MacArthur intended to invade the island from the Lingayan Gulf in the north-west, with a subsidiary landing to the south of the capital. This roughly followed the Japanese invasion plan of three years before. His escorting fleet during the first week of January suffered waves of kamikaze attacks, emerging low over the island. An escort carrier and a fleet destroyer were sunk while another carrier was severely damaged, as well as five cruisers, the battleships USS California and New Mexico and numerous other vessels. Many attackers were shot down by anti-aircraft fire and escort fighters, but it was impossible to deal with them all. The landing ships were let off lightly, and the invasion itself on 9 January was virtually unopposed. Filipino guerrillas had informed the American command that there were no Japanese in the area so there was no need to pummel the sector first, but Rear Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf felt obliged to stick to his orders. Great destruction was wreaked on homes and farms causing no damage to the enemy.
While I Corps on the left soon encountered strong Japanese resistance in the hills, XIV Corps on the right pushed south over flatter country towards Manila. General Krueger suspected that MacArthur’s pressure on him to advance rapidly was influenced by a desire to be back in Manila by his birthday, on 26 January. This was probably unfair. MacArthur wanted to liberate Allied prisoners held in camps and if possible seize the port of Manila before the Japanese destroyed it. A detachment of US Rangers, greatly aided by Filipino guerrillas, managed to free 486 American prisoners of war from the Bataan death march in a successful raid on a camp near Cabantuan ninety-five kilometres north of Manila. MacArthur’s impatience mounted because of the slow progress, caused more by the small rivers, rice paddies and fish ponds than by Japanese resistance. MacArthur stepped in to send the 1st Cavalry Division on ahead. He wanted to rescue other Allied prisoners held in the University of Santo Tomás.
Another landing, with 40,000 men from XII Corps, took place on 29 January north of the Bataan Peninsula, but they soon came up against a very strong Japanese defence line. The other landing south of Manila by the 11th Airborne Division appeared to produce more rapid results than the advance down the plain. On 4 February they reached the Japanese defence line just south of Manila, although they did not yet know that they had been beaten to the capital the night before. A dramatic dash forward by a flying column from the 1st Cavalry on the north side, storming across a bridge after a naval lieutenant cut the burning fuse to the demolition charges, had brought them into the northern section of Manila. That evening their tanks smashed through the perimeter walls of the Santo Tomás University where 4,000 Allied civilians were interned.
The Philippines, an archipelago with some 7,000 islands, had offered ideal terrain for guerrilla resistance and the Filipinos, more than any other nation in the Far East, had begun to prepare for their liberation soon after the Japanese occupation began. Partly out of trust in the Americans, who had promised them full independence in 1946, and hatred for the arrogant and cruel Japanese, with their torture and public beheadings, guerrilla groups had formed on most of the islands. A few were led by American officers who had been cut off there in 1942. Many of the Filipino troops had hidden their arms at the time of the surrender. Once MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane had confirmation of the size of the movement, submarines brought in more weapons, radios and medical supplies, as well as the MacArthur propaganda items.
In the large areas where Japanese troops seldom ventured, the local groups organized civic life and workshops and even issued their own currency, which was preferred to the Japanese occupation banknotes. Coast-watchers with radios passed information on Japanese shipping, which US submarines were able to use with devastating results. The main danger came from Japanese radio detection units. There was little risk of denunciation by the local population, who helped carry the bulky equipment if a Japanese army sweep approached. The Philippines produced remarkably few collaborators. Most of those in Manila, who worked for the Japanese administration, provided as much intelligence as they could to the resistance.
Japanese revenge was conspicuous after MacArthur’s forces landed, especially in the fighting for the capital. Yamashita had not intended to defend Manila, and the local army commander had planned to withdraw according to his orders, but he had no control over the navy. Disregarding Yamashita, Rear Admiral Iwabachi Sanji told his men to fight on in the city. The remaining army units felt obliged to join them, making a force of some 19,000 men. As these troops withdrew to the centre, the old Spanish citadel of Intramuros and the port area, they destroyed bridges and buildings. Raging fires spread across the poorer areas, where the houses were made of wood and bamboo. In the centre, however, most of the buildings were concrete and could be turned into defensive positions.
MacArthur, who wanted to organize a victory parade, was dismayed by the battle which then developed in the city with more than 700,000 civilians trapped in the war zone. The 1st Cavalry, the 37th Infantry and the 11th Airborne Division became involved in house-to-house fighting. As with the attack on Aachen, the Americans soon recognized the need to attack each building from above and fight their way down, using grenades, sub-machine guns and flamethrowers. American engineers used their armoured bulldozers to clear roadblocks. The Japanese naval and army defenders, knowing that they were all going to die, massacred Filipinos and raped the women mercilessly before killing them. Despite Mac-Arthur’s refusal to use aircraft in an attempt to spare civilian lives, around 100,000 Manila citizens, more than one in eight of the population, died in the fighting which lasted until 3 March.
The most urgent priority for General Krueger’s troops was to eliminate the Japanese force east of Manila, which controlled the city’s water supplies. Once again the Japanese had constructed caves and tunnels in the hillsides and once again the Americans had to clear them out with phosphorus grenades and flamethrowers. They blew the entrances to the tunnels, then poured gasoline and explosives in the main opening to burn, suffocate or bury those left inside. P-38 Lightnings dropped napalm, which proved much more effective than conventional bombs. The process was greatly aided by a regiment of guerrillas who reached the main dam first in a sudden rush. The Japanese had no time to blow their demolition charges. The survivors slipped away into the hills at the end of May.
Even while the fighting continued in Manila, MacArthur launched a drive with Lieutenant General Eichelberger’s Eighth Army to retake the central and southern islands of the Philippines, secure in the knowledge that the Japanese could not reinforce them. He regarded this as more urgent than finishing off Yamashita’s main force in the hills of northern Luzon, since they could be bottled up and bombarded at leisure. One amphibious attack followed another, all supported by air power. Eichelberger claimed to have conducted fourteen major landings and twenty-four minor ones in just forty-four days. In many cases his troops found that Filipino guerrillas had done their work for them, dealing with the smaller garrisons.
On 28 February, the long western island of Palawan stretching between Mindoro and North Borneo was invaded. These forces discovered the charred bodies of 150 American prisoners of war, who had been doused in gasoline and set on fire by their guards in December. On 10 March they invaded Mindanao, where an American engineer, Colonel Wendell W. Fertig, led a large guerrilla force and secured a landing strip. C-47 transports touched down before the attack, bringing two companies of the 24th Infantry Division. Marine Corsair fighters then arrived to use it as a forward base. On Mindanao, the close cooperation between American infantry, guerrillas and Marine air support forced the Japanese survivors on its western Zamboanga Peninsula to take to the hills. But the operation to reduce the main eastern mass did not start until 17 April.
Once again, Fertig’s guerrilla forces managed to secure an airfield and American troops advanced inland, some by a bad road, while a regiment embarked on boats and barges and escorted by sub-chasers sailed up the broad Mindanao river, taking Japanese garrisons by surprise. They knew that they were in a race against the mon
soon. Slowed by the jungle and gorges, where the Japanese had destroyed almost every bridge and mined every approach, the fighting took far longer than expected. It did not end until 10 June, a month after the end of the war in Europe. General Yamashita in the northern cordilleras of Luzon resisted, prolonging the fighting to the very end. He emerged to give himself up only on 2 September 1945, the day of the official surrender.
In China, the Ichig Offensive had finished in December 1944. Japanese forces had probed towards Chungking and K’un-ming, but their supply lines were vastly over-extended. Stilwell’s successor, General Wedemeyer, flew in the two American-trained divisions of X-Force from northern Burma to form a defence line, but the Japanese had already begun to withdraw. The two divisions returned to Burma, and at the end of January finally joined up with Y-Force on the Salween. The remaining Japanese troops retreated into the mountains and the Burma Road was finally open again. The first convoy of trucks reached K’un-ming on 4 February.
Slim’s advance meanwhile came to a temporary halt along the River Irrawaddy, after Lieutenant General Kimura Hoyotaro pulled the remnants of the Burma Area Army behind this formidable defensive barrier. Slim made a great show of mounting a major crossing with the XXXIII Corps, having secretly withdrawn his IV Corps on its flank. A dummy headquarters remained behind transmitting messages, while its divisions marched south under radio silence, then crossed the river much further down unopposed to threaten Kimura’s rear. The Japanese had to withdraw rapidly, and Mandalay was captured on 20 March after a hard battle.
Slim wasted no time in pushing south along the Irrawaddy Valley towards Rangoon, in a race to reach it before the rains came. Mountbatten, meanwhile, organized Operation Dracula, an amphibious and airborne assault for early May using the British XV Corps from the Arakan. The monsoon arrived two weeks early, stopping Slim’s forces sixty-five kilometres short of their objective. On 3 May, Rangoon was taken by XV Corps assisted by the Burmese Independent Army, which had changed sides to join the Allies. Kimura’s forces had no alternative but to retreat into Thailand. The remnants of the Japanese 28th Army, now cut off behind Allied lines in the Arakan, attempted to break out to the east across the River Sittang. But the British knew of their plans. When the Japanese reached the river, they were ambushed and massacred by the 17th Indian Division. Only 6,000 men out of 17,000 escaped.
As far as the Japanese command was concerned, the Ichig Offensive had achieved its objectives. Japanese troops had inflicted half a million casualties on the Nationalist armies and forced them to withdraw from eight provinces, with a combined population of more than 100 million people. Yet it also represented a triumph for the Communists. The Nationalists had lost not only more food-producing areas, but also a large part of their manpower reserve for conscription. However much they hated the Japanese, this must have come as a relief to the local inhabitants. As General Wedemeyer observed: ‘Conscription comes to the Chinese peasant like famine and flood, only more regularly.’
After the Ichig Offensive had destroyed the thirteen US airfields, two new American air bases were built at Lao-ho-k’ou (300 kilometres northwest of Hankow) and Chih-kiang (250 kilometres west of Heng-yang). In April 1945, the Japanese advanced with 60,000 men from the Twelfth Army and destroyed the airfield at Lao-ho-k’ou, but an attack by their Twentieth Army on the base at Chih-kiang was less successful. Five well-equipped Nationalist Chinese divisions, part of the modernization plan by General Wedemeyer, with another fifteen partly modernized formations, were diverted to defend Chih-kiang. On 25 April, supported by 200 aircraft, they smashed the 50,000-strong Japanese force in the last major engagement of the Sino-Japanese War. It demonstrated that with proper training and equipment, and above all food, the Nationalist divisions could take on the Japanese effectively.
Japanese forces in China and Manchuria had already been gradually reduced by transfers to the Philippines. Then Imperial General Headquarters felt obliged to divert troops from the China Expeditionary Army to defend Okinawa. The 62nd Division, which took part in the Ichig Offensive, had already been transferred there to defend the city of Shuri.
Japan’s other priority of joining up with its forces in Indochina had also been achieved. In January 1945, when their divisions from China crossed the border, Japanese senior officers in Indochina had been shocked by their condition. The men of the 37th Division had long hair and beards, their uniforms were in tatters and few retained any badges of rank. They were incorporated into the newly constituted 38th Army to fight in northern Tonkin against the guerrillas of Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh’s men had greatly assisted the Allies with intelligence and the return of downed air-crew, as had Thai groups provided with radios and weapons parachuted in from India by SOE and the OSS.
On 12 January, Halsey’s Third Fleet reached Indochinese waters to strike at two Japanese battleship-carriers, the Hyuga and the Ise, in Camranh Bay. This roving sortie in the South China Sea was Halsey’s swansong before he handed over command to Admiral Spruance. The two Japanese warships had in fact left for Singapore after American submarines had sunk their tankers, but aircraft from Halsey’s thirteen fleet carriers sank a light cruiser, eleven small warships, thirteen cargo ships and ten tankers, as well as the French cruiser Lamotte-Picquet, which had been disarmed by the Japanese. While they were in the area, the navy flyers shot up airfields round Saigon, destroying Japanese aircraft on the ground and fuel dumps.
On 9 March, the Japanese swept aside the Vichy administration of Admiral Decoux and disarmed French forces, some of whom resisted, especially in the north. Gaullist agents as well as the OSS had been working on French officers, who were already keen to change sides. Japanese forces proceeded to launch the Meig Offensive against French colonial troops holding strongpoints, such as Liangshan fort with a garrison of 7,000 men.
The Japanese commanders in Indochina intended to send the half-million tons of stockpiled rice back to Japan and to other Japanese garrisons, but the American blockade and the shortage of shipping made this impossible. While a part of the stockpile rotted, the rest was seized in November 1945 by Chinese Nationalist troops, who had been sent to disarm Japanese forces, and they took it back to China. For many Indochinese, their experience of famine during this period was even worse than both the war of independence against the French and the Vietnam War.
The first information for bombing targets in Japan was provided by Thai diplomats based in Tokyo who passed it on through the Thai resistance to the OSS. By December 1944, the air bases on Guam, Tinian and Saipan were in operation. Using the great advantages which the Mariana Islands offered over the China airfields, all B-29 Superfortress operations were gradually concentrated there under the command of Major General Curtis E. LeMay. Yet bomber losses mounted, partly from fighters rising to intercept them from intervening islands, especially Iwo Jima. Imperial Japanese Navy fighter pilots at dispersal on Kyushu played bridge as they waited to be scrambled to attack Superfortresses high overhead on their way to Tokyo. Their passion for the game was a bizarre legacy from the days when the Imperial Japanese Navy wanted to ape the Royal Navy.
The American command decided to invade Iwo Jima with its airfield from which Japanese fighters operated against the bombers and the bases on the Marianas. Once seized, it could provide an emergency landing strip for stricken aircraft.
On 9 March, the same day as the Japanese removed the French administration in Indochina, LeMay’s Twenty-First Bomber Command launched its first major incendiary attack on Tokyo. Just over a month before, the B-29s had made their second experiment using napalm bombs. The factory district in Kobe had been virtually burned to the ground. LeMay had been aware of the destructive potential of incendiary attacks since the devastating B-29 raid on Hankow at the beginning of the winter.
The 334 Superfortresses carpet-bombed Tokyo, sparing neither residential nor industrial zones. More than a quarter of a million buildings went up in flames spread by strong winds. Houses made of wood and paper caught fire in seconds. Al
together 83,000 people died and another 41,000 were severely injured, a far greater toll than when the second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki five months later.
General MacArthur opposed the area bombing of Tokyo, but American hearts had been hardened by the kamikaze campaign against US ships. LeMay, however, did not answer to MacArthur, and his only concession was to drop leaflets warning Japanese civilians to leave all towns and cities with any industry. LeMay was determined to carry on until all the major manufacturing centres of Japan were burned out. Bizarrely, the USAAF still tried to claim that these area incendiary attacks by night constituted ‘precision’ bombing. Coastal shipping between the home islands was also brought to a virtual halt by the dropping of mines in and around the Inland Sea.
Bomber crews in the early part of the campaign had been shaken by their losses. They started to calculate their odds on surviving a thirty-five-mission tour. One came up with the personal mantra: ‘Stay Alive in ’45’. But the destruction of aircraft factories and the losses of Japanese fighters, most of which had been diverted to kamikaze attacks against the US Navy, soon meant that they could roam over Japanese air space with comparatively little danger.
Iwo Jima, although only seven kilometres long, was revealed by air reconnaissance to be a tough objective. LeMay needed to reassure Admiral Spruance that it was absolutely necessary to take it for his bomber offensive against Japan. The large island of Okinawa would be invaded six weeks later.
The Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima were commanded by Lieutenant General Kuribayashi Tadamichi, a sophisticated and intelligent cavalry-man. He had no illusions about the final outcome of the battle, but he had prepared his positions to prolong it for as long as possible. Once again this meant constructing cave and tunnel networks as well as bunkers which were made out of a concrete which mixed cement with volcanic shingle. Despite the small size of the island, the tunnels stretched for twenty-five kilometres. Once the small civilian population on the island had been evacuated, reinforcements arrived bringing his strength to 21,000 soldiers and marines. His men swore to kill at least ten Americans before being killed themselves.
The Second World War Page 96