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

by Toland, John

  … Has it already been decided in Washington that the Philippine front is of no importance as far as the final result of the war is concerned and that, therefore, no help can be expected here in the immediate future, or at least before the power of resistance is exhausted? If so, I want to know, because I have my own responsibility to my countrymen.…

  I want to decide in my own mind whether there is justification for allowing all these men to be killed when for the final outcome of the war the shedding of their blood may be wholly unnecessary. It seems that Washington does not fully realize our situation nor the feelings which the apparent neglect of our safety and welfare have engendered in the hearts of the people here.…

  MacArthur did not have to be persuaded. He hoped the message would stir up Marshall. To his own men on Bataan, however, he sent inspiring words he could not have fully believed:

  Help is on the way from the United States. Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched.… No further retreat is possible. We have more troops in Bataan than the Japanese have thrown against us; our supplies are ample; a determined defense will defeat the enemy’s attack.…

  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 will win; if we retreat, we will be destroyed.

  Most of the Americans on Bataan didn’t believe it either. The Filipinos alone found inspiration in MacArthur’s words, which made them more determined than ever to prove themselves worthy to fight under the Stars and Stripes. On the morning of January 16 the 51st Philippine Army Division launched a determined counterattack. In fact, they were so eager that one regiment far outran units on its flanks.

  It was the opportunity Colonel Imai had been looking for. The Filipinos had formed a salient more dangerous to themselves than to him and he promptly struck at the eastern end of the bulge. At that moment, too, Colonel Takechi’s lost regiment burst out of the jungled slopes directly into the other side of the bulge. Assaulted from both sides, the Filipino salient crumpled and by noon collapsed. It left a two-mile hole in the Abucay line.

  It was late afternoon by the time Takechi—face lined with fatigue and hunger, uniform in tatters—reported to Nara how he had become hopelessly lost on Mount Natib. The general was sympathetic and ordered him to go into reserve. Takechi saluted crisply, and without pausing for supplies or rest, led his troops off—not north into reserve but back to the south. He thought Nara was punishing him for getting lost; he was going to lead his men back over Mount Natib this time or die in the attempt.

  The other side of Bataan, from Mount Natib to the South China Sea, was so inaccessible that as yet Homma had been unable to mount any appreciable offensive. But late the following afternoon five thousand Japanese moved opposite Wainwright’s positions. Their commander, Major General Naoki Kimura, discovered that the American defense line extended only halfway up the western slope of Mount Silanganan, a peak two miles west of Mount Natib. He decided to do what Takechi had failed to do on the other side. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Hiroshi Nakanishi, seven hundred infantrymen secretly circled Wainwright’s right flank and turned sharply west. By dawn of January 21 they reached the South China Sea, cutting off all of Wainwright’s front-line troops.

  To the east, the Abucay line was at the point of collapse. Troops sent in to boost the punctured front had become bogged down in the dense vegetation and rugged crevasses and never reached their positions. Along the front itself the troops were exhausted from constant fighting during the day and harassing attacks at night from infiltrators who terrorized the defenders with firecrackers and taunts over loudspeakers.

  After a quick tour of Bataan, General Sutherland advised his chief to withdraw immediately to another defense line behind the cobblestone road bisecting Bataan. MacArthur ordered a general retreat, starting at darkness the following evening. At seven o’clock on January 24, trucks and men began pouring back from the Abucay line. By midnight the trail to the rear was jammed with battered buses full of gaunt-faced Filipinos in blue denims and coconut helmets, command cars packed with fatigued officers in filthy uniforms, and marching troops. There were no military police to regulate the flow to the rear, and units became separated in the nightmare chaos. Officers could do nothing but keep men and vehicles moving south and pray that no shells would fall.

  Just before dawn the handful of troops holding the front lines began leapfrogging to the rear. They looked like walking dead. Unwashed and unshaven for nine days, their gaunt faces were blank. The withdrawal continued all through the next day, harried by Japanese planes which freely strafed and bombed the trails and the coastal road. Retreat turned into rout when the indomitable Colonel Takechi and his starved men burst out of nowhere. They had done the impossible, crossed Mount Natib.

  By January 26 the new Fil-American line, connected by an ingenious network of communication and supply trails hacked out of the jungle, was almost completely manned. It lay in the valley between the two dead volcanoes, just behind the cobblestone road, and extended uninterruptedly from Manila Bay to the South China Sea. It was divided into two sectors, with Wainwright again commanding the western half and Parker the eastern. The troops rested in foxholes and dugouts, thanking God they had survived the arduous retreat from Abucay. In his position Lieutenant Henry G. Lee, of the Philippine Division, was composing a poem about the withdrawal. Bataan, he wrote, had been

  … saved for another day

  Saved for hunger and wounds and heat

  For slow exhaustion and grim retreat

  For a wasted hope and sure defeat.…

  Like the Americans, the Japanese were in no condition to continue the battle. Nara’s “Summer” Brigade was riddled with more than two thousand casualties. The survivors were exhausted and still stupefied by their first taste of battle.

  The resumed fighting brought on even more confusion than at Abucay. Here the jungle was so dense that one Japanese force of a thousand men slipped through Wainwright’s lines without being detected for three days. It took almost three weeks of desperate, deadly hand-to-hand combat to wipe them out. The Japanese also tried to outflank Wainwright by sea, landing in barges on the rugged west coast far behind the front. They planned to drive south to Mariveles and cut off supplies from Corregidor. Five separate landings were attempted over the next two weeks, and it wasn’t until February 8 that the last pocket of infiltrators was eliminated. That same day Homma held an important conference at his command post in the sugar center of San Fernando. It was muggy, above 95 degrees. The general was tormented. He had already lost seven thousand men in combat on Bataan, and another ten thousand had been stricken with malaria, beriberi and dysentery. He had twice asked for reinforcements and been rejected twice.

  There were only three Japanese infantry battalions strung across Bataan, and Lieutenant General Masami Maeda, Homma’s chief of staff, warned that if MacArthur discovered this he could break through. The senior operations officer, Colonel Motoo Nakayama, still insisted the attack should be prosecuted vigorously. “The main effort, however, should be made along the east coast, not the west.”

  Maeda wanted Bataan merely blockaded while the rest of the archipelago was occupied. “By that time the men of General Matsukuasa [MacArthur] will be starved and ready to surrender.”

  Maeda was right, but to Homma it was unthinkable not to press for a quicker victory. Tokyo would never permit such face-losing strategy. He said a new and much more powerful offense had to be launched, To do this he would have to bear the unbearable—swallow his pride and once more ask for heavy reinforcements. Tears coursed down his face. As the staff started to file out he was handed a telegram from Tokyo. Tojo was displeased; there were victories everywhere except in the Philippines. A look of agony came over Homma’s face and he slumped heavily onto the table. The unconscious commander was carried to the next room.

  On Corregidor, Quezon in his wheelchair listened in mounting fury as Roosevelt told a r
adio audience how thousands of aircraft would soon be on their way to the battlefront—Europe. Quezon pointed to smoke rising from the mainland. “For thirty years I have worked and hoped for my people. Now they burn and die for a flag that could not protect them. Por Dios y todos los santos! I cannot stand this constant reference to England, to Europe. Where are the planes this sinvergüenza [scoundrel] is boasting of? How American to writhe in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while a daughter is being raped in the back room!”

  He summoned MacArthur and said, “Perhaps my presence on Corregidor is not of value. Why don’t I go to Manila and become a prisoner of war?” MacArthur thought such a surrender would be misinterpreted abroad. “I don’t care what outsiders think,” Quezon snapped, but agreed to think it over.

  That night a young Filipino second lieutenant crawled up a rocky beach on Corregidor with a bag of ping-pong balls tied around him as a life preserver. He had swum from Bataan to warn Quezon of the increasing hostility between Filipinos and Americans at the front. “We feel we should have the same rations as the Americans,” Antonio Aquino told the President. He was the elder son of Benigno Aquino, the sugar-cane king and speaker of the Philippine Assembly. “We eat only salmon and sardines. One can per day for thirty men, twice a day.”

  Quezon was enraged. He summoned his cabinet and said he would ask Roosevelt to let him issue a manifesto requesting the United States to grant at once absolute independence to the Philippines. Then he would demobilize the Philippine Army and declare the Philippines neutral. Consequently both America and Japan would have to withdraw their armies.

  Vice President Sergio Osmeña tried to point out the consequences of such an action in Washington, but Quezon continued to rage. He was stilled by hacking coughs. To calm him, Osmeña reluctantly approved sending the message to Roosevelt. As usual, it would have to go through MacArthur. He not only let it pass but—rankled by the suspicion that Washington, and Marshall in particular, had let him down—supported it with his own grim assessment of the situation.* “There is no denying that we are nearly done,” he wrote; Quezon’s plan “might offer the best possible solution of what is about to be a disastrous debacle.” MacArthur was risking his military career but felt it was worth the gamble. Perhaps Quezon’s desperate proposal would shock Washington into action.

  It dismayed Marshall, as did the fact that MacArthur “went more than halfway toward supporting Quezon’s position.” Roosevelt’s reaction was unequivocable. “We can’t do this at all,” he tersely told Marshall and Stimson. Until that moment the Chief of Staff had entertained some doubts about Roosevelt’s leadership. The President’s firm decision convinced him that he was, after all, “a great man.”

  Roosevelt had enough insight not to expect Quezon and MacArthur to agree with the policy determined by “Arcadia” that Hitler should be defeated first. He must somehow persuade them that everything possible was being sent to the southwest Pacific. By the middle of March seventy-nine thousand troops would have left for the Pacific front, almost four times the number heading for Europe. Most of the available planes were also bound for the Orient.†

  It was vital that Quezon understand that there were two fronts—almost 200,000 tons of American shipping had already been sunk off the North Atlantic coast and Rommel was threatening to push the British back to Alexandria. Roosevelt had to find the right words to get all these facts to Quezon without a hint of threat or accusation.

  He succeeded in masterful fashion: while rejecting Quezon’s proposal as unacceptable to America, he gave his word that no matter what Quezon did, the United States would never abandon the Philippines.

  SO LONG AS THE FLAG OF THE U. S. FLIES ON FILIPINO SOIL … IT WILL BE DEFENDED BY OUR OWN MEN TO THE DEATH. WHATEVER HAPPENS TO PRESENT AMERICAN GARRISON WE SHALL NOT RELAX OUR EFFORTS UNTIL THE FORCES WHICH ARE NOW MARSHALLING OUTSIDE THE PHILIPPINES RETURN TO THE PHILIPPINES AND DRIVE OUT THE LAST REMNANT OF THE INVADERS FROM YOUR SOIL.

  These words overwhelmed Quezon. He swore to himself and God that as long as he lived he would stand by America regardless of the consequences to his people or himself.

  Roosevelt’s reply to MacArthur was more direct:

  … THE DUTY AND THE NECESSITY OF RESISTING JAPANESE AGGRESSION TO THE LAST TRANSCENDS IN IMPORTANCE ANY OTHER OBLIGATION NOW FACING US IN THE PHILIPPINES.… I PARTICULARLY REQUEST THAT YOU PROCEED RAPIDLY TO THE ORGANIZATION OF YOUR FORCES AND YOUR DEFENSES SO AS TO MAKE YOUR RESISTANCE AS EFFECTIVE AS CIRCUMSTANCES WILL PERMIT AND AS PROLONGED AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.

  This meant that the Philippines had been irrevocably written off, and MacArthur’s own value was reduced to a symbol of resistance. He replied that he would fight to destruction on Bataan and then Corregidor, making them names for Americans to remember forever.

  I HAVE NOT THE SLIGHTEST INTENTION IN THE WORLD OF SURRENDERING OR CAPITULATING THE FILIPINO ELEMENT OF MY COMMAND.… THERE HAS NEVER BEEN THE SLIGHTEST WAVERING AMONG THE TROOPS.

  While this was an exaggeration, it was truer than it had been a few weeks earlier. Riddled as they were by dysentery and malaria, their uniforms in tatters, the half-starved men of Bataan were full of fight and confidence. The Japanese had been held, and Filipino recruits who had fled in panic from Lingayen Gulf had become tough and dependable.

  2.

  On the Malay Peninsula the Japanese rolled relentlessly toward the keystone of the British Empire in Asia, Singapore Island. On January 7 General Wavell, chosen at “Arcadia” to command the entire area, flew from his headquarters in Bandung on Java to Singapore on a brief inspection tour. The previous night fifteen Japanese tanks had burst through the front lines of the 11th Indian Division to cross the strategic Slim River bridge, less than 250 air miles from Singapore itself. There wasn’t a single Allied tank in all Malaya to stop them; British experts had decreed that armor was unsuited for jungle warfare.

  Wavell drove north to find III Corps disorganized and the 11th Indian Division completely shattered. He ordered a general withdrawal of almost 150 miles to Johore Province, where Major-General Gordon Bennett and his Australians would make the final attempt to stop the invaders.

  Wavell returned to Singapore to inspect the defenses on the north side of the great fortress island. He found nothing, not even detailed plans for resistance against land attack. To his consternation, he also learned that almost all of the island’s great guns facing the sea could not be turned around to fire at the advancing Japanese.

  Churchill was dumfounded by Wavell’s report that Singapore, far from being impregnable, was almost naked. He blamed himself for putting his faith in Fortress Singapore and hastily penned this note for his Chiefs of Staff:

  I must admit to being staggered by Wavell’s telegram of the 16th.… It never occurred to me for a moment … that the gorge of the fortress of Singapore, with its splendid moat half a mile to a mile wide, was not entirely fortified against an attack from the northward. What is the use of having an island for a fortress if it is not to be made into a citadel? … How is it that not one of you pointed this out to me at any time when these matters have been under discussion? More especially this should have been done because … I have repeatedly shown that I relied upon this defence of Singapore Island against a formal siege, and never relied upon the Kra Isthmus plan.…

  Not only must the defence of Singapore Island be maintained by every means, but the whole island must be fought for until every single unit and every single strong point has been separately destroyed.

  Finally, the city of Singapore must be converted into a citadel and defended to the death. No surrender can be contemplated.

  From the first the enemy had kept the British off balance in Malaya. Outnumbered more than 2 to 1, the Japanese never stopped to consolidate a gain, to regroup or wait for supplies; they surged down the main roads on thousands of bicycles and in hundreds of abandoned British cars and trucks. Whenever they came to a destroyed bridge, the cyclists waded across the river holding aloft their bikes or crossed
on log bridges supported on the shoulders of engineers.‡

  The accelerating Japanese success was unforeseen on both sides. A captured British Engineer officer told Colonel Tsuji he had expected the defenses in northern Malaya to hold out for at least three months. “As the Japanese Army had not beaten the weak Chinese Army after four years’ fighting in China we did not consider it a very formidable enemy.”

  Tsuji himself was often up front giving advice and pushing the troops forward. At one roadblock halfway down the peninsula he impatiently devised a frontal attack on the spot and phoned back to Army headquarters for reinforcements and cannon. The answer was no—make a flank attack. This tactic was successful, but at midnight Tsuji stormed into headquarters and wakened everyone with a shower of insults. “What are you doing sleeping while a battle is going on!” he roared and broke into the bedroom of Lieutenant General Sosaku Suzuki, Yamashita’s chief of staff. The gentlemanly Suzuki greeted Tsuji with his usual courtesy. This only infuriated Tsuji more. “What do you mean wearing nemaki [nightwear] when I’m reporting from the front line!”

  Cowed by such righteous indignation, as other generals before him, Suzuki drowsily changed into his dress uniform and buckled on a sword. “I am the chief operational staff officer responsible for the operations of the entire army,” Tsuji raved on. “I submitted my idea based on actual front-line conditions and your rejection of my request means you no longer have confidence in me!” He shouted and swore and repeated the same accusations over and over until dawn. Finally he stamped out, wrote his resignation and handed it to Yamashita.

  He was so petulant that he refused to eat and sequestered himself in his bedroom. A week later he emerged. His actions were ignored by Yamashita and Suzuki, and he returned to his duties as if nothing had happened—as arrogant, inexorable and brilliant as ever.