On the same day that they attacked Pearl Harbor, Japan had made a similar raid on Clark Field, the key to the defences of the Philippine Islands. This was an American possession which linked the United States with the imperial systems maintained by the European Powers. However, several years before the United States Government and key Congressmen had entertained serious doubts about whether or not the Islands were defensible or whether the Philippines should be granted ‘Independence’ merely in order to be ‘neutralized’. Thus, effectively, the Philippines had been abandoned to their own devices rather than remaining a costly political and military encumbrance to the United States. As the risks from this process of estrangement mounted, leading Filipino politicians began to look elsewhere for defence guarantees, and the President of the Philippine Commonwealth, Manuel Quezon, sent feelers to the British Government in London offering to join the British Commonwealth and Empire in exchange for British protection. The British weighed up the risks involved and then secretly informed the Americans of what was afoot. By 1941, however, the American mood had changed and the United States was expected to defend it tenaciously. Although the real determination to hold fast in the Philippines came late in the day, the Philippine Commonwealth was not, like Hong Kong, regarded as expendable. With this attack, Japan launched upon the serious task of driving the white invader from the soil of Asia.
The Philippines are an island group off South-East Asia which for three hundred years had been the empire of Spain in this part of the world. They had passed into American possession – assisted in no small measure by a home-grown Filipino guerrilla rebellion against the Spanish crown – when the United States had defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898. It was a war which it was hard to justify: at first it seemed to show that the United States had given up its traditional stand against imperialism and was about to start on the acquisition of colonies. Its heart, however, was never in empire. No American literature had grown up around the Philippines; no class of Americans (except small groups of teachers, missionaries, West Point Army officers, businessmen, educators and planters) could claim to have the Philippines in their bones.
Thus it had been easy for Americans to compromise when they found that, among their new subject peoples, the Europeanized middle class of Manila was becoming inspired by the nationalism of the day. Americans had engendered no professional imperialists, in their adventure with ruling subject peoples. They could therefore readily conceive a constitution, which was a replica of the United States one, and could foresee that the Filipinos would make a success of this, and of governing their country without disaster.
By the time that Japan attacked, as a legacy of the period of doubts which Americans had held about the value of the Philippines in the past, the United States was already so well ahead with grooming the Philippines for liberation that all conceded that the Americans would not, after all, renege on their promises. Japan did not find in it a representative of imperialism at its most stubborn. More than six years before it struck, the United States had already passed a law which set a timetable for Filipino emancipation. This envisaged, however, that there would be a treaty between itself and the Philippines, regulating their defence.
By this treaty, the United States was to keep a moderately powerful Air Force, stationed at Clark Field. The rather sketchy chain of airfields throughout the islands was to be at its disposal. The United States also maintained a weak garrison of soldiers. When the war began, the defences were out of date; in part that was yet another legacy of the ill-fated Washington Treaty System which had expired in 1936. The communications between the islands were especially poor. The native Filipino Army, which was being trained by the United States, was only half ready.
The command in the Philippines was in the hands of General MacArthur. He was thenceforward to play the most conspicuous part of any commander in the Pacific War. A rather older man than most of his contemporaries, a general with an outstanding record in the First World War, a former Chief of Staff of the United States Army, he had been loaned, by the United States Government to the Filipino Service to organize the future armies of the free Philippines. He entered with enthusiasm on this task. His father had been the first military governor in the American rule of the island. The relation of trust between him as generous patron of the Filipinos, and the Filipinos as loyal and grateful clients, caught his imagination. He believed that he had the knack and principle to do what other western soldiers and administrators had failed to do: to win the attachment of an oriental people. He was enabled to stand to his own Government in the position of a semi-independent power rather than a subordinate servant, a relation which suited him much better than a more regular one.
At the time when the Japanese struck, he had completed six years of a planned ten-year period on this task, and the Filipino Army had been brought to a stage of fair competency. Its worst impediment had been the multitude of languages and dialects which were spoken by the soldiers, which made it difficult for them to be organized under a single command. In the months preceding the war, it was, as part of the rather belated American preparation against the Japanese threat, reincorporated in the US Army. But when the invasion came, the plans, such as they were, for the defence of the Philippines were sketchy and completely shattered by the events of Pearl Harbor. The American intentions had proceeded from the axiom that the United States Pacific Fleet and Asiatic squadron would be intact, and would, at least within months, be able to come to the rescue.
The Japanese bombed Clark Field some hours after they attacked Pearl Harbor. Reports of what was happening there had reached the Philippines by radio. On receipt of the news, the Air Force – thirty-five bombers and seventy-two fighters – was alerted and had taken to the air. But the Japanese attack was delayed by dense morning fog. At lunch-time nearly all the American planes were grounded. While they were being serviced, lined up, while the pilots were being fed, the Japanese struck. Nearly a hundred American aircraft were destroyed in the air or on the ground.
Thus the war in the Philippines began with recrimination over an unnecessary loss. The American habit of concentrating its aeroplanes in formations which made them perfect targets had before this caused anxiety. Before the War against Japan, Duff Cooper, who had been appointed a few weeks before as Resident Minister in the British Administration of Singapore, was horrified at seeing them parked wing by wing at Clark Field and had pointed out to the Americans what a temptation they might be to the Japanese. Lest the apparent alarm of this former First Lord of the Admiralty and ex-Minister of War be mistaken for a general British reaction, it must be said that the reports of British air attachés exuded confidence in what they saw as General Douglas MacArthur’s strategical understanding of East Asian defence problems and the American’s willingness to learn from Britain’s experience regarding the handling and deployment of aircraft. On the whole, British visitors to MacArthur’s domain came away feeling that the defence of the Philippines was being far better attended to than they had previously supposed. The loss sustained in the Philippines, when it occurred, was anyway nowhere near as fatal as that at Pearl Harbor. Possibly the disaster had no deep influence on what followed. But the disgrace and the material damage had a very discouraging effect.
The raid was followed up by a landing of the Japanese Army. It came from Formosa, and the troops had been embarked some days previously. At first there was doubt as to whether the Filipinos, under American command, would resist the Japanese armies, which proclaimed they were bringing freedom. But this doubt was quickly dispelled.
MacArthur quickly appreciated that he could not check the Japanese landings. He met them with a scheme which had something of surprise. He gathered together his force, and withdrew into the historic fortress of Corregidor, on an island in Manila Bay, and into the peninsula of Bataan, on the northern side of the bay. Corregidor was one of the famous strong points in the East. It had first been built by Spaniards in the early years of their rule in the seventeenth century, and was heavy with history. But, though extremely picturesque – like Cyprus in the wars against the Turks or like a Crusader’s castle – it had had nothing done to it in modern times to make it suitable for modern war. On the other hand Bataan was more serviceable. It was a strip of country covered by jungle and had been prepared by MacArthur for its role by the installation of concealed factories, supply depots and hospitals. In these two centres MacArthur had more than 50,000 troops (of whom only 6,000 men were of the regular American Army). He planned to withstand a siege by a Japanese Army numbered about 200,000.
MacArthur was at first optimistic that he would be relieved. Apparently, for a senior officer of the US Army, he was singularly out of touch with the ways in which the US General Staff thought in time of emergency. The explanation is simply that MacArthur had left Washington years before under something of a cloud. His prima donna behaviour, his fondness for the field marshal’s baton that his appointment in the Philippines had brought him, did nothing to endear him to the American military and political authorities in the United States. He reckoned in terms of a six months’ siege, for which he had stored ammunition, though his supplies of food were far less satisfactory. He refused to admit that the United States had been robbed by Pearl Harbor of all powers to relieve and reinforce its protégé. The United States might have lost its battleship fleet, but a great deal could be contrived with cruisers, destroyers and submarines. These ships remained in existence: they might have been used in relation to the Philippines. Actually the American Navy fought actively for the next few years in the Pacific without receiving any large new ships. But the will and dash had departed temporarily from the Navy. MacArthur, isolated in beleaguered Corregidor, did not grasp this fact. He adapted tactics of strategic defence when they were in fact pointless because the defence, however resolute, could look for no eventual reward in the early restoration of communications with the United States.
When MacArthur in the end faced the facts as they were, he seriously planned that the entire Bataan garrison should attempt a break-out, and should then filter away to southern Luzon, where they should wage guerrilla warfare. But the scheme, transmitted to Washington, was coolly regarded, and was never sanctioned.
The Japanese began their serious offensive against MacArthur on 29 December, when they let loose their aircraft against Corregidor. Surprisingly, both Corregidor and Bataan held out. The Japanese met their first check of the war. The resistance, unexpectedly prolonged, began to upset the larger Japanese plan. They had calculated that their forces would be quickly disengaged from the Philippines, and would be free to move on to the belt of coral islands which lay along the northern coast of Australia. From these they would be able to prepare for the invasion of Australia, and the cutting-off of its communications with the United States.
Their delay continued. At one time the Japanese were so badly placed – stricken with dysentery, beri-beri and other tropical diseases – that the Americans and the Filipinos, had they been able to launch an offensive, could have retaken Manila. But this did not put hope into the Philippine President, Manuel Quezon. On 8 February he sent a telegram to Washington saying that the Filipinos were nearly exhausted, and proposing that, as the United States had been unable to fulfil its pledges of protection, it should immediately declare the Philippines independent, the islands neutralized, and the American and Filipino armies disbanded. Quezon, though mercurial and vain, probably regarded himself as personally loyal to the United States (for lack of any satisfactory alternative). Now, however, he judged it possible for the Philippines to take refuge in neutrality.
At the end of January the Japanese troops were heavily reinforced. Two extra divisions were moved in, together with heavy artillery groups. The Japanese offensive continued. It was marked by none of the brilliant improvisation which the Japanese were showing in Malaya, but the geographical circumstances and the calibre of their enemy commanders were vastly different.
On 22 February, the President of the United States sent a telegram to MacArthur, ordering him to leave the Philippines and to go to Australia to organize the war from there. He went unwillingly, half under the delusion, as is plain from the documents of the time, that he would be put in command of a mighty Army with which he would return to the Philippines. From this time onwards he developed a monomania about return. ‘I shall return’ were his last words in transferring his Filipino command to General Wainwright.
The United States Navy had kept four speedboats miact. MacArthur had sent Quezon, the Filipino President, to Australia in a submarine, but preferred to travel in a motor torpedo boat. On the night of 11 March this little flotilla ran the Japanese blockade. The sea is vast; it is surprising how many times a blockade has been successfully broken. The speedboat in which MacArthur sat found itself at one stage in the shadow of a Japanese battleship, but in the darkness it failed to be aware of its prize. Certainly Japan would have done well to have intercepted this general, who, once away, responded, as if to a magnet, to the powerful drawing force of Japan. But when he returned it would be with an army.
With MacArthur gone, the Filipinos carried on their resistance for a month longer, but the spirit passed out of it. It was one thing to resist under MacArthur’s command, and another under General Jonathan Wainwright. Although Wainwright was a valiant soldier, the American and Filipino defenders were conscious that they had been left in the lurch. On 9 April Bataan surrendered; on 6 May Corregidor. The defenders, the majority of them of the Filipino Army, were still a large force, and, as Japan was in future to show, a Japanese garrison would have been disinclined to surrender. But resistance seemed pointless when the Filipinos heard on the American radio that the United States was putting its energies first into the German War; and that, for the time being, it had written off the Philippines. The Filipino Army had fought with distinction when there was still reason for fighting and, with that reason gone, was entitled by all the conventions of war to surrender.
The garrison of Bataan and Corregidor met with a terrible fate for having been the first to throw the Japanese timetable out of date. They were shepherded into captivity in a march which earned the grim name of ‘the Death March’. Most of the victims passed into the hands of the Japanese military police, the Kenpeitai.
The other American island possessions in the Pacific had been able to offer very much less resistance. Guam was taken on 10 December after a spirited defence. Wake Island held out gallantly, but succumbed on 23 December.