EVEN AS the battle for Manila was being fought, senior U.S. officers speculated about the looming end of the war in Europe, and its implications for the defeat of Japan. Lt.-Gen. Robert Eichelberger of Eighth Army wrote on 16 February: “I believe the BC [Big Chief] would fight against469any attempt to bring the European crowd over here, even if they should desire to do so. I personally hope that the Japanese will quit if and when Stalin begins to push down along the Manchuria railway. They will realize they cannot hope to stand against that pressure…If we ever get Russia on our side out here the Japanese will be in a horrific position and therefore I think they will quit before having their towns bombed out.” Eichelberger added on 5 March: “I never expect the BC to change. He will never want anybody on the stage but himself.”
While three American divisions were fighting for Manila through February, others recaptured the great symbolic place-names of Bataan and Corregidor. Zig-Zag Pass, on the approaches to the Bataan Peninsula, became the scene of some of the most painful fighting of the campaign. Before the area was secured several senior officers, including a divisional commander, were sacked for alleged inadequacy. An American parachute assault on the fortress island of Corregidor surprised the Japanese defenders in advance of an amphibious landing, but cost heavy jump casualties, and days of bloody mopping-up. A tank fired into the Malinta Tunnel, hitting munitions which exploded, blasting the vehicle bodily fifty yards backwards and overturning it. On the islands of Corregidor and nearby Caballo, the Americans disposed of the most stubborn underground defenders by pumping oil into their bunkers, then setting this ablaze. “Results,” said the divisional report, “were most gratifying.” Some Japanese chose to end their ordeal by detonating underground ammunition stores, killing Americans unlucky enough to be standing above. It was a messy, horrible business. Even MacArthur felt unable to display much triumphalism about the recapture of these famous symbols, though he led a flotilla of PT-boats to a ceremony on Corregidor.
Sixth Army’s drive north and eastwards meanwhile continued, in the face of dogged resistance. Through the months that followed, Yamashita conducted a highly effective defence of the mountain areas in which he had fortified himself. Japanese units fought; inflicted American casualties; caused days of delay, fear and pain; then withdrew to their next line. Krueger’s engineers toiled under fire to improve steep tracks sufficiently to carry tanks and vehicles. Disease took its toll of attackers and defenders alike. Japanese soldiers endured hunger always, starvation latterly. “Of the forty-nine men who are left470, only seventeen are fit for duty,” wrote Lt. Inoue Suteo of the Japanese 77th Infantry on 19 March. “The other two-thirds are sick. Out of fourteen men of the grenade discharger section, only three are fit…43rd Force [to which his unit belonged] is called ‘the malaria unit’…The quality of Japanese soldiers has fallen dramatically. I doubt if they could carry on the fight. Few units in the Japanese army are as lacking in military discipline as this one.”
Private Shigeki Hara of the 19th Special Machine-Gun Unit described the misery of retreating in a column of sick men. They abandoned all personal possessions, though Hara sought to sustain the custom of taking home to Japan some portion of every dead fellow soldier: “After daybreak, removed arm471 from the dead body of a comrade and followed the main body…was attacked by a company of guerrillas and suffered one casualty. Killed one enemy with the sword.” In addition to the usual tropical afflictions, men discovered that scrub typhus was carried by a small local red mite. Its symptom was a high fever, which inflicted heart damage from which some victims never recovered. “Practically every day472 two or three men fall out and [are] instantly shot by the officers,” said Private First Class Bunsan Okamoto, a twenty-four-year-old apprentice salesman serving with the 30th Recce Regiment. He was fortunate enough to be captured by the Americans and kept alive for intelligence purposes. A U.S. officer met an attractive young Filipino woman who said she had been in flight for weeks with three Japanese soldiers. “The last few days,” she reported, “they were in tears most of the time.” Americans found a pencilled note among supplies abandoned by the enemy, signed by a despairing Japanese: “To the brave American soldier who finds this—tell my family I died bravely.”
All over the Philippine archipelago in the early spring of 1945, Japanese garrisons waited with varying degrees of enthusiasm for Americans to come. On Lubang, for instance, an island some eighteen miles by six within sight of Luzon, 150 of Yamashita’s men shifted supplies into the hills, in readiness to maintain a guerrilla campaign. “They all talked big473 about committing suicide and giving up their lives for the emperor,” said their commander, Lt. Hiroo Onoda. “Deep down they were hoping and praying that Lubang would not be attacked.” A small American force landed on 28 February, inflicting a slight wound on Onoda’s hand as he and his men retreated. Thereafter, hunger and sickness progressively worsened their circumstances. One day, high in the hills, a pale young soldier came to Onoda from the sick tent, asking for explosives. He said: “We can’t move. Please let us kill ourselves.” Onoda thought for a moment, then agreed: “All right, I’ll do it. I’ll set a fuse to the charges.” He looked into twenty-two faces, “all resigned to death474,” and did his business. When he returned after the explosion, there was only a gaping crater where the sick tent had been.
In those months, more Japanese in the Philippines died from hunger and disease than the U.S. Army killed. In some degree, this must be attributed to a psychological collapse, overlaid upon physical weakness. Onoda, whose life on Lubang became that of a hunted wild animal, prowled the mountains struggling for survival, rather than making much attempt to injure the enemy. One day he glimpsed American gum wrappers beside a road, and found a wad stuck to a weed. He felt a surge of bitterness and frustration: “Here we were, holding on for dear life, and these characters were chewing gum while they fought! I felt more sad than angry. The chewing gum tinfoil told me just how miserably we had been beaten.”
A military surgeon in the Philippines, Tadashi Moriya, ate bats:
We tore off the wings475, roasted them until they were done brown, flayed and munched their heads holding them by their legs. The brain was delicious. The tiny eyes cracked lightly in the mouth. The teeth were small but sharp, so we crunched and swallowed them down. We ate everything, bones and intestines, except the legs. The abdomen felt rough to the tongue, as they seemed to eat small insects like mosquitoes…Hunger is indeed the best sauce, for I ate fifteen bats a day.
An officer reported that he saw a group of soldiers cooking meat. When he approached, they tried to conceal the contents of the mess tins, but he had a peep at them. A good deal of fat swam on the surface of the stew they were cooking, and he saw at once that it couldn’t be karabaw [animal] meat. Then I had the news that an officer of another unit was eaten by his orderly as soon as he breathed his last. I believe the officer was so devoted to his orderly that he bequeathed him his body. This loyal servant fulfilled his lord and master’s final wishes by burying him in his belly instead of the earth.
Col. Russell Volckmann, an American officer who had been leading guerrillas against the Japanese on Luzon since 1942, provided a report to Sixth Army assessing the enemy’s tactical strengths and weaknesses. He admired Japanese powers of endurance, skill in moving men and equipment over harsh terrain. He thought well of their junior officers and NCOs. More senior commanders, however, impressed him little with their “absurd orders476, assignment of impossible missions in relation to a unit’s strength, utter disregard for the lives of subordinates, refusal to admit defeat or even face the fact that events are going against him [sic] and inability to adjust to a changing situation, proneness to exaggerate success and minimize failure causes higher echelons to get a false picture. Jap small unit tactics are tops but there is seldom any coordination between units. To sum it up—the Jap officer generally has no idea of modern methods of fighting in large mass.” This seems fair. The Japanese showed themselves superb soldiers in defence, yet often failed in attack because they relied upon human spirit to compensate for lack of numbers, firepower, mobility and imagination. When the Japanese counterattacked, they were almost always repulsed with heavy loss. But when they merely held ground, as did Yamashita’s men for most of the Luzon campaign, they performed superbly.
To the dismay of Krueger’s Sixth Army, after the fall of Manila MacArthur launched the five divisions of Eichelberger’s Eighth Army on the progressive recapture of the lesser Philippine islands. Strategically, this decision had nothing to recommend it. American forces struggling to defeat Yamashita on Luzon were left grievously shorthanded. Eichelberger’s formations, which carried out fourteen major and twenty-four minor amphibious landings in forty-four days all over the Philippines Archipelago, thereafter spent weeks pursuing small Japanese forces which hit and ran, inflicted casualties, then retreated, day after day and month after month, with worsening weather and American morale. Samuel Eliot Morison notes that the joint chiefs of staff in Washington strongly questioned the necessity for the further extension of ground operations in the Philippines. “It is still something of a mystery477,” the great naval historian remarks acidly, “how and whence, in view of these wishes of the JCS, MacArthur derived his authority to liberate one Philippine island after another.” The simple explanation is that MacArthur’s manic will to fulfil his personal mission was stronger than that of the chiefs of staff to stop him doing so.
In this second phase of the Luzon campaign, the general’s behaviour became bizarre. During the advance on Manila he had assumed personal command of American forces and repeatedly risked his life in forward areas, hustling his generals on. When the capital fell, however, he seemed to lose interest in subsequent operations, only once visiting a Sixth Army front before the war’s end. He constantly criticised Krueger for sluggishness, but successfully recommended his subordinate to Washington for promotion to a fourth star. Most senior Americans on Luzon thought it would have been more appropriate to sack Krueger. It was the familiar story. MacArthur was loyal to his own, right or wrong, competent or otherwise. Promotion for Krueger represented an endorsement of his own performance.
Robert Sherwood of the Office of War Information visited MacArthur on 10 March and reported in some alarm to Roosevelt: “There are unmistakable478 evidences of an acute persecution complex at work. To hear some of the staff officers talk, one would think that the War Department, the State Department, the joint chiefs of staff—and, possibly, even the White House itself—are under the domination of ‘Communists and British Imperialists.’” Sherwood thought the atmosphere at SWPA headquarters profoundly unhealthy. While MacArthur’s demeanour became ever more autocratic, his interest in accepting responsibility for military operations in the Philippines diminished. The clearance of Luzon was a mess, because he and Krueger showed themselves far less competent commanders than was Yamashita.
“It was a long, slow and costly operation479,” said Maj.-Gen. William Gill, commanding the 32nd Division. “Morale was poor, because the men were tired—they’d been in there in combat for months…We killed a lot of [ Japanese], of course, killed many more of them than they killed of us, but we lost too many…Our engineers that were building roads often came under machine gun fire.” On the steep mountains, progress was painfully laborious. Gill watched admiringly one day as a soldier driving a bulldozer worked under fire beside a sheer precipice, manoeuvring his blade to deflect bullets which whanged off the steel. The fruits of such labour were often doubtful. “We sometimes reported480 enemy losses as ten times our own when we did not know the correct number,” admitted an American officer.
BY APRIL, some infantry regiments were reduced to half strength. Salvatore Lamagna returned late from a home furlough in Thompsonville, Connecticut, an offence for which he found himself busted from sergeant to private. When he reached his old unit, he sought out his comrades from the New Guinea campaign: “I looked around to see481 if I could find anyone I knew. Most of the guys were new to me. ‘Where’s Tietjen?’ ‘He was killed by a Jap artillery shell,’ Farmer says. I felt bad. I asked if any of the original 4th Platoon guys that left from Hartford, Ct. were left. ‘Just you and I,’ he says.”
Discipline lapsed badly in some units. Maj. Chuck Henne was walking beside a train one day in April when he heard shooting from the cars. Soldiers were firing at buffalo in the fields. He identified himself as a battalion executive officer: “They laughed and kept on482 shooting…I then shouted up to the men and told them to get their asses back in the car or I would shoot them off the roof…They came off the roof handing their rifles down butt first…I asked the lieutenant if he could now control his men…He sulked and vowed he could handle his troops. If he had been mine, I would have relieved him on the spot.”
The struggle to cut and hold Yamashita’s principal supply route, the Villa Verde Trail, became one of the most bitter of the campaign. “The price that the…trail cost483 in battle casualties was too high for value received,” said Gill of the 32nd Division. There was heroism. Lt. Van Pelt and a platoon of the 3/148th Infantry tried to work forward to deal with a Japanese 150mm gun. Pelt fell mortally wounded by machine-gun fire, which also hit two others beside him. One of these, Private Fred Ogrodkick, dragged himself into a cave, then realised that his buddy still lay in the open. He struggled out again, braved the fire to drag his friend into shelter, then sat trying to bandage both their wounds. Private Melvin Kidd, a K Company truck driver, saw what had happened. He jumped onto the engine deck of an M4 tank, rode forward under fire, jumped down and began to treat the wounded men in the cave. A Japanese shell blew down the entrance, trapping all three inside. An American infantry squad followed the tanks forward, and hacked open the cave mouth with bayonets and entrenching tools. Others rushed the Japanese positions. An officer later asked Kidd why he had joined a fight that was not his business. He shrugged: “It seemed the right thing to do484.”
Higher commanders had worries of their own. Col. Bruce Palmer485, chief of staff of 6th Division, was dismayed by the conduct of his general, Edwin Patrick, who behaved recklessly when sober, and worse when drunk, which was alarmingly often. A Japanese machine gunner solved this problem by killing Patrick when he exposed himself while visiting a battalion observation post. Soldiers were startled to discover how cold it became at night, when the sun dropped behind the mountains. There were mornings when they found water buckets covered with ice—and nights when the heavens opened. “With the torrents of rain486 beating down only a few were able to sleep,” wrote Chuck Henne. “Helmets were large enough only to keep the rain out of one’s eyes. The issue poncho held back the flood for a time and then became nearly as wet on the inside as on the outside. Worst of all, as the torrent continued, foxholes and slit trenches started to fill, and when bailing failed to keep up…a man could choose between sitting in a water-filled hole or getting out to sit in the mud. It was a bad night, and no doubt the Japs were as miserable as we were.”
Yamashita held out until the end of the war in his mountain fastnesses on Luzon, though the Americans had destroyed most of his forces. By August 1945 his Shobu group had been driven back into a forty-two-square-mile redoubt near Bontoc, and its supplies were almost exhausted. In the last six weeks of the war, these remnants killed some 440 American soldiers and Filipino guerrillas—but themselves lost 13,000 men. The general gave an interview at his headquarters to the Domei News Agency, in which he said—surprisingly to those who suppose all Japanese commanders to have been brutes: “I think Japan has made a big mistake, in the way it has conducted foreign occupations. We lack any experience of this, and it is one of our weaknesses. We simply haven’t tried to understand other societies. Relatively speaking, Japan is poor. We can’t compete scientifically with the West. Nor do we use the skills of our women as we might. They should be educated, albeit differently from men.” For Yamashita and his comrades, however, such revelations of sensitivity came too late. He himself was burdened with the appalling crimes of the Japanese occupiers of the Philippines, and would soon be called to account for them.
It is a striking feature of the Second World War that the populist media of the democracies made stars of some undeserving commanders, who thereafter became hard to sack. MacArthur’s Philippines campaign did little more to advance the surrender of Japan than Slim’s campaign in Burma, and was conducted with vastly less competence. Its principal victims were the Philippine people, and MacArthur’s own military reputation. Before the landing at Leyte, this stood high, probably higher than it deserved, following the conquest of Papua New Guinea. The early blunderings of that campaign were forgotten, and the general received laurels for the daring series of amphibious strokes which achieved victory. In the Philippines, however, instead of achieving the cheap, quick successes he had promised, his forces became entangled in protracted fighting, on terms which suited the Japanese. MacArthur’s contempt for intelligence was a persistent, crippling defect. On Luzon, where he sought to exercise personal field command, his opponent Yamashita displayed a nimbleness in striking contrast to the heavy-footed advance of Sixth Army. Stanley Falk has written of MacArthur: “On those occasions487 when the Japanese faced him with equal or greater strength, he was unable to defeat them or to react swiftly or adequately to their initiatives.” “The…South-West Pacific commitment488 was an unnecessary and profligate waste of resources, involving the needless loss of thousands of lives, and in no significant way affecting the outcome of the war.”
Japanese barbarism rendered the battle for Manila a human catastrophe, but MacArthur’s obsession with seizing the city created the circumstances for it. The U.S. lost 8,140 men killed on Luzon. Around 200,000 Japanese died there, many of disease. If the exchange ran overwhelmingly in America’s favour, those same enemy forces could have gone nowhere and achieved nothing had the Americans contented themselves with their containment. SWPA’s supreme commander compounded his mistakes by embarking upon the reconquest of the entire Philippines Archipelago, even before Luzon had fallen. MacArthur presided over the largest ground campaign of America’s war in the Pacific in a fashion which satisfied his own ambitions more convincingly than the national purposes of his country.