The Pacific Theater of World War 2

 The Pacific Theater of World War 2 was characterized by a brutal Island hopping campaign that saw Allied forces engaging Japanese troops in places they’d never heard of before. This state of affairs was not the case when the Allies started their invasion of the Philippines. The former US colony fell in 1942, but General MacArthur made good on his promise and returned in October 1944.

Swift Allied advances saw them on the doorstep of the Philippine capital of Manila.  General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Japanese Commander in-country ordered his forces to retreat north towards the mountainous regions of Northern Luzon Island. Manila cannot be defended by his forces since for one, he could not feed its inhabitants. Most of the Japanese forces followed his orders, but not Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi. Many of you may know that the relationship between the Japanese Army and Navy during World War 2 was a bit weird. Rear Admiral Iwabuchi probably did not appreciate being ordered around by an Army general. He wanted to make a last stand in Manila. With that, the city’s faith was sealed. The battle of Manila was the only instance in the Pacific theater where the belligerents engaged in urban warfare. American Artillery destroyed much of the city in order to root out the Japanese from their position, but they just took new ones in the rubble. The intense street-to-street and house-to-house combat saw brutal fighting akin to that of Stalingrad and Berlin. Even amidst all of this carnage, Japanese brutality towards civilians did not waver with numerous documented reports of massacres, rapes, bayonetting babies after throwing them up, barricading buildings with civilians inside them then setting them on fire, and more. In the end, hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the battle with almost the entirety of the Japanese force wiped out, and around a thousand American casualties. Lives were more important to the Allies than the buildings. The destruction of Manila was a tragedy, Manila was a city that mixed Asian, American, and European culture into its buildings and was dubbed as the Pearl of the Orient. And it was senselessly destroyed because of some guy’s ego.

lesson- Inappropriate ego of a general can kill thousand of soilders