2023-04-24 02:58:12
Much has been written about Sanji Iwabuchi since 1945, without anyone having been able to unravel what were the exact reasons that led this Japanese general to disobey the orders of his superiors and sow terror in the Philippine capital when World War II was about to end. . In her novel ‘I left my heart in Manila’ (La Esfera de los Libros, 2020), Marta Galatas describes him as “stubborn and fanatic.” For John Kennedy Ohl, “Iwabuchi did not want to survive another defeat, especially without offering a fight, and he decided to fight to the death for the city.”
In ‘Who Was Who in World War II’ (‘Who is who in World War II’, 1976), the English military historian Juan Keegan defined him as “the Japanese commander who led the suicide attempt to prevent American troops from taking Manila and the man responsible for the death of one hundred thousand Filipinos in a single month, as well as all the Japanese soldiers under his command.” For Michael Arnold, author of ‘Imperial Atrocities’ (‘Imperial Atrocities’, Strategic Book, 2022), he was also “the culprit of the atrocities in Manila, but when he died, the Americans decided to go after Yamashita”, his boss, who He was executed by hanging in 1945.
One of the best definitions of Iwabuchi is, however, that of the famous British historian Max Hastings, for whom the general had “the heart of a lion and the brain of a sheep”, like many other Japanese commanders of that phase of the war. war, whose rule was to obey to the death without questioning whether the order they had been given had any military meaning. But in this case there was a difference: our protagonist disobeyed his superiors for once, but it was precisely to sow the capital of the Philippines with corpses, despite the fact that he no longer had any chance of winning or recovering the territory.
Three years ago, Álvaro del Castaño, son and grandson of survivors of that extermination, since his grandfather was the consul general of the Philippines appointed by Franco to attend to the Spanish residents there, told ABC [enlace en el subtítulo] the memories that his father had transmitted to him of those terrible days: «He was only a child, but he perfectly remembered the Japanese who perpetrated the massacres while he was there with his family. To him, they were nothing more than starving, ragged, and desolate soldiers. They were seen as uneducated and uncouth, like jackals with no destiny, which made them lose all humanity and indulge in their worst nightmares. But what happened to make this happen?
The retreat
On February 3, 1945, the Battle of Manila had begun, in which the Americans set out to reconquer the archipelago that the Japanese had seized from them in 1942. At that time, the capital had approximately one million inhabitants, including the numerous colony of Spaniards. Everyone, in principle, breathed easy and was convinced that the Japanese, after three years of rigid discipline and a considerable increase in political prisoners, would flee quickly and peacefully. They knew they had nothing to do and there was no point in causing more damage. But they were wrong. Iwabuchi, like a lone wolf, acted against the decisions of his superiors and in the most sinister way possible.
The day the reconquest of the United States began, this commander of the Japanese naval force decided, in effect, to unleash barbarism at his own risk to inhuman limits. In just 29 days, he and his about 20,000 of his men, including sailors and soldiers, annihilated more than 10% of the population of Manila. More than a hundred thousand innocent people were killed for no apparent reason, since the plaza was already lost. Even today it is considered the largest massacre in history in a warlike siege of a modern city, along with Leningrad and Nanking.
The truth is that not a drop of blood should have been spilled in the retreat, because Yamashita Tomoyuki, commander of the Japanese forces, declared Manila an “open city” with the aim that the inhabitants could leave the capital safely. For that very reason, he ordered the withdrawal of his troops to the nearby hills. Víctor Martínez, who is now around 90 years old, but then he was just another of the Spanish children who lived there, recalled in the same ABC report, in 2020, those who did decide to obey Yamashita by pushing the cars with their hands. on the run: “Some rifles had bamboo canes with sharp points instead of bayonets. Look what weapons… The image was shameful!».
One of the few surviving images of Iwabuchi
Die, rather than surrender
“Unlike Yamashita, Iwabuchi believed that Manila was a vital asset that should be denied to Americans for as long as possible,” Kennedy Ohl argued. For this reason, he became obsessed with preventing the Americans from gaining control of a port as important and strategic as the one in the capital, which could later be used to conquer Japan. Therefore, the Japanese Navy under the command of Iwabuchi took up positions and its twenty thousand men, among which there were some Taiwanese and Koreans in auxiliary functions, entrenched themselves to the south of the river that crossed the city: the Pasig.
However, a significant group remained in Intramuros, where the narrow alleys and stone walls, together with the weapons recovered from the ships in the port, made an unbeatable trench against an infantry assault. And as he prepared his for the final battle, Iwabuchi was adamant: “We are very happy and grateful for this opportunity to serve our country in an epic battle. Now, with our remaining forces, we will bravely face the enemy. Banzai to the emperor, we are determined to fight to the last man!”
Iwabuchi and his warriors preferred sacrifice to surrender, despite the fact that they would face American forces twice their number and with decidedly superior weapons. They would die killing. It was at that moment that the battle began with a surprise attack by the Americans to the north of Manila, with the aim of freeing the detainees in the internment camp of the University of Santo Tomás. Its success was so notable that Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander on the Pacific Front, announced three days later that Manila had already been liberated, but this was not true, killings were still taking place in other areas of the city.
Yamashita, during the trial in which his death sentence was confirmed
the last killings
Martínez recounted on ABC, in fact, that as soon as the massacre began, she saw her cousin, Jane Lizarraga, die, who resisted being raped by the Japanese and was stabbed. She also her uncle Tirso of hers, who was shot dead on the way to a shelter. Another cousin of hers, Vicky, was shot and she lost a leg. A grenade was thrown at her husband when he hid in the bathtub of a house and the explosion tore off half of his foot. And another cousin, Elena Lizarraga, received two bayonets and a bullet, although she survived, to tell what happened with the help of Carmen Güell: ‘The last one from the Philippines’ (Belacqva, 2005).
Allied forces wiped out the last groups of Japanese resistance on March 3. The mystery of Iwabuchi’s end has never been fully cleared up, although almost all sources say that he, after perpetrating one of the biggest massacres of the war and finding himself surrounded in the ruins of the Treasury building, committed suicide. Others believe that he shot himself in the head or mouth, and a few sources argue that he was killed in action during the US troops’ assault on the building.
In any case, almost all historians agree that Iwabuchi’s soldiers continued to hold out in the building after their commander had taken his own life on February 23. The assault would have begun five days after his death, through artillery bombardment that did not stop for the next 24 hours. The following letter was found on the corpse of a Japanese: «I am exhausted. We have nothing to eat. The enemy is now 500 meters from us. My goodness, dear wife, my son, I am writing to you in the dim light of a candle. Our end is near. What will be the future of Japan if this island falls to the enemy? Our aviation has not appeared. General Yamashita has not arrived. Hundreds of emaciated Japanese soldiers await a glorious end and nothing more.
At the end of this, 25 Japanese soldiers surrendered, but many others continued to resist even knowing that it was practically impossible to get out of there alive. On March 2, the second and definitive artillery attack took place, which was followed by the final assault. The last living Japanese defenders were discovered in the elevator shaft, where they surrendered. Iwabuchi’s body has never been identified. Left for dead at the end of World War II, the blame fell on Yamashita, who swore that he had not ordered the massacre, but was sentenced to death in a summary trial and hanged on February 23, 1946.
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