He had worked hard to “get familiar” with his troops, to treat them with “affection” and “consideration,” sleeping in the same hold, eating the same food, by turns encouraging and calming them. He knew well that combat was close work (is there anything more intimate than dying in the arms of a comrade?), work driven by love, not hate or fear. He also knew that men never follow a bully (they’d been bullied enough in training), so he spared them the tub-thumping lectures on the evils of the West, loyalty to the emperor, their duty to give up their lives.
“Do not die for no purpose,” he urged them. “Think well before doing things. Don’t hurry to die.”
On the morning of the invasion he woke his men at three o’clock and huddled with them at breakfast: miso soup and an egg over a thick porridge of barley and white rice. Japanese soup always reminded the men of home, but on this morning the troops complained the miso had a “strange” flavor, and Ryotaro Nishimura knew that the men had awakened with the metallic taste of fear in their mouths.
He tried to keep his mind on the moment (there was much to think about—the objective, the weather, the terrain), but as he ate his porridge and soup his thoughts began to drift.
“Even in a little war,” he thought, “we have only one life as a human being. And even in a little battle we are worried about that life, our one important precious life to be lost. Now we are in a big war with a big enemy, a war very different from the war we fought before in China. This enemy is a very difficult enemy to attack.” Naturally, the men were worried about their lives. “I am worried too, worried about my own life, my one precious life to be lost in battle.”
And then the call came to assemble on deck. The men silently shouldered their packs and queued up at the ladders to go topside. They were breathing heavily, sighing, and shifting about.
On deck, waiting for the landing boats to return from shore to pick up his battalion, Ryotaro Nishimura looked at his watch—the boats were late. This was not good. They had wanted to land in the dark to shroud their movements, but now he could see the first approach of dawn, the slow gray awakening of day he had watched so often at home above Mount Momoyama.
By the time the landing boats returned, the sun was well above the horizon. The tillermen reported that the swift currents and rough seas had carried the first battalion south of its assigned beach to a spot near Bauang, where troops of the Philippine Army’s 12th Infantry Regiment were waiting with machine guns. Casualties had been heavy. Now Nishimura’s battalion was being taken out of reserve and sent into the fight. The lieutenant would get his orders on the beach, he was told.
So they would be landing under fire after all. Ryotaro Nishimura looked at the lines of soldiers waiting on deck. The men would do fine, he thought. They had been trained to fight hard. Then he caught sight of his battalion commander weaving his way toward him through the lines of men. The colonel put his hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder.
“I will pray for the safe landing of your company,” he said.
The wind was up and the sea was full of swells, some ten feet high. The landing boats were rising and falling and banging against the hull, and the men climbing down the side of the ship on nets and rope ladders felt awkward and clumsy, the weight of their packs and ammunition and heavy equipment throwing them off balance in the pitch and roll.
Now the boats were heading toward shore, the wind blowing them south toward the beach at Santiago. Ryotaro Nishimura noticed debris in the water ahead of them, round metal casings floating off the bow. Mines!
At almost the same moment, he could hear the ping and snap of bullets passing overhead, then came the sh-h-h and whump of mortars or perhaps small artillery shells landing around them.
As the boat approached the heavy surf it started to founder, and the company sergeant jumped over the side and ordered the men into the water.
They were bobbing about now in their life belts, beginning to separate, and the lieutenant threw the sergeant a rope from the boat. He was a good man, this sergeant, a very clever man, and he told the men in the water to grab the rope, and then he began to tow them to shore, through the roiling surf toward the beach and the sandy bluffs and earthen re-doubts where the enemy was waiting.
ONCE ASHORE and driving toward their objectives, the invaders knew they would be outnumbered but they did not feel overmatched. They had air and naval power, and the enemy did not. More tanks, too. Most of all, they were sure they had better troops. The Japanese estimated that 130,000 Filipinos and Americans would be dug in against them at various places on Luzon and the other islands, but they believed that an Imperial Army force less than half that size would be more than enough to carry the campaign.3
[Pre-invasion Report] The Americans have the makings of excellent soldiers, but due to the torrid zone, there is a tendency to physical and mental laxness and subsequent lack of eagerness.4
And they were right. According to a U.S. Army report, “the average enlistee” in 1941 “was a youth of less than average education, to whom the security of pay, low as it was, and the routines of Army life appealed more than the competitive struggles of civilian life.” They resented their officers, the army’s remote upper class, and saw their sergeants as crude overseers promoted more for their mindless forbearance, their time in uniform, than their merit. They thought the training rote and stupid, drill for “nitwits”: marching in formation, scrubbing barracks floors, shining shoes, standing frequent inspections. Instead of esprit de corps—a “moral force,” Ardant du Picq said, that wins battles—the average soldier in the Army of the United States had esprit étroit, narrowing self-interest. “Don’t stick your neck out,” he would tell his buddies, then reach for another beer.5
In their pre-invasion reports, the Japanese thought even less of the Filipinos: “Their military ability is lower than the Americans’.”6
In 1934 when the U.S. Congress voted to grant the Philippines full independence (effective in 1946) and created a Commonwealth government, the first president, Manuel Quezon, asked his American sponsors to help him plan for the islands’ defense. Quezon wanted his old friend Douglas MacArthur, soon to retire as U.S. Army chief of staff, to be his military adviser, and Washington approved.
MacArthur’s staff drafted plans for a “citizen army” of trained Filipino reserves ready to be mobilized in an emergency. By July 1941, the Philippine Army and the American garrison in the Philippines had been combined under one command, and MacArthur told Washington that 120,000 Filipino reservists had been trained and were ready to fight. “The Philippine Army . . . is progressing by leaps and bounds,” he wired the War Department.7
In truth, the Commonwealth Army was more of a levée en masse, a force of reservists being quickly mobilized, than a standing army. The Filipinos were without adequate equipment or quarters. Their guinit helmets were fashioned from coconut husks and varnish; some had combat boots, but most wore rubber-soled canvas shoes that fell apart or rotted in the wet climate; in their initial training they used lengths of wood and stalks of bamboo instead of rifles and had only limited opportunities to handle or test-fire real weapons.
More than half of them were illiterate peasants drawn from the provinces. They came into the training camps speaking a hundred regional languages and dialects, and orders often had to be translated and retranslated three or four times before a man could understand them. During their first week of “training,” they learned how to operate flush toilets and were lectured on the value of washing their hands before they sat down to eat. In the mornings they were taught how to march, stand in formation, tender a crisp salute. In the afternoons they worked in the camp gardens raising vegetables, and tended herds of livestock and flocks of fowl so they would have something to eat.
Their officers were often wholly ignorant of the most basic military subjects—map reading, troop movements, tactics, even simple self-defense. An American adviser once asked a Filipino officer to order his men to dig foxholes, and the Filipino, out of earshot, t
urned to a subordinate and whispered, “What is a foxhole?”8
Had they been well trained and well led, the Filipinos might have made superb soldiers. Generally a passive people, they followed the custom of pakikisama, Tagalog for “just go along with it” whatever the “it” was—the rule of government, the will of the family, the preferences of friends. And if going along put trouble in his path, well, then, the weary magsasaka (farmer) would just bahala na, “leave it to God, come what may.” But wrong him, insult him, slander his family, question his honor, and the average Filipino would likely turn his bolo from cutting sugarcane to harvesting someone’s head.
A handful of Americans in the islands, veterans of the Spanish-American War, had experienced this fury. After the United States invaded the islands in 1898, Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the Filipino revolt, and his peasant army fought pitched battles with the Americans, then became a guerrilla force that regularly harassed and ambushed the American troops who pursued them into the provinces. Impressed by the Filipinos’ capacity to fight, the American Army created within its ranks a unit called the Philippine Scouts, ten thousand highly trained Filipino troops considered by some in 1941 to be the best light infantry in the Pacific.
Unlike the veteran Scouts, however, the much larger Commonwealth Army, only five years old, had no experience and little support. When the Japanese set sail from Formosa, the native force preparing to meet them was ill led and underequipped. Morale was high—the Filipinos shared their American overseers’ contempt for the Japanese and were proud of their birthright and eager to defend it against the invaders. But without the proper equipment and preparation for the hard fight ahead, they were just “multitudes of men,” as the ancient Roman, Vegetius, might have called them, waiting to be “dragged to slaughter.”9
MacArthur knew of these deficits but never corrected them. Instead he concentrated on the politics of the moment, building morale and maligning his enemy. In May 1941 he told a reporter that the Japanese Imperial Army had suffered so many casualties in China, it was now a “third-class” force, a statement that said more about the general than the Japanese. Only a handful of American intelligence officers had the ability to analyze the strength and caliber of the Japanese troops, and these men had scant information in front of them. Japan was a police state in 1941, and everyone—natives, foreign residents, diplomats, and travelers—was under surveillance. So American operatives in Tokyo could only guess at the proficiency of the emperor’s troops, and their best guess was sobering: the Japanese, they believed, were among the finest fighting men in the world, “aggressive, well-trained . . . superbly led,” and “dogged in combat.”10
AN ARCHIPELAGO of 7,100 islands lying on an axis some 1,150 miles long, the Philippines was too diffuse for a garrison to defend and too far away—almost 7,000 miles from American shores—for a battle fleet to reach them in time to thwart an invasion or relieve a garrison under siege. And for more than forty years, from December 1898 when America took possession of the Philippines, until December 1941 when the Japanese attacked, this conundrum, this classic problem of assembling “forces in space” and “forces in time,” as Carl von Clausewitz called it, kept military planners spinning.
Across the years a succession of admirals and generals in Washington and Manila wrote and rewrote a war plan, code-named Orange, that tried to anticipate Japan’s ambitions and America’s answer. With almost every revision of Orange, and there were many, military planners reached the same conclusion: the islands would fall and the garrison would be captured or slaughtered. Brigadier General Stanley D. Embick, a respected strategist who had served in the Philippines, believed that if war came, America should abandon the islands, bide its time, build up its fleet, then return in strength to retake what it had lost. But to sacrifice territory without a fight, and to give up America’s only major naval base in the western Pacific, was to risk the opprobrium of the other Western powers. All of which left American commanders in the Philippines in a tactical quandary: How was the army to defend the indefensible, and how could commanders convince their men to hold out for help when those commanders knew well that help would never come?11
In the decades before World War II, the top American officers in the Philippines talked about two strategies: an “active defense” of meeting the invaders at the water’s edge, and a “defense in depth,” which called for an orderly withdrawal down Luzon’s central plain to the mountainous peninsula of Bataan whose east shore faced Manila Bay. There, in a last stand, the army would be able to deny the enemy the use of the bay and Manila harbor and would try to hold out for six months until the Pacific Fleet arrived to save them.12
Both stratagems were fictions, fictions because the generals who conceived them and the colonels in charge of translating them into action knew that the garrison would be outmanned and outgunned, constantly under siege and cut off from home. “Active defense” and “defense in depth” were euphemisms, military bunkum for what was really going to happen—the defeat, or annihilation, of the garrison.13
MACARTHUR had his own plan.
By 1940 Congress, now inured to the cries of the isolationists, voted for a military draft and for funds to rebuild the army and navy. It takes time, however, to retool factories and manufacture the matériel of war, time to stockpile armaments and mobilize men. That winter and spring the armed services were still understrength, and military planners wanted America to stay out of the war “as long as possible,” long enough, at least, to get the country’s factories going and enlist and train hundreds of thousands of men. At length Washington settled on a strategy to buy that time, a strategy that worried more about Europe than the Pacific. Germany seemed ready to reduce the British Isles and occupy all of Europe, so for the moment Washington decided to put “Europe First,” as the plan was nicknamed. America would concentrate what resources it had on its Atlantic defenses; it would bolster the English and try to bluff the Japanese, long enough at least to let America build its stockpiles and prepare for a two-ocean war.14
Ignoring the shortages and the political realities back home, MacArthur in February 1941 sent the War Department a proposal to defend the entire archipelago, all seventy-one hundred islands. His plan called for his air force to bomb and shell invading ships as they approached the beaches, then, as soon as the invaders set foot on Philippine soil, his ground forces would attack and cast the invaders back into the sea. The stalwarts manning the beaches were to come from the ranks of the Philippine Commonwealth Army, an army that had never taken the field.
Although the War Department knew the truth—a former commander of the American Garrison in the islands had reported “the realities” of MacArthur’s force “in precise and unflattering terms”—the rosy reports the general was sending to Washington were the only good news coming out of the Far East that winter and spring. And as the Japanese marched across East Asia and into the southern latitudes, any “good” news was welcome. Hope, not cold reason, ruled the halls of government during those anxious days of 1941.15
In July, President Roosevelt called the Philippine Army into active service, then he made the general commander of all American forces in the Far East. In August, MacArthur assured the War Department that his plan for the defense of the Philippines was nearing completion. And in October, he reported that he would soon have a force of 200,000 men, all of which led Washington to believe that their man in Manila was “ready for any eventuality.”
When war came seven weeks later, MacArthur had under arms only half the number of men he’d promised. His army consisted of squadrons of unproven B-17 bombers and their green ground crews, a small garrison of guzzling Sundowners (as American troops in the tropics were sometimes called), 12,000 Filipino Scouts, and 80,000 Philippine Army reservists in tennis shoes and coconut-husk helmets. To these men, on the eve of war, Douglas MacArthur issued the following order:
“The enemy will be met at the beaches . . . [which] will be held at all costs . . . There will be no withdraw
al.”16
LUZON, Japan’s primary target in the archipelago, was the largest of the Philippine islands, a roughly rectangular tract of land (like the shaft of a boot) 460 miles long and 140 miles wide at its extremes. The coastline ran for 2,242 miles, but only a handful of the hundreds of bights and inlets were big enough to accommodate an armada of troopships. The site most suited to an invasion, the largest anchorage with the longest landing beaches, strips of sand big enough to accept waves of soldiers and supplies coming ashore, was Lingayen Gulf on Luzon’s west coast. The beach there was like a threshold; once the invaders had crossed the sand and debouched the defiles between the mountains, they would be standing at the gateway to a wide central plain that ran southeast between ranges of mountains 120 miles down the center of the island to Manila, the political heart of the country. The central plain was wide enough for ground troops to maneuver, and it had two paved highways, a number of side roads and trails, and miles and miles of railroad track. It was also a direct route to Manila Bay, one of the most perfectly formed harbors in the Far East. The central plain, in short, was an inviting pathway for an invading army, and its gateway was Lingayen Gulf.
By mid-December, Japanese aircraft had destroyed MacArthur’s Far East Air Force, and after a devastating air raid on the U.S. navy yard at Cavite, home of the Asiatic Fleet, Admiral Thomas Hart sallied most of his ships south to the Malay Barrier, leaving behind only a handful of torpedo boats and submarines. Japanese planes, meanwhile, continued their attacks on American airfields and bases. And everyone on the island of Luzon was on tenterhooks waiting for the invading army to arrive.
The boozy belligerence and barroom burlesques of late November—“Let the Little Yellow Bastards come, we’ll knock the living shit out of them!”—gave way to a frame of mind as dark as the banks of clouds that crept in low off the South China Sea and swallowed the tops of the mountains.
Tears in the Darkness Page 5