D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  LOS BAÑOS WAS ON THE SOUTHERN tip of shallow Laguna de Bay, and thus some fifty miles behind enemy lines. It was estimated, and accurately, there were between eight and fifteen thousand enemy troops available for counterattack within four hours march of the camp. Past history had given us reason to fear that the Japanese camp guards, if they knew attack was imminent, might execute their prisoners and thus clean the slate….

  Trusted guerrilla spies were sent into the area. Five days before the operation they brought back a gentleman named Peter Miles, who had recently escaped from the camp and gone into hiding. Miles had been an engineer in the Philippines before the war, and his careful information was invaluable. Miles drew up an exact map of the camp….

  All of the planning was highly secret, and few of the troops involved knew anything about their mission until they were plucked from their positions near Fort McKinley under cover of darkness and moved to the positions from which they would make their attacks. Fifty-nine ungainly [amtracs] … moved noisily into Parañaque from the north. Nine C-47 planes … landed on Nichols Field [in Manila] and picked their way hopefully along the pitted runways. A company of paratroopers moved to Nichols Field and slept under the wings of the planes.

  [Joseph Swing, commander of the] 11th Airborne, had planned, for the sake of surprise and safety of the internees, one of the oddest expeditions in military history. It was to include a ground force advance, an amphibious expedition, and a parachute drop. A great deal of faith, too, had to be placed on a reconnaissance platoon [of American soldiers and Filipino guerrillas, led by Lieutenant George Skau]. They departed in bancas [small boats] two days before the operation and, after reaching the southern shore, went into hiding.30

  Luis M. Burris, commander of Dog Battery, an artillery company with the 11th Airborne, was with the amphibious tractors. He had been told that intelligence reports indicated that the Japanese planned to kill the prisoners thirty minutes before the scheduled attack on the camp. “A mistake of seconds can mean disaster for the prisoners,” he told his men. A cousin of one of his men was in the camp. They started off for Los Baños at midnight and headed into landlocked Laguna de Bay for the seven-and-a-half-mile trip. The skippers of the amtracs were all amateurs, and most of them were confused and scared, unsure they could navigate the lake, on a moonless light, by compass. Burris tells the story from this point:

  GIS WITH FILIPINO GUERILLAS (SC).

  AT THE ORDER OF “CRANK UP,” a noise like a bellowing bull, came out of each of those fifty-nine diesel exhaust pipes. The roar could be heard for ten miles. None of us had considered the noise of the amtrac convoy…. If this noise alerted the Japanese, would they have time to react? … One thing we could assume was that our secrecy was blown right out of those amtrac tail pipes.

  We didn’t need further proof, but, large fires crackled on the shoreline where entire villages cheered us. At a distance of half a mile we saw villagers dancing and waving flaming sticks as if the war was over. They had to know about the raid many hours before in order to have gathered wood for the fires…. Were we blundering into a trap? … Our adrenaline was pumping so fast we were intoxicated.

  As dawn broke, they began to search the skies from the shoreline of the lake for the paratroopers, who were to be dropped right into the camp.

  NOTHING WAS THERE. WHAT HAD GONE wrong? Without the jumpers, could we get into camp before the guards shot the prisoners? Had Skau’s platoon been able to get to their positions …?

  Then some specks were steadier and grew larger. We realized they were our planes…. Lieutenant John Ringler popped the first chute, followed by another. Then the whole sky was full of silk, spilling out of nine transports. We could hear rifle fire of the infiltrators on signal of the first parachute opening.

  The amtracs hit the sand, and we headed, as fast as we could go, toward the center of the camp.

  As they did, the reconnaissance platoon began killing Japanese sentries, and the paratroopers began mowing down the startled camp guards, who had just started doing their morning calisthenics. The job of the men in the amtracs was to round up the prisoners and get them back across the lake to safety. Burris continues the story:

  THE FIRST AMTRAC, WITH … MY PARTY, came to a halt in the center of the camp. Prisoners were all out of their barracks milling about in confusion.

  It took a short time for them to realize we were Americans. The uniforms had changed so much over the several years they had been locked up. Then came the surge of emotion for prayers answered. Prisoners just stood with arms to the heavens or hands over their faces covering the outpouring of tears. Some were on their knees praying for gratitude…. Many of the adults knew of the planned execution, but kept the information from the children and others who would be too upset.

  A hardened criminal would have cried.

  A group of 2,147 prisoners is a lot of people. They all thought the ordeal was over with no reason to hurry. They already had about as much emotion as they could stand at one time. There was no point in trying to scare them with the idea of 10,000 Japanese troops just over the hill.

  We told the prisoners to throw what clothes they needed into two bags and start walking toward the beach.31

  The amtracs carried the old, the sick, and women with children to the lake, a mile and a half away; everyone else walked. From the lakeshore, all internees were taken by the amtracs to a town across the bay. “When we got to the beach, the Japanese started to fire,” recalls Margaret Nash, a Navy nurse who was holding a newborn infant in her arms. “I covered the baby with a great big hat and I lay down on the sand over her. Later I ran across the beach with her and got into another amtrac.”32

  The entire operation lasted barely four hours. Among those liberated were 1,589 Americans, including Margaret Nash and eleven other Navy nurses. Only two American soldiers were killed and two wounded. The entire Japanese garrison of 250 was killed. “It was said to be the most perfect combat operation of World War II,” Burns recalled proudly. “Its success depended on teamwork and not on individual heroism.”

  Japanese troops converged on Los Baños the following day and slaughtered every Filipino who had not fled to the hills. Upward of 1,500 died.33

  Following the fall of Manila, MacArthur sent airborne and amphibious troops to capture the tunneled rock fortress of Corregidor, where General Jonathan “Skinny” Wainwright had made his valiant stand in April 1942. On February 26 the last Japanese defenders blew themselves up inside Corregidor’s labyrinthine tunnels. Four days later, and three years after his hasty departure, MacArthur stood on Corregidor and gave the order: “Hoist the colors and let no enemy ever haul them down.” As Carl Mydans snapped his photograph, MacArthur turned to Lieutenant General Richard K. Sutherland and said, “This is home. I am home at last.”34

  The Japanese continued their resistance on Luzon. More American soldiers fought on Luzon than in either North Africa or Italy, and they and their guerrilla supporters, over 100,000 of them, died in great numbers from enemy gunfire and disease. South of Manila, a strong enemy defensive line was shattered on March 17, trapping some Japanese in caves and forcing others to retire into the remote Sierra Madre Mountains—a malaria-infested region, much of it never thoroughly explored by Westerners. Although hard fighting was to continue in northern Luzon for the rest of the war, great parts of the Philippines were now firmly in American hands, as MacArthur, in arrogant defiance of the Joint Chiefs—who wanted him to concentrate on subduing Luzon and preparing for the invasion of Japan—mounted nearly a dozen major amphibious assaults in the central and southern parts of the archipelago. In the general’s view, these were liberation landings, in fulfillment of his pledge to free all Filipinos from the grip of their tyrannical masters. The landings were strategic masterworks, executed with minimal casualties, but they did nothing to shorten the war.35

  Even Luzon was a strategically inessential objective in the opinion of some of MacArthur’s sternest critics inside the military, an unnecessar
y battle won at fearsome cost. Sixth Army suffered almost 38,000 casualties in the battle for Luzon, and the American and Australian navies lost 2,000 men, mostly to kamikaze attacks. The Philippines were to be used as a staging area for attacks on Japan, but with the B-29s beginning to lay waste to Japan from the Marianas and the naval blockade of the home islands tightening, the Philippine campaign, some Navy and Air force leaders argued, should not have been approved.

  General Eichelberger has another view. “If we were to undertake an armed invasion of Japan—and all planning, necessarily, in 1944 looked forward to that objective—we needed the deep-water harbors, the great bases, and the excellent training areas available in those islands, which, in the main, had a friendly and loyal population. We had no knowledge of the atomic bomb; indeed, it was not until almost a year later that the first atomic bomb was exploded experimentally in New Mexico. Up until then even the scientists weren’t sure it would work.”36

  On August 25, 1945, almost two weeks after his government capitulated, ending World War II, General Tomoyuki Yamashita—still holed up in the vastness of northern Luzon—chose surrender over suicide in the hope that his arrest for war crimes would save the lives of his officers and men. The stoic warrior did not expect justice; nor did he get it. A revengeful MacArthur personally drew up the charges against his greatest adversary in the Pacific and had him tried in Manila, along with General Masaharu Homma, who had been in overall charge of the prisoners on the Bataan Death March. Barbaric atrocities had been committed on the steaming road to Camp O’Donnell and in the burning streets and churches of Manila. But there was no direct evidence that either commander ordered his troops to act as they did. But with the mood in ravaged Manila, that did not matter. The tribunals were “kangaroo courts,” in the words of William Manchester, MacArthur’s biographer. They “flouted justice” with MacArthur’s approval and perhaps at his insistence.

  The military’s weakest case was the one against Yamashita. The dozen correspondents who heard the testimony polled themselves and unanimously found for the defendant.

  Both generals were convicted by panels of Army officers and sentenced to death by hanging. After a personal appeal for clemency from Homma’s wife, MacArthur reduced his sentence to one more befitting a soldier, death by firing squad. Yamashita went to the scaffold. Before he did MacArthur ordered that he be “stripped of uniform, decorations and other appurtenances signifying membership in the military profession.”37

  Yamashita and Homma were executed, separately, in the same courtyard in the town of Los Baños, where Catholic Masses were being offered for families in the community that had been massacred in one of the occupier’s most monstrous reprisals.

  The Japanese lost a staggering 400,000 men in the defense of the Philippines, from Leyte to Luzon. At the end of the fighting on Leyte, American soldiers found a letter from a Japanese soldier to his family:

  “I AM EXHAUSTED. WE HAVE NO food. The enemy are within 500 meters of us. Mother, my dear wife and son, I am writing this letter to you by dim candlelight. Our end is near…. hundreds of pale soldiers of Japan are awaiting our glorious end and nothing else. This is a repetition of what occurred in the Solomons, New Georgia and other islands. How well are the people of Japan prepared to fight the decisive battle with the will to win?38

  *After Halsey completed his work with MacArthur in the South Pacific, Nimitz alternated him with Spruance as commander of the main naval striking arm in the Pacific. This system allowed for a quickened pace of operations, with one commander always at sea while the other planned future operations. With Spruance in command, the Fifth Fleet retained its name. Under Halsey, it became the Third Fleet. Under Halsey, Spruance’s Fast Carrier Task Force 58 became Task Force 38.

  The B-29s

  THE PLANE

  The French journalist Robert Guillain was in Tokyo on March 3, 1945, when he heard the news that MacArthur’s forces had liberated Manila. “No Japanese,” he wrote later, “would yet let himself say the forbidden words Nippon maketa Japan is beaten—but one could see the thought lurking behind the wooden faces.”1 More than the fall of the Philippines, however, the firebombing raids that began a week later from the Marianas shattered hope on the home front that the war could be won.

  On the morning of October 19, 1944, one day before MacArthur landed in the Philippines, Captain I. J. Galantin, skipper of the submarine Halibut, approached the clear green waters of Saipan with his pack of underwater raiders. Galantin had last seen Saipan in January when his submarine was nearly sunk trying to attack an enemy ship inside the island’s anchorage. Nine months later, Halibut was greeted in Tanapag Harbor by a Navy band and some familiar faces. “The harbor had been transformed into a bustling replenishment site for our submarines with the tenders Holland and Fulton on station.”

  The once pristine island had been devastated by modern machine warfare. There was only one major building left standing on all of Saipan, the Navy port director’s headquarters, but Galantin had never seen a busier place. It was a nonstop construction site. “New roads were being bulldozed; foundations were being poured; steam shovels and cranes groaned and screeched; huge piles of lumber grew as we watched. Everywhere soldiers and Seabees were at work with what seemed an equal number of indigenous laborers. Nightfall brought little change; powerful lights drowned the shadows until the hot sunlight poured once more over the eastern hills.”2

  The Seabees, with teams of forced Japanese labor, were transforming Saipan and neighboring Tinian and Guam into the main Pacific base for both the United States Navy and the Army Air Forces, building from jungle and shattered coral three major military cities on the Pacific highway to Tokyo. On every inch of usable space, they were hammering and bulldozing by day and night, constructing roads, hospitals, commissaries, Quonset huts, chow halls, pipelines, storage tanks, barracks, warehouses, chapels, wells, palm-thatched officers clubs, and, on Guam’s highest peak, splendid residences for the Pacific theater commander and the island commander. From their wide porches, these Navy luminaries would have unimpeded views of Apra Harbor, a four-mile long anchorage that would soon be the second busiest war port in the world, behind Antwerp. One of the two airstrips being built on flat and green Tinian would be the largest in the world.

  Wearing blue pants and up-tilted baseball caps, their sweating backs shining in the scorching sunlight, Seabees were hauling, blasting, and packing down what would eventually be enough coral to fill three dams the size of Boulder Dam. Be fore the war, the Seabees, whose name derived from the initials, CB, for Construction Battalion, had been sandhogs, steelworkers, dam builders, dock wallopers, and lumberjacks. “[These] are the men who built America’s cities, dammed her rivers, strung her wires and dug her sewers,” said their chief, Admiral Ben Morcell. Since the Pacific war was primarily an air and sea struggle, fought over “a limitless, unprepared battlefield,” it involved more construction than any nation had previously contemplated.3 And the Marianas was the Seabees’ biggest job yet. The islands were to be turned into a vast airdrome and anchorage for the bombing and blockade of Japan.

  The Seabees were Navy men, so the Navy got the best living facilities on the islands. When Army Air Force personnel began arriving around the time the Halibut did, they had to camp out in borrowed tents along their uncompleted jungle airstrip, in open places that they hacked out of sugarcane fields with axes and entrenching tools. Invited to lavish dinner parties at the hilltop houses of the admirals, Air Force commanders entertained in their tents with canned rations; and every day at dusk, pilots and navigators could be seen lingering outside Navy and Marine officers clubs, hoping to get invited in for a drink.

  The Air Force arrived on Saipan in such a hurry and with such extravagant expectations that it had no time to build anything that resembled an amenity. At this point in the war, it was the only branch of the service—with the only weapon—capable of striking the industrial heartland of Japan; and it was under pressure to set up operations and be over targe
t Tokyo by early November.

  The Seabees had begun building an airfield long enough to accommodate the B-29s while the battle for Saipan was still being fought. The first Air Force engineering crews would not arrive until later that, summer and were assigned a few acres of half-cleared sugarcane fields. Through the miserable rainy season, the Seabees and the engineers built servicing and maintenance installations for the B-29s and their crews, which were still on training exercises back home. Working in the furnace heat, officers and enlisted men battled flies, mosquitoes, dengue fever, and diehard Japanese soldiers who were still holding out in the island’s deep coral caves. With these “pioneers” was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, St. Clair McKelway, now serving as staff press censor and public relations officer for the 21st Bomber Command of the Twentieth Air Force, to which the B-29s in the Marianas were assigned.

  Later in the war, while he was on leave in the States, McKelway attended a preview of an Army Air Forces film called Target Tokio, and watched again, as he had in person, the landing on Saipan of the first B-29, Brigadier General Haywood S. “Possum” Hansell’s Joltin’ Josie. One of the Air Forces’ top strategic thinkers and a former bombardment commander in the air war over Germany, Hansell had just been appointed head of the 21st Bomber Command. “What got me,” McKelway wrote after seeing the film of that October landing, “was the movement and noise of the vast mob of people who had been waiting for the airplane for some hours and who, as it landed, moved toward it across the base with the happy, fluttering movement of a crowd going into a baseball park…. They had been waiting for this moment, actually, for days and weeks and even months…. The sound track for the movie was good and accurate—the noises made by a joyful bunch of men—but it didn’t pick up one voice in that crowd which I still remember, the voice of a grease-monkey staff sergeant who shouted over and over, above the racket, as the B-29 people moved across the coral rubble toward the new landing strip and the idling B-29, ‘Look at ’er, look at ’er, look at ’er!”4