1 In low-key ceremonies, the Philippines on Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. recapture of Manila, a battle which destroyed the city and killed an estimated 100,000 Filipino civilians.
2 Historians describe the month-long battle as one of the great tragedies of World War II and a half century later still debate whether it was even necessary. Among Allied capitals, only Warsaw suffered greater devastation.
3 The anniversary has also reopened old wounds among the generation that remembers the battle, including ferocious American artillery fire, house-to-house fighting and the orgy of rape and murder by Japanese troops.
4 Because of the controversy, city officials will mark the anniversary with subdued ceremonies, including wreath-layings, photo exhibits and a Mass celebrated by Manila's archbishop, Cardinal Jaime L. Sin.
5 The battle began on Feb. 3, 1945 when the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division entered the city nearly a month after the U.S. Army landed at the Lingayen Gulf, about 176 kilometers (110 miles) to the north.
6 U.S. troops suffered relatively few casualties as they advanced on the city, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur believed it would fall quickly. The Japanese commander, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, had evacuated most of his forces and ordered the remaining Japanese marines and sailors to flee, as MacArthur had done when the Japan invaded more than two years earlier.
7 But Yamashita's order was either ignored or never reached the naval command. The Japanese commander, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, decided to resist.
8 'Once he had decided to defend Manila, the atrocities began, and the longer the battle raged, the more the Japanese command structure deteriorated,' historian William Manchester wrote in his biography of MacArthur, 'The American Caesar.' 'Hospitals were set afire after their patients had been strapped to their beds. The corpses of males were mutilated, females of all ages were raped before they were slain and babies' eyeballs were gouged out and smeared on the walls like jelly.'
9 Blinded by fear and rage, the Japanese even slaughtered 1,500 people who had taken refuge in the German Club. The dead included five Germans, even though Germany was allied with Japan.
10 Gradually, the Japanese retreated into the old Spanish walled city of Intramuros, which included the Manila Cathedral and some of the country's most beautiful cultural landmarks. American artillery fire reduced them to rubble before the Japanese were finally defeated in early March.
11 Iwabuchi died in the fighting, and a war crimes court refused to accept Yamashita's explanation that his order to evacuate Manila had been ignored. Yamashita, one of Japan's ablest commanders, was hanged on Feb. 23, 1946.
12 Some historians wonder whether MacArthur shared some of the blame. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff decided in 1944 to bypass the Philippines and strike instead at Taiwan, which would have given the Americans air bases to strike at Japan.
13 The United States was on the verge of perfecting the atom bomb, which brought the war to an end six months after Manila was destroyed.
14 MacArthur argued forcefully to invade the Philippines, fulfilling his 'I shall return' vow made when he fled the islands in 1942. He convinced President Franklin Roosevelt that the United States had a moral obligation to liberate U.S. military and civilian prisoners and the Filipino people whom Washington had abandoned in 1942.
15 In a commentary Thursday in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Jesus Lava, a wartime guerrilla and one-time general secretary of the Communist Party of the Philippines, claimed MacArthur was motivated by ego and a desire to restore U.S. hegemony in the Far East.
16 Lava maintained that if the Philippines had been bypassed, 'tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lives would have been spared.' It would also have strengthened the postwar position of Lava's Marxist guerrilla movement, which waged an unsuccessful insurgency against the new Philippine government in the 1940s and 1950s.
17 But others who remember the war hold a different view of who was primarily to blame.
18 'Today, there are still some Japanese who cynically claim they fought a just war to free Asians from colonialism,' columnist Rosalinda Orosa wrote Thursday in The Philippine Star. 'In their twisted minds, this must have included freeing the civilians of Manila from this earthly life.'

In low - key ceremonies , the Philippines on Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the U . S . recapture of Manila , a battle which destroyed the city and killed an estimated 100 , 000 Filipino civilians .
recapture
What war was this?