said Koji Nakamura, a facilitator for Kawamura, Kamei and other petitioners. Aside from the difficulty of finding and authenticating Japanese remains so long after the war, the petition alleged there have been ''terribly disgusting cases'' in which the remains of Filipino tribe members have been dug up and stolen to be sold off and passed off as those of Japanese soldiers. ~

Supporting the petition against Kuentai, Ceasar Dulnuan and Aniw Lubag, representing the tribes from Ifugao and Mindoro Oriental provinces, respectively, asked for ''justice'' for the loss of the remains of their ancestors and tribesmen. Lubag claimed that the remains of some 1,600 people from the Mangyan tribe graves in Mindoro Oriental have been stolen since 2009, while Dulnuan said some 500 skeletal remains from his tribe in Ifugao have gone missing since 2008.

Image Sources: National Archives of the United States; Wikimedia Commons; Gensuikan;

Text Sources: National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, The Guardian, Yomiuri Shimbun, The New Yorker, Lonely Planet Guides, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Wikipedia, BBC, “Eyewitness to History “, edited by John Carey ( Avon Books, 1987), Compton’s Encyclopedia, “History of Warfare “ by John Keegan, Vintage Books, Eyewitness to History.com, “The Good War An Oral History of World War II” by Studs Terkel, Hamish Hamilton, 1985, BBC’s People’s War website and various books and other publications.

Last updated February 2026