Remembering the Battle of Manila: A Look into Ermita’s Harrowing Past

Trigger warning: this article mentions rape, torture, and death.

(SPOT.ph) Ermita today feels like any other busy stretch of Manila: students spilling out of university gates along Taft Avenue, government employees cutting across Padre Faura for lunch, jeepneys idling near United Nations Avenue, people wandering through the stone buildings of the National Museum complex. It is noisy and alive, as Manila has always been.

You wouldn’t suspect that this district was once reduced to rubble, that entire families were massacred inside their own homes, and that hotels along the bay became sites of systematic rape. You wouldn’t think that the reinforced-concrete government buildings were turned into fortresses and blasted apart by artillery.

These are just some of the harrowing facts one picks up via The Battle of Manila Memorial Walks by Renacimiento Manila, a tour that retraces the history of World War II in Ermita and other areas within the capital. Through this and its other walking tours, the heritage group has built a reputation for pushing conversations beyond nostalgia, arguing that Manila’s future must be developed in tandem with an honest reckoning with its past.

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Renacimiento Manila’s walking tour of Ermita focuses on the harrowing weeks between February and March 1945, when Manila became one of the most devastated cities of World War II. To put it into perspective, one speaker said: Imagine the Battle of Marawi—then multiply that devastation by five.

Before the war, Ermita, under American colonial rule in the early 20th century, was shaped as part of a grand urban vision. Dewey Boulevard, now Roxas Boulevard, curved along the bay. United Nations Avenue cut through in a tree-lined sweep. Government offices rose in neoclassical symmetry: the Legislative Building (now part of the National Museum), the Agriculture and Finance buildings, and other state institutions were meant to endure both earthquakes and time. Sternberg General Hospital, one of the major U.S. military hospitals in the Philippines during the American period, stood sturdily nearby. The Manila Police headquarters rose in the 1930s, a marker of a capital modernizing under Commonwealth governance. Ermita was residential and respectable, housing affluent families, schools, churches, and professionals.

All that changed when Japan attacked the Philippines in December 1941, just hours after Pearl Harbor. The country’s defenses quickly faltered. Manila was declared an “open city” on December 26, 1941, in hopes of sparing it from destruction, but that only delayed the inevitable. By January 1942,  Japanese forces entered the capital, and what followed was a three-year occupation.

History would have you believe that things took a turn for the better when, by late 1944, American and Filipino forces returned, landing in Leyte and pushing north toward Luzon. At this time, the Japanese commander in the Philippines, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, did not intend to defend Manila. His strategy was to withdraw into the mountains of northern Luzon and fight a prolonged campaign there.

But one of his men, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi of the Imperial Japanese Navy, had something else in mind. Commanding the Manila Naval Defense Force, he refused withdrawal and instead prepared the city for a last stand. Trenches cut through familiar streets, and naval guns—never meant for urban combat—were dragged ashore and positioned at key intersections, their barrels now pointed down roads once filled with civilians.

Manila was then divided into sectors: Ermita, Malate, Paco, and Intramuros. Pillboxes rose where storefronts once stood, barricades cut across roads, and government buildings—engineered to withstand earthquakes—were repurposed into urban fortresses. The transformation was deliberate and total: the Japanese Navy units assigned to Manila would resist evacuation orders and prepare to deny the city to the Americans at any cost.

So, when American forces entered Manila on February 3, 1945, they expected a relatively swift liberation. Instead, what followed was a month of brutal, block-by-block urban warfare. Streets that once carried clerks and students became frontlines, and schools, churches, police stations, and government offices were turned into fortified buildings.

In response, American troops used heavy artillery, tanks, and flamethrowers. Entire structures were reduced to shells. City Hall burned, and government buildings were gutted. Archives and historical records were destroyed by flames. The city was a battlefield.

During the tour, the Renacimiento guides pause near the former government center to dwell on a quieter devastation: documents, revolutionary records, cultural artifacts, and paintings were lost and reduced to ash. You can rebuild buildings, one guide says, but not the memory they carried. The loss was not just physical, but archival, intellectual, and cultural.

By the time the battle ended, between over half of Manila had been utterly destroyed. Districts south of the Pasig River, Ermita among them, suffered some of the heaviest damage. Its streets were barely recognizable. What had been one of the most beautiful cities in Asia was left in ruins.

But the damage wasn’t just on the buildings and the city structures; it was worse for the people who lived in them. During the fighting, Japanese troops carried out widespread atrocities in what historians now call the Manila Massacre. An estimated 100,000 civilians died during the month-long battle, many of them deliberately killed.

Even more harrowing were the recorded instances of abuse against women. Documented accounts describe that hundreds were rounded up by Japanese soldiers and brought to the Bayview Hotel. Survivors later testified that the Ermita hotel was used as a “rape center.” Nearby establishments such as the Miramar Hotel and the Alhambra Apartments were also used for detention and abuse. Any attempt to escape was met with execution.

It’s unsettling, but these buildings still stand today. The Bayview Hotel and Miramar continue to operate. Their façades have been repainted; their interiors renovated. Nothing in their present-day appearance signals the horrors that occurred inside.

The tour guides recount the testimonies of sisters Priscilla, Esther, and Evangeline, who survived the ordeal and later gave detailed accounts of what happened inside the Bayview Hotel. Around 400 women, many from Ermita’s affluent families, were rounded up and repeatedly assaulted. Those who tried to flee were shot. While Ermita’s streets bore the brunt of artillery shells, gunfire, and explosives, inside buildings, women endured unimaginable violence. The guides emphasize that these were not isolated incidents but part of a broader pattern of sexual violence across Manila and the Philippines.

Unfortunately, the horrors continued to other parts of Ermita. Not far from these hotels stood the German Club on what is now T.M. Kalaw Avenue. As fighting intensified, civilians sought refuge there. According to accounts shared during the tour, around 1,000 people had gathered at the German Club compound by February 10, 1945. They had dug air raid shelters, believing the site would be respected because Germany was Japan’s ally. Instead, Japanese soldiers entered and herded civilians into basements. Some survivors later described killings, sexual assaults, and grenades thrown into crowded rooms and buildings set on fire with people still inside. Other survivors pretended to be dead beneath piles of bodies as the building collapsed around them.

When American forces reached the site, they found charred remains. Elsewhere in Ermita, bodies were found near major institutions, including the Supreme Court and Department of Justice buildings. Civilians caught between entrenched Japanese defenders and advancing American troops died in crossfire or from artillery blasts. The violence was indiscriminate and intimate: bayonets and bullets were used inside homes, basements turned into execution sites.

There are more sites of violence, displacement, and devastation. Families fled apartments along United Nations Avenue and Orosa Street. Some survivors testified after the war, pointing out specific houses where massacres occurred. In one documented compound, dozens were killed—infants and elderly residents among them. American forces gathered these testimonies in attempts to identify responsible units. The localized accounts also underscore how the Battle of Manila was a neighborhood-by-neighborhood catastrophe. It wasn’t confined to just one place.

The Battle of Manila is often framed as a story of liberation. By March 3, 1945, American and Filipino forces had secured the city, but liberation came at a staggering cost. In terms of civilian deaths and urban destruction, Manila was one of the most devastated Allied cities of the war.

And yet, within that devastation were quieter stories of endurance.

At Sternberg General Hospital, dozens of U.S. Army and Navy nurses were stationed when war broke out. The walking tour lingers on these 77 women—later known as the Angels of Bataan and Corregidor—whose paths diverged but remained bound by the same resolve. 66 evacuated to Bataan and then Corregidor, where they set up makeshift, open-air hospitals under relentless shelling. The remaining eleven were captured in Manila and later interned in Los Baños.

Despite internment and deprivation, all 77 survived and were eventually repatriated, receiving bronze medals for valor. Their discipline became an assertion of dignity amidst collapse. Their story adds complexity and heroism to a narrative otherwise dominated by atrocity and ruin.

What stands in Ermita today are largely postwar reconstructions. The National Museum buildings were restored. Roads were rebuilt, and the skyline changed. Manila was rebuilt, but its prewar elegance was lost.

Ermita is alive and bustling, just like any other part of the Metro. But beneath it lies one of the most harrowing chapters in Philippine history, a story that groups like Renacimiento Manila are determined to keep telling, especially as the last living witnesses of World War II pass on.

At the end of the walk, near the former government center, the walking tour guides returned to the question of why remembering matters. Within a few years, they note, the Battle of Manila will no longer be a living memory. The temptation to reduce it to a footnote, to speak only of liberation and not of massacre, will grow. But the streets of Ermita hold evidence in plain sight: restored façades, repurposed hotels, rebuilt institutions standing on ground once burned. The tour guides reiterated that development without memory risks repetition. To walk these streets informed is also to see Manila differently, not just as a city that survived war, but as one permanently reshaped by it.