The Manila Massacre — The Battle That Destroyed an Entire City

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The untold story of Filipino civilians under Japanese occupation — Japanese occupation Philippines 1942, Mickey Mouse money hyperinflation, Battle of Manila 1945, Manila Massacre civilians, Filipino guerrilla resistance WWII, Nieves Fernandez Leyte guerrilla, Josefa Capistrano women fighters, Kempeitai military police Philippines, Stalingrad of Asia Intramuros, Filipino comfort women WWII. When Japanese forces invaded the Philippines in late 1941, life as Filipinos had known it shattered almost overnight, and what followed was three years of fear, famine, hyperinflation, and resistance that this video tells in full.Japan declared Manila an open city to spare it from destruction but invaded anyway on January 2nd 1942. The Japanese Military Administration shut down American and Allied banks and issued a new currency Filipinos called Mickey Mouse money because it was practically worthless, triggering hyperinflation that crippled the country. A pre-war cavan of rice that cost 7 pesos rose to tens of thousands of worthless wartime pesos. The Kempeitai military police enforced obedience through informants, surveillance, and brutal interrogation, and Filipinos could be dragged off the streets and never seen again for the slightest suspicion of anti-Japanese activity. Famine spread across the country and corpses became a common sight on the streets of Manila as agriculture collapsed and the Allied blockade cut off supplies. The burden fell hardest on Filipina women who managed scarcity, fed families on impossible rations, and faced extraordinary risks including forced sexual slavery as comfort women.But Filipinos did not simply endure. An estimated 260,000 Filipinos joined guerrilla organizations, and by the end of the war underground resistance networks controlled an estimated 60 percent of the archipelago. Women like Nieves Fernandez, a schoolteacher in Leyte who became a guerrilla commander with a reported 10,000 peso bounty on her head, and Josefa Capistrano who organized and trained women as soldiers and spies, foug