Philippines campaign (1941–1942)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Philippines campaign of 1941-1942 opened in the pre-dawn hours of the 8th of December 1941, just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Japanese bombers appeared over Clark Field near Manila and found nearly every American heavy bomber sitting on the ground. In a 45-minute attack, the United States lost half its aircraft in the Philippines. What followed would stretch into five months of fighting, surrenders, and suffering on a scale that led historians to call it the worst military defeat in American history. About 23,000 U.S. military personnel and roughly 100,000 Filipino soldiers were killed or captured. This is the story of how Japan planned to neutralize the Philippines in days, and how American and Filipino defenders turned that plan into a prolonged ordeal that altered the wider Pacific War.

• 2. Japan's Strategic Design

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  Captain Ishikawa Shingo, a hard-liner in the Imperial Japanese Navy, toured the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia in 1936, cataloguing the raw materials Japan's armed forces would need. His tour helped fuel the ambition that would crystallize years later into a formal military operation. The Southern Expeditionary Army was created on the 6th of November 1941, placed under General Hisaichi Terauchi, a former minister of war. Its mission was to seize sources of raw materials in Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies while the Combined Fleet neutralized the American Pacific Fleet.

  The Philippines invasion had four specific objectives: denying U.S. forces an advance base, acquiring staging areas for operations against the Dutch East Indies and Guam, securing the lines of communication back to the Japanese home islands, and limiting Allied counteroffensives toward Australia and the Solomon Islands. Terauchi assigned the operation to the 14th Army under Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma. Air support was provided by the 5th Air Group under Lieutenant General Hideyoshi Obata, transferred from Manchuria to Formosa. The amphibious component fell to the Philippines Force under Vice Admiral Ibo Takahashi, drawing on the Third Fleet. Combined army and navy air strength allocated to the landings came to 541 aircraft.

  The 14th Army's two lead divisions were the 48th, specially trained in amphibious operations and considered one of the army's best units, assigned to the main landing at Lingayen Gulf, and the 16th, staged from the Ryukyus and Palau, assigned to Lamon Bay. Alongside four tank regiments, five field artillery battalions, and an unusually strong complement of combat engineers, Homma had a force designed to move fast. The Japanese planned to be done quickly. They were not.

• 3. A Defense Built on Shortfalls

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  General Douglas MacArthur was recalled from retirement by the War Department and named commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East on the 26th of July 1941. He inherited a defense built largely on reservists. MacArthur had spent two years before his 1937 retirement as military advisor to the Philippine Commonwealth, and he knew well what the army lacked: training, equipment, and organization.

  MacArthur requested 84,500 M1 Garand rifles to replace the World War I-era M1917 Enfields carried by Philippine Army troops. The War Department denied the request, citing production difficulties. The reserve divisions had only 20 percent of their artillery requirements, and plans to address the gap came too late. An estimated 70 dialects among the army's ethnic groups complicated training between American cadres and Filipino troops. By the outbreak of war, only two-thirds of the planned force had been mobilized, though additions continued until the total reached roughly 130,000 men.

  The aviation arm, the Far East Air Force, commanded by Major General Lewis H. Brereton, was the largest U.S. Army Air Forces combat organization outside the United States. Its primary striking power was 91 serviceable P-40 Warhawk fighters and 34 B-17 Flying Fortress bombers. The navy contribution from Admiral Thomas C. Hart's Asiatic Fleet included 23 modern submarines, one heavy cruiser, two light cruisers, and thirteen World War I-era destroyers. The U.S. 4th Marine Regiment, which had been stationed in Shanghai since the late 1920s, arrived in the Philippines on the 30th of November 1941 and was posted to Corregidor. The older shore batteries on Corregidor and its sister forts, most built around 1910-1915, were largely unprotected against air attack except by camouflage.

• 4. The Opening Catastrophe

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  News of the Pearl Harbor attack reached the Philippines at 02:20 local time on the 8th of December 1941. Brigadier General Richard Sutherland, MacArthur's chief of staff, heard about it from a commercial radio broadcast at 03:30. Major General Brereton reported to headquarters at 05:00 and tried to see MacArthur without success, then recommended to Sutherland that the FEAF launch bombing missions against Formosa. Authorization was withheld.

  Japanese plans to attack Clark and Iba Fields were delayed six hours by fog at Formosa bases. That gap was not exploited. Through a sequence of disputed decisions, authorization for the first American air strike was not approved until 10:15, for an attack just before sunset. The B-17s at Clark Field were ordered to land and prepare for the afternoon mission. All three pursuit squadrons ran short on fuel and broke off their patrols at the same time. At 11:27 and 11:29, the radar post at Iba Field detected two incoming raids while the nearest was still 130 miles out, but confusion at the command level left the warning reaching only the pursuit group commander, Major Orrin L. Grover, who was overwhelmed by conflicting reports.

  When Japanese bombers of the 11th Air Fleet attacked Clark Field at 12:40, they achieved tactical surprise. Two squadrons of B-17s sat dispersed on the ground. The first wave of 27 Nell bombers struck the P-40s of the 20th Pursuit Squadron as they were preparing to taxi; only four managed to get airborne before bombs began falling. A second attack of 26 Betty bombers followed, then Zero fighters strafed the field for 30 minutes. When it was over, 12 of the 17 American heavy bombers present had been destroyed and three others seriously damaged. A near-simultaneous attack on the auxiliary field at Iba by 54 Betty bombers destroyed all but four of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron's P-40s. The Far East Air Force lost half its planes in 45 minutes and was, in practical terms, finished as a fighting force.

• 5. Retreat to Bataan

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  The main Japanese landing came early on the morning of the 22nd of December, when 43,110 men of the 48th Division and one regiment of the 16th Division landed at three towns along the eastern shore of Lingayen Gulf, supported by artillery and approximately 90 tanks. General Wainwright's 11th and 71st Divisions, poorly trained and equipped, could neither repel the landings nor pin the enemy on the beaches. By nightfall on the 23rd of December the Japanese had pushed 10 miles inland. The next day, 7,000 men of the 16th Division landed at Lamon Bay in southern Luzon and began driving north toward Manila.

  On the 24th of December, MacArthur invoked the prewar Orange 3 plan, which called for a fighting withdrawal through five delaying positions in central Luzon while forces fell back into the Bataan Peninsula. Nine days of frantic supply movement began, primarily by barge from Manila, in an attempt to stockpile enough food and ammunition for an anticipated force of 43,000 troops for six months. Ultimately 80,000 troops and 26,000 civilians flooded Bataan, far exceeding the estimates. MacArthur declared Manila an open city on the 26th of December, but the Japanese ignored the declaration and bombed it anyway.

  The withdrawal depended on holding the steel bridges at Calumpit over the Pampanga River and the junction at San Fernando. Philippine Scout engineers demolished those bridges on the 1st of January after the South Luzon Force had crossed. The M3 Stuart tanks of the Provisional Tank Group and supporting 75mm halftrack batteries were the last units to enter Bataan, stopping Japanese thrusts repeatedly during the final withdrawals despite 50 percent losses in the 194th Tank Battalion.

• 6. The Battle of Bataan

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  From the 7th to the 14th of January 1942, the Japanese prepared to assault the main American-Filipino battle line running from Abucay to Mount Natib to Mauban. At a critical moment in this preparation, they replaced the veteran 48th Division with the much less capable 65th Brigade, a garrison force not designed for offensive combat. The 48th was pulled back for redeployment to the Netherlands East Indies, along with the 5th Air Group, which was withdrawn from Philippine operations on the 5th of January.

  The defenders held. Filipino and American forces repelled Japanese night attacks near Abucay, and elements of the Philippine Division counterattacked on the 16th of January. On the 8th of February, General Homma suspended offensive operations to reorganize, pulling his line back several miles to the north on the 22nd of February. The result of the engagements in January and February, including the Battle of the Points and the Battle of the Pockets, was the complete destruction of all three battalions of the Japanese 20th Infantry Regiment.

  But the defenders were being consumed. Malnutrition and disease spread through the peninsula as the naval blockade tightened. On the 20th of March, at a rural railway station on his way to Australia after President Roosevelt ordered him there to become Supreme Allied Commander Southwest Pacific Area, MacArthur made the declaration that would follow him for years: "I came through and I shall return." General Wainwright assumed command on the 23rd of March. Beginning on the 28th of March, a new wave of Japanese air and artillery attacks hit forces already weakened by months of insufficient food and sickness. On the 8th of April, the 57th Infantry Regiment and the 31st Division were overrun near the Alangan River. The defenders on Bataan surrendered on the 9th of April 1942.

• 7. Corregidor and the Final Surrender

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  Corregidor held Manila Bay's entrance against Japanese control for weeks after Bataan fell. The island, formally designated Fort Mills, was defended by 11,000 personnel including the 4th Marine Regiment, U.S. Navy personnel deployed as infantry, and survivors who had escaped from Bataan. Its older seacoast gun batteries, built to repel attack from the sea, proved vulnerable to Japanese air power. Early in 1942, Japanese air command equipped its bombers with oxygen systems to fly above the range of Corregidor's anti-aircraft guns, after which heavier bombardment began.

  In December 1941, Philippine President Manuel L. Quezon, MacArthur, and other senior officials had taken shelter in the island's Malinta Tunnel. In March 1942, U.S. Navy submarines arrived on the north side of Corregidor, bringing mail, orders, and weapons, and taking away the highest-ranking American and Filipino government officers, along with gold and silver reserves and important records.

  The Japanese began their final assault with an artillery barrage on the 1st of May. On the night of the 5th to the 6th of May, two battalions of the Japanese 61st Infantry Regiment landed at the northeast end of the island. Despite strong resistance, they established a beachhead reinforced by tanks and artillery, pushing the defenders back toward Malinta Hill. Late on the 6th of May, General Wainwright asked Homma for terms. Homma demanded surrender of all Allied forces in the Philippines. Wainwright, believing those still on Corregidor would be killed otherwise, accepted. By the time the last positions fell, eighteen U.S. Army generals had surrendered to Japanese forces, and four generals serving as prisoners of war would die in captivity.

• 8. What the Delay Cost Japan

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  General Homma's victory was not celebrated at Imperial General Headquarters. Premier Hideki Tojo and his colleagues dismissed Homma's performance as inefficient, faulting him for failing to defeat the Americans on the Japanese timetable. Homma was recalled to Tokyo and assigned as a reserve officer. The campaign had in fact cost Japan considerably more than anticipated.

  In early January 1942, Japanese planners had already decided to accelerate operations in Borneo and Indonesia, withdrawing their best division and the bulk of their airpower from the Philippines to do so. This left Homma without the forces he needed and extended the fighting. The fall of Corregidor on the 6th of May denied Japan use of Manila Bay's harbor facilities for months. While offensive operations in the Dutch East Indies went ahead without major disruption, the extended Philippines campaign severely hindered operations in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. That delay gave the U.S. Navy time to plan and execute its response at Guadalcanal rather than much further east. The Philippine-American resistance lasting from the invasion through the fall of Bataan on the 9th of April 1942 ran 105 days.

  For the men who surrendered, the campaign's end was the beginning of something worse. The Bataan Death March, the Japanese prison camps, and the unmarked ships used to transport prisoners to Japan as slave labor killed thousands more. On the 7th of September 1944, one such vessel was sunk with the loss of 668 prisoners; only 82 survived. American and Filipino guerrillas continued fighting through the occupation, and the campaign to recapture the Philippines began in 1944 with landings on Leyte. On the 29th of January 1945, U.S. and Philippine forces liberated prisoners in the Raid at Cabanatuan.