August 14, 2005

There is no anti-American significance to their deaths...

Belmont Club posts on the Battle of Manila...

In February 1945, a woman now dying of lung cancer grabbed two of her children and jumped out the window to escape Imperial Japanese Marines crashing through the door intent on bayoneting everyone in the burning house. Finding no one, they went on to the next house to continue their massacre on a street not far from the Rizal Memorial ballpark, where Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth both played in sunnier days before the forgotten Battle of Manila. The 100,000 civilians who died in the largest urban battle of the Pacific War -- more than at Hiroshima -- are not remembered in beautiful candles floating down darkened rivers or in flights of doves soaring into the blue sky; there is no anti-American significance to their deaths. But they still live in the fading memory of that woman, who hid for two days in the smoldering ruins of the neighborhood until the first American patrols came into view...

How many Americans know about that battle? Not many. [Pause while I conduct a scientific test and ask my daughter and her 7 visiting friends. None have heard of it, except one who knows a Filipino family]

Not the kind of story that fit the narrative our schools want to teach. Americans fight to liberate a small country. They don't want to make it a colony or steal its oil, but to set it free from horrible tyrants, who murder 100,000 people just because they are pissed off.

Naw. It must be some kind of anomaly. Leave it out of the textbook, and put in more stuff about slaves, Indians and slums.

Posted by John Weidner at August 14, 2005 8:41 AM
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