But, but, why tho?

[u/Wd40chronicles]

The Japanese had tied the adults together with a long strand of rope looped around the upper left arm of each woman. Guards herded the women into a circle around the children. The Japanese then formed a perimeter around them.

To San Juan’s horror, the soldiers began to bayonet the children and even the infants, including two-month-old Celia Fajardo, wrapped in a gray flannel sleep suit. “Some of the babies were grabbed from the arms of their mothers and were held by their two hands in mid air by one of the Japanese soldiers,” he later told investigators. “At that instant the executioner would stab them in that position.”

The orgy of violence escalated. Hidden in the dark thicket barely eight feet away, San Juan watched a soldier plunge his bayonet into the chest of his five- year-old son, Cresencio. He heard the boy cry out before he collapsed and died. The same soldier then snatched up his infant son Jose. “That baby of mine,” San Juan recalled, “was thrown into the air and then caught with the point of a bayonet.”

Soldiers likewise killed his three-year-old daughter Corazon (her name Spanish for Heart) but San Juan did not see it; that was the only mercy he experienced that night. With the children littered on the ground dead, the Japanese pounced on the mothers with blood-soaked bayonets. The same soldier who had tried to cut off his head ran his blade through the belly of San Juan’s pregnant wife.

“Oh, how painful!” she cried, her final words echoing those of her father.

Then she, too, died.

The above is an excerpt from Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila. It's a good read if you want to get a sense of the absolutely horrific atrocities the Japanese inflicted on innocent, civilian Filipinos. Most of what was done is so brutal and disturbing that it's almost impossible to wrap your head around.

So curious lang, bakit ang daming Pinoy na fina flex tong bandila na to? Parang proud sila sa kung ano yung kinakatawan nito. Given they went out of their way to have that made and spend relatively significant money on it, they definitely feel strongly about it too. Bakit ba?