It was a vain, if not fatuous, hope. The new commander of the Pacific Fleet, Chester Nimitz, was in Pearl Harbor surveying the damage from the air raid three weeks earlier. The air still smelled of burned oil and scorched metal and wood. In his pocket were his operational orders from the commander of the U.S. Fleet, Admiral King. They were to secure a sea communications and supply line between the West Coast, Hawaii, and Midway Island, and a second sea link between the West Coast and Australia via Samoa, New Caledonia, and Fiji. Nothing more.26
This was a navy operating on an emergency shoestring, and on the defensive. Relieving MacArthur in the Philippines could play no part in its plans.
—
Meanwhile, the evacuation of Manila continued until New Year’s Eve.
The city was still burning, not just from American demolition but from constant air attack. The open city declaration made no impression on the Japanese; their planes continued to bomb and strafe anything that moved in and around the city. “To the native population,” wrote one eyewitness for the Saturday Evening Post, “encircled by fires, bewildered, panic-stricken…it seemed like the end of the world.”27
Another eyewitness remembered “heaps of wreckage and crumbled ruins were everywhere” while bombed ships burned brightly in Manila Bay.28 At the docks enormous piles of goods sat ready to be shipped out—all too late to make it to Bataan or Corregidor. Instead, scores of beggars and priests, children and old men, were combing through the piles “like flies on a dung hill,” remembered one of the last Americans to leave, civilian engineer Robert Cartwell. “Filipinos who had never owned more than a loin-cloth and bolo in all their lives, saw laid before them a fortune”—and took what they could.29
For almost forty years Manila had been the key outpost of American civilization in the Far East. Now it was a smoldering ruin, wreathed in smoke and fire.
—
Far off in Washington, Henry Stimson sat at his desk and wrote in his diary.
“The last day of the old year, and a pretty gloomy one, for the Japanese are encircling Manila and the fall of the city is very imminent. MacArthur seems to be making a successful and skillful retreat to the peninsula of Bataan and Corregidor. But the psychological effect on the Filipinos is very bad, coming after the defeat at Hawaii, the effect here in this country is also very bad…I think and trust our people will have enough steadfastness to carry through the work of driving the invaders out and reestablishing our effort in the Philippines, but I foresee many difficulties…and a long strain.”30
—
Back in the Philippines, as the last day of 1941 turned to New Year’s Day 1942, General Wainwright was standing in the blackness on the Calumpit Bridge. Beneath him were two 8,000-pound dynamite charges that had been suspended underneath the steel bridge’s double spans.
Nicknamed “Skinny” since West Point days, Wainwright was tall, thin, and rawboned. He was a born cavalryman who had successfully made the transition to modern warfare with its planes and tanks, and had become MacArthur’s most able field commander. Wainwright was also known for an overfondness for the whiskey bottle, which sometimes worried MacArthur.
He was stone-cold sober now. A team of engineers, led by Colonel Harry Skerry, were crouched nearby around a detonator plunger. They were waiting for Wainwright’s signal to blow up the bridge, which would seal off Bataan Peninsula from the Japanese.
If Wainwright had a moment to reflect in the sticky darkness, his “fighting withdrawal” that was supposedly one of the most difficult of all military operations, had gone very well, all things considered—so well that it would later become a textbook case.31 With MacArthur meticulously issuing orders at every stage, North Luzon Force’s pullback had managed to stay ahead of the Japanese advance without becoming a rout, all in time to rendezvous with General Albert Jones’s South Luzon Force retreating westward with Manila at their backs.
There had been nasty moments. On December 29 General Homma—who understood exactly what MacArthur and Wainwright were up to—had tried to break North Luzon Force’s next-to-last defensive line, dubbed D-4, by driving through the center, hoping it would cut Wainwright’s command in half. Instead the Japanese attack ran into stiff resistance from the Philippine Eleventh Division as it held fast at a key roadblock, but on the right Wainwright’s line began to sag, and he had been forced to order a full retreat before everything gave way.32
The truth was, all the lines that North Luzon Force had to hold existed more on maps than they did in reality. “Not a single position was really occupied and organized for defense,” MacArthur’s overall intelligence estimate said later. “Troops were barely stopped and assigned defensive sectors before they stampeded into further withdrawal, in some instances without firing a shot.”
Yet somehow it had worked, just as somehow Jones’s command, South Luzon Force, had managed to find its way west toward San Fernando.33 In this fighting withdrawal MacArthur had been helped by two things. The first was that the bulk of Homma’s troops were moving toward taking the capital, Manila, not pursuing the Philippine Army. The other was that even though the Japanese enjoyed complete air superiority, they had directed their air attack at targets in and around Manila instead of the long drawn-out convoys of trucks, oxcarts, footsore soldiers, and terrified refugees that marked the North Luzon Force withdrawal. “Had the [Japanese] bombers struck the jammed columns with bombs and strafing,” noted Colonel James Collier, “our withdrawal would certainly have been seriously crippled”—and probably would never have succeeded.34
Also fortuitously, the Japanese had never bombed the Calumpit Bridge, an action that would have cut off South Luzon Force—which was slated to clear the bridge by New Year’s Day.
That was what Wainwright was waiting for when suddenly he heard the rumbling of tanks in the darkness.
With a knot in his stomach, Wainwright wondered whether he should give the signal to blow the bridge at once, to keep any Japanese tanks from grabbing the objective. But then he breathed a sigh of relief. They were American tanks, National Guardsmen with Company C of the 192nd, who had blocked the Japanese advance at Baliuag, as Japanese and American tanks chased each other up and down the narrow streets.35 Company C had managed to knock out eight Japanese tanks with no losses of their own, while heavy and accurate artillery fire had covered their withdrawal and the last elements of South Luzon Force. By the time the Japanese recovered and surged forward past Baliuag, the Americans and Filipinos were gone.
Hour by hour, Wainwright watched the exhausted men of South Luzon Force trudge out of the darkness and cross the bridge. By 5:00 A.M. the last rear-guard unit, the Fifty-first Infantry, made it across. That left only a platoon of Filipino demolition engineers under Lieutenant Colonel Narciso Manzano on the road south of Calumpit. They waited until 6:15, when Wainwright decided he could wait no longer, and with a rumble and a roar, the charges went off as the remains of the Calumpit Bridge tumbled into the deep, unfordable Pampagna. Manzano and his men would have to find some other way back. For now, MacArthur’s army—or what was left of it—was safe.36
There was no denying their numbers were sadly depleted—Wainwright had left Lingayen with 28,000 men and now had barely 16,000—as men became lost, or simply ran away, in the jungle. But the troops who were left were fitter, more motivated, and more cohesive than before the Japanese had landed. Still dressed in their old-fashioned coconut-style helmets, blue tunics, and white trousers, the Philippine Army had become, as one participant remembered, “a fighting force.”37
But there was also no denying that they were starting the defense of Bataan with supplies at a low ebb. The original War Plan Orange had envisaged enough food and ammunition to keep a fighting army of 43,000 in the field for six months. They had nowhere near those supplies now—and the numbers of troops who had to be fed and armed were closer to 80,000, including airmen and sailors who had lost their planes and ships. There were also 26,000 civilians, American and Filipino, who were taking shelter on Bat
aan and who would have to be fed as well.
But for now MacArthur could take pleasure and pride in the operation. Not a single major unit had been lost or even cut off during the two-week pullback, despite constant pressure from the enemy. It was, in the words of the official army historian, “a tribute to the generalship of MacArthur, Wainwright, Jones, and to American leadership on the field of battle.”38 That afternoon back on Corregidor he got the final message from Wainwright: withdrawal completed without major loss of men or materiel. The final defense of Bataan was about to begin.39
The next day, January 2, MacArthur looked out with his binoculars clear across Manila Bay and saw something peculiar flying from his penthouse roof atop the Manila Hotel. His face twisted into a strange crooked smile.
It was a flag with a large red sunburst. The Japanese were in Manila.
—
That next day in Washington, Marshall met with his staff at the War Department. The picture they drew was sobering. To relieve the Philippines would require at least 1,500 aircraft of all types, seven to nine battleships, five to seven carriers, fifty destroyers, and sixty submarines—plus auxiliary and support ships. Even if it were possible, they concluded, it would “constitute an entirely unjustifiable diversion of forces from the principal theater—the Atlantic.”40
The final nail in the coffin for any plan to relieve the Philippines came from General Gerow, who had commanded the Philippine Department before MacArthur took over. Gerow recognized that MacArthur had been right—the Philippines was indeed “the key to the Far East position” of the Allied Powers, and that if Japan took the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and Singapore would soon follow. China would be isolated, and Australia threatened.
All the same, the best the Allies and the United States could hope for now was to hold a line from Australia and the Malay Barrier to Burma while “projecting operations northward to provide maximum defense in depth.” Gerow recommended that “operations for the relief of the Philippines not be undertaken.”41
Marshall bowed to Gerow’s judgment, and his staff. But he would never tell MacArthur. Instead, for the next month and a half he and the president would continue to send messages that would encourage hope of coming relief without actually lying to the commander of U.S. Armed Forces Far East.
It was not a comfortable decision. Stimson in particular felt the dilemma acutely. In late December, Marshall and Secretary Stimson met with Winston Churchill. The joint Anglo-American decision to win the war in Europe first had already been made, but when Roosevelt proposed shipping the supplies slated for MacArthur to Britain instead, Stimson angrily rebuffed the idea. He even threatened to resign.42 The supplies remained where they were, at the San Francisco docks, waiting for ships to carry them west to Asia—ships that would never arrive.
Now Stimson and Marshall had to tell Churchill the truth: there was no hope of saving the Philippines and no plan for evacuation. Astonished, Churchill asked what the Americans intended to do. Stimson said simply, “There are times when men have to die.”
Unless a miracle happened, it would be the epitaph for the U.S. Armed Forces Far East—and for MacArthur.
—
Miracles, of course, do happen, especially in wartime. And certainly if God Himself decided to create a place where a small defensive force could hold off a much larger army for an indefinite time, Bataan would be it.43
Twenty-five miles long, and twenty miles across at its widest point, the peninsula was covered with jungle, deep ravines, and only two roads suitable for motor vehicles. One, Route 110, ran down the east coast to Mariveles at the southern tip and up the west coast to Morong, a small town two-thirds of the way up the peninsula. The other ran east to west like a waist belt, passing between the Mariveles Mountains to the south and the towering peak of Mount Natib rising 4,111 feet in the center of the peninsula—suitable, at least in theory, for shifting troops east to west to meet attackers trying to come down Route 110 on either side.
Any attacker was at a severe disadvantage in every respect. He had a lack of roads for moving troops and supplies, a lack of room for moving around a defender’s flank, and no way forward except along the coast or across jungle so thick, especially on the western side, that a man couldn’t advance a step without a compass and a machete or bolo in his hands. In addition, the thick jungle canopy, in Colonel Skerry’s words, “concealed the works of the defender even when the enemy had constant air superiority and air observation.”44
The Japanese were facing an impossible task. No wonder morale in Bataan Force was looking up despite the long retreat since before Christmas. “We have run far enough,” one officer confidently noted, “now we’ll stand and take ’em on.”
For MacArthur, taking the Japanese on meant splitting Bataan Force in two. Wainwright himself would be defending the west coast approaches with I Corps, consisting of three Philippine Divisions: the First, Thirty-first, and Ninety-first, with some detached combat units, including the Twenty-sixth Cavalry of Philippine Scouts, and a couple of field batteries—22,500 men in all. Holding the other side of Mount Natib along a line running east to Abucay was General Parker’s II Corps, with four Philippine Army divisions, the Fifth-seventh Infantry of the Philippine Scouts, and some artillery—about 25,000 men in all. Eight miles back, still finishing dispositions for a final line of defense when all else failed, was an operational reserve consisting of the crack Philippine Division, MacArthur’s remaining tanks, and some self-propelled artillery.45
Opposing them would be more than 80,000 Japanese, plus multiple squadrons of bombers and fighters and a Japanese navy now in full control of every seaward approach. As the new year of 1942 dawned, General Homma and his staff were as confident of an easy victory as MacArthur’s men were of making that victory as tough and bloody as possible.
And here the Japanese made a mistake. So confident was Tokyo that Homma was facing a demoralized force on the run and short on rations, that it pulled away his best troops for operations in the Dutch East Indies. Homma protested, but to no avail. Instead he was left with the Sixty-fifth Brigade to spearhead the attack on Bataan, an occupation unit of overage veterans “absolutely unfit for combat duty.”46
Whatever his inner doubts, on January 4 Homma ordered the Sixth-fifth Brigade to take up their main battle position. It would take them four days to reach their destination. By then MacArthur had been forced to make a fateful decision. On January 5 the supply situation was already so dire that he ordered everyone on Bataan on half rations—roughly 2,000 calories a day, enough to keep civilians from going hungry but hardly enough to keep active soldiers working and fighting in the jungle eighteen to twenty hours a day. “Each day’s combat, each day’s output of physical energy,” as one officer wrote in his diary, “took its toll of the human body—a toll which could not be repaired.”47
The first shot had not been fired, and yet a specter already haunted MacArthur’s forces on Bataan—the specter of starvation.
—
Still, it was MacArthur’s job to keep the Bataan Force upbeat and motivated, so on the evening of January 9 Sutherland sent a message to both Parker and Wainwright: Have all general officers assemble to receive an important visitor. MacArthur was leaving the Rock to visit his troops on Bataan.
Events were already moving ahead of him. On that very day, January 9, the Japanese began their preliminary assault on II Corps with a massive bombardment that “shook the northern portion of the Bataan peninsula.” Parker’s 155 mm artillery replied with a ferocious barrage of its own, as shells thundered down on the advancing Japanese column. It was a signal that the American and Filipino forces weren’t running away; they were there to stay. There was no direct contact between infantry units as yet, but that would change very soon.
On the 10th a PT boat pulled up at the Mariveles pier with MacArthur and Sutherland on board. A car carried them up to Parker’s headquarters, where he met his principal officers and inspected the lines. “I had to see the ene
my or I could not fight him,” MacArthur later wrote in his Reminiscences. “Reports, no matter how penetrating, have never been able to replace the picture shown to my eyes.” Then he took the east-west Pilar-Bagac road until he met Wainwright and his waiting officers.48
“Jonathan,” MacArthur said, “I’m glad to see you back.” He congratulated Wainwright on his successful withdrawal, saying it was “as fine as anything in history.” For that, he was recommending Wainwright for permanent major general in the Regular Army—not just the USAFFE. Very pleased and flattered, Wainwright then offered to show MacArthur his 155 mm emplacements.
“I don’t want to see them,” MacArthur said stoutly. “I want to hear them”—in other words, hear them pounding the enemy.49
Then he turned to the other officers. One of them was Cliff Bluemel, commander of the Philippine Thirty-first Division.
“Help is definitely on the way,” he told them. “We must hold out until it arrives. It can arrive at any time. Parker is fighting the enemy on the Manila Bay side and he’ll hold them. He’ll throw them back. We’ve just got to hold out until help arrives.”50
MacArthur, of course, was mistaken. Help was not on the way, although he did not know it yet. But he was right about one thing, at least. Parker was throwing them back, all the next day when the Japanese Sixty-fifth Brigade renewed its attack along the Abucay line. A blizzard of artillery fire once again sent them reeling in retreat, but by late that night the Japanese had managed to reach a sugarcane field in front of the Fifty-seventh Infantry. The Sixty-fifth’s full-scale attack would be met by the Philippine Scouts in their first combat experience.
Around midnight “a great shout of ‘Banzai’ came from the front,” Lieutenant Colonel Philip Fry, commander of Second Battalion, remembered, “and the Japs started a Civil War charge. I got [Captain] Haas on the phone and told him to sweep I Company’s front with his machine guns. It was slaughter.” When the attack faded and died, Fry’s men had suffered fewer than five wounded. The Scouts whooped with triumph. Fry sternly warned them to expect another serious attack soon.
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