"The more I see of Manila the more it comes home to a person of the horrors of war. It is really past any description that one could give, and unless one had previously seen it one could not really appreciate just how much damage had been done. Beautiful buildings, public and private, churches schools, residences and the like are just masses of rubble, made more tragic because they had been up so long. Some even since the early 1600’s. I met a G.I. taking photos and passed the casual statement, “S’pose you are getting some good pictures?“ and he answered, “They may be good pictures but I’m not getting any pleasure out of taking them“ and he expresses the opinion of any one who has been to that city. "
That's what my father wrote in one of his letters home from Manila in 1945. He hadn't been fighting - his job had been to prepare TOP SECRET communiques within MacArthur's GHQ, and his proximity to typewriters allowed him to maintain a constant stream of commentaries on what he found in Manila when the fighting had died down. These were the seeds from which the book grew, drawing from extensive collections of contemporaneous photographs of Manila.
The book contains the most comprehensive collection of images of Manila 1945 available today. It also features three articles which put the historic experience into a historic perspective.

This Edition has been specially prepared for the MacArthur Memorial, and is available in a hard cover and photowrap version.

344 pages. Full color.