The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)

by Toland, John

  Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were united against Hitler, but at the moment the first two were desperately in need of help on the other side of the world. In Moscow, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden put the question politely to Stalin in mid-December: would he join his allies and declare war on Japan? Stalin explained that he had been forced to withdraw troops from the Far East to hold back Hitler and didn’t think he could replace them in less than four months. He couldn’t declare war on Japan or provoke her until these forces were back to strength. Perhaps before then Japan would herself solve the problem by attacking Russia: he was inclined to hope that would happen, since it would be difficult to get much popular support for another war thousands of miles to the east.

  Curiously, he was convinced that Japanese air successes would not have been possible without the Germans, who—according to one secret report—had contributed fifteen hundred aircraft and hundreds of pilots.

  “Certainly the Japanese have shown more skill in the air than we expected,” Eden remarked politely.

  “We have had experience fighting the Japanese in the air and we have also carefully observed them in China for a very long time, and I have come to the conclusion that this is not really a Japanese war. I think some of the Japanese pilots were trained in Germany, and others are German.”

  “How do you think the airplanes got there?”

  “Probably through South America.”

  Eden apologized for not sending ten squadrons to the Russian front; they would have to go to Singapore.

  “I fully understand and have no objection,” Stalin said.

  “It is a great disappointment to us.”

  “I fully realize the position and that the situation has changed. We, too, have had our difficult periods.”

  “I very much appreciate the spirit of your answer,” Eden said, “and if the wheel goes round again we shall be very glad to help.”

  On his part, Stalin was sorry he could not help in the Far East. “We can do nothing now, but in the spring we shall be ready, and will then help.”

  Eden made another effort to get a more definite commitment and used the deteriorating situation in Malaya as the excuse.

  “If the Soviet Union were to declare war on Japan,” Stalin replied, “we should have to wage a real war by land, on sea and in the air. It would not be like the declarations of war on Japan by Belgium and Poland. Consequently we have to make a careful estimate of the forces involved. At present we are not ready.… We would prefer that Japan should attack us, and I think it very probable that she will do so—not just yet, but later. If the Germans are hard pressed it is likely that they will urge the Japanese to attack us, in which case the attack may be expected about the middle of next year.”

  This did not satisfy Eden. “I fear that the Japanese may meanwhile adopt a policy of dealing with their opponents one by one, and may try to finish with us before attacking the Soviet Union.”

  “Great Britain is not fighting Japan alone. She has allies in China, the Dutch East Indies and the United States of America.”

  “The main attack at the moment is on Malaya, where our allies cannot help us much,” said Eden. The next six months were going to be most difficult. “We have got to stick it out, and we shall do so. But it is a very uncomfortable situation.” Even so, the Libyan campaign would not be called off just to increase the strength in Malaya. “The Far East must hold until we can afford to send reinforcements.”

  “I think that is quite sound. The weakest link of the Axis is Italy, and if this link is broken the whole Axis will collapse.” Stalin couldn’t help adding that if the British had attacked Italy in 1939, “they would not be masters of the situation in the Mediterranean.”

  Dinner that evening went on until dawn and several officers—notably the colorful Commissar for Defense, Marshal Semën Timoshenko—became intoxicated. Stalin turned to Eden in embarrassment. “Do your generals ever get drunk?”

  “They don’t often get the chance” was the diplomatic answer.

  Churchill was aboard Duke of York, a day’s sail from Chesapeake Bay, when he received a cable from Eden announcing that the talks with Stalin had “ended on a friendly note.” He was bound for “Arcadia,” code name of the first wartime conference between Britain and America and named after the region in Greece so famed for its pastoral innocence and contentment that it has become a universal symbol. The conference, designed to bring about the best means of fighting the Axis, was to belie its name from the beginning.

  Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff expected to dominate “Arcadia,” and by the time they arrived in Washington on the evening of December 22, they had formulated a detailed program: Germany was the prime enemy and her defeat was the key to victory. Italy and Japan would then speedily collapse. “In our considered opinion, therefore, it should be a cardinal principal of A-B [American-British] strategy that only the minimum of force necessary for the safeguarding of vital interests in other theatres should be diverted from operations against Germany.”

  But at the first meeting the following afternoon it was immediately apparent that the Americans had not come merely to listen and approve. They made it clear that only a frontal attack on Germany would bring victory and that the British concept of maneuver was nothing but a pecking away at the edges. It was an understandable conflict between a nation whose limited forces had already been strained by more than two years of war and one new to battle with almost unlimited resources and manpower. To the Americans, war was something like an athletic contest and little was thought of what would happen when peace came. The more sophisticated British regarded battle as flexible, a continuation of policy that could take surprising turns. Even the best friend the United States had among the British military leaders, Sir John Dill, privately felt that America had not—“repeat not—the slightest conception of what the war means, and their armed forces are more unready for war than it is possible to imagine.”

  4.

  On the day Churchill arrived in Washington a large invasion force of eighty-five transports approached the Philippines. The submarine Stingray had sighted the convoy in time to alert General MacArthur, who expected the Japanese to land at the southern end of Lingayen Gulf where the bulk of his artillery was emplaced. The Japanese knew all about this concentration from “the Battle of Lingayen Gulf” and were about to land the 14th Army miles up the coast.

  The Army commander, General Masaharu Homma, the amateur playwright, had long opposed the road to war. He had spent eight years with the British, including service in France in 1918 with the British Expeditionary Force and had deep respect for and some understanding of the West. Following the fall of Nanking, he had publicly declared that “unless peace is achieved immediately it will be disastrous,” and then confided to General Muto that Tojo would make a poor minister of war.

  Few of his men knew where they were. They had been secretly loaded five days earlier at Formosa and the Pescadores, and even those officers who knew their destination had the vaguest of instructions. The first of Homma’s 43,110 men began going overside at two o’clock in the morning on December 22. The high seas almost swamped the first boats, and it took two and a half hours to load two battalions of infantry and a battalion of mountain artillery. Forty-seven minutes later the first boat ground onto a beach near the town of Agoo, but many of the landing craft which followed were overturned by the roaring breakers. On the beach the soldiers met no resistance.

  By midmorning the entire first wave had landed and the beachhead was consolidated with spirited opposition from a lone Filipino battalion. Late that afternoon all the infantry and half the tanks were ashore and moving south down Route 3, the paved highway running along the coast to Manila.

  In the capital MacArthur anxiously awaited news from Lingayen Gulf. He radioed Marshall a suggestion that carriers bring pursuit planes within range of the Philippines: CAN I EXPECT ANYTHING ALONG THAT LINE? Marshall replied that according to the Navy, this was impossible and MacArthur wo
uld have to rely on the planes already ferried as far as Brisbane in Australia.

  At dawn General Brereton’s remaining bombers—four Fortresses—attacked the Japanese convoy in Lingayen Gulf. They dropped 100-lb. bombs and then turned south for Australia. Homma was steadily pushing toward Manila and early in the afternoon attacked the unit blockading the main road. With scarcely ten weeks’ training, few of these Filipino soldiers knew how to operate their antiquated Enfield rifles. They broke and fled, leaving the supporting artillery unprotected. Major General Jonathan M. (“Skinny”) Wainwright, commander of all forces in northern Luzon, phoned MacArthur for permission to withdraw behind the Agno River.

  With no air force or navy, MacArthur had to abandon his dream of holding the enemy at the beaches and was obliged to fall back on a plan drawn up by his predecessors. This was known as War Plan Orange-3 and provided for withdrawal of Fil-American forces to the Bataan Peninsula if enemy landings could not be contained. Here, within sight of Manila, the defenders would hold out for as long as six months until the Navy could bring in reinforcements. MacArthur had long since shelved this operation as defeatist. All he could do now was call in his staff and say, “Put WPO-3 into effect.”

  The situation was worse than MacArthur had feared. The next morning he discovered that his forces were caught in a giant pincers. Twenty-four Japanese transports had landed during the night at Lamon Bay, sixty air miles southeast of Manila, and almost ten thousand men of the 16th Division were advancing on Manila in three columns. At ten o’clock MacArthur ordered his South Luzon Force, two divisions, to retreat to Bataan. The battle in the south was over before it started and MacArthur was forced to give instructions to transfer his headquarters to Corregidor Island at dark.

  Nearby in the Marsman Building, Admiral Hart told Rear Admiral Francis W. Rockwell, commandant of the 16th Naval District, that he was moving his headquarters south to Borneo so he could be with the operating fleet. Rockwell would assume command of all naval remnants. Their conversation was drowned out by the roar of planes and thunder of bombs exploding in the Walled City. They could see flames all over the port area. Dust from pulverized cement and stone mixed with black billows of smoke and engulfed the entire Pasig River section.

  At Malacañan Palace, President Manuel Quezon was exhorting his executive secretary, Jorge Vargas, and José Laurel to make a sacrifice without parallel for the good of the people: “You two will remain here and deal with the Japanese.” He and Vice President Sergio Osmeña would join MacArthur on Corregidor.

  All four of them must pledge never to reveal his order to Vargas and Laurel. But people will call me a collaborator, protested Laurel. He broke down and begged for permission to accompany Quezon to Corregidor. It was Laurel’s duty, insisted Quezon, who was dying of tuberculosis. “Someone has to protect the people from the Japanese.”

  Outside, the streets swarmed with Army trucks and squat Pambusco buses overflowing with soldiers and supplies. Every vehicle was going north—toward Bataan, on the other side of the bay. As darkness came on, the steamer Don Esteban, with MacArthur and most of his staff aboard, plowed across the inlet toward Corregidor, less than thirty miles away. It was balmy and the moon was shining. In the distance, flames leaped up from Cavite Navy Yard’s oil dump. Almost all of the men of USAFFE headquarters were in short sleeves. It was a strange Christmas Eve for Americans.

  Seven hundred miles to the north another island bastion was about to fall. The Japanese held most of Hong Kong’s mountainous thirty-two square miles. The British forces were split in two and their final lines were crumpling. There was little ammunition left and only enough water for another day or so. Though the resistance on the mainland had been disappointing, the stand on the island was stubborn, primarily because of the determination of the 1,759 men of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps. Dubbed “playboy soldiers” by the Regulars, this mixture of local British, Eurasian, Chinese and Portuguese civilian recruits had fought as well as any of the other troops and better than most.

  By Christmas morning those defenders were overrun who were cut off at the narrow Stanley Peninsula on the southern end of the island, and uncontrolled groups of Japanese began butchering the wounded and raping Chinese and British nurses. The main force at Victoria, the capital of Hong Kong, was also close to being overwhelmed. At nine o’clock two prisoners of the Japanese—a retired British major and a civilian—were released with a message for Major-General C. M. Maltby, military commander of the colony: it would be useless to continue the fight and the Japanese had promised to hold fire for three hours while the British made up their minds.

  Maltby held off until three-fifteen before reluctantly ordering his commanders to surrender. It was a humiliating end to British rule in China—and even with surrender the atrocities continued throughout Christmas night.

  It was also a dark Christmas in the Philippines. That morning MacArthur reviewed the gloomy situation at his new headquarters on Corregidor, a small tadpole-shaped island three miles south of Bataan Peninsula in the mouth of Manila Bay. Whoever held it controlled the bay, for it stuck in its throat like a bone. The coastal-gun, mortar and antiaircraft batteries were formidable, and the labyrinthine tunnel system in the solid rock under Malinta Hill provided bombproof shelter for a hospital, headquarters, shops and storehouses.

  The flow of American traffic was moving toward Bataan from every direction. Route 3 out of Manila was clogged with trucks, 155’s on their carriages, naval guns on trucks, buses, cars, calesas and oxcarts. A couple of well-placed bombs on the two bridges at Calumpit, thirty miles north of Manila, over the wide, unfordable Pampanga River, would have cut off all forces from the south.

  Ten miles above the bridges the line of vehicles turned left at San Fernando toward the peninsula. Here they met the van of Wainwright’s main body flowing in from the north. The result was a monumental traffic jam and the road from San Fernando leading into Bataan was so narrow that traffic had backed up into town before noon.

  The peninsula itself was bedlam. As thousands of frightened civilian refugees fleeing ahead of Homma’s army streamed into Bataan on foot, in oxcarts and ramshackle cars, fragments of units arrived to find few road signs or markers and wandered about in confusion. The trenches and fortifications specified by WPO-3 existed on paper alone. The villagers should have been evacuated but someone had apparently forgotten to give the order; they stared in wonder as an endless parade of trucks, cars and guns rumbled past, coating their bamboo houses with thick layers of dust.

  WPO-3 called for a six-month food supply, but there was not enough for a month. More provisions were on the way by water, rail and highway, but for how many more hours would the roads to Bataan be kept open? The one hope was that Wainwright’s men could delay the enemy drive from the north another two weeks. This would give the troops on Bataan time to dig defenses while the South Luzon Force retreated up through Manila and into Bataan. At best it was a slim chance. Then came an official report that the Japanese had penetrated the Agno River line, the last formidable natural fortification between them and Bataan. It seemed unlikely that the poorly trained and exhausted defenders could hold back the Japanese long enough. Could they resist even until New Year’s Day?

  On Christmas Day a flying boat brought an admiral to Hawaii from the mainland. It was Chester Nimitz, the man chosen to relieve Admiral Kimmel and command all naval forces in the Pacific. His hair was turning white but he was trim-looking and his blue eyes were piercing. He had hoped for a sea command.

  In a few hours Nimitz found what he had feared—too much pessimism. Morale was at “rock bottom” and he noticed that the shock of Pearl Harbor had turned several senior officers’ hair white. He summoned the staff he had inherited, some of whom were taking sedatives on surgeon’s orders. “There will be no changes,” he said. “I have complete confidence in you men. We’ve taken a terrific wallop but I have no doubts as to the ultimate outcome.”

  In his Academy classbook he was described as
a man “of cheerful and confident tomorrows,” and true to form his calm serenity was infectious. But he knew the complete rehabilitation of spirit would take time. The Pacific Fleet would not be ready to strike back in force for several months.

  The last survivors of those trapped inside the sunken battleship West Virginia finally lay lifeless on the lower shelf of storeroom A-111. On a bulkhead was a calendar with X’s marked from December 7 through 23.

  5.

  “This is a strange Christmas Eve,” Winston Churchill said emotionally. He was standing next to Roosevelt on the south portico of the White House addressing a crowd of thirty thousand gathered on the south lawn for the traditional lighting of the municipal Christmas tree. “Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and with the most terrible weapons which science can devise, the nations advance upon each other.… Here, in the midst of war, raging and roaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearths and homes, here, amid all the tumult, we have tonight the peace of the spirit in each cottage home and in every generous heart.… Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifices and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

  He told his personal physician, Lord Moran, that he’d had palpitations during the ceremony and wanted his pulse taken. “It has all been very moving,” he lisped excitedly. “This is a new war, with Russia victorious, Japan in, and America in up to the neck.”