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Sixty-two years ago, as the Second World War and the
Japanese Occupation of the Philippines were about to end, Japanese
military men committed atrocities on hapless residents of Manila.
People who suffered at Japanese hands and Filipinos who read about
these atrocities in the fifties and mid-sixties know that these
things did happen.
But in later decades, the younger
generations ceased to recognize the Japanese Empire and its military
of those evil days as enemies of the Filipinos (and their American
allies). And now, as the Philippines goes deeper and deeper into
debt to Japan, political leaders, businessmen and the media leave
these atrocities unspoken—until one day no one will remember. On
that day someone will say that written accounts of those atrocities
are all a hoax, produced by Japan-haters. Some people want that to
happen to memories of the Holocaust. Neo-Nazis as well as some
Islamists driven by hatred of the Jews wage a campaign to convince
the ignorant that the mass murder of Germany’s Jews never
happened.
The Filipino veterans of the
Second World War, whose number has dwindled to a little more than
12,000 are still waiting for the US government to make up for
America’s betrayal of them when it passed the Rescission Act of
1946. That law suddenly declared that these Filipino soldiers of the
US flag were not worthy of being treated as US veterans of WWII.
They were deprived of their benefits. There were originally 200,000
Filipino soldiers of the US Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE).
Just like them, the number of
Filipinos who witnessed the WW II colonization of the Philippines by
the Japanese, and saw the atrocities, have also become a tiny
minority in our country of 84 million souls.
Thankfully something other than
books and magazine articles (which have an insignificant readership
relative to the total population) has come into being to give
present day Filipinos from age 1 to age 65, the means to realize the
pain their parents and grandparents suffered under the Japanese.
This previous thing is a
documentary film produced by Peter Parsons, son of the famous WW II
guerrilla “Chick” Parsons, and Lucky Guillermo.
Available in DVD, the documentary
film will be released to commemorate the Battle of Manila which
began on February 3, 1945.
Parsons and Guillermo put the
blame for the atrocities on Japanese higher authorities. This
refutes the erroneous conventional wisdom that remnant Japanese
forces, trapped in Manila by American battalions with superior arms
and equipment, had no choice but to fight to the death. Another
theory, which the documentary also debunks, is that Admiral Sanji
Iwabuchi ignored General Yamashita’s order for him and the
remnants of his forces to leave Manila, insubordinately stayed and
let his men have their way with the Manilans.
The film proves that the Japanese
had no intention of withdrawing from our capital and doing as
MacArthur had done three years before, declare Manila an “open
city” (one which is to be spared from warfare and bombing.
Instead, the Japanese spent two months fortifying Manila’s key
buildings with pillboxes, sniper holes, barbed wire and dynamite.
The film cites field orders to
prove that the massacres of batches of Manileños were products of
planning and preparation.
The documentary does not leave
the American forces uncriticized. It shows examples of how their
firepower also caused a lot of deaths. While the Japanese killed
thousands and burnt houses (with their dwellers in them), it was
American bombs that destroyed most of the buildings that marked
Manila as the Distinguished and Ever Loyal City of that other
imperial colonizer, Spain.
When the tally was done, Manila
ended up being the Second World War’s most devastated city next to
Warsaw. This, of course, does not include the two Japanese cities
that tasted the only atomic bomb attacks in world history: Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
Parsons and Guillermo spent
months researching for their film in the US National Archives and
the MacArthur Memorial. They interviewed survivors and historians on
both sides of the Pacific.
The documentary film is rated
“R” by the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board.
DVD copies will soon be sold by the Ayala Museum in Makati and by
the Solidaridad Book Store on Padre Faura, Ermita, Manila.
May people who view the
Parsons-Guillermo documentary film Manila 1945: The Forgotten
Atrocities also remember that atrocity of the United States: its
betrayal, through the Rescission Act of 1946, of the Filipinos who
served the American flag in WWII.
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