2. what makes the Rape of Manila a horrendous?
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2. what makes the Rape of Manila a horrendous?
2. what makes the Rape of Manila a horrendous?
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February 1945: The Rape of Manila
By: Joan Orendain - 8 years ago
DEAD bodies could not be buried as relatives fled the carnage. Photo courtesy of Albert Montilla
To this day, much is heard of the Rape of Nanking when the rampaging Japanese Imperial Army killed 300,000 from 1937 to 1938 and raped 20,000 women in that Chinese capital.
Pitifully few, though, in the Philippines and even fewer elsewhere, know that in Manila, in February 1945, World War II at its agonizing climax brought forth 100,000 burned, bayoneted, bombed, shelled and shrapneled dead in the span of 28 days. Unborn babies ripped from their mothers’ wombs provided sport: thrown up in the air and caught, impaled on bayonet tips.
With rape on the streets and everywhere else, the Bayview Hotel became Manila’s rape center. After the dirty deed was done, nipples were sliced off, and bodies bayoneted open from the neck down.
William Manchester in his book “American Caesar,” wrote that “Once Rear Adm. Sanji Iwabuchi had decided to defend Manila, the atrocities began, and the longer the battle raged, the more the Japanese command structure deteriorated, until the uniforms of Nipponese sailors and marines were saturated with Filipino blood.
“The devastation of Manila was one of the great tragedies of World War II. Seventy percent of the utilities, 72 percent of the factories, 80 percent of the southern residential district, and 100 percent of the business district were razed…Hospitals were set afire after their patients had been strapped to their beds. The corpses of males were mutilated, females of all ages were raped before they were slain, and babies’ eyeballs gouged out and smeared on walls like jelly.”