THE Battle of Manila 74 years ago this month was one of the most destructive and saddest legacies of World War II. It is comparable only to the widespread destruction of Warsaw, the Polish city described as “the most devastated city in the world in WWII,” after the Germans were done with it.

For all the destruction, the Battle of Manila seems to remain at the periphery of most Filipinos’ consciousness, rivaled by more popular images of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Leyte landing. For a time it was thought such low profile in the national consciousness of Manila’s “liberation”—an ironic word—was owed to the fact that Filipino historians could not access the rich materials dwelling in some dusty libraries abroad. Or maybe, there were few surviving Filipinos to corroborate the story of bombs raining and fires that engulfed Manila, causing the demise of at least 100,000, not only in the hands of the invading Japanese army but also by the returning Americans.

James M. Scott, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said he was also looking for “that story that has not been told” when he wrote Rampage.

Or maybe it was still such a raw wound it would hurt the Filipino emotions to scratch that wound and see the ugly truth.

James M. Scott’s book, Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita and The Battle of Manila, attempts to close that gap and give readers a fresh look at what really transpired 74 years ago in what was then dubbed the “Pearl of the Orient.”

He tells of cornered Japanese invaders, feeling the heat of their American enemies, consumed by uncontrollable rage—bayoneting and decapitating Filipinos, even children, and raping women. On the other hand, the ensuing fires—both those started by the crazed Japanese soldiers and from the bombs unleashed by the American to rout the enemy—reduced the city to rubble.

Scott’s 500-page tome takes us back along those 29 days in 1945, when Field Marshall Douglas MacArthur eventually returned to the Philippines. His arrival in Manila, two years after his embarrassing departure from the island fortress of Corregidor, is filled with controversy.

There were those who welcomed his reappearance as a way to save Filipinos from imminent death, but many blamed him and not the Japanese, for the bombs that razed Manila.

Scott was able to access official records of the monthlong event because, as soon as the battle ended, he said American military officials sent to Manila a team of Army war-crime investigators to interview survivors in field hospitals, “while the victims are still in bed, recovering from their wounds.”

Like many other buildings in Manila, the Legislative Building was not spared from heavy shelling and bombing.

The US military authorities sent the investigators after the battle ended, “because military officials realized that Manila was less of a battlefield and more of a crime scene.”

“Those interviews were done, wounds were photographed, maps were made of atrocities, and sketches were done,” Scott said, after combing through “literally tens of thousands of materials, all of which is in the National Archive in Washington, D.C.”

He said he copied and digitized about 4,000 records a day and built his database “to track all the names of the victims, every person of what massacre, visiting the places, doing interviews of survivors and meeting with the board members of ‘Memorare Manila.” The latter is a foundation set up in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Manila, in order to draw up as complete a list as possible of those who died in 1945, and to honor them properly.

“You can look through it, it’s filled with the voices of survivors and I really wanted to have the voice of the people who lived through what happened in Manila be the ones to tell that story,” he added.

He said he used the transcripts in the books so “you’ll see tons and tons of words from these survivors, because it’s more powerful for a reader to hear directly from the person who was there,” adding those are the important things he tried to recapture.

Citizens of Manila run for safety from suburbs burned by Japanese soldiers, February 10, 1945.

What prompted him to write the book? “The Battle of Manila is a story of a city. What happened to the people; a hundred civilians died for every one US soldier, six civilians died for every one Japanese.”

Scott, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said he was also looking for “that story that has not been told.”

Although there had been a couple of books here in the Philippines about the Battle of Manila, he said there has never been an American book about the Battle of Manila.

The 43-year-old former journalist added that one of his motivations to write about those events was that “Manila has a huge close association with the US.”

The US had captured Manila in the Spanish-American war and brought here Daniel Burnham, a municipal planner and architect, to help lay out the design for Manila, “home to thousands of not only American servicemen but also employees of Westinghouse, BF Good­rich and others because Manila was a big part of the US.”

So, he said, “to have it all destroyed, makes it all the more tragic. So it’s really a battle borne on the backs of the women and children of Manila, it’s important to tell their story.”

Many students of history, this writer told Scott, believe that Mac­Arthur should not have come over to the Philippines since the Japanese was in near defeat following the delivery of atomic bombings over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, he had orders from Washington to proceed to Japan from Australia.

“Then Manila would have been spared from American bombs and the Japanese would not have gone into a frenzy of retribution,” this writer told Scott.

Scott, who had written four books before, said there was a big debate in the summer of 1944 between the US Army and the US Navy whether to come back to the Philippines or bypass the Philippines and go to Formosa because even Adm. Ernest King of the US Navy “really wanted to bypass the Philippines.”

He said the two US military services had a conference in Hawaii, and King sent Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, who was head of the Pacific fleet, to do the bidding for the Navy.

“MacArthur came to tell his side, and Nimitz kind of saw both sides of the argument and so he didn’t fight as he should have and was later reprimanded by Ernest King ‘for not pushing his case as much.’”

“But essentially,” he said, “the Navy is a purely strategic one which saw that ‘the sooner we get to the Japanese home island the sooner the war ends, because Japanese troops will sooner whither on the vine.’”

On the other hand, Scott said MacArthur made a very different argument: “The US had a colony in the Philippines when the war broke out and the US had a moral obligation to come back and liberate the Philippines at the very earliest possible moment.”

Scott added that MacArthur, with his passionate argument, “in the end…ultimately was able to persuade FDR [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] that that was the right way to do it.”

Scott said the iconic American general’s only wish was “to be welcomed with a city parade,” presumably thinking the Japanese would simply retreat.

“But Japanese Adm. Sanji Iwabuchi defied the order of Yamashita to withdraw and in true Samurai fashion, ordered his sailors and marines to dig in for the house-to-house defense of the city.

“With certain death their only option, Iwabuchi’s command embarked on a campaign of atrocities in which more than 100,000 Filipinos and foreign nationals were slaughtered.”

Scott added that to save ammunition, Iwabuchi ordered all Filipinos grouped together and then disposed of by burning buildings “and, with them, material evidence of the massacre.”

He said had the Americans not come back “you would have had a lot more deaths in Manila for starvation,” recalling that “the Japanese occupation was a brutal time here that by January of 1945 we had about 500 people a day starving to death in the Battle of Manila.”

At the University of Santo Tomas he said about 40 to 50 were starving to death every day; the daily caloric intake of the internees was just about 580 calories.

He added: “Had America waited an extra six, seven months, I think Manila would have been a different humanitarian catastrophe. You would have had a lot more starvations.”

Scott continued: “It may have saved the buildings, [and] Manila would not have been reduced to rubble,” but the human toll would have been very high.

He said MacArthur returned because he was convinced that the Japanese would actually leave the city, “just what he did at the beginning of the war, when he declared Manila an open city and evacuated the forces and he was really convinced that the Japanese would do the same even. On the other hand, Filipino guerrillas in the city, particularly in 1945, were radioing that the buildings in the city had been fortified by the Japanese, that land mines are being planted, that all indications point to a siege.”

MacArthur, however, didn’t believe it. “He trusted his own gut instinct over his intelligence officers. So, even when the battle started, he was slow to grasp how bad things were, because very quickly soon after the Americans arrived, the Japanese set fire to Tondo, Binondo and all the areas north of the Pasig River.”

While retreating, the Japanese literally burned the bridges and moved south across the river and they began the destruction there.

“He [MacArthur] was slow to grasp what was going on even though his field commander could see it. He was outside the city and so he didn’t get it until the destruction had already begun.”

One would think it would be easier for a foreigner to swallow the destruction of another nation’s heritage, but here’s how Scott described the old Manila that many Filipinos never knew or saw.

“So it didn’t just erase a city, it erased a heritage and not only that, it’s the cost of human lives, that precious human capital. Your engineers, doctors, inventors, judges, your moms and dads, that human intelligence and people, that would have been the foundation for a newly independent Philippines in 1946 was so decimated.”

He said an officer’s diary after the Battle of Manila had a list of the dead “and it reads like a who’s who in the Philippines [was it the original root of our brain drain?].

“Because this was a battle that affected all walks of life, it affected the poor, the middle class, the upper class, the teachers, judges, bank presidents. It eradicated all of that so quickly, [and] I think [it] very much hurt the Philippines going forward with its independence,” Scott added.

“All that talent [was] lost, so I think that is the tragedy of this battle. It not only robbed the Philippines of its heritage, not only its past, but also handicapped its future in that post-war period.”

“Would future historians be kind to MacArthur?” I asked.

“MacArthur, because he has such a long career, he had moments of greatness and moments of weakness and so history would kind of always view him with both of these things in mind.”

He said biographies on MacArthur will always carry criticisms of his personality, his ego and his decisions. “But he’s still no doubt a controversial figure in history. The people who loved him, the people who hate him, a lot of the men who served in Bataan, they despised him.”

Arthur MacArthur was a former Philippine governor general and when he left, it was his son Douglas who took over. At the time, the country was recovering from Spain’s 300 years of occupation and the beleaguered Filipinos were once more fighting the American troops as the US tried to grab the Philippines’s victory over the Spaniards—who were in near defeat—and simply paid $20 million, the cost for our territory at the Treaty of Paris.

“Is there a moral lesson behind the book?” I asked.

“Yes, I think one of the things that was so important about the Battle of Manila is it’s a transformative battle for the city and for the people.”

He said that before the war, Manila had this great prewar architecture, a beautiful city and “a whole of them was totally destroyed, 613 blocks containing 11,000 buildings, churches, archives, schools, businesses.”

“It wasn’t just the buildings; it was the heritage of the Philippines that was lost. It was the weather records, the data back to the time of the Jesuits, the medical records at PGH that were destroyed, it was the priceless museum paintings and sculptures, the literary works.”

“Think also of the loss to families, the children who grew up without mom or dad, parents who lost their children or grandparents who lost their children and grandchildren, that anguish, that grief, it hurts you and it hurts subsequent generations.”

“Did it ever surprise you that we seem to have forgotten that part of our history and now we’re so friendly with the Japanese?”

Scott replied, “History is one of those, and I see it. I have two children, their ages between 9 and 11, studying in schools—society and culture always look forward and only a few would look back and review history.”

“And that makes our job as historians difficult; but also important that we have to remind people of what happened in the past, the lessons learned and applied to the future.”

“History is a hard sell, particularly to younger generation, they’re always looking at Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, but when you tell them, ‘Hey, let’s read about a book 75 years ago,’ and it’s hard for them to do that.”