Sixty years after Japan surrendered ending World War II, for many young Filipinos today the events that took place in the Battle for Manila have little significance or impact on their lives. Every day hundreds of young Filipinos queue up outside the Japanese Embassy in Manila for visas to work in Japan.
The Battle of Manila lasted just 28 days, ending on March 3, 1945. Over 100,000 civilians were dead and the city known as the Pearl of the Orient reduced to rubble.
Six months after street-by-street fighting and US bombardment had leveled the once-proud city, the stench of rotting flesh still lingered in the capital, according to those who survived the ordeal.
ôThe destruction of Manila was one of the greatest tragedies of World War II. Of all the allied capitals only Warsaw suffered more,ö wrote American historian William Manchester.
Benito Legarda, who was 18-years-old at the time, said the Japanese forces occupying the city since January 2, 1942, went out of their way to make life unlivable once they realized the US military was advancing to recapture the city.
ôThey dynamited bridges, destroyed utilities and murdered civilians . . . There was no excuse for what took place in Manila in those 28 days . . . none at all.ö
Tales of men, women and children being rounded up and shot, mutilated, raped, decapitated or bayoneted by Japanese troops paint the period as one of the darker episodes in the closing chapter of World War II.
By the end of 1944 the tide had turned for Japan and its conquest of Southeast Asia.
On October 20 Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Allied commander in the Far East, invaded the eastern Philippines in the biggest land and sea assault of the Pacific War with nearly 200,000 men and 700 ships.
MacArthur, who had vowed ôI shall returnö when he abandoned the Philippines for Australia more than two years earlier, waded ashoreùtwice, the second time for the benefit of the newsreelsù...