professor in the Department of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. His books include Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War.
Sarantakes applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War. and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test is an interesting approach to summarizing a book. In the case of my new text, The Battle of Manila—a history of the battle fought between the Americans and Japanese for control of the capital of the Philippines in 1945—the Page 99 Test only half works in trying to capture what is in the book.Visit Nicholas Evan Sarantakes's website.
Page 99 is the start of chapter seven, which is the section on the 1st Cavalry Division’s liberation of the civilian internment camp at the University of Santo Tomas. The text on the page quickly explains that U.S. civilians and those of other allied nations the Japanese were fighting were located in this prison camp. (They were not prisoners of war, since they were not in the military—but that is a technical, legal distinction.) The Japanese had not done a whole lot to care for the internees and they were slowly starving to death when the U.S. Army arrived in Manila. Reading page 99 gives the readers a good sense of anticipation—far more than I realized until now—of the battle that is to come. It also reflects an approach I use in my writing: the use of good quotes to make events more understandable. (I learned this approach as a reporter for The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at the University of Texas.)
What is missing from page 99, though, is the intensity of the battle. That comes 27 pages later with the start of chapter nine when combat operations begin inside the city of Manila. The book looks at the battle in an effort to use what I call “a whole of army” approach. Battle histories need to focus on the men at the main point of contact, where the actual shooting is happening, but I wondered what were quartermaster, transportation, medical and other support units doing? Answer: they were all trying to support the combat units while getting shot at themselves. (There were no safe areas in Manila). I also used a triangular focus: what were the Americans, Filipinos, and the Japanese doing during the battle? To that end, I did research in Manila, and this book is the first account in English to make use of Japanese-language material.
As a result, I think this book captures—as best as one volume can—the complex battle that took place in Manila in 1945.
--Marshal Zeringue
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