Over the decades, I have read many books, transcripts, interviews, done personal interviews, etc. regarding the killing squads and death camps of the Nazi regime. “How” I wondered, “could a cultured nation like Germany march so easily into the brutal murder of millions of individuals who the deemed as sub-human?” This is certainly not a new question as it has been debated for decades, by those who like Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” theory to those who felt that there was some sort of missing component to the German soul. Perhaps there were two types of killers, especially in the SS; the bureaucrats such as Eichman and the officers who stood at the receiving dock at Auschwitz, and those who murdered by executing men, women, and children in the killing pits of Ukraine, Poland, and the rest of Europe. Could they have been indoctrinated by their SS training to believe that they were doing good, freeing the world of vermin to create a better world? But, what about the Police battalions? They were made up of ordinary police officers, men trained up uphold the law, yet they were able to overcome their training and became killers as deadly as the SS Eizengruppen. There were also sadists such as the hardened criminals and perverts of the Kaminski Brigade and the 36th SS division under the command of Oskar Dirlewanger, but even they were viewed with distain by the regular SS divisions. It was a question that is still debated today by historians, psychologists, and others; was it due to their training, beliefs, or a mass psychosis. Somehow another group of men, who were under strict military control managed to become even worse that the groups I have mentioned; that group is the officers and enlisted men of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy
It has been known since the end of WWII, that the Japanese occupation of any land was brutal; although cloaked in the concept of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” the occupied lands were, stripped of what was valuable to feed the Japanese homeland. Crops, minerals, oil, rubber were ruthlessly exploited while the women of the conquered lands were seen as an asset to be used and discarded in an orgy of rape and organized sex-exploitation. Somehow the real dimensions and scope of actions by especially the army, has never truly been documented or presented in the West. Some would say this was because of racism, but I believe that more likely it was because the Nazi’s were so committed to their record keeping and the lands, they conquered had functional states with bureaucracies that could record their action. Many of the land conquered by Japan were colonies without a native functioning state and those who could record the brutality and war crimes recorded how the crimes affected them during their time of captivity. The Bataan Death March, the attempts to build a railroad in Burma, the prison camps were all terrible, but it meant that the prisoners were ignorant of the terrible suffering of the native population.
Rampage is a volume which focuses on the Battle of Manila during which the city was systematically destroyed by Imperial Japanese marines and to a lesser extent, regular Army units. In early 1945 as the U.S. forces began to approach Manila, which had been called the “Paris of Asia”, the Japanese commanding general, Tomoyuki Yamashita the fabled “Tiger of Malaysia” for his brilliant capture of Singapore, ordered his army troops to destroy the dock facilities and withdraw from the city. He also was the commander of the naval forces, but Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi who commanded the naval detachment in Manila was determined to hold up the advance of American General Arthur MacArthur. Toward this end, he developed a plan for the total destruction of Manila.
What followed was a bloodbath combat by which Manila easily equaled the destruction of Warsaw by the Germans. Every intersection withing the city was fortified so that there were numerous opportunities for deadly cross firing from concrete pillboxes. To hamper the Americans advantage of mobility, every block in the city was destroyed by digging in five-hundred-pound bombs and then detonating them to case the buildings to collapse. In a frenzy of destruction, the Filipino occupants of those buildings were locked and were shot if they tried to escape. Going from house to house the Japanese troops hunted for women and girls to rape them, mutilate, and then murder them, often by tying two women together by their hair and then dousing them in gasoline before setting them on fire. Anyone who tried to stop the rapes were killed, many times by beheading. Japanese officers set up special houses where prisoners were taken to the second floor where a large hole had been created in the floor. Forced to kneel, the were then beheaded and their body then fell through the hole to the ground floor. Such executions when on until the pile of bodies grew to block the hole and so the officers moved to another building.
Civilians were not allowed out of their houses and as the fighting moved into Manila, they were caught in a deadly crossfire between the Japanese and Americans. On one hand, you had the Japanese Admiral who was determined that he, his men, the Americans and the civilians would all die while the American general was determined to save as many of his men’s lives as possible, even if that mean the trapped civilians were destroyed in the process. It was a long, dirty and vicious battle with no quarter given by either side.
In the end, Iwabuchi committed ritual suicide, apologizing to the Emperor for his failure to stop the Americans. Yamashita was captured, tried and executed for war crimes. His defense was that he did not have communications with Iwabuchi and that before the battle, he had commanded Iwabuchi to not destroy the city. Was it a valid defense? The author has an excellent chapter on the pros and cons of the trial which was often painted as a revenge by MacArthur to erase the stain of his defeat in the Philippines while Yamashita had been involved in other war crimes earlier in the war. Readers are left to draw their own conclusions.
I do not recall reading a book which provided such as powerful and accurate description of fighting in a city, in many ways better than descriptions of fighting in Stalingrad, Leningrad, Nanjing or Warsaw. In this battle, man’s most vicious, inhuman nature is exposed; the Japanese whether drunk or not committed face to face, one on one atrocities which the average person cannot image. The Imperial Japanese military was once described as a modern military with a medieval mindset. That would be a generous description. The sad part is that this one battle is but a reflection of how Imperial Japan treated those in their conquered territories. The burning of prisoners, contests to see how many individuals an officer could decapitate, widespread rape, etc. were everyday occurrences by the troops. In this, the extent and one on one, face to face murders and mutilations, they proved themselves to be the equals of the worse of the SS. The saddest part is that in the Imperial forces, those who committed those crimes were not a special detachment, but were the ordinary soldiers themselves, the product of a system based on fear, naked power, beatings, and the lack of value of the individual.
