On October 30, 2018, James M. Scott delivered the banner lecture, “Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila.”

General Douglas MacArthur, driven from the Philippines under the cover of darkness at the beginning of World War II, famously vowed to return. This is the untold story of his homecoming. The twenty-nine-day battle to retake Manila resulted in the catastrophic destruction of the city and a rampage by Japanese soldiers and marines that terrorized the civilian population. Landmarks were demolished, houses torched, suspected resistance fighters were tortured and killed, countless women raped, and their husbands and children murdered in a massacre as heinous as “The Rape of Nanking.” Based on extensive research, war crimes testimony, after action reports, and survivor interviews, Rampage recounts one of the most heartbreaking chapters of the Pacific war.

A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, James M. Scott is the author of Target Tokyo, which was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist and was named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus, The Christian Science Monitor and The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. His other works include The War Below and The Attack on the Liberty, which won the Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison Award. His newest book is entitled Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.