Japanese occupation of the Philippines

• 1. Introduction

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  The Japanese occupation of the Philippines began on the 8th of December 1941, just ten hours after bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Within weeks, Manila had fallen. Within months, tens of thousands of soldiers had surrendered on a peninsula called Bataan. And for over three years, a nation found itself caught between an occupying empire, a guerrilla war fought from jungles and mountains, and atrocities that would take decades to fully reckon with.

  How did a Commonwealth nation, promised independence by the United States, come to endure one of the most brutal occupations of the entire Pacific War? What did ordinary Filipinos do when their government went into exile and a puppet republic took its place? And when General Douglas MacArthur finally made good on his famous promise to return, what did liberation actually cost? Those questions run through every phase of this story, from the first aerial strikes to the formal Japanese surrender on the 2nd of September 1945.

• 2. Collapse and Capture

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  General Douglas MacArthur had been recalled to active duty in the United States Army earlier in 1941, placed in command of the United States Armed Forces in the Asia-Pacific region. When Japanese aircraft struck on the 8th of December, his planes were wiped out on the ground. His naval forces were ordered to withdraw. Cut off from reinforcement or resupply, the defending Philippine and American troops had no choice but to fall back to the Bataan Peninsula and the island fortress of Corregidor at the entrance to Manila Bay.

  Manila itself was declared an open city to spare it from destruction, and Japanese troops occupied it on the 2nd of January 1942. The defense of Bataan held for months under desperate conditions, but on the 9th of April 1942, the 76,000 starving and sick defenders finally surrendered. MacArthur had already been ordered out, leaving Corregidor on the night of the 11th of March 1942 for Australia, 4,000 kilometers away. The remaining 13,000 survivors on Corregidor surrendered on the 6th of May.

  What followed the Bataan surrender became one of the war's most infamous episodes. Around 80,000 prisoners of war were forced onto the Bataan Death March, a trek of 105 kilometers north to Camp O'Donnell prison camp in Capas, Tarlac. Men weakened by disease and malnutrition were treated harshly by their captors. Between 7,000 and 10,000 died or were murdered along the way. More men died from mistreatment in the first four months at the camps than had perished in the four preceding months of battle.

  Quezon and Osmeña, the Commonwealth's senior leaders, had accompanied troops to Corregidor before departing for the United States, where they established a government-in-exile. Quezon's old political rival, former president Aguinaldo, made the opposite choice, siding with the Japanese as a collaborator. Japan had initially planned to appoint Aguinaldo president of a puppet state, but instead gave him leadership of the National Distribution Corporation, placing him in charge of rationing essential goods for the Japanese war effort.

• 3. Occupation and Atrocity

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  Japanese military authorities moved quickly to reshape Philippine governance. They organized a Council of State to direct civil affairs, and it was not until October 1943 that they formally declared the Philippines an independent republic. The puppet republic was headed by President Jose P. Laurel. Philippine collaboration in that government had begun earlier under Jorge B. Vargas, who had been appointed mayor of the City of Greater Manila by Quezon before he left. The only political party permitted under the occupation was the Japanese-organized KALIBAPI.

  Beyond the political architecture, the occupation was defined by systematic violence against the Filipino population. More than a thousand Filipinos, including mothers, girls, and gay men, some as young as ten years old, were imprisoned and forced into sexual slavery at installations across the Philippines. Each Japanese military facility maintained what was called a comfort station. One such place was Bahay na Pula. Victims were kidnapped from their communities, routinely subjected to gang rape, torture, and humiliation. Many were murdered. Decades after the war, survivors sought to have their documented enslavement inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, but Japan's government blocked the inscription, using its financial contributions to threaten UNESCO into inaction.

  Japanese personnel also sent individuals described as doctors and surgeons to conduct human experimentation on Filipinos. Procedures included amputations, dissections, live vivisections, and the suturing of blood vessels in living people. Victims were in some cases forced to dig their own graves before the experiments began. Some who were vivisected and sewn back up were then shot dead; others were dumped alive into those graves with their intestines beside them. Most of those who performed these experiments never disclosed what they had done, and the majority remained at large in Japan until retirement. After the war, then-General MacArthur suppressed evidence of Japan's human experimentation program from the war crimes tribunal, and the United States received the experimental data in exchange for that protection of those responsible.

• 4. The Guerrilla War

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  Postwar investigations would eventually show that about 260,000 people were organized into guerrilla units across the Philippines, and that the anti-Japanese underground was even more numerous. By the end of the occupation, Japan controlled only twelve of the forty-eight provinces. That outcome was the result of years of coordinated, dangerous, and often improvised resistance.

  MacArthur, from Australia, formed a clandestine operation to sustain the guerrillas. He had Lieutenant Commander Charles "Chick" Parsons smuggle guns, radios, and supplies to them by submarine. For several months in 1942, all contact with Philippine resistance forces had been lost entirely. Communications were restored in November 1942 when the reformed Philippine 61st Division on Panay island, led by Colonel Macario Peralta, established radio contact with the USAFFE command in Australia. That link allowed intelligence about Japanese forces to flow to the Southwest Pacific Area command and helped unify what had been sporadic, disconnected resistance.

  The island of Mindanao, being farthest from the center of Japanese occupation, concentrated roughly 38,000 guerrillas eventually consolidated under Colonel Wendell Fertig, an American civil engineer. Fertig's force included Americans and Filipinos who had refused to surrender. When General Wainwright had ordered Major General William F. Sharp's forces to stand down, many officers refused, reasoning that Wainwright, now a prisoner who could be considered under duress, lacked authority to give that order. To protect those who stayed behind, the names of new Filipino recruits were deliberately left off surrender lists, and documents were sometimes fabricated to report fewer men than actually remained.

  In Central Luzon, the Hukbalahap, or People's Anti-Japanese Army, was organized in early 1942 under Luis Taruc, a communist party member since 1939. By war's end, the Huks had armed around 30,000 people and extended their control over portions of Tarlac, Pampanga, and Nueva Ecija. Guerrilla activity on Luzon was complicated, however, by the heavy Japanese presence and by infighting, including Hukbalahap units attacking American-led guerrilla forces operating in the same territory.

  By the time of the Leyte invasion, four submarines were dedicated exclusively to delivering supplies to the resistance. At the end of the war, some 277 separate guerrilla units, comprising roughly 260,715 individuals, had taken part in the resistance movement.

• 5. Liberation and Its Cost

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  MacArthur returned to the Philippines on the 20th of October 1944, landing on the island of Leyte with a force of 700 vessels and 174,000 men. Alongside him was Sergio Osmeña, who had assumed the Commonwealth presidency after Quezon died on the 1st of August 1944. The Battle of Leyte Gulf, which broke out in the waters around that island, ended in disaster for Japan and became the largest naval battle of the entire Second World War. The kamikaze corps had been created specifically to defend the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.

  From Leyte, landings followed on Mindoro, then around Lingayen Gulf on the western side of Luzon, and the drive toward Manila began. Japanese General Yamashita had planned to trap MacArthur's army, but intelligence gathered by the guerrilla network revealed those fortifications in time. The Philippine Commonwealth troops and recognized guerrilla units rose up across the islands for the final offensive. One guerrilla unit came to substitute for a complete American division; others of battalion and regimental size supplemented US Army operations throughout the campaign. The cooperative civilian population eased the immense logistical demands of supply, construction, and civil administration.

  Fighting was especially fierce in the mountains of northern Luzon and in Manila itself, where Japanese troops fought a last-ditch resistance that reduced the city to rubble. Combat continued until Japan's formal surrender on the 2nd of September 1945.

  The toll was staggering. An estimated 527,000 Filipinos, military and civilian, died from all causes during the occupation; of those, between 131,000 and 164,000 were killed in seventy-two documented war crime events. That figure breaks down to roughly 27,000 military dead, 141,000 massacred, 22,500 forced labor deaths, and 336,500 deaths from war-related famine. US casualties were 10,380 dead and 36,550 wounded. Japanese dead numbered 255,795. Before the war, the Philippines had been the second richest country in Asia after Japan. In the five years that followed liberation, the Philippine population shrank continuously as disease spread and basic necessities remained out of reach.