Yamashita was left with few options. The only offensive weapons he still possessed were the young pilots who were willing to fly one-way suicide strikes at MacArthur’s support ships, and their numbers were dwindling. The situation on the ground was even worse. On paper, Yamashita had 275,000 troops, but those numbers were deceptive. Many of his soldiers were survivors of other battles thrown together in ad hoc outfits of dubious value. Many more were service troops and second-rate line units.

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Another 16,000 sailors and special landing-force troops of the 31st Naval Base Force were stationed around Manila under the command of Rear Adm. Sanji Iwabuchi. Although Iwabuchi was nominally under Yamashita’s command, in practice the fiery Bushido warrior chose to ignore orders from Yamashita that he did not like.

The plan Yamashita finally adopted for defending Luzon was simple. He would abandon Manila and its environs and head for the hills. Already resigned to losing eventually, Yamashita simply hoped to occupy as much of the island as possible to deny its use to MacArthur. He later claimed that he was already prepared to cede Manila to MacArthur when the Sixth Army struck. Meanwhile, Iwabuchi put his own simple plan into effect. Iwabuchi planned to defend Manila to the death.

On January 9, 1945, MacArthur finally mounted his invasion of Luzon. At two points on Lingayen Gulf, 110 miles north of Manila, 68,000 men from Krueger’s Sixth Army waded ashore. Two days later, Krueger established a secure beachhead and began forging inland. With I Corps on the left flank and XIV Corps in the van, Krueger headed for Manila.

For the rest of the month he piled on new divisions, until almost the entire Sixth Army was ashore. Throughout January, Krueger’s troops fought a series of tough actions that slowed their assault on Manila to a crawl. Some of the pressure on the Sixth Army’s front was relieved on January 31, when the 11th Airborne Division came ashore by boat at Nasugbu Bay, 55 miles southwest of Manila. But it was not until February 3, when the newly arrived 1st Cavalry Division drove 70 miles through thinly held Japanese lines to reach the eastern approaches to Manila, that the Sixth Army’s goal was in sight. The following day the 11th Airborne Division entered the city from the south to catch Iwabuchi’s sailors in a giant vise.

Remarkably, MacArthur was still hopeful that Manila could be taken without a serious fight. To that end he ordered his soldiers and airmen to use restraint when taking the city. MacArthur completely forbade the use of tactical airstrikes in the city, and he told his gunners to shoot sparingly. There were both philosophical and practical reasons for doing so, MacArthur told his generals.

First and most important, MacArthur said, Yamashita could not feed Manila’s 700,000 civilians. Second, if Yamashita allowed his army to be bottled up in Manila, he could not defend the rest of the island. Finally, MacArthur, for whatever reason, did not believe that Yamashita would order the city’s destruction.

Perhaps MacArthur believed that the dire warnings he had been broadcasting to Yamashita after landing at Leyte would give the Japanese general pause. In a broadcast initially read on October 4, 1944, and repeated many times during the ensuing campaign, MacArthur warned Yamashita that he would “hold the Japanese military authorities in the Philippines immediately liable for any harm” to POWs, civilians and internees trapped in the Philippines.

By February 6, facing mounting casualties, MacArthur purged himself of his grand delusion and ordered his soldiers to use their artillery. He still forbade tactical bombing. Once the earlier prohibitions against using heavy artillery on important buildings was rescinded, the Sixth Army began applying its full might against the Japanese. As fighting raged from building to building and strongpoint to strongpoint, the battle slowly consumed the city.

Later, Yamashita protested that the naval troops and service units still in Manila were not supposed to be there. During his court-martial, Yamashita testified that even before MacArthur had invested Manila he had given orders for his troops to pull back into the mountains to the north and east. The bulk of the Japanese forces complied, he said, though some army service troops and almost the entire contingent of Iwabuchi’s naval force stayed behind.

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