D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  On the night of October 24 … we began to hear distant cannonading and could see the flash of big gun fire being reflected off low-lying clouds…. The firing increased until it was almost a continuous rumble. It now seemed apparent that a significant naval engagement was taking place off the southeast coast of Leyte. The sound of this gunfire continued until about 0200 the next morning. We had no way of knowing its outcome…. The next day we learned [from a downed Navy pilot] that “Kinkaid had kicked their ass.”

  During the next few days we continued the push to the west…. There is a ridge of mountains running down the center of Leyte that goes up to about 4,500 feet. This is extremely rugged terrain. It is covered with dense tropical growth. When you drop an artillery shell into growth like this it seems to get to tally lost….

  The whole month of November was a miserable time. [Other Army units] had secured the north end of the island but had run into the same problem that we did when trying to push down the west coast to Ormoc. Ormoc was the major town on the west coast and it was through here that the Japanese reinforcements were, being brought in from other islands in the Philippines.

  The Japanese strategy for the defense of Leyte had also changed during this period. Their initial strategy was to save their best for the defense of Luzon, which was politically more significant than Leyte. They now decided to throw everything available into the defense of Leyte. Air strikes from Luzon were increased and the first kamikaze attacks on the supply ships in Leyte harbor were initiated. The Japanese called this new offensive the “Wa Operation.”…

  FIGHTING ON LEYTE, PHILIPPINES (SC).

  It was in our section that [they] launched … the Wa Operation. Their objective was to recapture all of the airstrips on eastern Leyte and to bring their planes to these strips to support this offensive. What a stupid thing to do. These airstrips were a sea of mud and therefore worthless….

  [During this offensive] an incoming mortar round [hit our position.] I knew immediately that the company commander and platoon sergeant were dead. My left eye filled with blood so I had a problem assessing any further damage. I lay there for a minute, sort of numbed by what had happened. It was getting dark. I then became aware of someone trying to move me. My left leg hurt and was bleeding. A medic cut my pant leg and found a piece of shrapnel sticking in my fibula. He pulled it out and put on a compress to stop the bleeding.

  Just when I was thinking that my situation wasn’t that bad, I felt a pain in my lower abdomen. The medic took a quick look with a flashlight. I had been gutshot….

  I was quite sure I was going to die. Morning did come though and I was still alive. Three others were not. I somehow got loaded onto the back of a weapons carrier and made the bumpy ride to the battalion aid station. The doctor took a quick look at me and tagged me to go to the field hospital….

  My seventh day I was allowed to go back to my unit for “light duty.” It was now approaching the middle of December. The 77th Division had assaulted Ormoc and taken it. The Japanese on Leyte were now cut off from receiving outside support from the other islands in the Philippines….

  I had about a dozen letters from my parents and my fiancée…. We had decided to wait until after the war to get married. I read the last letter from her first. Her opening paragraph began, “When you read this I’m sure you’ll understand.” … Here I lay on some far, distant battlefield and all the while she was with another man. She said since she hadn’t heard from me for such a long time she assumed that I had lost interest in her….

  On the 15th of December General MacArthur declared that Leyte was secured and the fighting had ended. It’s too bad he wasn’t there to see what was going on because the fighting wasn’t over. There were still thousands of Japanese soldiers on Leyte and they did not plan to surrender. It wasn’t until [March 1945] that the Japanese on Leyte were neutralized. [Between Christmas Day and the end of the campaign the Americans killed more than 27,000 Japanese.]

  By mid-January … we got some good news. We were no longer part of MacArthur’s command and therefore would not be going to Luzon. Our destination was Okinawa, another place I had never heard of.

  For his service in World War II—and the Korean War—Linwood Crider received twelve military decorations and awards, including a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and a Presidential Citation. “All my awards were for merit,” he says today. “I got none for valor. I am not a hero.”11

  Sixty-five thousand Japanese soldiers died to hold Leyte, killing or wounding 15,500 Americans. Many of these boys breathed their last to take and hold terrain in central Leyte that was unsuitable for the construction of airfields. Steel mesh for runways sank or shifted dangerously in the soft soil, making the Leyte operation one of the most bungled intelligence efforts of the Pacific war. Inadequate air support led to further, and unnecessary, casualties, turning Leyte into an in-close infantry slugfest.

  AMERICAN MORTAR SQUAD ON LEYTE (SC).

  A NURSE CHECKS MEDICATION FOR A SOLDIER AT AN EVACUATION HOSPITAL ON LEYTE (NA).

  Many of the Americans fell in the weeks after MacArthur, in a publicity stunt typical of him, declared the island secured, to the amazement of Crider and other GIs. The historian of the 11th Airborne describes what MacArthur cavalierly called a mop-up operation. “Through mud and ram, over treacherous, rain-swollen gorges, through thick jungle growth, over slippery, narrow, root-tangled, steep foot trails, the Angels [as 11th Airborne troops called themselves] … pushed west to clear the Leyte mountain range of its tenacious defenders. It was bitter, exhausting, rugged fighting—physically, the most terrible we were ever to know.” General Robert Eichelberger, commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, which relieved the Sixth Army on Leyte on Christmas Day, remarked that “if there is another war, I recommend that the military, and the correspondents … drop the phrase ‘mopping up’ from their vocabularies. It is not a good enough phrase to die for.”12

  Thousands of Japanese soldiers, weakened to the point of death by hunger and disease, fought on until the following April.

  LIBERATION

  Before the Americans left Leyte their dead and wounded were replaced by new draftees whose average age was nineteen. They went to Luzon to liberate 18 million Filipinos, the first large Christian population they had encountered in the Pacific.

  The landing was made in Lingayen Gulf, north of Manila, on January 9, 1945, on the very spot where General Homma’s troops had come ashore on the fifteenth day of the Pacific War. Despite furious attacks by waves of kamikazes, which sank or damaged forty ships of the invasion armada on its way to the beachhead, MacArthur landed a force of 68,000 men by nightfall. It would be the biggest American land engagement of the Pacific war and one the Japanese could not win, having lost so many troops, planes, and ships in trying to stop MacArthur on Leyte. “Now it is their turn to quake!” MacArthur declared.13

  In all, MacArthur would bring 280,000 men to Luzon. Lying in wait for them but scattered widely on the island were 287,000 Japanese under General Yamashita, the largest enemy army the Americans faced in the Pacific. The stage was set, said Life magazine, for “the first large-scale slugging match with the Japanese army.”14

  Yamashita knew that massed American naval, air, and ground power made resistance at the beaches futile. His only option was to fight a protracted and bloody delaying action. “In Singapore, when I negotiated the surrender there with [General Sir Arthur] Percival, the only words I spoke to him were, ‘Yes or no?’ I intend to ask MacArthur the same question.”15 The “Tiger of Malaya” withdrew most of his forces to mountain strongholds in the east, opening the way for MacArthur’s drive to Manila. Yamashita would sacrifice the capital to win the battle in the badlands.

  The first big fight carried Krueger’s forces across the Agno River, over low hills paralleling the gulf, and out onto the great plain leading to Manila, 110 miles southeast of Lingayen. Here tanks could operate on open terrain and fine roads.

  On January 28, a band of handpicked men from the Army�
��s 6th Ranger Battalion made a daring raid deep into Japanese held territory on a prison camp at Cabanatuan. With the aid of Filipino guerrillas, the Rangers freed 513 American and British POWs, including many survivors of the Bataan Death March. MacArthur would soon learn that only a third of the men he had left behind in Luzon had survived. After seeing the ghastly condition of the prisoners at Cabanatuan, and learning from his intelligence officers that other POWs and internees were dying of starvation, MacArthur called in the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, Major General Verne D. Mudge. “Go to Manila,” he ordered. “Go around the Nips, bounce off the Nips, but go to Manila. Free the internees and Santo Tomás.”16 Santo Tomás was the camp where 3,700 American men, women, and children, including the Army nurses of Bataan and Corregidor, had been interned for almost three years.

  Mudge assembled two small “flying columns” of infantry and armor, a “modern version of a mounted cavalry unit,” and sped for the capital, with Marine Corps dive-bombers covering his advance.17 Along the way, jubilant Filipinos waved and shouted at them, handing them flowers, eggs, and beer. Forty-eight hours later, on the evening of February 3, they reached the city limits. The New York Times reported their entrance into the city:

  THE FIRST TWO FORCES HAD TO fight their way from house to house, in the face of fires and demolitions and through mined streets, to the north bank of the Pasig River, which cuts the city in two. After they crossed the stream in a fleet of amphibious trucks and moved into southern Manila, they were met with steady machine-gun and mortar fire from upper floors and from, concrete pill-boxes placed at important intersections by the Japanese, who were still clinging to “Intramuros,” the old walled section of the city on the Pasig’s lower bank….

  Immediately on their entrance into the capital, a flying squadron of cavalrymen sped to the gates of the Santo Tomás internment center where 3,700 persons, mostly women and children, were being detained. The troopers pushed through machine-gun nests and sniper fire up to the camp grounds and then fought from room to room to clean out the Japanese. Other forces, meanwhile, moved against burning Bilibid Prison, where 1,100 war prisoners and civilian internees were saved from flames.18

  “Tanks were crashing at the gate,” one of the Bataan nurses described the liberation of Santo Tomás. “I happened to be in the front building with a room above the front entrance. Tanks rolled to the front door.” But in the darkness, no one could tell whose tanks they were. Then a soldier pulled himself out of one of the steel monsters and said simply, “Hello, folks.” This was it. These were Americans. Pandemonium broke loose. Hysterically happy prisoners mobbed the soldiers of the 1st Cavalry. “The men in the tanks looked like giants to us because we were all so emaciated and thin,” said Army nurse Martha Dworsky. “We were all laughing and crying, hanging out the windows, shouting and screaming and waving. It was a wild scene of joy and happiness,” another nurse recalled.19

  With the liberators was a figure familiar to the prisoners. “Carl Mydans. My God! It’s Carl Mydans,” cried a woman inmate as the Life photographer turned a flashlight on his face to identify himself.20 Mydans had covered the battles of Bataan and Corregidor, and he and his wife, Shelley, a writer for Life, had been captured and interned in Santo Tomás for more than nine months before being sent to Shanghai, where they were freed in 1943 as part of a prisoner exchange. “I was picked up bodily,” Mydans dispatched his editors on the morning after the liberation of Santo Tomás, “full camera pack, canteen belt, and all, and carried on the hands of the internees over their heads.”21

  Outside the main building, Mydans found a sight he had dreamed about many times. “In the brilliant light … stood three Japanese in officers’ uniforms, ringed by soldiers pointing guns at them.” The next day, he learned that every one of the prisoners was suffering from malnutrition. Most of them were so emaciated he did not recognize them. And they had been indoctrinated into a state of docility. “Even with husky welcoming Americans on the main gate, the internees would not venture past the swale fence which marked the out-of-bounds area.”

  ENTERING MANILA (LRP).

  On Sunday morning the American flag was raised over Santo Tomás. The whole camp shouted and cheered as the flag went up. Then someone started singing “God Bless America” and everyone joined in. “I have never heard it sung as it was sung that day,” said Mydans. “I have never heard people singing ‘God Bless America’ and weeping openly. And they have never seen soldiers—hard-bitten youngsters such as make up the 1st Cavalry—stand unashamed and weep with them.”

  Later on, an American sergeant seemed confused when, leading the Japanese prison administrators away from the camp, a group of recently released children shouted to him, “Make them bow. Make them bow.”22

  By early February, MacArthur had more troops on Luzon. Landings had been made at Subic Bay on the west and at Nasugbu on the south. From both points, Allied forces were racing inland. By February 4, two American columns, including the 11th Airborne, led by General Robert Eichelberger, were within fifteen miles of Manila, MacArthur’s spiritual home, the city where his mother had died, where he had courted his wife, and where his son, Arthur, had spent the first four years of his life. “We were ready for the dash on Manila,” General Eichelberger recalled. “I pressed forward with the infantry, and my headquarters was set up in what had once been the annex of the Manila Hotel. It was a bare and looted building, but the view was just the way I remembered it. And just as beautiful.

  “I could see the city of Manila gleaming whitely in the sunshine. I could see Corregidor, and the hook of the Cavite peninsula, which curves into Manila Bay. … It was strangely like a homecoming. But soon tall plumes of smoke began to rise in Manila, and at evening the tropical sky was crimsoned by many fires. The Japanese were deliberately destroying the magical town which had been traditionally called ‘the Pearl of the Orient.’”23

  The Americans drove in from three sides—the 1st Cavalry Division from the east, the 37th from the north, and Eichelberger’s forces from the south. The 1st Cavalry got into the city without much trouble, but the 11th Airborne ran into 12,500 of the 16,700 Japanese sailors and marines that were guarding Manila and had to fight its way into the city, suffering heavy casualties. Earlier, Generarl Yamashita had declared Manila an Open City and ordered the commander of its defense garrison, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, to withdraw his forces and join him in the mountains of northern Luzon. But Iwabuchi ignored that order, brought in big guns from damaged ships in the harbor, set up artillery pieces, rockets, and mortars, and staged a suicidal resistance from buildings designed to withstand earthquakes and typhoons.24 “Manila was burning. The whole downtown section was smothered in roaring black billows of smoke,” Yank correspondent H. N. Oliphant described the opening hours of the battle for the city. “The Jap shells were coming in. A sprawling wooden structure across the street got a direct hit. A Filipino girl stood beside us shaking her head. She said her father and baby brother were inside the burning building.

  AMERICAN NURSES LIBERATED FROM SANTO TOMÁS, MANILA (SC).

  “A pretty, light-skinned woman, dressed in a kimono, was standing across the street. She scolded a little boy, who was pulling at her kimono. She pushed the child and yelled, ‘Get away from me, you little Jap bastard!’”25

  It was probably her own child, his father Japanese, and she did not want to be seen with him for fear of being branded an enemy collaborator. One American soldier, Fred Nixon, was walking along a street with a priest when they passed a procession of men carrying small coffins. “Father Rogers told us that the caskets contained the bodies of Filipino children whose fathers were Japanese. When it looked like we were winning, their families killed them so that they would not appear to be Japanese collaborators. He said the church could not condone the killings, but the children deserved a Christian funeral.”26

  These women feared reprisals for unspeakable acts of barbarity committed against their people by the Japanese. When Lester Tenney esca
ped for a short period from Camp O’Donnell after the Bataan Death March, he went into the hills with a small band of Filipino guerrillas. From a hilltop overlooking a village, he witnessed a group of Filipino women being tortured by the Japanese. “The women were tied, with their legs spread, to the stilts that supported their cottages. The Japanese put sticks of dynamite into their vaginas and started asking them questions that we couldn’t hear. Then they lit the dynamite and within a matter of three minutes there were loud explosions and I could actually see the parts of bodies flying through the air.”27

  In some of the worst fighting of the war, building-to-building urban warfare akin to that at Stalingrad, a city of 800,000 people was almost completely destroyed, the most ravaged Allied capital after Warsaw. Nearly 100,000 Filipino civilians were killed in this urban holocaust, many of them in a succession of diehard reprisals by Iwabuchi’s doomed defensive garrison. “Hospitals were set afire after the patients had been strapped to their beds. The corpses of males were mutilated, females of all ages were raped before they were slain, and babies’ eyes were gouged out and smeared on walls like jelly,” wrote historian William Manchester.28

  The Japanese fought to the last man from the sewers of the city, where they were annihilated by American troops with grenades and flamethrowers. After walking through his ruined city, the Filipino journalist Carlos Romulo wrote: “Wherever I went I felt like a ghost hunting its way in a vanished world.”29 When MacArthur returned to Manila at the end of February to reestablish the civilian government, he was emotionally overcome by the plunder and slaughter and could not complete his speech. He ended instead with the Lord’s Prayer.

  THE LOS BAÑOS RAID

  Three weeks after the liberation of Santo Tomás, MacArthur ordered an attack on a Japanese internment camp at Los Baños, forty-two miles southeast of Manila, where over 2,100 American and European civilians and POWs were slowly starving. “It was a complicated problem,” said General Eichelberger, who took part in the planning of the raid: