“The Army and the Navy in Japan do not practice what Americans now call joint operations. There's no ability to work together... According to the Constitution of Imperial Japan, the Commander in Chief of the Army is the Emperor. According to the Constitution, the Commander in Chief of the Navy is the Emperor. What's different from that setup than what you have in the United States is the civilian government, the cabinet, the Prime Minister is not in the chain of command.”
US artillery crews fired shells through individual windows like sniper rifles
“At one point, uh, they're using artillery in, in the battle, and they are actually able to use artillery as basically sniper rifles. They're basically, they're Japanese people on top of buildings that are shooting at them, and they can call up a artillery unit and say, hey, can you take these guys out? And they're like, yeah, watch this, boom. And they had such skill and such proficiency that they were able to actually put artillery shells in wind, through windows.”
MacArthur's reputation swings between home runs and strikeouts like Babe Ruth
“MacArthur was really good and he was really bad all at the same time. Put another way, everyone remembers that Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs. They don't remember that he struck out 2,000 times. With MacArthur, you get hit home run or strikeout. Feast or famine and there's not a whole lot in between.”
Strategic logic, not MacArthur's ego, drove the Philippines campaign
“A lot of people say this is all about ego, trying to make back, make good his defeat in 1942 Okay, sure. But we need to consider something. The United States doesn't make strategy because of the whims of one field commander... no general, no matter how good, no matter how egotistical, can basically just say, I want to redeem myself, so let's have the nation send its resources to the Philippines.”
Sunken ships in Manila Bay made the prized port useless after victory
“The dock facilities, the port facilities are gone. They're just ripped to sheds, blown up. The Japanese before the battle had started, had sunk about 300 ships in the bay... He takes a look at Manila and he says, whoever destroyed this knew exactly what they were doing. They sank all these ships in exactly the right spots. Not only are the ports and docks not working, you have wrecks, hulks of ships that are in the exactly wrong spot.”
Manila's defenders were sailors and draftees with almost no infantry training
“The people who are fighting in Manila are primarily sailors. There are some army units, but there are primarily sailors, and these are guys who are not trained in infantry combat. They barely know how to do what their load a rifle... basically, their military training, infantry training amounted to, this is how you load a rifle, put bullets in it, plant this way, this is how you pull the trigger, and that's about it.”
Manila was the first major US-Japan urban battle of the Pacific
“Manila is one of the biggest, most populated objectives that the United States will fight for. And it is the first urban battle of the Pacific Theater. It's not necessarily the first urban fight for the Japanese, and it's not the only urban fight in World War II, but it's the first one where the Americans and the Japanese are going at it.”
Urban warfare turns cities into man-made mountains of rubble and dust
“One of the things that happens in the Battle of Manila is, for lack of a better way of putting it, the city melts... You are marching down a street, but unless you have a really good map, and even if you do have a good map, you might not have any idea where you are, because a building that was there is not there anymore. It's just a pile of rubble... So it almost becomes, um, you're climbing man-made mountains.”
MacArthur 'liberated' Manila weeks before the battle actually ended
“The Battle of Manila is declared a victory so many times, it's not even funny... The reporters are there and they're like, hey, MacArthur has liberated Manila. I spent some time looking at newspapers... Massive headlines. MacArthur liberates Manila... The problem is, is no one told the Japanese, and then the Japanese decide to fight for the city, and you get a lot of fighting, and then the next day, reporters are like, oh, well, they're still fighting in a liberated city.”
The battle erased Manila's Spanish-speaking population almost entirely
“It accelerates the move from being a bilingual English, Spanish nation to being an English. Well, it was trilingual because you had people also speaking Tagalog. But it becomes bilingual in the sense that Spanish just goes away because you killed off all the Spanish speakers. Who mostly live in Manila.”
