A World at Arms (166 page)

Driving southward in an effort to free all of Burma from the Japanese if at all possible, the British-Indian 14th Army decided on a flanking movement which, with great daring, would cross the Irrawaddy river below Mandalay and cut off the portions of the Japanese 15th Army holding that city and central Burma. In one of the most extraordinary river assault crossings of World War II, this effort succeeded in spite of some confusion and heavy Japanese resistance in February 1945.
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The prospects for the Burma campaign had been immeasurably improved not only by the attitudinal change but by the success, at last, of the third British attempt to seize the port of Akyab on the Arakan coast. An amphibious operation had seized the port in january 1945, and provided a basis from which an assault toward Rangoon could be launched once the offensive from the north had eliminated the main Japanese force in central Burma.

Slim’s pincer movement against Mandalay succeeded as the troops
which had crossed the Irrawaddy south of the city pushed toward those which had crossed the great river north of the capital a month earlier. With British and Indian units already pursuing the Japanese further south, Mandalay itself was retaken on March 20. Substantial portions of the Japanese 15th and 33rd Armies still remained, but the British were determined to push on before the monsoon rains began in late April or early May. They had over 300 miles to go, but vastly increased air support offered at least a hope of success for the attempt.

In one of the more spectacular demonstrations of what a daring and driving army could do when provided with a full complement of air transport, the British divisions were, in effect, leap–frogged south from Mandalay toward Rangoon in the face of crumbling Japanese resistance. An amphibious force supported from Akyab landed near Rangoon at the beginning of May. The monsoon had started but could not halt the determined British. Rangoon was freed on May 3.
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The dramatic last stages of the war in Europe largely overshadowed the Allied victory in Burma, but this did not make it any the less complete. The flag which had once flown over the city had been taken as a souvenir by the Japanese unit which seized it, carried by them to the Aleutian campaign where it was recaptured by the Americans. At the Quebec Conference of 1943 Marshall had given it to Brooke; now it was run up in Rangoon once more.
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Plans for new operations toward Singapore were already being made at Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia Command.

LUZON, THE SOUTHERN PHILIPPINES, AND BORNEO

The fight for central Burma coincided in time with the American invasion of Luzon. The new empire which Japan had conquered in the winter of 1941–42 was being assaulted simultaneously from both sides and Japanese forces in these widely separated campaigns proved no more able to coordinate their efforts than the Allies had three years earlier. Field Marshal Terauchi could not provide substantial reinforcement to either of his embattled garrisons any more than Field Marshal Wavell in his earlier role as Allied theater commander. If in this regard there were similarities, there were also great differences. The forces engaged on both sides in both battles were substantially larger than those of the earlier struggles.
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The Japanese army in Burma in 1944–45, unlike the British one in 1942, remained in small battered clumps of survivors in the country; they did not move out for an eventual return. The Japanese army in Luzon, on the other hand, did not make MacArthur’s big mistake of trying to hold an untenable perimeter only to be driven into a
siege without adequate preparations to hold out as the focus of retreat; instead Yamashita followed a far shrewder strategy and kept some of his forces fighting on Luzon until the surrender of September 1945.

The invasion plan as finally approved by MacArthur called for the major landing at the southern end of Lingayen Gulf with later subsidiary landings just north of Bataan and southwest of Manila. Though the obvious place to attack–and defend–the Lingayen Gulf itself afforded a sheltered bay for the huge conglomeration of ships, a set of very good beaches for the landing, and an open plain toward Manila, 130 miles to the south, for the employment of armor on the main axis of the advance. Staging from bases on the northern shore of New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands as well as Leyte, the invading forces, which would grow to over a quarter of a million men, were supported by a huge array of naval power. As in the case of the Leyte landing, Admiral Kinkaid commanded the amphibious assault while Admiral Halsey’s 3rd Fleet and General Whitehead’s 5th Air Force provided the support needed for General Krueger’s 6th Army.
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The two corps of 6th Army successfully landed on January 8, 1945.

The kamikazes had caused very serious casualties among the escorts, sinking one escort carrier and damaging many other ships; among the hundreds of dead was General Lumsden, the British liaison officer attached to MacArthur’s headquarters, whose place would be taken by General St. Clair Gairdner.
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The ordeal of the warships also led to the destruction of most of the Japanese planes committed to the Luzon defense. That defense could not include the ambitious naval operation which the Japanese had launched against the Leyte invasion. With so much of the Japanese navy sunk or disabled in that great battle, Yamashita had to rely on his ground forces, weakened by earlier transfers to reinforce the army on Leyte. But he had over 280,000 army and navy soldiers left
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and believed that he had a real opportunity to defeat the landing or at least deny use of the air and sea bases of Luzon to the Americans for a very long time. He would certainly keep them occupied in bloody battle for months.

Yamashita divided his force into three groups. The largest, the Shobu Group, was assigned to northern Luzon; it would help the others crush the invasion or, alternatively, retreat to the northern part of the island and hold out there. A second force, the Kembu Group, was to block the route across the plain from Lingayen Gulf to Manila, while a third,
the Shimbu Group, would defend the capital itself as well as southern Luzon.

The 6th Army, once ashore, pushed south and east from the bridge–head gained the first day. The push inland was too fast for Yamashita to mount an effective counter-attack, which might have contained the Americans for some time the way the Germans had initially contained the Normandy invasion. As more American troops came ashore, they shouldered the Shobu Group aside and headed south. Fighting was very bitter with heavy casualties on both sides, but MacArthur was determined to push forward and prodded his ground commanders. A hard drive into the mountains on the left flank of the advance pushed back the Japanese, destroyed their most dangerous counter-attack, and effectively eliminated the 2nd Tank Division, the main Japanese armored force on Luzon. Shobu Group was pushed into the northern mountains by the middle of February but it had prepositioned substantial supplies for a long fight there.
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Krueger, pushed by MacArthur, now sent XIV Corps south to seize the key airfields collectively referred to as Clark Field and defended by the Kembu Group. In a week’s hard fighting, the fields were retaken and, with their paved runways, could provide excellent bases for the American air force. Several of Krueger’s divisions now raced for Manila with the 1st Cavalry Division breaking into the city’s suburbs on February 3. In the meantime, the American 8th Army’s 1th Airborne Division had landed by sea and parachute southwest of Manila and was also pushing toward the city.

Clearing Manila of the Japanese was to prove far more difficult and costly than the spectacular rush into its northern portion and horrendously different from the victory parade MacArthur had hoped for. Yamashita’s original plan to pull all forces out of the city was altered dramatically. His deliberate destruction of the harbor facilities produced an enormous fire which engulfed a very large part of northern and western Manila; American troops found themselves fighting the raging fires and not only the Japanese. The latter, under the command of Admiral Iwabachi Sanji, decided to hold the southern portion of the city below the Pasig river (which bisects the city as it flows into Manila Bay). Neither Yamashita nor Iwabachi would or could control the Japanese naval garrison and army men who, quite aside from fighting the Americans, proceeded to butcher and rape Filipinos and all others they could get their hands on in a massacre reminiscent–if on a smaller scale–of the notorious rape of Nanking.

For a month the approximately 20,000 Japanese in the city fought the Americans, who had to batter their way forward block by block and
house by house. Both the heavy modern reinforced concrete buildings designed to withstand earthquakes and the ancient solid stone walls of the old core–city fortress Intramuros (“between the walls”) provided extraordinarily good protection for the defenders and difficulties for the assaulting Americans. MacArthur refused to allow air support so that the Americans relied on artillery; whether this saved civilian lives as MacArthur intended is doubtful. At the end of the fighting over 12,000 American soldiers and over 16,000 Japanese soldiers had died in the street fighting. The Japanese massacres and the battle had cost over 100,000 Filipinos their lives and left Manila the most damaged Allied capital after Warsaw.

By the time fighting flickered out in the streets of Manila, the Americans had cleared Bataan and most of the shore of Manila Bay. The island of Corregidor had been bombarded and bombed since January 22, and a combined parachute and amphibious assault was launched on February 16. Although the Japanese garrison was more than five times as large as estimated and therefore outnumbered the air and seaborne assailants, it was caught by surprise. After the Americans had established footholds on the island, they repulsed a series of uncoordinated banzai charges with heavy losses. In the night of February 21–22 a tremendous explosion of ammunition and other explosives in the underground fortifications–set off either by accident or as a mass suicide–killed about 2000 of the garrison. Two more underground explosions killed most of the remaining Japanese in the following days, and by March 1 the fighting was over. On the following day, one day before the conclusion of the struggle for Manila, MacArthur saw the American flag raised again on the old flag pole of Corregidor.

With the capital and its immediate surroundings cleared, the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippines was returned to a city which Americans and Filipinos began to clean up as best they could. It was in these days that MacArthur began to implement two decisions which he appears to have made earlier and which would have major long-term effects, one on the internal affairs of the Philippines, the other on the further conduct of military operations in the war.

Mac Arthur had long been a friend of Manuel Roxas, and the latter was one of the very few who knew of the huge sum of money Quezon had given MacArthur early in 1942. Roxas had remained in the Philippines and had become a leading figure in the collaborator government of José P. Laurel. While Laurel was flown out of Luzon by the Japanese, Roxas and others remained. MacArthur claimed that his old friend had in reality been a source for American intelligence and had aided the resistance to Japanese occupation, but evidence to this effect has yet to
surface. By openly favoring Roxas and many of his associates in the months following the liberation of Manila, MacArthur not only assured the election of Roxas to the presidency of the country but effectively spiked any serious confrontation with the issue of collaboration. The Commonwealth did not regain its independence with as much of a new start as the liberated countries of Western Europe, which had enough trouble dealing with the issue of collaboration without having one of the most prominent ones heading their government.
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Mac Arthur’s other decision concerned the next stage in the liberation of the Philippines. It had been assumed in the discussions of the joint Chiefs of Staff that the campaign for Leyte and subsequent landing on Mindoro were preparatory steps needed for the Luzon landing and that the latter would be the last major campaign in the islands. To secure the airports, cities, and harbors of Luzon for the subsequent strike toward the Japanese home islands, the whole, or at least the main ports, of Luzon would have to be freed, but there was no intention to project operations southward into the central and southern Philippines-a direction opposite to that in which further operations were to be aimed. General MacArthur, however, had other ideas on this subject and instead proceeded to direct General Eichelberger’s 8th Army, only marginally involved in the Luzon operation, to stage a series of amphibious attacks into the islands south of Luzon.

Although retroactively authorized from Washington, the over fifty landing operations in which 8th Army assaulted and liberated most of the central and southern Philippines were essentially MacArthur’s own project. They provided very significant experience in amphibious operations for those units of 8th Army which were expected to participate in the invasion of the Japanese home islands; and they opened up a large additional series of ports and bases for the staging of American divisions expected from Europe after the end of hostilities there, even as they liberated millions of Filipinos from Japanese rule. The campaign was successful; and no one in Washington appears to have objected; but it had very serious implications for the effort of the 6th Army to complete operations on Luzon.
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With some of its divisions and most of its reserves diverted from the Luzon campaign to 8th Army operations further south, the American 6th Army found itself battering the large remaining forces of General Yamashita left on the island. In a long, difficult and costly campaign, most of Luzon was indeed cleared, but in the process the American divisions involved repeatedly faced Japanese forces of equal or superior
numbers in well–entrenched positions. With massive assistance from Filipino guerillas, Yamashita’s army was steadily battered down. At the time of surrender in September, Yamashita had some 50,000 men left in his command, and several of the 6th Army divisions which had been engaged in the hard fighting needed a great deal of rebuilding.
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