by Ian W. Toll
That action off Balikpapan was a tactical victory for the Allies, but also a disappointment inasmuch as nine of twelve Japanese transports survived the attack. Having achieved complete surprise, the attackers could have done better. Many of the American torpedoes missed their targets and many more likely hit but failed to explode. The attack did not prevent the important port and oil fields at Balikpapan from falling into the enemy’s hands. The victory provided a welcome interruption to the deluge of bad news, but it did nothing to check the speed of the Japanese offensive into the Dutch East Indies, and it was the last significant accomplishment of the ABDA fleet.
IN THE PHILIPPINES, General MacArthur’s Manila headquarters had recovered its equilibrium after the chaotic first days of the war, when Luzon’s sea and air bases had been pulverized by Japanese airstrikes. The imperious general hoped to rally his combined American and Filipino army to meet the Japanese invasion forces advancing on Manila from their beachheads.
Forty years of war planning had envisioned that the defenders would pull back behind fortified lines bisecting the neck of the Bataan Peninsula, which commanded the sea approaches to Manila Bay. There they would dig in and await rescue by a seaborne convoy to be brought across the Pacific under the wing of the U.S. Navy. But MacArthur, charged with preparing the Filipino army to assume full responsibility for the nation’s defense after 1946, could not stomach a plan that yielded the country to a foreign invader. He hoped instead to meet and annihilate the Japanese forces at their beachheads. Such a strategy would have required (at a minimum) superior airpower, highly mobile infantry divisions, and a Pacific fleet that was both intact and committed to sail to the aid of the Philippines. In fact, none of those conditions existed. After the third day of the war, an American airplane was not often seen in the skies above Luzon. Even if the American-Filipino forces had been trained and equipped to move quickly to contest enemy beachheads (which they were not), the primitive condition of Luzon’s roads made such operations impracticable. Most of the Pacific Fleet had been knocked out of action on December 7—but even if it had not been, the Europe-first strategy ruled out a large-scale rescue of the Philippines until 1943 at the earliest. Pulling the army back to Bataan was the only move that made any sense, and MacArthur should have done it the first week of the war.
The first Japanese troop landings had come ashore in northern Luzon on December 10. A much larger invasion force—some 50,000 troops with weapons, light tanks, and artillery—sailed from Formosa in a huge fleet of some eighty-four freighters and camouflaged troopships, landing at Lingayen Gulf, north of Manila, on December 22. Reiji Masuda, a merchant marine officer on the freighter Arizona-maru, recalled that the invasion convoy sailed “in two long lines extending beyond the horizon in both directions.” The American submarine force, which had survived the early airstrikes, was expected to mete out heavy punishment on any enemy invasion convoys that approached the Philippines, but their performance was disappointing. A late sighting report did not give the boats sufficient time to move into position, and they could not maneuver freely in the shallow inland waters of the Lingayen Gulf.
A few U.S. Army B-17s and Navy PBYs appeared and managed to get some licks in on the convoy as it disgorged its troops, but casualties were minimal. Greater Japanese losses were sustained as a result of choppy seas and high winds, as several boats were overturned by breaking waves near the beach. “The swells were high,” Masuda recalled. “It was terribly difficult to load soldiers and supplies on the bobbing boats. Enemy planes struck us at dawn, aiming primarily at the beachhead. Bullets from strafing planes chased our boats to the shore. Arizona-maru poured fire into the sky. We saw enemy planes spiraling down, trailing smoke. Our ship was rocked by the concussions of exploding bombs and the force of walls of water striking our sides. Most of the ships, however, unloaded successfully and the landing force began its drive on Manila.”
It was the largest and most successful amphibious troop landing up to that point in history. The force got ashore with most of its artillery and supplies and about half of its tanks. The way to Manila now was open along Route 3, a paved road, one of the best in the country. The Japanese army advanced rapidly, brushing aside the green, poorly equipped conscripts of the Philippine army, who broke ranks and ran for their lives with distressing regularity. Artillery units manned by American troops were left exposed to withering frontal attacks by the Japanese banzai charges. MacArthur was besieged with requests from his commanders in the field for permission to withdraw.
On the 24th, a second Japanese force came ashore at Lamon Bay, sixty miles southeast of Manila on the east coast of Luzon. That came as a cruel surprise. Now two Japanese armies were advancing on the capital in a great pincer movement from two directions. General MacArthur, at his headquarters in Manila, saw the writing on the wall. He cabled a series of anxious missives to Washington. Could he be reinforced? He urgently needed more airpower. Could planes be ferried up from Australia? Could aircraft carriers get within range of the islands? General Marshall replied that assistance of any kind was unlikely. MacArthur was forced to fall back on War Plan Orange (WPO), the decades-old plan of abandoning Manila and staging a fighting retreat to Bataan, where the army would dig in for a long siege behind fortified lines. He declared the capital an “open city” and issued the order: “Put WPO-3 into effect.” MacArthur told his air chief, General Lewis H. Brereton, to send the remaining B-17s out of harm’s way. “You go on south. You can do me more good with the bombers you have left and those you should be receiving soon than you can here.”
MacArthur and his staff folded up shop and sailed in an old coal steamer across the bay to Corregidor Island off Bataan. Filipino president Manuel Quezon, who was suffering from tuberculosis, made the agonizing decision to go with MacArthur—he feared for the fate of the Filipino people but was unwilling to act as a collaborator. The troops traveled north on Route 3 in long disorderly convoys of trucks, buses, jeeps, and even oxcarts. Horses and donkeys were enlisted to haul artillery pieces. The army shared the road with tens of thousands of civilian refugees on foot. Smoke rose above the dying capital, the work of looters and perhaps fifth columnists. It was Christmas Eve. At St. Fernando, the flow of civilians, troops, and vehicles out of the city met the southward torrent of retreating troops and civilian refugees who were scrambling to get out of the way of the advancing Japanese armies. Those two groups met and turned south together, like tributaries of a river, to the peninsula. The defensive lines held long enough to allow most of the forces engaged to move back through them before drawing back into Bataan.
The Japanese appear to have been caught by surprise by the retreat, and their air forces were strangely quiescent. Strafing attacks on the densely packed road to Bataan could have taken a devastating toll, but for once in the campaign no enemy planes appeared. Had the Japanese even knocked out a few key bridges, a large portion of MacArthur’s forces might never have reached the relative safety of the peninsula. Many Filipinos had deserted the army, but those who remained fought with courage and fortitude, so the loss of their less determined comrades had the effect of raising the overall quality of the troops that got to Bataan.
The first Japanese troops entered Manila unopposed on January 2, 1942. Storefronts were boarded up; gangs of native looters were at work in some of the deserted storehouses; crowds of civilians stood and watched in stunned silence. At the house of the American high commissioner, the Japanese lowered the American flag in a military ceremony, and a Japanese sailor ground his feet into it. The Rising Sun was raised in its place, as a band played Kimigayo. General Masaharu Homma, the Japanese army commander, had made the mistake of believing that should his forces occupy Manila, the battle for the Philippines would be as good as won. He was slow to realize that the big fight was going to take place across the bay.
MacArthur’s forces dug in behind the Abucay-Mauban line, which cut across the northern end of the peninsula and across the flank of an extinct volcano known as Moun
t Natib. Many of the front-line troops were elite Filipino units, determined to redeem the poor performance of their countrymen in the fight for Lingayen Gulf. MacArthur, who had received clear signals from Washington that he should not expect much in the way of timely aid, nonetheless told his troops on January 15, “Help is on the way from the United States. Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched. . . . No further retreat is possible. We have more troops in Bataan than the Japanese have thrown against us; our supplies are ample; a determined defense will defeat the enemy’s attack. I call upon every soldier in Bataan to fight in his assigned position, resisting every attack. This is the only road to salvation. If we fight, we will win; if we retreat, we will be destroyed.”
Probing Japanese attacks on the eastern end of the line brought heavy fighting on January 9. The defenders fought tenaciously and repulsed those first attacks, and in those actions some of the Filipino troops fought with remarkable valor. In the ensuing days, however, Japanese attacks on the western end of the line, followed by ferocious counterattacks by the 51st Philippine Army Division, opened a breach in the defensive positions. Troops under Colonel Susumu Takechi punched a hole in the Abucay line and drove deep into the Abo-Abo river valley. Spirited counterattacks could not dislodge the Japanese. After observing conditions on the line, Lieutenant General Richard Sutherland recommended that troops should withdraw to the Bagoc-Orion line, which ran between two towns of those names, and MacArthur quickly ordered the pullback.
On January 24, the Allied forces poured southward. It was a chaotic retreat, as thousands of soldiers were separated from their units and arrived haphazardly behind the lines. But there was little sign of enemy bombers or fighters, which could have done grievous harm to the troops exposed en masse on the roads. By January 26, the men were securely positioned behind the pillboxes, trenches, and bunkers of the Bagoc-Orion line, and resupplied effectively from the rear by footpaths through the jungle. The American-Filipino forces were well aware that they had been driven back into a peninsula that might be their death trap. By insisting on stopping the invasion at the beaches MacArthur had lost valuable time, and in the overdue rush to effect WPO-3, the army had not managed to transfer all available ammunition, food, and medical supplies to the peninsula. Almost immediately the troops were put on half-rations. But they were secure for the moment—more so than at the northern line—and so long as they held out, big shore guns commanded the entrance to Manila Bay, denying its use to the ships of the enemy.
In late January and February, repeated frontal attacks on the American-Filipino lines led to heavy losses for the Japanese, and amphibious landings on the west coast of the peninsula also resulted in bloody repulses. The Japanese initially underestimated the number of American-Filipino troops on Bataan at no more than 25,000, but there were more than three times that many. And they fought hard. They did not break and run as they had in earlier skirmishes on Luzon—they remained hunkered down behind their lines, and met the Japanese infantry attacks with heavy artillery barrages. By mid-February, General Homma had lost 7,000 troops in the battle for Bataan, and his requests to Tokyo for reinforcements had been spurned. Homma was under pressure to extinguish resistance and declare the entire nation pacified. The army’s “face” was at stake, and no less a figure than Hirohito was demanding quick action to snuff out resistance. Those considerations would grow more acute with the conquest of Singapore in mid-February. Homma’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Masami Maeda, argued that the correct strategy was to lay siege to the peninsula and wait for the tens of thousands of men trapped there to eat through their provisions, at which point they would probably surrender without a fight. But a long siege was not acceptable to General Tojo, whose cables made clear that Homma must either attack or be relieved.
President Quezon was incensed by the evidence, readily garnered from reports picked up by shortwave radio in his Corregidor bunker, that the Allies were committed to a Europe-first strategy. “Que demonio!” he cried, after listening to such a broadcast in early February. “How typical of America to writhe in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while a daughter is being raped in the back room!” He was further enraged by reports, denied by MacArthur, that Filipino troops on Bataan were receiving lesser rations than their American counterparts. Quezon, with the unanimous support of his cabinet, proposed giving himself up to the Japanese as a prisoner of war and declaring the Philippines neutral and independent. In that position, he might bargain for the welfare of his people under a prolonged Japanese occupation. MacArthur, who was personally close to Quezon, forwarded the proposal (dated February 8, 1942) to Washington with his qualified endorsement, observing that it “might offer the best possible solution of what is about to be a disastrous debacle.”
When the cable was received at the White House, however, President Roosevelt did not give it a moment’s consideration. “We can’t do this at all,” he told Marshall and Stimson. There could be no separate peace with the Japanese. The president was adamant that Bataan must be defended to the last man, and the Philippines must suffer under occupation until they could be liberated by force. Before that day, Marshall had privately doubted whether the amiable New Dealer in a wheelchair was up to the task of waging a world war, but now he grasped that Roosevelt was capable of utter ruthlessness. “I immediately discarded everything I had held in my mind to his discredit,” he said. “I decided he was a great man.”
In reply to Quezon, Roosevelt evaded the question of reinforcements for the Philippines, but instead emphasized that the great bulk of American aircraft, troops, and other war assets were being sent to the Pacific in the early months of the war. That was true enough. By mid-March, 79,000 troops were scheduled to sail for the Pacific, more than four times the number scheduled for Europe. Though offering no specific commitments for the reinforcement of Bataan, Roosevelt gave Quezon his unequivocal pledge to liberate the Philippines. “So long as the flag of the U. S. flies on Filipino soil . . . it will be defended by our own men to the death. Whatever happens to the present American garrison we shall not relax our efforts until the forces which are now marshalling outside the Philippines return to the Philippines and drive out the last remnant of the invaders from your soil.” This message apparently had the desired effect on Quezon, who swore that he would stand by America until the war was won.
The Philippines were done for, but no one was willing to say it out loud. MacArthur’s forces on Bataan were expected to hold out as long as they could, perhaps to be annihilated. Their sacrifice would buy time for the stabilization of theaters in the south and east. MacArthur himself would lead the eventual counteroffensive from Australia. On March 11, by order of the president, MacArthur left Corregidor with his senior staff, his wife, and his four-year-old son. They fled under cover of darkness in a PT boat to Min-danao, and there boarded a dilapidated B-17 for the long flight to Australia.
MacArthur was considerably less popular among his own beleaguered forces on Bataan and Corregidor than he was among the American press and public, who had lapped up every word of his grandiloquent press communiqués. Before his departure his men had taken to calling him “Dugout Doug,” a reference to his practice of remaining holed up in a bunker on Corregidor and never showing himself among them. After he left for Australia, rumors circulated that MacArthur had taken a large amount of luggage crammed with money, food, and superfluous luxury items, rather than make more room on the plane for others to escape. Those rumors were greatly embellished and largely unfair. However, it is a fact that MacArthur received, by order of President Quezon on January 3, 1942, a payment of $500,000 from the Philippine treasury. Three of his senior staff officers accepted smaller gratuities, amounting in total to $140,000. There is evidence that Roosevelt and Stimson knew of the transactions and did not object to them.
General Jonathan Wainwright, who remained on Corregidor, was promptly promoted to lieutenant general and given nominal command of all Allied forces in the Philippines. But
Wainwright was not confident about the prospects of holding out for long—he cabled the War Department to say that if the forces on Bataan did not receive relief supplies by mid-April, they would be verging on starvation and probably would have little choice but to surrender. Conditions among the men on Bataan grew steadily worse throughout February and March. Rations were reduced from one half to one third. Cavalry horses and mules were slaughtered and devoured. Not only malnutrition but illness sapped the men’s strength: Bataan was rife with malarial swamps, and dysentery spread widely among their numbers. Supplies of quinine dwindled and then ran out entirely by the end of March. Sick men died in their hospital beds, untreated for lack of medicines. The journalist Frank Hewlett penned a verse that was soon taken up throughout the ranks as a sardonic anthem:
We’re the battling bastards of Bataan:
No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,
No pills, no planes or artillery pieces,
And nobody gives a damn.
IN MALAYA, the British had been far too confident. The first weeks of the war brought a sequence of sudden, catastrophic defeats on land, on sea, and in the air. To say that morale was poor among the British Commonwealth forces does not quite do the theme justice; between the outset of war and the surrender of Singapore ten weeks later, they suffered something akin to a mass psychological collapse. One can speculate that time, leadership, and a timely victory or two might have retrieved the ugly situation. But time was scarce, leadership was lacking, and all the victories belonged to the invaders.
