D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  BATAAN

  To win the war that Pearl Harbor had begun the United States would send over two million men to the Pacific and launch over a hundred amphibious invasions—D-Days in the Pacific—against the widely scattered island garrisons of Japan’s oceanic empire. But far into 1942, it was the Imperial Japanese forces that were the masters of amphibious conquest. In an ocean expanse dominated by their fast-striking navy, they reeled off a shocking succession of territorial conquests, all of them sea-to-land invasions.

  To students of Japanese history, this Pacific blitzkrieg should not have been surprising. “For twenty-six hundred years, Japan had no war on its own soil,” the Japanese ambassador to Berlin told Hitler after the attack on Pearl Harbor. “All wars that Japan was forced to fight were conducted outside the Japanese islands, each time in conjunction with amphibious operations.”51 Japan’s victories in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) were achieved by a lethal combination of land and sea assault. And in the succeeding decades, army and navy units conducted extensive amphibious training operations, developed new landing boats with ramps and exit rails for assault troops, and fashioned an impressive body of doctrine on modern amphibious warfare.

  Japan first tested this new method of warfare on a massive scale in the months after Pearl Harbor. Landing at night whenever possible, and at lightly defended points, with heavy naval and air support, Japanese troops—many of them carrying bicycles on their backs—swept across scores of Pacific beaches, moved inland with dramatic suddenness, and began to fight independently before later and larger waves of troops arrived at the anchorage. By the time the United States could mount a counterattack, Japan held a string of island fortresses and economic colonies that stretched across the Pacific, east to west, from the Gilbert Islands to the Philippines, and north to south, from the icebound Aleutians to the mountainous jungles of New Guinea. It was a stunning assault that paralyzed the American and British fleets, overpowered the Allies’ ground forces, and placed Japan’s sea, air, and ground forces on Australia’s doorstep—all within five months.

  On the morning that Pearl Harbor was attacked the Japanese bombed Singapore and sent troops from Siam (now Thailand) toward Malaya in preparation for a full-scale assault on the fortress city. Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, commander of the British Far Eastern Fleet, put to sea with the battle cruiser Repulse and the battleship Prince of Wales to prevent an amphibious landing in northern Malaya. As the two ships steamed northward, Japanese warplanes sank them on December 10.

  Even as the Repulse and the Prince of Wales went down, a Japanese task force was approaching the Philippines, determined to smash, in one sudden blow, the only enemy of consequence in its arc of aggression. Senior commander General Douglas MacArthur anticipated an attack. Work on new airfields was going forward and troop and aircraft reinforcements—mostly B-17 heavy bombers—were on the way from the United States, but all this was too late. After reading an incoming report on Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant Edwin Ramsey went to the officers club for a drink with the Army chief of intelligence for the island. “‘Lieutenant, are you religious,’ he asked me. ‘No sir, not particularly,’ I answered. Then he said, ‘I think you better give your soul to God because your ass belongs to the Japanese.’”52

  Nine hours after the Hawaiian assault an air armada descended on Clark and Iba fields, near Manila, and destroyed most of the American planes on the ground. “At 12:35 in the afternoon … we heard the airplanes,” recalled Lester I. Tenney, a Jewish kid from Chicago whose tank battalion was in position around Clark Airfield, expecting the landing of Japanese paratroopers. “As we looked up into the sky, we saw … bombers flying very high over Clark Field. Just as I was about to say, ‘They’re not ours,’ the ground beneath us shook … the war we feared was upon us.”53

  MacArthur’s “failure in this emergency is bewildering,” writes biographer William Manchester. We will probably never know why he allowed his Air Force to be slaughtered like sitting ducks because, as Manchester notes, “we know little about his actions and nothing of his thoughts that terrible morning.”54 Arrogant, iron-willed sixty-one-year-old Douglas MacArthur, whose father had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Civil War and whose own Army career was a succession of stunning achievements, was never forthright about this humiliating disaster, one of the greatest in American military history. Nor was there ever an official inquiry, although Pearl Harbor was the subject of eight investigations.

  After hitting Pearl Harbor, the Japanese expected MacArthur’s Air Force to attack their vulnerable air base in Formosa. “We put on our gas masks,” a Japanese officer recalled, “and prepared for an attack.”55 But orders for the Formosa mission were inexplicably stalled, and when the Japanese struck Clark Field the B-17 Flying Fortresses, along with the rest of the air fleet, were sitting wingtip to wingtip, with no fighter cover, while their pilots and crews were having lunch.

  With the American Air Force all but destroyed and the Navy’s small force of warships retreating southward, the Japanese landed 50,000 troops at Lingayen, just north of Manila, on December 22, in the largest amphibious operation of its Pacific assault. After his poorly planned strategy to stop the enemy on the beaches collapsed. MacArthur declared Manila an Open City in a futile attempt to save it and fled to the rock fortress of Corregidor, an island at the entrance of Manila Bay. From there, by radio, he commanded a fighting retreat to the wilderness peninsula of Bataan.

  The mountain jungles of Bataan are ideal for defensive fighting. But MacArthur’s Filipino-American army of 80,000 men was poorly armed and desperately low on food. Before long, the troops were eating horses, mules, and monkeys; 20,000 had come down with malaria; and thousands more were stricken with dysentery, scurvy, hookworm, and beriberi.

  General Masaharu Homma, with his formidable Fourteenth Army, had expected to make quick work of Bataan. But in weeks of miserable jungle fighting, American and Filipino troops held him off. After pushing back the initial Japanese offensive, Major General Jonathan Wainwright, the skinny, hard-drinking leader of the jungle defense, reported to MacArthur that barely one quarter of his army was still fit to fight. Men were so sick and hungry they could barely crawl out of their foxholes. The cautious Homma, with a supply line extending back to Japan, settled in for a siege, against the advice of his superiors in Tokyo, who wanted him to launch suicidal attacks.

  A gaunt and weary MacArthur, his wife and three year old son by his side, directed the Battle of Bataan from the 1,400-foot-long Malinta Tunnel, his huge underground command post and hospital on Corregidor, where the stench of gangrene permeated the stale, uncirculated, air. Those around him never questioned his bravery. To the alarm of his family and aides, he would stand out in the open without a helmet, coolly puffing on a Lucky Strike cigarette, as Japanese bombers pounded Corregidor. Yet the brave commander paid only one visit—in a Ford staff car—to his trapped and demoralized army on the Bataan peninsula, only three miles away by water. Perhaps he was ashamed to face his men, for the relief force that Roosevelt had promised to send never arrived.

  Some troops called him “Dugout Doug,” and composed poems that described their own desperate plight—abandoned by Washington because, by agreement with Churchill, priority was to be given to the defeat of Germany. Frank Hewlett, an American correspondent at the front, wrote what was to become the war’s most famous piece of doggerel:

  We’re the battling bastards of Bataan;

  No mamma, no papa, no Uncle Sam;

  No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces;

  No rifles, no planes, or artillery pieces;

  And nobody gives a damn.

  After Roosevelt and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson privately informed Churchill that they considered MacArthur’s army doomed, Stimson wrote in his diary: “There are times when men have to die.”56

  But not Douglas MacArthur. He had become an American hero, commander of the only Allied army still holding out against Japan. A maste
r of public relations, MacArthur’s official dispatches gave all the credit to himself for the defense of the Philippines.

  Roosevelt abhorred MacArthur—both the man and his conservative politics—but was counting on him to lead the upcoming counteroffensive in the Pacific. Others, including MacArthur’s former aide, Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower, admonished him severely from his staff position in Washington—mostly in private—for being caught unprepared by the enemy and losing most of the B-17 fleet in the Far East.57 Roosevelt obviously needed MacArthur more than he did the men unjustly blamed for the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet, and Lieutenant General Walter Short, the Army commander at Hawaii, both of whom were relieved and subsequently retired from the service.

  General George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, begged MacArthur to leave the Philippines. But MacArthur wired back that he and his family—the wife and son of a soldier—would share the fate of his men. Finally, on February 22, MacArthur received direct orders from Roosevelt to escape to Australia. He stalled until March 11 and then left with his family and staff in a PT boat captained by Lieutenant John D. Bulkeley. After a harrowing 600-mile run through the Japanese blockade, MacArthur and his party arrived on the Philippine island of Mindanao and were flown to Australia. On his arrival in Melbourne he made one of the most famous statements of the war, “The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan. A primary purpose of this is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.”

  The American government asked him to change this to “We shall return.” MacArthur refused. Was it megalomania? Perhaps. But the original author of the phrase, the Filipino journalist Carlos Romulo, informed a MacArthur aide that this pledge was intended for Filipinos, not Americans. “America has let us down and won’t be trusted. But the people still have confidence in MacArthur. If he says he is coming back it will be believed.” The aide told this to MacArthur and he naturally agreed.58

  Back on Bataan, one of his staff, Brigadier General William E. Brougher, spoke for many of those MacArthur had left behind. “A foul trick of deception has been played on a large group of Americans by a Commander in Chief and small staff who are now eating steak and eggs in Australia. God damn them!”59

  Hunger and disease wore down the “Battling Bastards of Bataan” to the point where further resistance was suicidal. “Our stamina was gone,” recalls Lester Tenney, “our food was gone, our health was deteriorating, and our ammunition and gas had just about run out. We were helpless. We troops felt let down, even betrayed. If we had been supplied with enough ammunition and guns, troops, and equipment, and food and medical supplies, we believed that we would have been able to repel the Japanese.”60

  On April 8, the Japanese launched a massive attack on the American lines. General Wainwright, who succeeded MacArthur at Corregidor, ordered a counterattack. It was the last flicker of the flame of defiance. The next day 78,000 American and Filipino troops under Major General Edward P. King, who had replaced Wainwright as commander on Bataan, surrendered to the Japanese. It was the largest surrender by the United States Army in its history.

  A handful of the troops and nurses on Bataan managed to make their way to Corregidor to join the 13,000 defenders of that tunneled island rock. For almost a month the Japanese blasted it from air, sea, and land; and on May 6, they crossed the narrow channel and fought their way to the mouth of the tunnel. Concerned that the enemy would sweep through the tunnel guns blazing, killing his soldiers as well as the courageous American nurses who were caring for them, Wainwright ordered his men to lay down their arms. “In Western civilization, capture has always been viewed as being better than death,” Lester Tenney wrote later. “Our bad luck was that we were being captured by a people from a civilization that believed death was preferable to surrender.”61

  The ancient Japanese code of Bushido admonished warriors not to survive the “dishonor of capture,” but to “fight to the last man.” It did not, however, call for the mistreatment of enemy prisoners. The warlords who took over the Japanese government in the 1930s added that to it, even though the Japanese military had treated prisoners humanely in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 and in World War I. Soldiers of the new regime were fed the idea that they were members of a super race that all other people would eventually have to serve, and that prisoners of war, especially whites, were a species of cowards who deserved to be treated like animals for the dishonorable act of surrender.62

  The prisoners at Bataan and Corregidor were not completely aware of this, but they had heard frightening reports of the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanking—of Chinese women raped and burned alive, and of tortured men left for dead with their penises sewed to their lips. “I was scared spitless,” said Inez McDonald, one of the fifty-four Army nurses captured on Corregidor.63

  When his Japanese captors approached him, Lester Tenney’s “knees began shaking, my hands felt cold and clammy, and sweat broke out on my neck and forehead. We were all scared beyond anything imaginable.”64

  After caring for their patients in the Malinta Tunnel for two months, the nurses were sent to Santo Tomás Internment Camp in Manila, where they suffered hardships and hunger but were not physically molested. The American and Filipino troops on Corregidor were loaded onto freighters, taken to Manila, where they were marched through the streets, and then packed into ovenlike boxcars and shipped to a desolate POW camp. There 2,000 Americans died in the first two months of captivity.

  The men captured on Bataan went through an unimaginable nightmare: the Bataan Death March.

  When the defenders of Bataan surrendered, the Japanese expected to receive about 25,000 prisoners. They were to be marched nineteen miles to a dispatch station and then taken by truck and train sixty-five miles north to Camp O’Donnell, a former training facility for the Philippine army, in central Luzon. But General Homma found himself saddled with three times that number of prisoners, almost all of them sick and starving. Some of them were taken by truck to Camp O’Donnell, but most were forced to walk much of the way under the withering April sun (April is the hottest month in the Philippines) and over sand-covered roads lined with filthy drainage ditches. “The men were in such terrible condition from malnutrition and disease, and pure physical weaknesses from long days of incessant combat, that they didn’t have a chance,” said nurse Hattie Brantley, who had served with them in Bataan.65

  Before they were ordered into line, the men were stripped of canteens, food, and personal items. Japanese guards cut off the fingers of officers to get their West Point rings, and prisoners found with Japanese money were shot, on the assumption that it had been taken from a fallen soldier of the empire. Five prisoners who were too sick to make the march were bayoneted in their beds.

  General Homma had instructed his officers to treat the prisoners well, but the Japanese guards were in an ugly mood. They were exhausted, sick, and hungry, and they had lost comrades on Bataan. They also came from a culture of cruelty. The officer class had the status and authority of “feudal lords,” writes Japanese historian Saburo-Ienaga. The privates had no rights. They were “non-persons,” and were subjected to “an unending stream of humiliation and rough treatment.”66 Japanese military training was “filled … with beatings,” recalls Sakata Tsuyoshi, a retired World War II soldier. Senior officers would regularly inflict physical punishment on the men under them, slapping them, punching them, kicking them, and beating them with the leather straps of their swords, often while other officers stood by laughing. “This method of inflicting brutal punishment without any cause and destroying our power to think was a way of transforming us into men who would carry out our superiors’ orders as a reflex action.”67

  With such training, Japanese soldiers on Bataan did not need orders to inflict violence on prisoners they alrea
dy regarded with complete disdain.

  The American and Filipino prisoners marched four abreast, in long columns, and were given only enough food and water to survive the march. They felt like “walking corpses.” Lester Tenney was one of them:

  ONE DAY OUR TONGUES WERE THICK with the dust kicked up from the constantly passing trucks, and our throats were parched. We saw water flowing from an artesian well, and … a marching buddy, Frank, and I ran toward the well … and started to swallow water as fast as we could….

  Within a few minutes, another ten to fifteen prisoners ran to the well…. At just that time a Japanese guard came over to the well and started to laugh at us. The first five of us drank our fill, and when the sixth man began drinking, the guard suddenly pushed his bayonet down into the man’s neck and back. The American prisoner fell to his knees, gasped for breath, and then fell over on his face….

  Many of the men on the march were just too weak and had too many illnesses to continue. If they stopped on the side of the road to defecate, they would be beaten within an inch of their lives or killed.

  AMERICAN POWS CAPTURED ON BATAAN (NA).

  On the fourth day, as the prisoners entered the town of Balanga, Filipino civilians began throwing them food—rice cakes, small pieces of fried chicken, and chunks of sugarcane. When the guards spotted this they opened fire, killing randomly. The Japanese seemed to take malicious delight in killing Filipinos who had fought with or supported the “white devils.” Lieutenant Kermit Lay saw a Japanese soldier beat to death a Filipino man with a baseball bat; and at one point in the march, Japanese guards rounded up 300 or 400 Filipino soldiers, tied them together with telephone wire, and bayoneted or beheaded them from behind. The slaughter went on for two hours.68