by Perry, Mark
Yard by yard, day by day, the Americans tallied victory after victory, prying the Japanese from their emplacements. But these victories were only temporary, as Wainwright knew. From the moment he sent his men forward, he pleaded with MacArthur for yet another retreat to the south, to Bataan’s waist, where his line could be further shortened and strengthened. MacArthur turned him down. “Were we to withdraw to such a line now it would not only invite immediate overwhelming enemy attack,” he told Wainwright, “but would completely collapse the morale of our own forces. Sooner or later we must fight to the finish. Once again, I repeat, I am aware of the enormous difficulties that face you and am proud, indeed, of the magnificent effort you have made. There is nothing finer in history. Let’s continue and praise the fair fame that we have so fairly won.” This flowery statement was MacArthur urging further exertions. But in private, he harbored nagging doubts. Months before, he had told Clare Boothe Luce that fighting on the defense was a prescription for defeat, and the assertion loomed before him now in the form of retreating soldiers weakened by lack of food, their ranks thinned by disease. After sending his message to Wainwright, he instructed Sid Huff to find shells for his father’s small Derringer. “They will never take me alive, Sid,” he said.
The so-called Battle of the Pockets pitted Americans and Filipinos against Japanese soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, a necessity given the thick jungle cover. The Americans couldn’t bring their artillery to bear, but neither could Homma. Finally, on February 10, Wainwright’s men reduced the last of these incursions, eliminating the final Japanese pocket with a headlong infantry assault. The firefights were brutal, close-in, and reminiscent of the fighting that MacArthur had seen on the front lines during the Great War. Filipino and American troops fought the Japanese at such close quarters that commanders feared that their troops would fire into each other. The Battle of the Pockets was a battle of annihilation, a sobering textbook example of how the Japanese fought. It was now clear to MacArthur and his commanders that “the war to end all wars” had been but a prelude to what they were facing in the Pacific. Surrounded in their pockets and under constant pressure, the Japanese were urged to surrender, but replied with gunfire.
Back in Manila, with his forces on Bataan bloodied and battered, an embarrassed Masaharu Homma studied his maps and reviewed his casualty figures. On February 8 (as the Filipinos and Americans crashed in on the last Japanese pocket), he decided he had had enough. He reluctantly cabled Tokyo for more reinforcements, then ordered his forces into a general withdrawal. The Japanese general had failed in his mission to take the Philippines by storm and force an easy surrender of his American enemy. On Corregidor, MacArthur noted the cessation of attacks and breathed a sigh of relief. He had gained a badly needed respite. “The enemy has definitely recoiled,” he cabled Marshall. “He has refused [bent back] his flank in front of my right six to ten kilometers and in other sectors by varying distances. His attitude is so passive as to discount any immediate threat of attack.” Marshall cabled his response: MacArthur’s defense was “heroic,” he said—and help was on the way.
MacArthur and Marshall gained invaluable information from the Battle of Bataan, gleaning crucial insights into how the Japanese fought. MacArthur summarized these lessons by pointing out to his aides that as long as Japanese commanders had a plan, they performed well. But when the plan was interrupted, or when Japanese commanders were required to improvise, they could be defeated. The Japanese were well-trained fighters and absolutely tenacious on the offensive, but they lacked the ability to adapt their tactics to uncertain conditions and were poor defensive fighters. Their willingness to follow orders without question was the Japanese army’s great strength—and its most fundamental weakness. Their commanders were inflexible, viewing even a minor withdrawal as a personal humiliation. Because the Japanese were meticulous planners, they believed that failure resulted from a lack of initiative. American officers were quite different: If a plan didn’t work, they abandoned it and tried something else. MacArthur, who had been studying the Japanese military his entire life, understood this better than any American commander. “Never let the Jap attack you,” MacArthur told his subordinates at the war’s outset. “When the Japanese soldier has a coordinated plan of attack he works smoothly. [But] when he is attacked—when he doesn’t know what is coming—it isn’t the same.”
The Battle of the Pockets reflected this shortcoming in the Japanese defensive strategy, for when American commanders isolated and then reduced the bulges in Homma’s surge, the Americans were met not with innovative tactics or creative responses, but by relentless effusions of blood. It was as if the Japanese believed that somewhere in the universe, fate itself was throwing sacrifice onto the scales of battle, balancing out the edge in firepower their enemies could bring against them. This was the delusion of sacrifice that so animated the Japanese spirit. But this idea of personal sacrifice, while fundamental to any military’s ethic, was such an obsession for the Japanese—and a central tenet of their military training—that during a conflict, it resulted in a relentless orgy of personal savagery. The savagery resulted from the way that Japan trained its military recruits, providing a program that obliterated individual will and eliminated any human empathy. One Japanese soldier remembered his first year in the army:
Personality ceased to exist, there was only rank. You became the lowest of the low, condemned to cook, clean, drill and run from dawn to dusk. You could be beaten for anything—being too short or too tall, even because somebody didn’t like the way you drank coffee. This was done to make each man respond instantly to orders, and it produced results. If you want soldiers to fight hard, they must train hard. This was the system which made the Japanese army so formidable—each man was schooled to accept unquestioningly the order of his group leader—and then took over a new recruit intake to boss around himself. Isn’t that the way it is in every army?
Not surprisingly, this sadistic training hardened the individual Japanese soldier, whose common trait during the conflict was an utter lack of compassion for the defeated. Historians commonly describe Germany’s infantry as the most efficient and well trained in history, but no nation’s soldiers could match the Japanese for sheer ferocity. What the Japanese soldier learned in his training, where uncompromising violence was a minute-to-minute reality, was passed on to prisoners and captive populations. Following the capture of Nanking, in December 1937, the Japanese Army murdered over two hundred thousand innocent Chinese men, women, and children, and Japanese soldiers raped thousands of Chinese women. The fate of Nanking was horrific: Civilians were used for bayonet practice, children were decapitated for refusing to remove their caps, and Japanese officers engaged in contests to see who could kill the most and do so the most creatively. The Rape of Nanking lasted six weeks and was well known in the West, where it became the subject of newsreels that horrified American audiences. While Japan’s political leadership talked of “the war against the Anglo-Saxons” and urged Asians to join them in the fight against white colonialism, the atrocities visited on Nanking were repeated across the conquered territories, alienating millions and transforming potential allies into enemies.
It is little wonder, then, that Americans rarely viewed the Japanese military as a worthy battlefield opponent, in stark contrast with their view of the German Wehrmacht. During the war, Americans followed with admiration the exploits of Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” and were familiar with the genius of Gerd von Rundstedt, Heinz Guderian, and Albert Kesselring, who were hailed even then as military geniuses. No such quality was attributed to Japanese commanders, though Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (Japan’s foremost strategist), Admiral Chuichi Nagumo (who commanded the task force that attacked Pearl Harbor), and General Tomoyuki Yamashita (“the Tiger of Malaya”) proved as capable and creative as any German commander.
The Japanese foot soldier was accorded even less respect. Wartime cartoons showed Japanese soldiers swinging like monkeys down the Malay Peninsula on t
heir way to attack Singapore. Others showed them as “Louseous Japanicas,” a “type of pestilence” that “inhabits coral atolls in the South Pacific, particularly pill boxes, caves, swamps and jungles.” As the war rolled on and the defeats mounted, the Japanese soldier became, in the words of a navy booklet, “a blood-soaked beast—half man and half monkey.” The army put it differently, particularly after the string of Japanese victories that marked the eighteen months following Pearl Harbor, warning its soldiers that the enemy should not be seen as a “buck-toothed, near-sighted, pint-sized monkey.” But the solution was hardly better: In its own training manuals, the U.S. military urged its soldiers to view the Japanese soldier as “a robot-like creature.” For the historian, the difference in American viewpoints on the German and Japanese soldier is illuminating; after the first American battles against the Germans in North Africa in 1942, Dwight Eisenhower told his commanders that they needed to teach their men to hate the Germans. No such directive was ever required of MacArthur.
Still, although Japan was ill-equipped to match America’s industrial might, and Japanese commanders and soldiers were ill-prepared to match the battlefield flexibility of American thinking, the Japanese military had, since December 7, conquered more territory in less time than any other military in human history. The captured geographic area dwarfed that conquered by Alexander’s Greek phalanxes or Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. By the time that MacArthur’s soldiers were in Bataan, the Japanese controlled one-quarter of the surface of the earth. The Japanese had achieved this by adopting strategies that puzzled and embarrassed their foes and that relied on the willingness of the individual Japanese soldier to march enormous distances under daunting circumstances and across some of the world’s most difficult terrain. Those same “monkey men” who swung through the Malay jungles forced the capitulation of Singapore as their brilliant campaign overwhelmed a superior force that moved sluggishly and fought indifferently.
So while American soldiers, and the American people, might disparage the Japanese soldier as a primitive animal (descriptions that were rare in literature about the Germans), MacArthur and his commander knew the truth. The soldiers facing MacArthur’s forces on Bataan in early 1942 represented what was then, and with the possible exception of the German Wehrmacht, the best light infantry in the history of the world. They were disciplined, highly motivated, and capable of enormous sacrifice.
None of this was a surprise to Jonathan Wainwright, who had seen the Japanese penchant for sacrifice during their drive for Luzon. And now on Bataan, Japanese commanders were willing to throw their soldiers relentlessly at his threadbare entrenchments. Under normal circumstances, Wainwright and his men might have welcomed such a battle, but the shortage of food and ballooning sick rolls weakened his formations and undermined unit morale. Increasingly, Wainwright and Parker’s soldiers were growing disenchanted with Washington’s praise, suspicious of reports of imminent rescue, and dismissive of MacArthur’s triumphant missives. The Japanese played on these fears, bombarding Wainwright’s trenches with propaganda leaflets, one of which showed a map of Bataan surrounded by heaping platefuls of meat, fruit, and cake. At night, a Japanese radio broadcast from Manila featured a theme song titled “Ships That Never Come In.”
In the midst of Wainwright’s fight for the pockets and in an attempt to counteract Homma’s propaganda, MacArthur issued a reassuring circular, instructing his officers to read it aloud to their men. Everyone was to get the message:
Help is on the way from the United States. Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched. The exact time of arrival of reinforcements is unknown as they will have to fight their way through Japanese attempts against them. It is imperative that our troops hold until reinforcements arrive. No further retreat is possible. . . . It is a question now of courage and determination. Men who run will merely be destroyed but men who fight will save themselves and their country. I call upon every soldier in Bataan to fight in his assigned position resisting every attack. This is the only road to salvation. If we fight we win; if we retreat we will be destroyed.
The message gave MacArthur’s soldiers faint hope and was widely, and vocally, dismissed and labeled “MacArthur’s ghost story.”
By early February, disillusion with the American war effort had set in on Corregidor, capped by yet another Roosevelt fireside chat. America was waging a world war on many battlefields, the president said. And while it seemed that the future was shrouded in uncertainty, there was no doubt that America would be victorious. MacArthur’s men listened to Roosevelt and believed him. Victory was assured and help was on the way, but, they sensed, it would not arrive soon or in time to stave off their defeat. So although Roosevelt’s talk was intended to cheer up the troops, as one of MacArthur’s soldiers noted, it “[tended] to weaken morale.” In truth, as Roosevelt and Marshall knew, not only was no help on the way, but “the battling bastards of Bataan” (as MacArthur’s men now described themselves) were about to lose their commander.
The idea that Douglas MacArthur should be “rescued” from Corregidor and brought to Australia originated not with Marshall or Roosevelt, but with Australian Prime Minister John Curtin. A calloused trade union activist, the tough-talking Curtin came to office with a reputation as his country’s most celebrated antimilitarist and its most outspoken critic of Great Britain. In fact, his opinion of the mother country bordered on contempt. He viewed Winston Churchill as a leader who cloaked British imperialism in fine phrases about liberty and self-determination, but who was not only an unrepentant colonialist but also, as Curtin described him, “a blowhard.” The Australians had willingly joined the fight against Germany, providing England with three badly needed and well-trained combat divisions. But when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and then conquered much of Southeast Asia, Curtin pressed Churchill to bring the “Diggers” (the Australians) home. Curtin made these views public in a high-profile commentary in the Melbourne Herald three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. “We refuse to accept the dictum that the Pacific struggle must be treated as a subordinate segment of the general conflict,” he wrote. “By that it is not meant that any one of the other theatres of war is of less importance than the Pacific, but that Australia asks for a concerted plan evoking the greatest strength at the Democracies’ disposal, determined upon hurling Japan back.”
Curtin’s argument mirrored MacArthur’s thinking. Both acquiesced in the Germany-first strategy, but neither of them liked it. For Curtin, the strategy not only was ill-conceived, but also exposed Australia to military conquest. Quezón-like, Curtin seethed at this, for while Churchill talked of plucky little England, the British leader seemed to blithely ignore the Japanese onslaught rolling south toward Darwin. When Churchill pointed out that the British fleet was still in the Pacific and doing battle with the Japanese, Curtin harrumphed his disgust. The British prime minister, Curtin thought, was either out of touch or suffering from delusions. The British fleet was no match for the Japanese and was hardly a bulwark against the hundreds of thousands of soldiers Tokyo could put in the field. In his Melbourne Herald commentary, Curtin made these views, and his disdain for the British, clear in a statement that stands as the first declaration of Australian independence from British dominance: “The Australian Government therefore regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in direction of the Democracies’ fighting plan. Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links with the United Kingdom.” Put simply, while Curtin confirmed Australia’s place in the empire, he placed its future in the hands of the Americans—not the British. “We must try to save ourselves,” Manuel Quezón told Carlos Romulo, “and to hell with the Americans.” John Curtin agreed: Australia must save itself, he said, and to hell with the British Empire.
Churchill huffily responded to Curtin’s defiant commentary with a series of detailed missives stretch
ing over two months. He cajoled the Australian leader with expansive pledges of support—what amounted to the equivalent of Marshall’s “buck up” cables to MacArthur. Still, this was Churchill at his Churchillian best, reassuring, feisty, steely-eyed, and self-confident. “Night and day,” he wrote in early January, “I am laboring here to make the best arrangements possible in your interests and for your safety, having regard to the other theatres and the other dangers which have to be met from our limited resources.”
Curtin greeted this claim acerbically, telling his Canberra political allies that no one, and certainly not Churchill, was as concerned with the “interests and safety” of Australia as he was. In mid-January, sensing that Curtin remained unmoved, Churchill praised the work of the “Australian Imperial Force” in North Africa, then pointed out that he could not have possibly known of the Japanese attack beforehand—implying that, if he had, things would be different: “I am sure it would have been wrong to send forces needed to beat Rommel to reinforce the Malay peninsula while Japan was still at peace. To try to be safe everywhere is to be strong nowhere.”
This argument, too, fell on deaf ears: Curtin might have pointed out that although the Japanese had not attacked Britain directly, their actions over the last ten years could hardly be described as “at peace.” Churchill, it was clear, had simply not been paying attention. Nevertheless, Curtin believed that Churchill was not making an argument so much as issuing a plea: If the Australian prime minister insisted on a withdrawal of Australian forces under British command, the fight against the Germans in North Africa would collapse. “We must not be dismayed or get into recrimination,” Churchill said, metaphorically baring his breast, “but remain united in true comradeship. Do not doubt my loyalty to Australia and New Zealand. I cannot offer any guarantees for the future, and I am sure great ordeals lie before us, but I feel hopeful as never before that we shall emerge safely, and also gloriously, from the dark valley.”