Did 100,000 Civilians Die in The Battle of Manila?
May 19, 2023 8:56:09 GMT 8
Karl Welteke and chadhill like this
Post by EXO on May 19, 2023 8:56:09 GMT 8
I have just hosted a White Paper written by Rick Meixsel which re-examines the US Army official historian's number of civilian casualties in the Battle of Manila.
Those of you who do not follow such things should at least be aware that there is a controversy as to the accurate estimate of the number of civilian casualties of the battle. One hundred thousand has a propagandistic flair which falls trippingly off the tongue, doesn't it? It's easily remembered, isn't it.
Just as many authors have inflated the number of combatants of ancient battles to enhance the prestige of political dominance and victory, it's also most probably wrong.
Those of you who follow closely such things should recall Peter Parson's article "Battle Of Manila - Myth and Fact", also hosted at BattleofManila.Org. This is also published in my book "MANILA 1945 - AFTERMATH -" Peter's article worked his way through the evidence and came up with a reasonable estimate of civilian deaths. (Which, it turns out, is apparently what some people estimated at the time.) Peter's problem at that point was that people might say, “but what about the US Army official historian’s number, 100,000? Smith has to have been better informed than Parsons.”
That is where Rick Meixsel's White Paper comes in. Rick did not do any work to establish how many civilians died; rather, he showed that Smith didn’t either. You can say 100,000 civilians died if you insist, but you can no longer cite Smith as your authority. He did not know how many people died nor did he make use of evidence (from the war crimes trials; service force records; unit reports; interviews) that was available to him to come up with his own estimate. For reasons we can only speculate about today (unless new evidence is forthcoming), he accepted someone else's number.
Yes, he claimed (but kept the claim from public scrutiny) that he got the number from the Philippine government. Meixsel seeks to demonstrate why we have reason not to believe him, or his number.
Rick's paper complements Peter's, but does not duplicate it. He accepts Peter’s findings, though that is just his opinion of the value of his work; again, he did not himself attempt to determine the number of dead. Like Smith, he did not look at service force records (quartermaster, graves registration, and so on) either, so cannot say with certainty that nothing can be found in them. (There is a guy who has looked at some of those records and recently completed a dissertation which he is trying to get published; the dissertation is on the UMI database but his university has somehow managed to deny access to readers until a year or two from now.) There is an issue with that approach, namely that those records may not be very reliable anyway. (If you are being paid to bury bodies on a per body basis, you are going to inflate your claim.)
In all of this, do not bother to quote Connaughton's execrable book as the authority. That it is widely available appears to be the sole reason why so many uninformed people point to it as an authoritative account of the battle. They read one book and they think they know it all. Roderick Hall, who commissioned that book, became ashamed of its scholarship, he told me so personally.