Abstract
The Battle of Manila between February and March 1945 remains one of the most destructive yet underexplored engagements of the Asia-Pacific War. While the Philippines campaign has long attracted attention from scholars of MacArthur and the U.S. Army, the battle itself has lacked a comprehensive study drawing together American, Japanese and Filipino perspectives. In this thoroughly researched volume, Nicholas Evan Sarantakes sets out to provide one. The result is a comprehensive and engagingly written battle history, organised around a compelling central concept: that Manila was a ‘poisoned victory’, a battle the United States won but which worked against its own interests.
The book's 19 chapters are well structured, moving from MacArthur's biographical connection to Manila and the Japanese defensive preparations, through the operational approach and the battle itself, to its devastating aftermath. Sarantakes employs a mirrored architecture – pairing chapters on life behind Japanese and American lines, matching the two converging pincers of the advance – which lends the narrative clarity and balance. The treatment of MacArthur is notably balanced, avoiding the eulogistic and prosecutorial traditions that have long dominated assessments of the general, and instead presenting a commander whose virtues and failings were inseparable from the battle's outcome.
Perhaps where the book is most powerful is in its sustained attention to Manila's civilian population. The systematic targeting of Filipinos under Rear Admiral Iwabuchi's orders is documented with unflinching precision: massacres, roundups, and the collapse of military discipline within the Manila Naval Defense Force. Yet Sarantakes is equally attentive to the destruction wrought by American artillery, which killed many of the civilians it was intended to liberate. This willingness to examine the moral and ethical dimensions of both sides’ conduct – without resorting to false equivalence – is one of the book's considerable strengths, and no small achievement in a field where accounts of the Asia-Pacific War have often been one-sided. The civilian voices throughout – families caught between two destructive forces, making impossible choices under fire – are not colourful anecdotes but the evidentiary foundation of the book's central argument.
The aftermath chapter extends this focus effectively, documenting the administrative collapse that followed: an estimated 100,000 civilians dead, the city's infrastructure destroyed, and an army forced to assume municipal responsibilities it had never planned for. Sarantakes captures the scale of the humanitarian disaster with characteristic thoroughness. It is here, though, that the book's most suggestive argument invites further development. Sarantakes contends that Manila's destruction fundamentally reshaped the post-war Philippine-American relationship, with the brutality of Japanese occupation effectively guaranteeing the Philippines would remain within the U.S. orbit for decades. This is a compelling observation, but it remains gestural rather than sustained. A companion study tracing the political and diplomatic consequences forward into the post-war period would be a welcome addition, and Sarantakes's work makes such a study possible.
This is a deeply researched, well-organised, and often moving account of a battle that deserves far greater attention, supported by extensive notes and a substantial bibliography. Sarantakes has written the definitive operational and human history of Manila; the political legacy history remains to be written.
