Northeast of the beachhead, in the I Corps sector, advance patrols of the 43rd Division ran into stiff artillery and mortar fire coming from the hills and ridges above the towns of Damortis and San Fernando. General Swift’s I Corps headquarters ordered the division to drive inland and seize these grassy heights. One regiment was assigned the job of clearing Hill 470, directly east, while another seized the ridgeline above Mabilao. Other elements of the force were put “on wheels” to drive up the coastal road. Japanese field artillery and mortars took a steady toll of casualties throughout the afternoon, but the invaders encountered only scattered infantry resistance on the ground. By sunset on January 9, the Americans had expanded the beachhead by 4 miles up the coast, to San Jacinto and Binday.
On the second and third day of the invasion, the 43rd Division launched probing attacks up the valley roads east of San Fabian and Damortis, and along the ridgeline running south to Rosario and the Cabaruan Hills. Everywhere in this sector, the invaders encountered stiffening Japanese resistance on the roads leading into the mountains. Intelligence had revealed that the senior Japanese army commander on the island, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, had established his headquarters in the resort town of Baguio, about 20 miles inland, high in the Cagayan Mountains. The mountain roads were defended by strongly entrenched and well-camouflaged firing positions, caves, and mines. The Americans hit back with heavy artillery, naval call fire, and airstrikes, but the Japanese would not be dislodged except by a concerted attack into that treacherous high ground. It was not to be. Manila, MacArthur’s prime objective, lay in the other direction. According to the boss’s playbook, the main thrust was to the south, into the heart of the Luzon Central Plain and on to the capital. Therefore, General Krueger could do nothing but reinforce his left-flank lines and hope that the Japanese were not preparing an armored counterattack from the mountainous region to the northeast.
By the third day of the operation, the Sixth Army’s beachhead was 20 miles long and 5–7 miles deep, encompassing the entire southern base of the gulf. The equivalent of about fifteen army divisions was on the island, arrayed in lines stretching about 30 miles in length. The placid beaches of Lingayen had been converted into a ship-to-shore depot with the cargo-handling capacity of a large urban seaport. LSTs had nosed onto the beach and opened their clamshell bow doors, and were unloading bulk cargo at an industrial pace. Fully loaded trucks, tractors, and jeeps were driving ashore over pontoon causeways. The beachhead was a teeming maze of stacked crates, fuel drums, parked vehicles, tent cities, and antiaircraft batteries ringed by sandbags. Cantankerous navy beachmasters shouted through bullhorns. Lingayen was to be the only seaport under U.S. control until Manila Bay itself was captured and opened to Allied ship traffic.
The once-pristine cerulean waters of Lingayen Gulf were stained by the accumulated effluent of eight hundred ships. Garbage and debris littered the sea and shore. Distended corpses, nearly all Japanese, floated among the anchored transports. Periodically, cleanup details on garbage scows gathered up the debris and enemy dead and burned it all together on the beach.
Inland of the XIV Corps sector was a lush wetland, crisscrossed by streams and dotted with commercial fish ponds. This sodden terrain presented logistical and engineering difficulties. Around Lingayen town, large sand dunes proved impassable for wheeled vehicles, so bulldozers were pressed into service to clear a level road. Most of the bridges in the area had been destroyed—either by the enemy, friendly Filipino partisans, or U.S. bombing and bombardment. Columns of soldiers waded across streams with their rifles held above their heads. Amphibian tractors were put to work as ferries, crossing swollen streams that were too deep to ford. Engineers built timber bridges to span the deeper crossings. Once properly anchored, they could support the weight of thousands of men, trucks, and tanks. Twenty miles of railroad track on the Damoritas-Rosario line was torn up, and the roadbed was converted into a highway for heavy equipment. On D plus 3, advance patrols reached the Agno River, the first major natural barrier on the army’s route of advance. The engineers quickly assembled two modular steel frame bridges that would support 35 tons of weight.
The route to Manila led through the heart of the Luzon Central Plain, a flat, fertile region of rice paddies, pasturelands, and canefields, watered by a network of streams and irrigation ditches. Enclosed by mountains on either side, it was about 120 miles long from north to south, ranging between 30 and 50 miles wide. It was one of the most productive agricultural regions of the Philippines, dotted with grand plantation houses and little market villages with stone churches overlooking Spanish plazas. It had the best-developed road net in the Philippines, including a two-lane macadam highway intersecting every mile or so with gravel roads running east and west, and two railroad trunk lines. It was a placid, bucolic landscape, bursting with many shades of green: alternating meadows of cogon grass and sunken rice fields, serpentine streambeds flanked by groves of durian and mangosteen trees, elevated huts on riverbanks, thatched with dun-colored nipa palms; grazing black carabao water buffalos, some with white herons perched on their backs; and bamboo-framed sheds with rusty corrugated tin roofs, garlanded with hibiscus and bougainvillea.
At first, the Japanese army offered only token resistance in the low country. Small units armed with light weapons and artillery fired on American scouting parties, then withdrew farther south or east up into the hills. These interim firing positions were set up in irrigation ditches or in clusters of plantation buildings improved with banks of sandbags. Firefights were brief and spasmodic, and they barely affected the tempo of the offensive. Anxious to keep the Sixth Army’s lines stitched up in a single wide front, General Krueger grew concerned at the headlong pace set by Griswold’s XIV Corps in its race toward the capital. Swift’s I Corps had the job of defending the army’s left flank, by keeping Japanese troop concentrations bottled up in the mountains to the northeast. But that meant that Swift had to match Griswold’s pace of advance—and that was proving difficult, because there were not many Japanese standing in XIV Corps’s way. The 37th Division tore down the Lingayen-Bayambang Road, meeting no one but throngs of ebullient Filipino civilians, while the 40th Division thundered south along Highway No. 13, which ran parallel about 10 miles to the west. Progress in the I Corps zone was stymied by stiffer Japanese defenses on the Damortis-Rosario road, where 43rd Division engineers were laboring to clear roads and build bridges while under intense artillery fire—and in the Cabaruan Hills, where the 6th Division ran into heavy fire from well-entrenched positions on a soaring promontory. Eyeing the risk of a Japanese counterattack on his elongated lines, Krueger deployed his reserve force, the 25th Division (less one regiment), to reinforce the 43rd Division.
MacArthur had set up his initial headquarters at Dagupan on Lingayen Gulf, but he spent most of his days on or near the front lines. His jeep drove along long columns of marching soldiers, and soldiers did double-takes as they glimpsed the familiar figure wearing the field marshal’s cap and aviator sunglasses. No fixed timetable had been agreed for the advance, but MacArthur was eager to take Manila as early as possible, partly because he was mindful of the dangers to American prisoners of war and civilian internees held in camps in the city limits. He suspected that Krueger’s concerns about the danger of a counterattack were overblown. On January 12, at a conference of senior commanders on the Boise, still anchored in Lingayen Gulf, MacArthur pressed his Sixth Army chief to speed the advance toward Manila. If XIV Corps was not suffering heavy losses, it should move faster. He interrogated Krueger: “Where are your casualties? Where are they?”8 MacArthur insisted on an early capture of the big airbase that the Japanese called Mabalacat—and the Americans still called Clark Field—so that the Fifth Air Force could begin operating heavy bombers on Luzon. But Krueger remained wary of an armored counterattack from the mountainous northeast, maintaining that “I considered that a precipitate advance toward Manila would probably expose [XIV Corps] to a reverse, and would in any case cause it to outru
n its supply—a serious matter, since all bridges had been destroyed.”9
GENERAL YAMASHITA WAS PESSIMISTIC. The U.S. submarine and air cordon had effectively severed links between Japan and the Philippines, so he could count on no further supplies or reinforcements. He had expected MacArthur to land at Lingayen Gulf, but he had not expected the landings to come so soon. Yamashita had been forced against his will to send his best troops by sea to die on Leyte Island. He still had impressive numbers under his command—about 270,000 Japanese troops and other military personnel were on Luzon—but his forces were scattered widely and fragmented into various and overlapping army and naval commands. The bulk of Japanese ground forces on Luzon were immobilized in defensive pockets in three widely separated mountain ranges. Transportation links were crippled by shortages of vehicles, rolling stock, and fuel—and the situation was exacerbated by Filipino guerilla attacks and sabotage operations against roads, vehicles, and railways. It was only a matter of time before the greater part of the Japanese army would be reduced to semiautonomous conditions, with small units roaming around the country and foraging in the jungles for whatever they could find to eat.
Under these dire circumstances, Yamashita was forced to adopt a static defense. His objective was to hold out for as long as possible, to slow the tide of American conquest as it washed toward the homeland. But Luzon and Manila would sooner or later fall to the invader, no matter what he did, and he knew it.
The largest Japanese troop concentration, the “Shobo Group,” numbering 152,000 men, was in the Cagayan Mountains, northeast of Lingayen Gulf. General Yamashita commanded it directly from his headquarters at Baguio, a resort town located 5,000 feet above sea level. A second group occupied Clark Field, north of Manila, with detachments on Bataan and Corregidor. A third, numbering about 80,000, was entrenched in mountains east of Manila. Smaller detachments were scattered in outlying areas. Yamashita rejected proposals to counterattack MacArthur’s forces in the plains west of the Agno River, reasoning that the attacking columns would be destroyed by superior U.S. artillery and airpower. Instead, he deployed his forces to plug all feasible invasion routes into the Cagayan Mountains. Local commanders elsewhere were told to establish defensive positions in high ground in hopes of “containing the main body of the American forces on Luzon and destroying its fighting strength, and at the same time, [to] prepare for protracted resistance on an independent, self-sufficient basis.”
That left the road to Manila wide open, but Yamashita did not intend to defend the city or its bay. He directed that some 65,000 to 70,000 metric tons of supplies, stockpiled on the Manila waterfront, should be moved to caches in the mountains, where they could supply existing Japanese detachments. After this transfer was completed, the remaining garrison force was to evacuate Manila and withdraw into the more defensible high country east of the city. That was the plan.
As I Corps pushed south and east during the second week of the campaign, the terrain continued to favor the defenders. Japanese artillery was positioned in caves in the sides of hills and ridges, cunningly positioned to keep the advancing columns under enfilade fire from several angles. In towns and road junctions, the Japanese had dug shallow trenches and set up banks of sandbags to protect their machine and antitank guns. In some places, they had buried medium tanks up to their turrets, converting them into fixed artillery emplacements. The Japanese fought with their habitual tenacity, and hard fighting was required to take these positions. The 25th Division encountered fierce resistance in the village of San Manuel, where the Japanese Seventh Tank Regiment launched several armored counterattacks. After two weeks of bloody fighting, the Americans finally took the town and cleaned out the remaining enemy.
MacArthur moved his headquarters down to a sugar refinery in San Miguel, near Tarlac, about 75 miles north of Manila. From there, near the front lines, he continued to press his field commanders to speed the pace of the campaign. On January 17, he ordered Krueger to attack Clark Field. Krueger relayed the order to General Griswold, whose XIV Corps had enough running room to reach and cross the Bamban River on January 23. But the following day, Griswold’s forces ran into an entrenched defensive line north of Fort Stoltenberg, where the ominous shape of Mount Arayat, an inactive volcano, loomed over the plain to the east. Admiral Takijirō Onishi had personally directed the construction of a series of concentric defensive lines around Clark Field. His forces had dug trenches and tank traps; they had extracted machine guns from wrecked planes and transferred them into firing nests; they had set up strong points overlooking Highway No. 3 as it climbed into the foothills to the west.10 On January 27, the 37th Division smashed through the Japanese lines with a tank and infantry attack and captured the airbase, while the 40th Division fought to take out one pillbox and cave at a time in the difficult terrain north and west of Fort Stoltenberg. Retreating Japanese troops left behind a wealth of provisions, supplies, and weaponry. In a communiqué dated January 29, MacArthur enumerated the captured assets, including “ 200 new aircraft engines, many radio transmitters and receivers, great quantities of miscellaneous equipment, several months’ stores of ammunition, food and equipment, and over 40 artillery pieces of various calibers.”11
Filipino guerillas had alerted MacArthur’s headquarters to the existence of a POW camp at Cabanatuan, about 60 miles north of Manila. Several hundred American prisoners were being held there in a barbed-wire stockade. In aerial reconnaissance photographs, the facility appeared to be only lightly guarded. MacArthur authorized a rescue operation. The mission was assigned to the 6th Army’s Ranger Battalion. An Alamo Scouts team was sent on a 14-mile overland trek, traveling light—rifles, BARs, grenades—with orders to conceal themselves in the jungle. The camp guards had withdrawn from the scene, leaving the prisoners alone, but hundreds of other Japanese troops were encamped in the area. At 8:00 p.m. on the night of January 30, the scouts staged a surprise attack on the Japanese camp and quickly killed over two hundred enemy, losing only two rangers killed and one wounded.
Assuming that they were about to be slaughtered by the Japanese, many of the POWS at Cabanatuan were too shocked to celebrate. Their evacuation required traveling nearly 10 miles over open country. Many of the prisoners were too weak or sick to walk, and were loaded into carts pulled by water buffalos. The rangers and 512 liberated POWs returned to American lines on January 31. The former prisoners were placed in care of a 1st Cavalry field hospital that had been set up in a Filipino schoolhouse. Many seemed timid or self-conscious, and flinched when doctors, nurses, or war correspondents tried to engage them in conversation. They ate heartily and gained weight quickly. But their full recovery, physical and psychological, would take time.
To the south, elements of General Eichelberger’s Eighth Army were getting into the fight. On January 29, an amphibious force designated the XI Corps went ashore on the Zambales coast, north of Subic Bay. The landing encountered no opposition, either on the beaches or during its initial inland advance. At Zigzag Pass on Highway No. 7, the Japanese finally made a stand against this new prong of the American offensive. After several days of heavy fighting, the road was cleared and opened. XI Corps poured through the pass and secured the area north of Manila Bay, sealing off the route into the Bataan Peninsula. South of Manila, meanwhile, two regiments of the 11th Airborne Division landed unopposed at Nasugbu and seized a strategic bridge before the Japanese could destroy it. A third regiment, the 511th Parachute, parachuted onto Tagaytay Ridge on the north shore of Lake Taal. The 11th Airborne took control of the southern part of Manila Bay and began advancing north through the capital’s southern suburbs. The force encountered only token Japanese resistance until reaching the town of Imus on February 3. There, a small but determined party of Japanese in a stone building carried on a daylong firefight. Finally a sergeant scaled the building and poured gasoline down through the roof, and then ignited it with a phosphorus grenade. Most of the Japanese were killed; those who attempted to escape the burning building were gunned dow
n as they emerged.
To the north, MacArthur continued to hector Krueger to pick up the pace. His long motorcade of jeeps was often seen racing ahead to the front lines, where he toured advanced positions and conferred with division and regimental commanders. On January 30, after visiting the 37th Division on the road between San Fernando and Calumpit, MacArthur radioed his Sixth Army chief to complain of a “noticeable lack of drive and aggressive initiative.”12 He predicted that an early attack on Manila would surprise the Japanese forces in the city, prompting them to evacuate in haste. In the best-case scenario, the Japanese would declare the capital an open city—as he, MacArthur, had done in December 1941. He was concerned about the fate of thousands of American and Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees in camps at Santo Tomas University, Bilibid Prison, and Los Banos. In December, at a POW camp on the long narrow island of Palawan, Japanese guards had herded 150 starving prisoners into trenches and burned them alive. MacArthur was understandably anxious to prevent more such enormities. The issue was not abstract; he personally knew many of the military and civilian prisoners in and around Manila. At the new SWPA headquarters in Tarlac, General Dick Sutherland made sure that the war correspondents knew where he and the boss stood on the matter. In off-the-record remarks, Sutherland panned Krueger’s cautious attitude, and added: “If I were commanding the Sixth Army, we’d be in Manila right now.”13
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