Introduction
The Battle of Manila, fought from February to March 1945, ranks among the Second World War’s most catastrophic urban conflicts (Connaughton et al. Reference Connaughton, Pimlott and Anderson1995; Scott Reference Scott2018). As U.S. forces under General Douglas MacArthur advanced to retake the Philippine capital from Japanese occupation, approximately 17,000 Japanese troops, most of them naval personnel, defied orders to withdraw and fortified the city for a final stand (Sarantakes Reference Sarantakes2025). The resulting month of urban combat virtually annihilated the city, its historic districts and iconic landmarks reduced to rubble by U.S. artillery, while Japanese forces systematically massacred Filipino civilians trapped within (Smith Reference Smith1963; Scott Reference Scott2018). The battle claimed an estimated 100,000 civilian lives, making it one of the deadliest events involving noncombatants in the Asia-Pacific War (Glenn Reference Glenn2023). Despite this devastating scale, the Battle of Manila remains relatively obscure in global memory (Nagai Reference Nagai2022), often overshadowed by other Second World War events such as the bombings of Dresden or Hiroshima. This obscurity is uneven: the battle is marginalized in the registers that confer durable public significance, in scholarship, in state commemoration, and in the visual media of the former belligerent powers, even as it circulates widely in popular digital form. Japanese television and film have rendered Filipino victims of the Asia-Pacific War nearly invisible relative to Chinese and Korean victims (Córdoba Arroyo Reference Córdoba Arroyo2026), while within the Philippines, the state has folded the battle into military commemorations that foreground heroism over civilian death (Candelaria Reference Candelaria2024; Nakano Reference Nakano, Hansen, Saupe, Wirsching and Yang2021). The heavy presence of the battle on YouTube therefore does not contradict its marginality; it is the contemporary form that marginality takes, where a history excluded from authoritative memory reaches global audiences through a platform that reshapes it in the act of circulation.
Even within the Philippines, this marginalization manifests in fragmented and uneven acts of commemoration. The battle’s human toll has been commemorated primarily through civilian-led efforts rather than state initiatives. The Memorare Manila 1945 monument in Intramuros, which honors civilian victims, stands as a poignant example; private groups funded its erection in 1995 and maintain it without government support. Meanwhile, the Philippine state has concentrated its war commemoration on military narratives (Candelaria Reference Candelaria2024), particularly the Fall of Bataan, where Filipino and U.S. forces surrendered to the Japanese in 1942, and the Bataan Death March, during which prisoners of war were forced to walk 100 kilometers from Mariveles and Bagac in Bataan to San Fernando, Pampanga, from where they were moved by rail to Capas, Tarlac. This commemorative focus demonstrates how states construct a usable past: military heroism provides clearer narratives of national identity and resistance than civilian suffering, which makes soldierly sacrifice more useful for the state (Mosse Reference Mosse1990).
How Manila’s destruction is remembered internationally also demonstrates these hierarchical memory patterns. The oft-repeated comparison that Manila was the most devastated Allied city after Warsaw (Manchester Reference Manchester1978) appears to convey the battle’s significance, yet such framings inadvertently privilege architectural loss over human experience. This emphasis on physical devastation illustrates the colonial fascination with “imperial debris,” the tendency to memorialize monumental ruins as discrete objects while overlooking how destruction permeated the entire fabric of urban life (Stoler Reference Stoler2008: 194). Contemporary media perpetuates these patterns when it presents spectacular images of ruined buildings as if they were separate from the social worlds they once contained. These patterns reflect a wider dynamic across Northeast and Southeast Asia, where the recognition of marginalized and dislocated victims turns on who controls public commemoration and on the geopolitics of international remembrance (McCarthy Reference McCarthy2024). What results is a hierarchy of grievability (Butler Reference Butler2009), in which Manila’s civilian dead struggle for acknowledgment against destructions long secured as iconic, from Dresden to Hiroshima.
Representing urban catastrophe becomes particularly complex in digital media, where visual content dominates and algorithmic structures reward engagement over nuance. YouTube videos about the Battle of Manila must grapple with how to convey destruction that is simultaneously material and social, architectural and embodied. Drawing on spatial theory from urban studies, particularly Henri Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre1991) and Doreen Massey (Reference Massey2005), this study examines how cities constitute socio-spatial assemblages where built environments and human experiences are inextricably intertwined. From this perspective, the destruction of Manila was the violent unmaking of these lived spaces. This analysis, therefore, explores whether digital representations recognize this socio-spatial interconnection or fragment it, foregrounding spectacular ruins over civilian casualties.
YouTube is an especially consequential site of historical memory, since its audiovisual form, its vast store of reuploaded archival footage, and its engagement-driven recommendation system make it a primary venue through which global audiences now encounter the wars of the twentieth century (Makhortykh Reference Makhortykh2020). Creators working within a platform that rewards visual engagement may gravitate toward representations that extract dramatic imagery from the socio-spatial context that produced it, reinforcing fragmented understandings of urban catastrophe and raising the question of whether digital media can convey the layered complexity of such an event.
This study investigates how YouTube videos represent the Battle of Manila through a systematic analysis of 17 videos spanning archival footage, contemporary documentaries, and entertainment content. By examining how these videos construct narratives, this study demonstrates that YouTube representations sever spectacular visual destruction from embodied social narratives. The effect is the fragmentation of Manila’s devastation—the city’s physical ruin is isolated from the social worlds that were annihilated, dispersing a singular catastrophe into disconnected visual pieces. These patterns emerge from the constraints of available archival materials, which consist predominantly of U.S. military footage, and the platform’s affordances that favor visually dramatic content.
As cities worldwide grapple with memories of violence and destruction, from Mariupol to Marawi, how digital media shapes collective memory grows more pressing, since, as the last eyewitnesses die, mediated representations carry an ever-larger share of public memory (LeMahieu Reference LeMahieu2011; Adriaansen and Smit Reference Adriaansen and Smit2025). The Battle of Manila offers a crucial case study of how digital media representations of urban catastrophe can illuminate or obscure the complex ways violence unmakes the socio-spatial assemblages we call cities. When digital media fragments the interconnected realities of urban destruction into separate visual and narrative categories, it risks producing what Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre1991) terms “abstract space”: depoliticized representations that cannot account for how power operates through the production and destruction of urban life. By making these dynamics visible, this study aims to contribute to more nuanced approaches to digital representations of war pasts that can better honor the full complexity of urban catastrophe.
“Pearl of the Orient,” destroyed
The month-long urban battle to wrest control of Manila from the Japanese in 1945 resulted in the near-complete destruction of the Philippine capital. To understand the magnitude of this catastrophe, it is essential to establish Manila’s significance as an urban center and the military context that led to its devastation.
Manila, founded as a Spanish colonial city in 1571, had evolved into Southeast Asia’s most cosmopolitan metropolis by the twentieth century. The city’s population reached approximately 623,000 by 1939, making it the Philippines’ largest urban center (Stinner and Bacol-Montilla Reference Stinner and Bacol-Montilla1981). Its historic core, Intramuros, contained 64 hectares of Spanish colonial architecture, including government buildings, churches, schools, and residences enclosed within stone walls built between 1590 and 1872. Beyond these walls, Manila had expanded to include modern business districts, residential neighborhoods, and educational institutions, including the University of the Philippines.
The path to Manila’s destruction began with Japan’s broader Pacific expansion. Following the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces invaded the Philippines on December 8, launching air raids on Luzon that same day. General MacArthur, commanding the United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), initially attempted to defend the archipelago but was forced to withdraw to the Bataan Peninsula by late December. On December 26, 1941, MacArthur declared Manila an “open city” to spare it from destruction, ordering the withdrawal of all military forces and installations. Japanese forces occupied Manila on January 2, 1942, beginning three years of occupation marked by increasing brutality against Filipino civilians (Scott Reference Scott2018; Connaughton et al. Reference Connaughton, Pimlott and Anderson1995).
The battle that would destroy Manila began as part of the Allied campaign to retake the Philippines. U.S. forces landed on Leyte in October 1944 and Luzon in January 1945. By late January 1945, U.S. forces were approaching Manila. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commanding Japanese forces in the Philippines, ordered a general withdrawal to defensive positions in Luzon’s mountains, considering Manila militarily indefensible (Nakano Reference Nakano, Hansen, Saupe, Wirsching and Yang2021). However, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, commanding approximately 12,500 navy troops ill-trained for ground combat, defied these orders (Sarantakes Reference Sarantakes2025). Iwabuchi’s forces, joined by about 4,500 army personnel who failed to withdraw, fortified the city for a last stand (Smith Reference Smith1963).
U.S. forces entered Manila on February 3, 1945, with the 1st Cavalry Division reaching the northern suburbs. Initial operations focused on liberating Allied prisoners, successfully freeing internees from the University of Santo Tomas and Bilibid Prison by February 5 (Connaughton et al. Reference Connaughton, Pimlott and Anderson1995). However, as U.S. forces pushed into the city center, they encountered fierce Japanese resistance. Iwabuchi’s forces had turned Manila into an urban fortress, establishing defensive positions in concrete buildings, mining bridges and streets, and creating interlocking fields of fire. The ensuing battle lasted until March 3, 1945. U.S. forces, commanded by MacArthur, employed massive firepower to dislodge Japanese defenders. U.S. artillery fired thousands of shells into the city, while ground forces used flamethrowers, demolition charges, and direct tank fire against Japanese strongpoints. As the 1st Cavalry and 37th Infantry Divisions drove across the Pasig and closed in on Intramuros and the government district to its south (Figure 1), the assault was concentrated in the very neighborhoods where the largest massacres of civilians would unfold.
The final U.S. assault on Manila, February 23 to March 3, 1945.
Source: Smith (Reference Smith1963: 298).
As defeat became inevitable, Japanese naval troops turned systematically on the civilian population. Throughout February 1945, they killed tens of thousands of Manila residents through mass shootings, bayonetings, and the deliberate burning of buildings with families sealed inside, alongside widespread sexual violence concentrated in the districts south of the Pasig River (Connaughton et al. Reference Connaughton, Pimlott and Anderson1995; Scott Reference Scott2018). These were organized atrocities and not merely incidental casualties of crossfire, as was documented at specific sites and later confirmed in the war crimes prosecutions held in Manila between 1945 and 1947 (Fellows and Chong Reference Fellows and Chong2023). The killing formed part of a broader pattern of civilian-targeted reprisals that Japanese forces had already employed elsewhere in the archipelago as resistance intensified (Maddox Reference Maddox2020; Bulado Reference Bulado2026). Its scale, an estimated 100,000 dead within a single month, places the battle among the gravest urban atrocities of the war, compared in contemporary accounts to the Rape of Nanjing (Scott Reference Scott2018).
By March 3, when organized Japanese resistance ended, Manila lay in ruins. U.S. military assessments documented that 11,000 of the city’s 14,000 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged (Glenn Reference Glenn2023). The destruction encompassed government buildings, cultural institutions, educational facilities, religious structures, and residential districts. Essential infrastructure collapsed: the water and sewage systems required extensive repairs, electrical facilities did not function, and 39 of the city’s more than 100 bridges—including all 6 over the Pasig River—had been destroyed (Smith Reference Smith1963). The human cost matched the physical devastation. Of the tens of thousands of Filipino civilians killed, detailed documentation exists for massacres at Malate Church, De La Salle College, St. Paul’s College, and the German Club, among other locations. Thus, the Allied victory offered little cause for celebration, as “no streets would be clear of rubble, and the gutters would be running with blood” (Manchester Reference Manchester1978: 437). In a short film documenting the devastation and intended as evidence for prosecuting Japan, Captain David Griffin of the U.S. Marine Corps described the outcome as a “bitter victory,” lamenting that the United States “had won only devastation” (“Orders from Tokyo” 1945). To emphasize the scale of destruction, he likened Manila to other cities ravaged by war, declaring, “[h]ere was Coventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw, Lidice. Here was Manila.”
Digital platforms and intergenerational war memory transmission
While the Battle of Manila’s damage and civilian suffering seem to exist only as a historical footnote in Philippine and global memory today, the digital age offers new avenues for rediscovering and amplifying such marginalized narratives, potentially bringing these atrocities into a new light. Digital media has profoundly reshaped how individuals remember, share, and contend with the past. With their participatory nature, platforms such as YouTube have shifted memory-making from traditional, centralized forms toward a more decentralized and interactive environment, becoming crucial arenas where history is mediated through processes of both democratization and fragmentation. Hoskins (Reference Hoskins2011) describes this shift as a “connective turn,” where memory no longer resides in a static archive but thrives within a distributed, networked system embedded within digital infrastructures. This shift promises democratic access to historical representation, yet it also introduces new forms of power and exclusion that require careful examination.
The algorithms driving platforms such as YouTube are not neutral channels; they create conditions that shape what creators produce and, consequently, what is remembered and what fades into obscurity. Makhortykh (Reference Makhortykh2023) points out that these algorithms act as powerful memory actors, curating content based on engagement metrics over historical significance or accuracy. This algorithmic gatekeeping can create echo chambers, reinforcing particular narratives and pushing emotionally charged, visually striking content to the forefront while more nuanced or dissenting perspectives are relegated to the margins. Alongside these structural forces, emotional storytelling plays a pivotal role in how digital platforms mediate memory. Scholars have highlighted how YouTube’s audiovisual format enables creators, through their content, to forge emotional connections with audiences—transforming historical events into deeply felt experiences (Knudsen and Stage Reference Knudsen and Stage2013; Talamayan and Candelaria Reference Talamayan and Lee Candelaria2024). Audiovisual techniques such as dramatic music, archival footage, and carefully crafted visual transitions are used to evoke empathy, grief, and nostalgia. While this emotional dimension can be powerful in mobilizing solidarity and advocacy, it also carries the risk of commodifying trauma and reducing complex historical events to easily digestible but affecting spectacles. Multiple scholars echo this concern, warning that overemphasizing emotional resonance can hinder critical analysis and lead to oversimplified narratives (e.g., De Smale Reference De Smale2020; Talamayan and Candelaria Reference Candelaria2024).
This emphasis on emotional engagement intersects with Hirsch’s (Reference Hirsch2008) concept of “postmemory,” which describes how younger generations inherit traumatic memories indirectly through mediated representations and not firsthand experience. Digital platforms are central to this process, acting as repositories for “prosthetic memories,” memories experienced vicariously through visual and textual forms instead of personal recollection (Landsberg Reference Landsberg2004). While this mediation allows users to engage with the past in profoundly emotional and embodied ways, it also raises questions about authenticity and the potential for detachment. This user engagement is a double-edged sword. On one side, vernacular memory practices, such as user comments and personal testimonies, create spaces for intergenerational dialogue, sustaining cultural memory while simultaneously introducing new layers of interpretation (De Smale Reference De Smale2020). However, this democratization of memory often accompanies fragmentation. Here, fragmentation describes a commemorative condition in which a difficult past is divided into separate narratives, each addressed to a different audience and seldom brought into relation, so that competing and sometimes conflicting versions circulate without resolution (Vinitzky-Seroussi Reference Vinitzky-Seroussi2002). On YouTube, the effect intensifies because the platform rewards emotionally legible fragments over the messier whole, reshaping historical complexity into clean, shareable narratives through a process of structural revisionism (Savvides and Papa Reference Savvides and Papa2026).
YouTube’s technical affordances create particular conditions for memory practices that shape what kinds of representations become viable. Recommendation algorithms suggest similar content, potentially reinforcing certain narratives while marginalizing others (Rieder et al. Reference Rieder, Matamoros-Fernández and Coromina2018). Comment sections enable forms of vernacular memory-making where viewers share family stories, debate historical interpretations, or express political sentiments (De Smale Reference De Smale2020), though these same spaces can become sites of contestation where different memory communities clash. The platform’s global reach means that local historical events compete for attention with content from around the world, pressuring creators to balance local significance with international visibility. Together, these affordances establish conditions that reward certain representational strategies, particularly those featuring visually compelling content and clear narrative arcs, over more complex or locally grounded approaches (Gaw Reference Gaw2022; Siciliano Reference Siciliano2023).
This analysis examines how content creators construct spatial narratives while navigating these platform conditions alongside the constraints of available archives. Moving beyond views of YouTube as either a neutral conduit or an autonomous agent, this study conceptualizes the platform as a set of structural conditions that shape the viability of different representational choices without determining them. The narrative strategies under investigation are creator practices emerging from this navigation, not platform outputs.
This study employs a combined qualitative content and visual analysis of YouTube videos. The methodology examines how audiovisual techniques, narrative framing, and emotional evocation shape representations of the Battle of Manila, paying particular attention to whether videos recognize the interconnected nature of urban catastrophe (the relationship between physical destruction and social experience) or fragment it. Using MAXQDA, I employed thematic coding along two main lines: narrative framing, which identified recurring themes and significant omissions, and visual framing, which focused on aesthetic elements such as editing choices, emotional cues, and visual metaphors. Together, these approaches evaluate how audiovisual techniques mediate the historical event and construct cultural memory.
I used an API-based YouTube scraper to gather videos, which helped mitigate the search algorithm’s filtering bias. The scraper identified 584 videos. I manually filtered this dataset using specific criteria: relevance to the Battle of Manila in 1945 (to differentiate from videos of the 1898 battle), a minimum of 5,000 views to ensure reasonable audience engagement, and the exclusion of repetitive or reuploaded content. This process yielded 40 videos for further analysis.
To develop a manageable yet representative sample, I watched all 40 videos and categorized them into three types based on their production context: archival reuploads (direct uploads of historical footage), contemporary documentaries (modern productions analyzing the battle), and entertainment videos (creative remixes or gaming content using historical material). This categorization revealed that many videos within each category shared substantial visual and narrative overlap, particularly those relying on the same archival sources. I therefore applied exclusion principles designed to maximize analytical diversity: selecting only the most-viewed version among multiple reuploads, choosing documentaries that offered distinctive analytical perspectives when several used identical footage, and retaining entertainment videos based on innovative approaches to remixing historical content. This process reduced the sample from 40 to 17 videos (Table 1).
Study sample of Battle of Manila YouTube videos
Table 1. Long description
Table with 17 rows and 7 columns categorizing Battle of Manila YouTube videos. Columns include Type, Title, Channel name, Views, Date uploaded, and Duration. Row 1: Archival reupload, Battle of Manila | 1945 | Liberation of the Philippines by the US Army | Documentary, The Best Film Archives, 4,432,884, 2014/09/19, 00:22:38. Row 2: Archival reupload, War Crimes—Manila 1945, Trampilla Arnis, 201,552, 2011/07/29, 00:17:24. Row 3: Archival reupload, Battle of Manila, Free of Japanese Domination 1945/3/22, Universal Newsreels, 172,895, 2006/09/18, 00:05:32. Row 4: Archival reupload, 1945 World War II: Battle of Manila and Clean-Up, MyFootage.com, 2,577,529, 2012/05/23, 00:06:24. Row 5: Documentary, Asian Stalingrad—The Battle of Manila 1945, Mark Felton Productions, 3,051,792, 2020/08/02, 00:22:15. Row 6: Documentary, Liberation: Battle of Manila, GovPH, 505,361, 2015/02/13, 00:10:37. Row 7: Documentary, The Battle of Manila: 75 years after one of WWII’s deadliest battles, DW News, 398,997, 2020/03/04, 00:04:32. Row 8: Documentary, Liberation of Manila (WWII Documentary) 18+, Army University Press, 197,656, 2021/07/03, 01:10:36. Row 9: Documentary, Harrowing Footage of the Manila Invasion Aftermath, Smithsonian Channel, 187,525, 2018/07/28, 00:02:39. Row 10: Documentary, The Stomach-Churning Events Of The Manila Incident, A Day In History, 137,721, 2023/02/09, 00:17:43. Row 11: Documentary, The Battle Of Manila, Jojo Araja, 134,661, 2019/02/19, 00:56:52. Row 12: Documentary, The Battle of Manila: American Glory, Civilian Apocalypse, Warfronts, 118,392, 2023/04/23, 00:26:00. Row 13: Documentary, The Glory Days of Manila & Its Destruction | Asian Stalingrad | The Battle of Manila 1945, Simuno Media, 17,522, 2020/12/22, 00:13:52. Row 14: Entertainment video, Attack on Titan Season 4 Opening but its WW2 [Battle of Manila (1945) Edition], NikolaiPro, 1,959,783, 2020/12/13, 00:01:31. Row 15: Entertainment video, Filipino guerrillas VS. Japanese (Battle of Manila 1945), arn-arn martin, 42,763, 2011/03/30, 00:04:32. Row 16: Entertainment video, Battle of Manila (1945) | Call to Arms—Gates of Hell: Ostfront, SturmFuhrer PK, 9,487, 2022/12/24, 00:11:47. Row 17: Entertainment video, Remembering The Battle of Manila …, Kevin 080592, 47,275, 2009/02/09, 00:07:06.
The final sample reflects the transnational character of digital war memory, encompassing independent Filipino creators (Trampilla Arnis, Jojo Araja, Simuno Media, NikolaiPro), Philippine government media (GovPH), international history channels (Mark Felton Productions, Warfronts), established media outlets (DW News, Smithsonian Channel), and U.S. institutional sources (Army University Press). This diversity allows the analysis to examine whether shared representational patterns emerge across different production circumstances and intended audiences. The sample spans both English- and Filipino-language videos, so it registers narratives produced for domestic Filipino audiences alongside those addressed to international audiences. What can be known of these creators’ positions is itself uneven: for the institutional channels, standing is a matter of record, while for the independent creators it can be surmised only from channel self-presentation, language, and genre. Even at that level, when creators this differently situated converge on the same spatial narratives, the convergence points to constraints lodged in the available archive and the platform’s incentives rather than in any individual creator’s outlook.
Although 17 videos constitute a small sample, the study pursues analytic generalization (Firestone Reference Firestone1993). Its aim is not to estimate how representations are distributed across all Battle of Manila videos, but to identify the mechanisms through which these spatial narratives are produced. Because these mechanisms operate across the platform and not only within this sample, the patterns they generate may transfer to other digitally mediated memories of urban catastrophe.
The Battle of Manila on YouTube
The systematic analysis of YouTube videos reveals how content creators construct particular spatial narratives of the 1945 Battle of Manila. Within the limits set by available archives and platform dynamics, these videos tend to present Manila according to three dominant spatial configurations: military terrain defined by strategic operations, spectacular ruins presented as visual drama, and the lived social space of Filipino civilians, pushed to the margins of the frame. The following analysis examines each of these configurations in turn.
The production of military space
Across the analyzed videos, content creators consistently map Manila as military terrain defined by strategic operations and tactical objectives. This spatial construction emerges from creators’ heavy reliance on two primary archival sources: “Battle of Manila,” episode 417 of the U.S. Army’s The Big Picture television series (1959), and “Orders from Tokyo,” a 1945 film produced by the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (TIME Magazine 1945). The widespread availability of these digitized military archives, contrasted with the relative inaccessibility of Filipino civilian testimonies, fundamentally shapes how creators can represent the battle.
The most-watched video in the sample illustrates this dynamic. The 2014 reupload of The Big Picture by “The Best Film Archives” has garnered 4.4 million views, making it the sample’s most viewed and remixed source. Originally produced as a military recruitment tool by the U.S. Army’s Office of the Chief of Information (Department of Defense 1959; Lemza Reference Lemza2021), the episode constructs Manila exclusively as military space. It uses a chance encounter between a U.S. veteran and a liberated prisoner as a fictional framing device to establish a narrative where the city exists solely in relation to military objectives: the re-entry into Manila, the liberation of internment camps, and urban combat zones. The city’s spaces gain meaning only through their strategic value or as obstacles to military advance.
Contemporary documentaries that remix this footage inherit and reproduce its spatial logic. When creators use available archival material, they work within its embedded perspectives. A video from the channel Mark Felton Productions (2020) opens by referring to Manila as the “Asian Stalingrad,” immediately framing the city through military analogies. The video, evidently a military documentary, maps the battle through “two-pronged pincer attacks” and the “daring parachute drop” of the 11th Airborne Division. Other documentaries do the same, tracing troop movements and strategic maneuvers across city districts (GovPH 2015). A Philippine government channel presents the city in the same operational terms, which is significant because here a producer with the standing to foreground Filipino civilian experience instead reproduces the military framing carried by the footage. This choice aligns with the state’s own commemorative priorities, such as the annual Araw ng Kagitingan (Day of Valor) rites commemorating the Fall of Bataan (Candelaria Reference Candelaria and Gregorio2025a), so here creator position and archival constraint pull in the same direction, not against each other. Such representational choices redefine Manila’s neighborhoods, streets, and buildings into tactical problems solved through firepower, eclipsing their reality as lived spaces disrupted by violence.
The second primary archival source is “Orders from Tokyo,” a 1945 short film produced by the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines in collaboration with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (for the corresponding reupload of this film in the sample, see Trampilla Arnis Filipino Martial Art 2011). Presented in Technicolor, this film opens with then-Brigadier General Carlos P. Romulo explaining that the footage will be entered as evidence for the prosecution of Japanese war crimes, particularly the deliberate and systematic destruction of Manila, allegedly executed under direct orders from Tokyo. The narrative subsequently transitions to the eyewitness account of Captain David Griffin, who also captured much of the footage. Unlike The Big Picture’s “Battle of Manila,” this film concentrates exclusively on the events of February 1945, offering a harrowing depiction of Japanese atrocities. However, its focus remains on providing visual evidence of destruction instead of exploring civilian experiences. Such focus is evident even in its most harrowing sequences. The camera surveys the bodies of massacre victims, including a bayoneted mother and child, as proof that the killings were ordered and systematic, while the dead remain unnamed and the survivors who appear on screen figure as exhibits of atrocity (Trampilla Arnis Filipino Martial Art 2011).
Other archival footage incorporated into the sample videos originates primarily from newsreels—short films of news stories screened in cinemas—which gained significant popularity in the 1940s in the United States due to the public’s demand for information about the ongoing war in Europe and the Pacific. Of the 17 videos analyzed, 4 are direct reuploads of archival videos, establishing a foundational, albeit biased, visual and narrative framework.
These archival constraints interact with platform dynamics to reinforce military spatial narratives. Creators attuned to YouTube’s engagement metrics recognize that dramatic visual content generates views, making military archives with their explosions, troop movements, and combat footage particularly attractive sources compared to static images or text-based testimonies. Under these constraints, creators make predictable choices. They emphasize General MacArthur’s “I shall return” promise, highlight liberation scenes at the University of Santo Tomas, and use military terminology that makes the city legible primarily through strategic concepts.
Even when contemporary creators attempt to include Filipino perspectives, they must work with available materials that position Filipinos within U.S. military space. Videos describe Filipino guerrillas as “supporting U.S. troops” or being “trained by U.S. soldiers” (DW News 2020), locating their agency within the U.S. command structure. While this dynamic is understandable given the political realities of the period, the reliance on existing archival film sources constrains how creators can position Filipino experience, fixing it within a U.S. military frame, foreclosing the plural ways residents understood and moved through their own city.
This military spatialization extends to how videos justify the massive destruction. Several videos frame civilian casualties and urban devastation as regrettable but necessary consequences of military operations. One video explains destruction as “stemming from the American decision to save lives in a battle against Japanese troops who had decided to sacrifice their lives as dearly as possible” (Mark Felton Productions 2020). Another argues that U.S. commanders believed “ending the battle as quickly as possible was the best way to save as many American and Filipino lives as possible” (A Day In History 2023). These framings construct space through military logic where efficiency and strategic objectives override the complex realities of urban warfare’s impact on civilian spaces.
Ultimately, creators work within structural constraints where military footage is accessible and visually compelling, resulting in representations that treat Manila as a strategic terrain defined by military objectives and obscure the social fabric the battle destroyed.
Spectacular space and visual commodification
Content creators consistently cast Manila’s destruction as a spectacular visual space, using narrative techniques to package a socio-spatial catastrophe as consumable images of architectural loss. This pattern emerges from creators combining dramatic archival footage with production techniques that generate the emotional engagement YouTube’s algorithms reward.
The production of spectacular space relies heavily on footage of ruined landmarks presented as symbols of cultural tragedy, a technique exemplified in Griffin’s narration from “Orders from Tokyo”:
Eighty percent of Manila’s buildings were ruined: the business section, the city hall, the National Assembly Building, the Manila Hotel, Heacock’s—no more Christmas shopping here. The University of the Philippines—where are its 8,000 students? Where is the home of my friends, the Reyes family? (Trampilla Arnis Filipino Martial Art 2011)
While Griffin’s questions gesture toward human displacement, the accompanying visuals focus exclusively on destroyed buildings (Figure 2). The catalog of ruined structures, from government buildings to department stores, constructs Manila as an inventory of architectural casualties.
Screen capture from the video: Trampilla Arnis Filipino Martial Art. “War Crimes - Manila 1945 [Video].” YouTube, July 29, 2011. https://youtu.be/J9xOp8z2Q-w?si=_HV3eal1rtPWW3nq.
Videos employ technical language that aestheticizes destruction while obscuring its human impact. One video describes the bombardment of Intramuros: “155-millimeter howitzers lob shells across the river to blast the walls of Intramuros and adjacent buildings. 240-millimeter guns of the 544th Field Artillery firing point-blank against the ancient walls” (MyFootage.com 2012). This technical precision turns violence into spectacle, focusing viewers’ attention on the mechanics of destruction over its consequences for inhabitants. Similarly, Mark Felton Productions (2020) describes Intramuros as “the mini-Vatican city at its [Manila’s] heart” that was “utterly destroyed” and “pounded into ruins.” These descriptions construct the walled city as an aesthetic object valuable for its architectural significance, not a neighborhood where people lived, worked, and maintained social relations.
The most powerful technique for producing spectacular space involves before-and-after narratives that recast Manila into a lost ideal. This narrative structure appears across multiple videos, each constructing prewar Manila as a golden age violently terminated. Griffin’s narration establishes the pattern:
… memories of Manila Bay filled with ships from all over the world, of the beauty of the city with its colorful parks, broad avenues, and modern buildings: the National Assembly Building, the Manila Hotel, and the University of the Philippines with its 8,000 students. Manila was a city of happy people, free people who worshipped as they pleased, whose children went to free schools, carefree people who loved life and enjoyed fashion shows, pageants, parades, and Coca-Cola.
This idealized vision, interrupted by “sounds of explosions” and the announcement that “at dawn, after a night of terror, the entire business district was gone” (Trampilla Arnis Filipino Martial Art 2011), creates Manila as a space of nostalgic loss. The Smithsonian Channel (2018) reproduces this pattern, showcasing “home movie footage of prewar Manila … infused with American style, from Western clothes to neon glitz” before cutting to the “ashen and hollow” city (Figure 3).
Screen capture from the video: Smithsonian Channel. “Harrowing Footage of the Manila Invasion Aftermath [Video].” YouTube, July 28, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6ok97Q98l4.
Creators employ these visual juxtapositions because they work within platform constraints: dramatic contrasts and emotional engagement generate views, and the before-and-after structure provides clear narrative arcs that maintain viewers’ attention while requiring minimal contextualization. Simuno Media (2020) extends this nostalgic framing, opening with claims that “there was a time in our history when Filipinos drove on the left side of the road … the powerful tranvias of Manila were the envy of all Asia” and describing Manila as “one of the cleanest in the world” where “crime was almost non-existent.” These idealized descriptions aestheticize prewar Manila into a mythical space whose loss becomes the primary tragedy. Even this nostalgic register, addressed to a domestic audience and mourning the city as a vanished ideal, stays within the spectacular frame and does not recover the city as lived space.
The transformation of destruction into spectacle produces abstract space, stripped of social relations and reduced to visual representation. Videos dedicate extensive time to cataloging architectural losses: “priceless national treasures … lost forever” (GovPH 2015), Manila as the “Pearl of the Orient” with “300 years of Western architectural heritage” (Mark Felton Productions 2020). This emphasis on heritage and architectural value turns buildings from lived spaces into cultural artifacts whose destruction can be mourned in abstract terms.
Even videos that acknowledge civilian casualties subordinate human loss to architectural destruction. Despite providing detailed casualty figures, the Warfronts channel frames civilian deaths as collateral damage to military operations:
With so many defenses inside Manila’s buildings and on the streets, the safest way to get further into the city was to just level the defenses entirely. This decision had a tragic side effect. Any civilians trapped inside the buildings that the Allies attacked were often killed alongside the Axis troops. (Warfronts 2023)
This framing positions civilians as incidental occupants of strategic structures, and not as inhabitants whose entire social worlds were being destroyed. The passive construction (“were often killed”) obscures agency and responsibility while maintaining focus on buildings as military objectives.
The production of spectacular space extends beyond depicting destruction to shaping contemporary memory. Videos consistently frame Manila’s present through its spectacular loss: the city “has not captured its pre-war beauty since 1945” (A Day In History 2023) or “never recovered from that event … Filipinos lost an irreplaceable cultural and historical treasure” (Simuno Media 2020). The narrative of a lost “golden age,” while powerful and emotionally resonant, can also contribute to a sense of passivity and resignation instead of the agency and determination of those who faced the challenges of reconstruction. The concluding statement of one video (Simuno Media 2020) even suggests that “[i]f the killing of Manila in 1945 had not happened, perhaps every Filipino today would see a different Manila,” which reinforces this sense of a lost opportunity and a fundamentally altered trajectory that ties Manila’s urban problems today to its destruction in 1945.
This spectacular framing emerges from specific material constraints. Aside from being readily available, archival footage of ruins provides immediately compelling visual content that generates platform engagement. The before-and-after structure offers clear narratives that require minimal explanation. Architectural destruction can be shown through powerful images, while social devastation resists easy visualization. Faced with these constraints, creators produce videos that construct Manila’s complex destruction into spectacular space: visually powerful, emotionally engaging, but ultimately abstracted from the lived experiences of those who called the city home.
The erasure of lived space
The analyzed videos systematically fail to represent Manila as lived space, a city constituted through the daily practices, social relations, and embodied experiences of its inhabitants. Instead, Filipino civilians appear only as background figures in narratives dominated by military operations and spectacular destruction. This erasure emerges from a combination of archival limitations, where Filipino testimonies remain largely inaccessible, and platform dynamics that favor visually dramatic content over complex social narratives.
The available archival footage constructs civilians as anonymous masses, erasing their identities as inhabitants with specific spatial practices and social networks. The Big Picture describes survivors leaving the city as a “great mass exodus” (The Best Film Archives 2014) that flattens the victims of a tremendous catastrophe into an undifferentiated flow of people. “Orders from Tokyo” similarly presents civilians as “refugees … homeless and sick at heart” (Trampilla Arnis Filipino Martial Art 2011). These descriptions, embedded in the most accessible source materials, provide creators with limited options for representing how residents experienced their city’s destruction. The visual grammar of these archives, such as wide shots of crowds and views of refugee movements, cannot capture the intimate scale at which people experienced the loss of homes, neighborhoods, and communities.
When videos do acknowledge civilian casualties, they present them through statistics that abstract lived experience into numerical data. Documentaries provide the figure of 100,000 civilians killed, but without exploring what these deaths meant for families, neighborhoods, or social networks. This statistical framing emerges partly from available sources, which documented military operations in detail while civilian experiences went largely unrecorded in accessible archives. The contrast with military narratives is stark: while videos describe troop movements with precise detail and active language, civilian experiences appear in passive constructions that obscure agency and flatten complexity.
The erasure of lived space extends to how videos represent Filipino agency within available narrative frameworks. Working with U.S. military footage, creators inherit perspectives that position Filipinos as supporting actors in a U.S. liberation narrative. Videos show Filipinos who “braved front-line fire, handing out cigars or candy to show their gratitude to us [U.S. soldiers]” and “willingly pointed out prepared defensive positions of the enemy” (The Best Film Archives 2014). While these actions could be read as strategic collaboration or survival tactics, the archival framing presents them solely as expressions of gratitude toward liberators. Similarly, “Orders from Tokyo” mentions Filipinos who “smuggled food and medicine” to U.S. internees (Trampilla Arnis Filipino Martial Art 2011), but positions these dangerous acts of solidarity as auxiliary support, denying them the agency of autonomous resistance.
Despite their creators’ intentions to include Filipino perspectives, contemporary documentaries remain constrained by these archival frameworks. Videos describe Filipinos as “elated to see their American liberators” (Jojo Araja 2019), reproducing narratives where Filipino spatial agency exists only in relation to U.S. military presence. Even when featuring Filipino veterans’ testimonies, videos frame their contributions within U.S. military structures without exploring how Filipinos navigated and understood their own city during occupation and battle. This holds across the independent Filipino channels as much as the institutional ones. Creators posting from Filipino martial-arts, gaming, anime, and other enthusiast accounts work from the same archive and toward the same engagement metrics, and they produce no distinct civilian-centered account of the city. The absence of a recognizable Filipino counter-narrative is a structural outcome rather than a gap awaiting the right creator, since the materials and incentives that foreclose lived space operate regardless of who sits behind the channel. The one partial exception underscores the same limit: a Filipino martial-arts channel reuploaded “Orders from Tokyo” (Trampilla Arnis Filipino Martial Art 2011), the single source that gestures toward homes and named families, yet selecting a more sympathetic source is as far as the choice can reach, because it cannot reshape the footage itself.
Producing the “digital” Battle of Manila: Archival constraints, platform affordances, and spatial narratives
This analysis has demonstrated that YouTube videos do not simply document the Battle of Manila but actively construct its spatial memory at the intersection of archival availability, platform dynamics, and inherited narrative frameworks. Understanding this process requires examining the material and technological constraints that subordinate lived experience to narratives of military operations and spectacular ruin.
The reconfiguration of Manila from a complex, lived-in city into a fragmented digital spectacle illustrates the production of abstract space. The videos analyzed consistently prioritize conceived space (the top-down logic of military plans and architectural heritage) and perceived space (the immediate, visceral experience of visual destruction). In doing so, they subordinate and effectively erase lived space, the realm of embodied experience, memory, and social meaning through which inhabitants navigate their city. This pattern is not necessarily a conscious choice. It is an outcome of a digital environment where available materials and platform logic combine to make certain de-socialized spatial narratives more viable than others. Such a dynamic is best exemplified by the NikolaiPro (2020) video, which remixes Battle of Manila footage with music from Attack on Titan, a popular anime series. By combining historical footage of urban combat, burning streets, and aerial bombardment with an anime soundtrack, the video reduces documentary evidence to pure perceived space, or space as immediate visual sensation. Its anime framing belongs unmistakably to a particular creator and fan culture, yet the operation it performs, stripping the footage of social context and rendering it as sensation, is the same one carried out by the state broadcaster and the institutional military channel. That a producer so unlike the others arrives at so familiar an operation is itself the evidence that it follows from the archive and the platform, and not necessarily from the maker.
Here, Massey’s (Reference Massey2005) ideas on the politics of space are particularly illuminating, explaining how the creative choices made in the videos are embedded in specific power relations. By collapsing the event into a singular spectacular moment, videos enact a denial of spatial coevalness, the principle that any space is constituted by the simultaneous existence of multiple stories. This choice responds to the platform’s underlying power-geometry, or the unequal structures that determine which narratives can circulate effectively. The videos and their respective popularity in terms of view counts (reaching millions of views at times) show how this system rewards emotionally charged spectacle, a dynamic that echoes Sontag’s (Reference Sontag2003) warnings about the detached consumption of suffering. The ultimate political consequence is the severing of the event from its actual “throwntogetherness,” which Massey (Reference Massey2005) defines as the messy, unplanned coexistence of intersecting lives. In the case of the Battle of Manila, families being separated, neighbors helping each other survive, and communities being destroyed are rendered invisible in favor of the visual spectacle of violence and destruction.
It is worth asking whether this production of abstract space is peculiar to Manila or simply describes how YouTube portrays any war, since spectacle and fragmentation shape even the most canonical events online. The mechanism is general, but its consequences fall unevenly:events secured in scholarship, state commemoration, and the institutions of surviving witnesses meet their platform representations alongside dense counter-archives that still hold the lived dimension, whereas for a marginalized battle whose other registers remain thin, YouTube carries a disproportionate share of what global audiences will ever know of it. The heavy circulation of the battle online and its marginality are therefore the same condition, for a history with little to hold it beyond the platform is the most exposed to the form its digital remediation takes.
The patterns identified emerge from the material conditions of archival access. The widespread availability of digitized U.S. military films, contrasted with the relative inaccessibility of Filipino civilian testimonies, creates a form of archival determinism where the most accessible and visually dramatic materials fundamentally shape how the event can be narrated. However, this determinism operates relationally: it is not simply that military archives exist, but that they exist within a power-geometry that enables their global circulation while confining other stories to local, analog formats that cannot enter the flows of digital memory production. Those with access to digitized military archives and the technical capacity to produce engaging content thus control how Manila’s space is represented, while Filipino inhabitants whose embodied experiences resist spectacular visualization find their trajectories erased, a dynamic that reproduces colonial power relations in new geographies of memory.
YouTube’s specific technological and economic structures further shape how creators digitally memorialize the Battle of Manila. Recommendation algorithms that favor content generating immediate engagement incentivize creators to prioritize emotional response, visual drama, and clear narrative arcs. Platform metrics punish videos with low retention rates, creating pressure to use the most visually compelling materials available (Cotter Reference Cotter2019), which overwhelmingly consist of military combat footage and destruction imagery. These affordances interact with available archives to produce predictable creator choices: before-and-after contrasts generate emotional engagement, military operations provide clear narratives, and spectacular destruction offers visual impact. This privileging of exchange value (views, engagement, advertising revenue) over use value (understanding, remembrance, critical reflection) exemplifies a key characteristic of abstract space. The complex temporalities of lived space resist reduction to the immediate visual gratification that drives platform engagement. As LeMahieu (Reference LeMahieu2011: 84) observes, the “complete extinction of living memory…profoundly diminishes the emotional interest and intellectual curiosity of successors.” This absence of firsthand accounts makes digital representations particularly influential in shaping how subsequent generations understand the event.
The comment sections and view counts indicate how these representations circulate within specific memory communities. Videos with a military focus attract audiences interested in Asia-Pacific War military history, while those emphasizing destruction draw viewers seeking historical spectacle. This segmentation, driven by algorithmic recommendation, creates differentiated connectivities: certain narratives achieve global reach while others remain confined to local circuits (Massey Reference Massey2005).
Rather than critiquing these videos for providing “incomplete” memory, this analysis illuminates how digital platforms produce particular kinds of memory that serve specific interests. The emphasis on military heroism aligns with state narratives in the United States and the Philippines that prefer clear stories of sacrifice and liberation over complex questions about civilian agency and colonial dynamics. The spectacular representation of destruction turns historical trauma into consumable content that generates platform engagement without demanding critical reflection on continuing inequalities. This process reflects how representations of historical events are shaped by contemporary ideologies and priorities (Palmié Reference Palmié, Radstone and Schwarz2010), where the past is reconstructed according to present concerns instead of being preserved in its complexity.
The marginalization of civilian experiences evident in the videos also resonates with how some lives are deemed less “grievable” within dominant social discourses (Butler Reference Butler2009). The disproportionate focus on U.S. military heroism and architectural devastation makes Filipino civilian suffering less visible and consequently less grievable in these digital narratives. This pattern finds a counterpart in official state commemorations in the Philippines. The Philippine Veterans Affairs Office’s focus on military valor, particularly on events like the Bataan Death March, mirrors the emphasis in YouTube videos (Candelaria Reference Candelaria2025b). This convergence suggests a structural alignment between platform affordances, archival availability, and state narratives. Far from conspiratorial, it emerges from similar constraints: the need for clear narratives, visually compelling content, and politically useful memory. Digital platforms, therefore, build parallel structures of their own that reinforce the same commemorative hierarchies as official memory.
These findings suggest that digital platforms neither simply democratize nor merely reproduce traditional memory hierarchies. Instead, they create new forms of memory production shaped by the intersection of technological affordances, archival materialities, and economic incentives. Scholars have noted the democratic potential of platforms like YouTube to provide more participatory spaces for commemoration than traditional forms (Knudsen and Stage Reference Knudsen and Stage2013; Candelaria and Ebro Reference Candelaria and Ebro2025). However, the production of abstract space that privileges conceived and perceived dimensions over lived experience occurs through power-geometries of access, technology, and visibility that actively foreclose spatial multiplicity (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre1991; Massey Reference Massey2005). YouTube’s algorithmic promotion of engaging content, combined with asymmetrical archival access, leads creators to craft narratives that simplify complex urban catastrophes into digestible spatial stories.
The challenge for critical memory studies is to develop frameworks that can account for how platform-specific dynamics shape historical representation without lapsing into technological determinism. Recognizing these processes opens possibilities for more critical approaches to digital memorialization that might work to restore the primacy of lived experience and recognize that urban catastrophe affects countless intersecting lives and stories.
Conclusion
YouTube representations of the 1945 Battle of Manila take shape under material and technological constraints. The patterns identified here show that platform affordances, archival accessibility, and algorithmic structures combine to shape which spatial narratives creators can viably produce, foreclosing others in the process. These digital representations actively construct memory through processes that privilege certain forms of visibility and narrative coherence.
The convergence of YouTube videos and official Philippine war commemorations suggests shared structural pressures rather than coordinated intent. These parallel dynamics illustrate how power operates through memory production across different scales and media, from state monuments to user-generated videos.
On YouTube, the Battle of Manila becomes a new terrain of memory struggle. As living witnesses die and digital representations increasingly mediate historical understanding, recognizing how these platforms shape what can be remembered becomes crucial for developing more responsible approaches to digital heritage. The question is how to create conditions where multiple memory trajectories coexist without being reduced to a single, consumable narrative.
Acknowledgments
I thank Karl Ian Cheng Chua, my co-editor on this special issue, for sharing the work of bringing it together while this article took shape; the journal editors, especially Mary McCarthy, for her patience across the many revisions; and the two anonymous reviewers, whose exacting engagement made the article far better than the manuscript they first received. Any remaining errors are mine alone.
Financial support
Research for this work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP24K20995.
Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Author Biography
John Lee Candelaria is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, Japan. He researches the memory and heritage of events of mass human suffering such as wars and disasters, with a geographical focus on the Philippines and Southeast Asia. He is the author of War Memorialization and Nation-Building in Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2025).
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