by James Johns
The plan required American troops to defend Central Luzon in the Manila Bay area, preventing enemy landings. Failing to do this, the troops were to defeat the enemy troops that had landed. And failing to do this, they were to fight a delaying action while withdrawing to the Bataan Peninsula, still controlling Manila Bay. Of importance, this plan did not contemplate the use of the Philippine Army from any of the Philippine Islands.
The success of the plan required the withdrawal of massive supplies from the Manila warehouses for transport to Bataan to feed thirty-one thousand men for six months.48 It would be up to the native Filipino-American defenders to fight a delaying action and to protect the long roads, keeping them open for the supply transports.
There was no stipulation as to what would happen after the defenders were defeated. It was just assumed that in that time, the U.S. Pacific Fleet would have fought its way through to the rescue and would drive the enemy into the sea. And yet no one in authority ever thought that this would happen, because the estimate was two years for the U.S. Navy just to fight its way across the Pacific. There was no plan to relieve Bataan, since the assumption was that it would just go down in defeat.
MacArthur had the answer: transform the WPO-3 defeatist plan into a victory plan. Being an optimist or a dreamer, he convinced his subordinate commanders and the War Department in Washington that the Philippines could resist an enemy attack. From his date of recall to active duty in the U.S. Army, he thought only of replacing WPO-3 with his own plan.
The Philippine Army had one regular division and ten reserve divisions. Because WPO-3 depended on troops already there, MacArthur told Washington that a two-hundred-thousand-man Philippine army was just around the corner in inscription and training.49 The numbers and the degree of training were greatly exaggerated.
With Washington approval presumed, he organized Luzon into two forces: the north Luzon force, under the leadership of Major General Jonathan Wainwright; and the southern force, under the leadership of Major General George Parker, Jr. Similar to Wainwright’s fate, Parker would also be taken prisoner after the fall of Bataan. Surviving his internments in Formosa and Manchuria, he was released in August 1945 and retired shortly after his return to the United States.
MacArthur’s plan was to defeat the enemy on the invasion beaches. There would be no withdrawal to Bataan. His generals were to hold the beach areas at all costs. And when the invasion started, artillery and light tanks were rushed to the one-hundred-twenty-mile Lingayen coastline to defend against General Homma’s Fourteenth Army. The trained Philippine Army that MacArthur had boasted to Washington about, broke and ran at the first appearance of the Japanese.
MacArthur’s reported estimate of enemy strength was seventy to eighty troop transports discharging eighty to one hundred thousand troops, and yet he reported that his defense only consisted of forty thousand troops.50 Later, when all the facts were available, the Japanese at Lingayen only numbered about forty thousand, while MacArthur had considerably more troops than what he reported. There were twelve thousand, Philippine scouts and seven native army reserve divisions that had been inducted into U.S. service. Strategists and intelligence experts have numbered MacArthur’s troop level at an estimated sixty-five to seventy thousand.51
As the situation continued to worsen, MacArthur was finally forced to abandon his own plan and revert to the original Orange Plan. This called for the organized retreat to the Bataan Peninsula. This situation was the result of his having put too much confidence in the Philippine Army and its reserve. Their performance was poor from the beginning, but MacArthur had always refused to admit that.
On December 23, the April 1941 version of WPO-3 was put back into effect. Now the big problem involved the supplies. Under the Orange Plan, supplies were to start moving to Bataan from the Manila warehouses when the first shot was fired. But under MacArthur’s plan, supplies were moving all over to meet each situation. Now with MacArthur and President Quezon moving to Corregidor, Brigadier General Charles Drake, the Manila quartermaster, was ordered to first send supplies for ten thousand troops to last six months to Corregidor before sending anything to Bataan.52
Now MacArthur violated his own chain of command when he failed to inform Admiral Hart immediately of the change in the war plan actually in effect. Manila would be declared an open city, and Hart had submarines moored in Manila Bay that had to move fast.
Although MacArthur and Hart had been friends for several decades, their relationship became severely strained during their service in the Philippines. Technically, Hart outranked MacArthur with his four stars to MacArthur’s three, and it was thought by some that MacArthur resented this. In any event, he failed to communicate any of the army’s activities to Hart, violating the Joint Coastal Frontier Defense Plan that the Hawaiian commanders had drafted. And in spite of Hart’s efforts to work with MacArthur, there was no coordination of defense efforts between the army and the navy in the Philippines. By the time Hart learned on December 24 that Manila would be declared an open city, he had a mere twenty-four hours to prepare for evacuation himself, and was forced to leave behind many supplies and ordnance.
MacArthur did inform General Brereton that he (Brereton) would evacuate to Australia by navy PBY. By now, his air force had been destroyed with only a few fighters remaining on Bataan. Brereton offered to stay, but was told he would be of more value in Australia. For Bataan, the rest is history.
War Plan Orange was based, however, on a situation that never came to pass. It was conceived of a war between the United States and Japan alone. Neither side would have allies or attack territory of a third power. It would be a naval war. The plan had been adopted in 1924, when the Americans saw Japan as their most likely enemy.
Toward the late 1930s, Japan had joined Germany and Italy in the Anti-Comintern Pact. Great Britain and France, still suffering from the depression of the early 1930s, both considered appeasement as an alternative to armed conflict. It was February 18, 1938, before the American strategic planners even considered the possibility of the necessity of fighting on two fronts. But an offensive war against Japan would take priority to defend American interests in the Pacific, primarily a naval war.
The Naval War Plans Division in December 1937 sent then Captain Royal Ingersoll to London to discuss potential arrangements of American-British naval cooperation. Concerns about Germany and Italy would require Britain to retain the bulk of her naval forces in the Mediterranean and Atlantic with little or nothing to protect her possessions in the Pacific. The United States would concentrate the bulk of her naval forces in the Pacific with a lightened load in the Atlantic. This would become the basis of the Anglo-American relationship of cooperation during World War II.
In the event of a two-ocean threat, the United States would go on the defensive in the Pacific and prioritize defense of vital positions between the Americas, the Panama Canal, and the Caribbean area. This would be easy if Britain and France were united in the eastern Atlantic, but if they were not, a much larger force would be required to defend American access to either ocean. And who would the American allies be?
All in all, the Joint Army and Navy Board of the war planning division arrived at five possibilities, or five Rainbow Plans, each plan dealing with a different situation. The only commonality in the plans was that the United States would face a coalition of nations and not just one. Rainbow 5 was the plan whereby, if not attacked by Japan, the United States would declare war on Japan to protect Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, to protect rubber and oil resources. It called for aggressive moves against the Marshall and Caroline Islands and Truk. The purpose was to get into Britain’s war with Germany.
Nonetheless, MacArthur was determined to keep the Japanese out of the Philippines altogether. But in spite of his accurate prophecy of where the Japanese would land, and with two days’ advance intelligence that they were coming, as well as nine hours’ notice of Pearl Harbor, he still wasn’t prepared when the Japanese did arrive. F
or the Japanese, the only difficulty was rough seas.
Because Washington’s WPO-3 plan had been built around American withdrawal to the Bataan Peninsula, it was essential to get supplies there as soon as the Japanese initially attacked. But because MacArthur had convinced Washington to allow changes to WPO-3 to meet his grandiose plans, many of the supplies had been diverted to the beachheads, supplies that were badly needed in the Battle of Bataan in the early months of 1942.
General MacArthur’s plan to defend all of the Philippines officially fell apart on December 22, when he finally realized that he was not even going to be able to defend Luzon. This was something Washington had understood since they drew up WPO-3 in 1938.
So on December 22, the Quezon government was alerted to prepare for a move to Corregidor by the next evening, and MacArthur notified his field commanders that the original WPO-3 was now in effect. This only allowed two days to get all the remaining supplies out of the Manila warehouses that should have already been safely on Bataan. They should have been moved prior to declaring Manila an open city, which, with the Japanese at the edge of town, was an attempt to save Philippine lives.
Another instance of MacArthur’s questionable leadership occurred when Colonel Harold George, General Clagett’s chief of staff, ordered planes out on a mission without the authorization from MacArthur, who was very upset about things happening on the initiative of his subordinate commanders. He raised hell until he was informed of the damage inflicted on the Japanese. Just to get back at his subordinates, he composed a dispatch describing the raid, giving himself credit for its planning and its execution by Philippine pilots, who had long since run out of airplanes. MacArthur had full authority over junior commanders in the field, which actually encumbered or restricted operations, while his dramatic and fictitious press releases from his public relations personnel painted the picture that he alone was carrying the load for Japanese failure for a quick victory. The participation of the U.S. Army was incidental.
Nor was MacArthur above misleading his commanders in Washington. On January 26, he gave Washington the impression that he himself was on Bataan rather than at his house on Corregidor, as evidenced by this message: “In Luzon: Under cover of darkness I broke contact with the enemy and without the loss of a man or an ounce of materiel am now firmly established on my main battle position.”53
By February 1942, the situation on Bataan had deteriorated significantly. Up to 80 percent of the defenders were suffering from malaria, respiratory infections, and malnutrition. Quinine was now just a memory. Bandages and gauze were washed out and used over again. And toward the end, it was common not to eat for a week. If wounded, it was just as dangerous to be admitted to the field hospitals, as they were the primary targets of the Japanese.
One field hospital with only four hundred fifty beds found itself overwhelmed in just a few days with fifteen hundred patients, all lying out in the sun. Yet the valiant army nurses worked around the clock, themselves with little food or sleep. They were considered among the real heroes.
In addition to fighting the enemy, the Quartermaster Corps was fighting the food shortage. Behind the lines, they threshed and milled rice, slaughtered the remaining animals, snared what fish they could, and distilled water for its salt. The worst part of meat was cut off and the balance cooked. But eventually they ran out of everything, and the troops were worn down to living skeletons. In the States, all would have been hospitalized, but on Bataan, they were considered fit for duty if they were strong enough to pull the trigger. By comparison, the Japanese were tested, rested, and under orders to finish the job.
General MacArthur would later recommend unit citations for all army units on Bataan and Corregidor, but none for the Marines. His only comment was that the Marines had gotten their share of glory in World War I and weren’t going to get any in this one. Ironically, they were the only ones with combat experience, having arrived from Shanghai just days before Pearl Harbor. MacArthur never authorized any visits to Marine units on Bataan, nor did he visit their beach positions on Corregidor.
With such a bleak outlook for Bataan, President Roosevelt ordered MacArthur in February to get out of the Philippines and over to Australia. On March 11, MacArthur left Corregidor’s north dock, leaving behind thousands of Philippine and American troops to fight the Japanese. In less than one month, approximately ninety thousand troops on Bataan would surrender, making it one of the largest capitulations in American military history.54
It had just been assumed that MacArthur’s existing staff would continue the defense of Bataan under General Wainwright. But MacArthur took thirteen army officers with him, and after his departure, in the eleventh hour, it was necessary to scramble to come up with an entirely new command staff. Secretary of War Henry Stimson would later write, “MacArthur, in a pretty complete disregard of everything except his own personal interests, had taken his entire staff away with him from Bataan, leaving Wainwright with the job of building up a new staff.”55
In spite of the deteriorating and virtually unlivable conditions, MacArthur’s last order to Wainwright was to hold on until he (MacArthur) would return with an army. The only ones thrilled at his departure were the Marines. And as far as the rest of those on Bataan were concerned, the captain had left the sinking ship with the only lifeboat available.
To add insult to injury, Wainwright’s selection of the new staff didn’t sit well with MacArthur, who complained to General Marshall in Washington, an effort that resolved nothing in MacArthur’s favor. He had had only himself to blame. American newspapers were now referring to Bataan as the new Alamo.
Another issue inherited by Wainwright was in the neighborhood of three thousand pieces of paperwork left by MacArthur on Corregidor, all of which required action of one sort or another. Much of the paperwork concerned promotions that badly needed attention for morale purposes. It required a special task force to expedite it all.
Shortly after MacArthur’s departure, Wainwright approached the staff on Corregidor for rations to ease the pain of starvation in the fighting men on Bataan. He was informed by General Lewis Beebe on March 15 that MacArthur had left specific instructions that no rations be sent to Bataan in the interest of Corregidor’s holding out as long as possible.
MacArthur’s press corps even made his Philippines departure appear to be a great military victory, though it essentially helped to doom those left behind. In his departure, he was authorized to take only his wife, his son, and his chief of staff, General Sutherland. He was not authorized to take the top thirteen army officers, who were personal friends, along with two naval officers (and one enlisted man), leaving behind the huge void of top leadership at a time when it was needed most.
MacArthur’s egoism would play out not only in his departure from Corregidor, when he loaded unauthorized personnel into four PT boats for evacuation to Mindanao, but also with his flight to Australia. Four B-17s had left Australia for the trip to rescue Mac and his staff on Mindanao. Two had returned with mechanical problems and a third had crash landed en route. The fourth actually arrived with an inoperative supercharger and no brakes. And to MacArthur’s further disappointment, the plane was piloted by a lieutenant who was not a field grade officer worthy of Mac’s grade. Mac took one look at the plane’s youthful pilot and announced “that he wouldn’t risk his family in ‘that broken down crate with a boy at the controls.’”56 This “boy at the controls” departed that night for Australia with sixteen people packed into his B-17, none of whom were from MacArthur’s group. Similar to his brakeless landing on Mindanao, they all arrived safely in Australia. This twenty-four-year-old, Harl Pease, Jr., would just five months later earn the Medal of Honor for heroism in the Battle of Rabaul.
The view from the North Malinta tunnel entrance on Corregidor. Bataan can be seen across the channel.
An early 1960s photograph of the north dock from which MacArthur departed Corregidor by PT boat in early 1942.
MacArthur was now livid and sent
a message to General Marshall in Washington to insist that the Australia command send three of their very best B-17s to pick up Mac and his staff. He further stated that he couldn’t bear the thought of losing any of his key personnel to inadequate air transportation. In turn, Marshall notified General George Brett in Melbourne to help meet MacArthur’s demands. Brett, who had previously served as acting chief of the air corps under Hap Arnold, was now in command of the U.S. Army’s forces in Australia. Marshall ordered Brett to select the three best B-17s and to dispatch them to Mindinao for MacArthur’s rescue, an order which was reluctantly agreed to. Of the three, one had to turn back because of an oil leak.
The two remaining aircraft were now being flown by captains, and on arrival on Mindinao, the decision was made that if all the baggage was left behind, everyone could squeeze into the two planes, but not before a couple of mattresses were made available in the navigator’s compartment for Mac and his family. With everyone packed in, the two bombers took off and headed for Australia. On approach, they found that their destination at Darwin was under attack, requiring them to reroute to an alternate airfield. Upon landing, both the general and Mrs. MacArthur commented to the effect that they were in no hurry to fly again.
After the December 8 attack on the Philippines, Japan’s next move had been to remove the British battle fleet at Singapore, as this was the last potential threat to Japanese expansion in the western Pacific. On December 8, Admiral Phillips departed Singapore with the Prince of Wales and the Repulse to thwart reported Japanese landings at Kota Bharu on the northeastern Malay Peninsula. As soon as he was spotted by the Japanese, Phillips realized the element of surprise was gone, and the operation was canceled. On the return trip to Singapore, and with no air support, the inevitable happened. At 11:40 on December 10, the ships were attacked by almost one hundred level, dive, and torpedo bombers launched from Saigon. Although valiantly defending themselves, both ships were eventually overwhelmed, and after an hour and a half, they went under. The friendly air support of British Buffalo fighters arrived just in time to witness the loss of over eight hundred British seamen along with their commander, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips.