On Jan­u­ary 2, 1942, Japan­ese troops marched into Mani­la, unop­posed by U.S. forces less than a month after Pearl Har­bor. Tokyo saw its con­quest of the Philip­pines as the key in its plan to con­trol all of Asia, includ­ing Aus­tralia. Thou­sands of sol­diers sur­ren­dered and were sent on the noto­ri­ous eighty-mile Bataan Death March. But thou­sands of oth­er Fil­ipinos and Amer­i­cans refused to sur­ren­der and hid in the Luzon hills above Bataan and Mani­la. MacArthur’s Spies tells the sto­ry of three peo­ple who fought the Japan­ese in their own way. The book touch­es on an inter­est­ing side­light the plight of sev­er­al hun­dred Ger­man Jews and oth­ers from Europe who fled Europe before the Pacif­ic War and relo­cat­ed in Mani­la. When war broke out, they were con­sid­ered to be allies of the Japan­ese because they had Ger­man and Axis pass­ports. Even when the Nazis protest­ed, the Japan­ese did not hin­der their free­dom to cir­cu­late even when oth­er for­eign­ers — notably Amer­i­can civil­ians — were round­ed up and placed in a deten­tion camp. Most of the Jews of the Philip­pines sur­vived the depri­va­tion of those days and made it through the cat­a­stroph­ic retak­ing of Mani­la, how­ev­er 100,000 civil­ians died in Feb­ru­ary 1945 dur­ing the Bat­tle of Mani­la and the suf­fer­ing was great.