Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
$26.17$26.17
FREE delivery: Tuesday, April 30 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon.com
Sold by: Amazon.com
$14.71
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Audible sample Sample
Follow the author
OK
Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila Hardcover – Illustrated, October 30, 2018
Purchase options and add-ons
The definitive history of one of the most brutal campaigns of the war in the Pacific.
Before World War II, Manila was a slice of America in Asia, populated with elegant neoclassical buildings, spacious parks, and home to thousands of U.S. servicemen and business executives who enjoyed the relaxed pace of the tropics. The outbreak of the war, however, brought an end to the good life. General Douglas MacArthur, hoping to protect the Pearl of the Orient, declared the Philippine capital an open city and evacuated his forces. The Japanese seized Manila on January 2, 1942, rounding up and interning thousands of Americans.
MacArthur, who escaped soon after to Australia, famously vowed to return. For nearly three years, he clawed his way north, obsessed with redeeming his promise and turning his earlier defeat into victory. By early 1945, he prepared to liberate Manila, a city whose residents by then faced widespread starvation. Convinced the Japanese would abandon the city as he did, MacArthur planned a victory parade down Dewey Boulevard. But the enemy had other plans. Determined to fight to the death, Japanese marines barricaded intersections, converted buildings into fortresses, and booby-trapped stores, graveyards, and even dead bodies.
The twenty-nine-day battle to liberate Manila resulted in the catastrophic destruction of the city and a rampage by Japanese forces that brutalized the civilian population. Landmarks were demolished, houses were torched, suspected resistance fighters were tortured and killed, countless women were raped, and their husbands and children were murdered. American troops had no choice but to battle the enemy, floor by floor and even room by room, through schools, hospitals, and even sports stadiums. In the end, an estimated 100,000 civilians lost their lives in a massacre as heinous as the Rape of Nanking.
Based on extensive research in the United States and the Philippines, including war-crimes testimony, after-action reports, and survivor interviews, Rampage recounts one of the most heartbreaking chapters of Pacific War history.
16 pages of illustrations; 10 maps-
Print length640 pages
-
LanguageEnglish
-
PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
-
Publication dateOctober 30, 2018
-
Dimensions6.5 x 1.7 x 9.5 inches
-
ISBN-100393246949
-
ISBN-13978-0393246940
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
― Wall Street Journal
"Powerful narrative history...impossible to put down."
― Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times
"A masterful reconstruction of the horror of the battle."
― Foreign Affairs
"A chilling, sometimes horrifying narrative of some of the fiercest urban fighting of World War II....Scott gives voices to the victims, and that is an important service to history....[He] is a fine writer, and he musters his considerable talents to move the storyline forward."
― Hal Bernton, Seattle Times
"An excellent but wrenchingly graphic account of one of the least commemorated massacres in World War II....Scott has dug very deep into the U.S. and Philippine records of the battle and uses them deftly....[He] wields the vivid testimony of the rare survivors to portray the full horrors of the events."
― Richard Frank, Proceedings
"Scott has done history a service in recording for all time this dark chapter in the Pacific War."
― Buffalo News
"What Iris Chang did for our understanding of the Rape of Nanking, James M. Scott has now done for the Battle of Manila. Here is a sweeping tale of frenzied fighting and heartbreaking devastation, written by a meticulous historian who has unflinchingly probed the truth of this largely forgotten episode from the Pacific."
― Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers and On Desperate Ground
"A masterpiece of historical reportage, brilliantly bringing to life the savage battle for Manila―one of the most dramatic and disturbing episodes of World War II."
― Alex Kershaw, New York Times best-selling author of Avenue of Spies
"This is General Douglas MacArthur as you have not heard him; this is World War II as you have not seen it before; this is history written with a wide sweep and deep focus, the prose and reporting falling in aching rhythms on scenes of beauty, despair, defiance, the terrible trespasses people make, and their striving to endure. James Scott’s skill as a reporter and his precision as a stylist make this story unstoppable from the very first scene. Across these pages falls the shadow of a history we thought we knew well, but in Scott’s telling, so much is revealed and illuminated. A bold surprise of a history book. A treasure for lovers of stories beautifully told. Transcendent."
― Doug Stanton, New York Times best-selling author of The Odyssey of Echo Company and 12 Strong
"A relentless narrative of one of the darkest chapters of the Pacific War....Deeply researched and superbly written."
― Ian W. Toll, New York Times best-selling author of The Conquering Tide
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; Illustrated edition (October 30, 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 640 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0393246949
- ISBN-13 : 978-0393246940
- Item Weight : 2.41 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.7 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #280,295 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #15 in Philippines History
- #289 in Japanese History (Books)
- #2,328 in World War II History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, James M. Scott is the author of Black Snow and Rampage, the latter of which was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by the editors at Amazon, Kirkus and Military Times. His other works include Target Tokyo, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist, The War Below and The Attack on the Liberty, which won the Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison Award. Scott lives with his wife and two children in Charleston, SC., where he is the Scholar in Residence at The Citadel.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
It is also the story of the almost personal conflict between Yamashita, who commanded the Japanese army defending Manila and MacArthur who had just returned to the Philippines that month, as he had promised, in 1942.
The book finishes with a riveting account of Yamashita‘s trial in Manila, just a few months after the end of the war. This was the first trial of any military general ever for war crimes.
As I was reading the book, I found myself skipping past some of the many many stories of individual horrors, and thinking that the author had made his point with the sheer brutality of the Japanese army. However, reading about the trial itself made me realize that all of these stories had to be told.
This is not an easy book to read because of the horrible content, but it is one that I will never forget.
General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the “Tiger of Malaya,” was tasked to defend the Japanese-occupied Philippines in September 1944, just ten days before American forces under the command of General Douglas MacArthur landed on Leyte. By January 1945, the Americans had landed in two places on the island of Luzon and were working to encircle Manila, the Philippine capital. Yamashita did not declare Manila an open city like MacArthur did in 1941 (to prevent the city’s destruction). He did, however, order a subordinate commander, Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, to withdraw from the city. Iwabuchi commanded approximately 16,000 Japanese sailors and marines. Rather than leave the city, he had his troops dig in and fight to the death. During the battle, his troops also systematically destroyed the city’s business buildings, burned entire neighborhoods of civilian homes, and killed every Filipino they could find. For what became known as the “Manila Massacre,” Yamashita was charged with war crimes.
In "Rampage," James M. Scott provides appropriate background on MacArthur, Yamashita, and the invasion of the Philippines in order to set the stage for the Battle of Manila. The actual fighting and tactics involved are covered in broad brush strokes. The battle primarily involved soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division, the 37th Infantry Division, and the 11th Airborne Division. Much attention is given to the rescue of the internees held at Santa Tomas University and their hardships during over three years of captivity. An even greater percentage of the book is dedicated to telling the story of war crimes committed by the Japanese Marines against Filipino civilians. Warning: The descriptions are direct quotes from survivors’ accounts and they are graphic. It is estimated that over 100,000 civilians were killed. The book concludes with the trial of General Yamashita immediately after his surrender at the end of the war.
I enjoyed the book. It was readable and paced well so that the pages kept turning. I learned some things I did not know before reading "Rampage" and I’m left wondering why the atrocities committed during the Manila Massacre are not better known in the United States. I recommend the book because I was entertained and educated and you can’t really ask for more from a nonfiction book. But I also think it’s important to remember exactly what kind of horrible acts mankind is capable of committing. So this book is going to stay on my shelf next to "The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang, and "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" by Christopher R. Browning.
Top reviews from other countries
This book answere my questions but the accounts are so horrific and the level of barbariy meted out by the Japanese occupying forces was repulsive that it numbs the senses. As a piece of history, the accounts of the civilians in this book make anything less than a five star review impossible. The "military" aspect, if anything, is played down although the author has no hesitation in painting Douglas MacArthur as an egotistical fool who ha little grasp of the situation he was facing in Manila and no understanding of the situation on the ground. Without doubt, the "liberation" of Manila came at a huge cost for the inhabitants of the city and whilst we are nowadays used to the idea of failures of armies to fulfil their tasks in freeing countries from tyranny, the author unconsciously looks at the consequences for the ordinary folk when caught in the middle of two enemies, one who simply has no respect for human life and another who is effectively inept.
In the end, this book looks at detail at the many atrocities commited by the Japanese and the horrors the residents of Manila had to deal with amongst the confusion of both the occupying forces High Command who may not have been fully aware of the scale of human rights abuses by the Japanese marines and an American invading force who seriously under-estimated how to deal with them. Over 100,000 Filipinos died during this battle and whilst there was a degree of "justice" in that the subsequent war crimes trial hung a fair number of Japanese commanders, the author makes it clear that the Japanese commander Yamahsita did not face a fair trial - the guilty verdict being something MacArthur was keen to achieve.
I would not say that this was an enjoyable book yet I think it is clearly something that people should read and be aware of. In my opinion, the book is unsettling and constantly horrific, drawing comparisons with the behaviour of ISIS. It is amazing that Japan was ever brought back into the mainstream of political , economic and social life whereas the Philippines still suffers the consequences of the successive occupation of the Spanish, Americans and Japanese. The books answered my questions about Manila and I strongly believe that this author has done a massive service by ensuring that the fate of this city is not forgotten. In my opinion this is a book that draws attention to an theatre of the 2nd World war that has shamefully been neglected in the West.
I bought my dad this for Christmas and he loved it.