Sutherland and MacArthur, too, saw the risk, but neither was willing to overrule the commanders on the ground. That meant the opportunity was available for any Japanese unit that was intrepid enough to take on the steep slopes, thick jungle terrain, and supposedly impassable peaks around Natib, to drive a wedge between Wainwright to the west and Parker to the east.4
On January 20 a Japanese battalion did just that, descending into Wainwright’s rear and onto the one major road used for transporting heavy equipment and supplies, even as Japanese forces swept through the village of Morong and secured the high ground overlooking the I Corps lines. Attempts to dislodge the Japanese, like those of II Corps days earlier, proved futile, and soon Wainwright’s troops had to fall back along the beach, abandoning their artillery.5
The result was that by the January 22, disaster was staring the Allies in the face along the entire line. Sutherland took a PT boat over from Corregidor to pay a personal visit and see firsthand how close to catastrophe MacArthur’s army really was. At once he told Wainwright and Parker to order a full withdrawal, which MacArthur also agreed to on the 23rd. By that morning columns of weary American and Filipino soldiers were tramping down both coastal roads toward Mariveles, as Japanese planes constantly harassed the II Corps retreat by bombing and strafing, Zeros swooping in and firing at untrained Filipinos soldiers, who scrambled “like sheep in a slaughter pen.”6
“It was impossible to do anything but keep the mass moving to the rear,” Colonel Miller, commander of a tank battalion, remembered. “It was a nightmare.”7
The last to pull out of II Corps sector were the Americans of the Thirty-first. An eyewitness saw them on the road, “walking like dead men” with “a blank stare in their eyes,” and “their faces, covered with beards, lacked any semblance of expression.”8 They looked more like hobos than soldiers; yet together with the Scouts they were slated to be the heart and soul of any successful defense.
On the 24th the first units of I and II Corps were stumbling into the reserve battle position, a line running from Bagac in the west to Orion in the east. “With its occupation,” MacArthur grimly told George Marshall, “all maneuvering possibilities cease. I intend to fight it out to complete destruction.”9
But to his troops and personnel, he intended to remain stoutly upbeat, and so he issued a statement that would haunt him the rest of his life—and his reputation ever afterward.
“Help is on the way from the United States,” it read. “Thousands of troops and thousands of planes are being dispatched. The exact time of their arrival is unknown [but] it is imperative our troops hold until those reinforcements arrive.”
He went on, “We have more troops on Bataan than the Japanese have thrown against us. Our supplies are ample. A determined defense will defeat the enemy’s attack.” Still, “no further retreat is possible.”
“If we fight we will win; if we retreat, we will be destroyed.”10
It was here at the tip of the peninsula, his statement implied, with 90,000 soldiers and civilians occupying some 200 square miles of brush and jungle, that the defenders of Bataan would make their final stand.
MacArthur had meant his words to be upbeat. He had hoped they would be inspiring; he knew the phrase about troops and planes “being dispatched” was ambiguous (most, he knew, would be headed not for the Philippines but for Europe), and the truth behind the remark about supplies being “ample” was flimsy at best.
But there are good reasons to believe that he didn’t mean to mislead the men of Bataan—although many who heard him had already concluded that only a direct act of God could save them now.
They had learned this the night before, on January 22, when over the scratchy reception of hundreds of radio sets the residents of Bataan and Corregidor heard the familiar drawling voice of President Roosevelt speaking from thousands of miles away, about the war. The president spoke sternly of the need to free Europe from the domination of Rome and Berlin; he spoke of the need to defeat Tokyo and the Japanese; he spoke of America’s and its Allies’ final victory.
But as they turned their radios off, the listeners realized there was one problem.
Roosevelt had never mentioned the Philippines.
As one American officer on Bataan put it, “Plain for all to see was the handwriting on the wall, at the end of which the President had placed a large and emphatic period. The President had—with regret—wiped us off the page and closed the book.”11
Deep in the bowels of Corregidor and the Malinta Tunnel one of those listening had been President Quezon. Although now confined almost constantly to a wheelchair, he flew into a violent rage. “Come, listen to this scoundrel,” he cried out in a shriek that echoed through the tunnel. “Que demonio! For thirty years I have worked and hoped for my people. Now they burn and die for a flag that cannot protect them….Where are the planes they speak of? America writhes in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin, Europe, while a daughter, the Philippines, is being raped in the back room.”
Furious and desperate, he sent a message to MacArthur. “Why don’t I go to Manila,” he pleaded with his friend when MacArthur arrived, “and become a prisoner of war?”
MacArthur had to shake his head. This was his worst nightmare. Once interned back on the mainland at Malacañan Palace, he explained, Quezon would become only a hapless Japanese puppet. If he refused to sign the declarations they ordered him to sign, they would simply forge his signature. Besides, MacArthur hinted, the Filipinos still fighting and dying on Bataan would remember him not as a patriot but a traitor.
So Quezon relented, but he still insisted on sending a personal cable to FDR. “This war is not our making,” he wrote. No government could expect the loyalty of citizens it cannot defend. “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.”12
Roosevelt’s soothing reply arrived the next day, filled with the rolling tones of personal reassurance. “Although I cannot at this time state the day that help will arrive in the Philippines,” the president of the United States wrote, “vessels…have been filled with cargo of necessary supplies and have been dispatched to Manila. A continuous stream of fighter and pursuit planes is traversing the Pacific…while extensive arrivals of troops are being guarded by adequate protective elements of our navy.”13
It was a warm message of reassurance, and of much-needed hope. Yet the picture Roosevelt painted of docks piled high with American supplies and lines of American soldiers loading onto ships destined for the Philippines, was a lie. Roosevelt knew that nothing was being done, and that the only reinforcements that would be coming from the States were verbal ones.
Because it wasn’t just FDR who was in on the deception. So was Chief of Staff George Marshall, who had told MacArthur back on January 4 that the War Department was steadily building up its airpower in order to cut off Japanese supply lines south of Borneo, in order “to permit an assault in the southern Philippines”—when his own staff had told him the day before there was no hope of relieving the Philippines. It was also George Marshall who on January 17 told MacArthur that his friend and former secretary of war Pat Hurley was being dispatched to Australia “to organize blockade running measures on a broad front for your supply of food and critical munitions…and lend his energetic support to efforts to reach you with supplies.”14
Yet Marshall knew his words of encouragement were empty, as did Henry Stimson. “I stood in Washington helpless,” he wrote later, “and had to simply watch their glorious but hopeless defense.” In order to keep the Philippines in the fight as long as possible, however, he and Marshall had to keep sending “news that would buck General MacArthur up”—just as they knew that MacArthur, in order to do his duty, would pass that encouragement on to his troops and personnel.
It was a cruel, though perhaps necessary, deception. Some were not fooled; others, like Madeline Ullom, a nurse who had made her
escape from Manila to Corregidor on that nightmarish evening of December 29, still believed. Later she recalled how, after MacArthur’s stirring statement on January 23, “every morning before breakfast I walked to the top of Malinta Hill to see if the promised convoy was arriving.”15
Sadly, it wasn’t just MacArthur who had misled her, however inadvertently. The brass in Washington, and her own president, were doing the same.
—
Meanwhile, the Japanese pressure on the new American-Filipino positions began even before Bataan Force had settled into their foxholes.
It started on the 22nd, not from the front lines but from the sea, with a series of amphibious landings on the peninsula’s west coast. It involved only a battalion or so of Japanese troops, and was hastily organized. Some of the landing barges ran afoul of John Bulkeley’s PT boats in the dark, and took a hail of .50-caliber bullets that sank two barges, one of which Bulkeley himself boarded before it sank, taking two prisoners whom he held in the water until his PT crew picked him up. The others came ashore, where they ran into a scratch force defending Mariveles naval base consisting of grounded airmen, Philippine Constabulary, and beached sailors.
Although they had no infantry training, these eager volunteers managed to rout their Japanese attackers, and by nightfall of the 24th they had secured the major points where the Japanese had landed—although it was not until February 8 that the last Japanese soldier was finally killed.16
By that date, more-conventional Japanese attacks along the Bagac-Orion line had failed too, and now it was the Japanese army’s turn to find itself in a desperate situation. Homma’s army had paid a terrible price in the advance down the peninsula. It had suffered more than 7,000 battle casualties, with 2,700 killed, while another 10,000 to 12,000 had been laid low by dysentery, malaria, and beriberi. His Sixty-fifth Brigade, which had taken the brunt of the fighting, was down from 6,500 men to barely 1,000, while the Sixteenth Division, once a proud force of 14,000 soldiers, had 712 men left who were able to carry a rifle.
Their supply situation was, if anything, even worse than MacArthur’s. Daily rations for Japanese soldiers had to be cut from sixty-two ounces to just twenty-three—barely two cups of rice a day.17
In fact, Japanese sources point to an inevitable conclusion, that the Japanese Fourteenth Army had all but ceased to exist as a fighting force.18 General Homma, who had hoped to declare victory by the end of January, had to call a halt to the entire proceedings—even order a temporary withdrawal. The army on Bataan, for all their inexperience, poor supplies, and bad luck, had fought the Japanese to a standstill. Homma would later claim that if MacArthur’s men had taken the counteroffensive, “they could [have walked] to Manila without encountering much resistance on our part.”19
But the Bataan Force wasn’t going anywhere. Wainwright’s surgeon general reported that almost half his men were incapacitated by some dread tropical disease or general malnutrition. Every battalion hospital was full to overflowing. The quinine had run out, and so had virtually every other medicine, as well as the food. Rations had to be cut from sixteen ounces to eight and then four—with a twice-a-week ration of carabao, mule, or horse meat (one of the first horses to be eaten was Wainwright’s own charger, Joseph Conrad, which he shot himself). There was no flour, no sugar, no vegetables. Major Harold Johnson, of the Fifty-seventh Regiment, saw his men “sitting beside trails, boiling a piece of mule hide or carabao hide in a tomato can and chewing away at the hide.”20
Some units were so reduced in numbers by casualties and disease that they took to propping the dead up in their foxholes, rifles pointing to the front, to fool the Japanese. Wainwright and his naval aide, Lieutenant Norman Champlin, visited one ghastly trench filled almost completely by dead “sentries,” all bloated and covered in flies from the feces at the bottom of the trench.21
Even if Wainwright had somehow pulled his troops together for a desperate advance, their ammunition was all but running out—and much of what was left was either defective or too old to be of much use. One veteran remembered about throwing his World War One–era grenades, “if two out of ten went off, we’d be lucky.”22
And while the Japanese still controlled the air and sea, and were able to resupply their sick and exhausted troops, the defenders of Bataan could not. All the successful efforts to run the blockade barely added 100,000 tons to Bataan’s slender resources, and like the Legaspi, more runners were caught than succeeded.23
All the same, for almost six weeks—from mid-February to the end of March—fighting on the Bataan Peninsula virtually came to a halt. “The enemy has definitely recoiled,” MacArthur told TAG on February 26. “[H]is attitude is so passive as to discount any immediate threat of attack.”24
Yet while stalemate reigned on Bataan, over on Corregidor events were quickly building to a climax. For MacArthur himself, in fact, the endgame was closer than he could have thought.
—
It started when Quezon decided he had reached his limit in dealing with the Americans.
On February 4 there was a conversation between MacArthur and a Lieutenant Colonel Warren Clear, who had come over to the Philippines from Singapore on an intelligence-gathering assignment. Clear had been ordered to return to Honolulu on the submarine Trout, which was also carrying away $10 million in gold and silver bullion from Corregidor. MacArthur kept asking the intelligence officer about what Washington was thinking, and whether the war chiefs and Secretary Stimson were serious about relieving his army. Clear said he had been told by Stimson and presidential press secretary Early that Roosevelt had said, “very emphatically that England and Russia had priority in all things.”
MacArthur was furious. “Never before in history,” he said in a tremulous voice, his face flushed, “was so large and gallant an army written off so callously.”25
Listening in the shadows, as it happened, was President Quezon.
“To hell with America,” he told Carlos Romulo afterward. “The fight between America and Japan is not our fight. We must try to save ourselves.”26 On February 8—three days after Japanese artillery on the mainland began shelling Corregidor, in addition to the almost daily air attacks—Quezon assembled the members of his cabinet in his tunnel sanctuary, where he drafted a letter for President Roosevelt.
“After nine weeks of fighting,” Quezon’s message began, “not even a small amount of aid has reached us….The British and American Navies, the two strongest fleets in existence, have seemingly pursued a strategy that excludes any attempt to bring aid to the Philippines. Consequently, while perfectly safe itself, the United States has practically doomed the Philippines to almost total extinction in order to secure a breathing space.”27
What followed was a proposal that the Philippines be granted immediate independence so that he, President Quezon, could begin negotiations with Japan for Philippine neutrality.
MacArthur did his best to dissuade his friend from sending the cable. He told Quezon there “was not the slightest chance” that the United States would agree to Philippine neutrality, but when Quezon insisted, MacArthur sent his own evaluation of the situation separately to Roosevelt.
“The temper of the Filipinos is one of almost violent resentment against the United States,” it read. “Every one of them expected help, and when it was not forthcoming, they believe they have been betrayed in favor of others.” For MacArthur in particular it must have been an especially bitter moment. The nation that his father had been determined to help to emerge as a modern nation, and the country for which MacArthur himself had thrown over his military career in order to organize its defenses, had turned against America. His PT commander Bulkeley estimated that 80 percent of Filipinos were now either anti-American or neutral. Above all, Quezon and colleagues watched and listened on the radio as politicians on the mainland, like Jorge Vargas and Manuel Roxas, were adjusting to Japanese rule—while they choked on mold and dust in a dark, dank tunnel.
In the final analysis, MacArthur did not th
ink Roosevelt should agree to Quezon’s proposal (interestingly, commissioner Sayre did, and sent his own cable to that effect). But he did not mince words about the state of affairs on Bataan. “There is no denying the fact that we are near done,” he told the president. “Troops have sustained practically fifty percent casualties…they are capable now of nothing but fighting in place in a fixed position….All our supplies are scant and the command has been on half rations for the past month. Nothing…can prevent their utter collapse and their complete absorption by the enemy.”28
To George Marshall, MacArthur was even more blunt. The current Allied strategy against Japan was “a fatal mistake.” Instead of acting defensively and building up forces along Japan’s front, now was the time for a bold thrust—“not at the enemy’s strengths but at his weakness.” With Japan’s lines of communication stretched across 2,000 miles of ocean, “a great naval victory on our part is not necessary to accomplish this mission; the threat alone would go far toward the desired end.”
MacArthur added, “[F]rom my present point of vantage I can see the whole strategy of the Pacific perhaps clearer than anyone else.” What he foresaw was a Japanese victory—not just in the Philippines but across Asia—unless the United States retook the initiative.29
Meanwhile, “since I have no air or sea protection,” MacArthur concluded in his memorandum to Roosevelt, “you must be prepared at any time to figure on the complete destruction of this command. You must determine whether the mission of delay would be better furthered by the temporizing plan of Quezon, or by my continued battle effort.”
Quezon’s message, and MacArthur’s, hit Washington like a “bombshell,” according to Dwight Eisenhower. He himself was getting fed up with MacArthur’s refusal to take his situation stoically, and confessed as much to his diary after getting MacArthur’s unsolicited advice “extolling the virtues of the flank offensive. Wonder what he thinks we’ve been studying all these years. His lecture would have been good for plebes.” Now came this “long wail” from Quezon, “I think he [i.e., Quezon] wants to give up.”30
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