as the first Japanese entered Manila on 2 January: ‘They came up the boulevards in the predawn glow from the bay riding on bicycles and on tiny motorcycles. They came without talk and in good order, the ridiculous pop-popping of their one-cylinder cycles sounding loud in the silent city.’
A week later, Homma launched his first attack on the American-Filipino line across the Bataan peninsula. In the days that followed, the defenders had little difficulty in repulsing successive assaults, though they suffered steady losses from air attack. From the outset, they were also hot and hungry, with 110,000 people to be fed – 85,000 US and Filipino troops and 25,000 civilian refugees. The Corps of Engineers set about gathering and threshing rice in the fields. Fish traps operated along the coast until destroyed by enemy fighters, and farm animals were slaughtered. Malaria swiftly reached epidemic proportions. Nurse Ruth Straub wrote in her diary: ‘I guess we are all self-imposed prisoners-of-war. All we’re doing is protecting our own lives.’
But the defenders of Bataan displayed more energy and initiative than the British in Malaya: several Japanese attempts to turn the Americans’ flank by landing troops on the coast behind the front resulted in their annihilation. One unit was forced back to the sheer cliffs of Quinauan point. ‘Scores of Japs ripped off their uniforms and leaped, shrieking, to the beach below,’ wrote Captain William Dyess. ‘Machine-gun-fire raked the sand and surf for anything that moved.’ When Japanese infantry punched through the perimeter and seized two salients at Tuol and Cotar on 26 January, after bloody fighting the line was restored by counterattack. Bombing inflicted remarkably little damage on American artillery positions. When fodder ran out for the cavalry’s horses, the garrison ate them. Almost every wild animal on Bataan was hunted down and thrown into the pot, while men picked mangoes, bananas, coconuts, papayas, and fished at sea with dynamite.
Through February and March the Japanese made no headway, but the defenders were fast weakening from hunger, and anti-malarial quinine was running out. MacArthur escaped to Australia by PT-boat with his family and personal retainers, in obedience to an order from Roosevelt, leaving Gen. Jonathan Wainwright to direct the defence through its last weeks. By late March, a thousand malaria cases a week were being admitted to hospital. In civilian refugee camps behind the perimeter, according to Lt. Walter Waterous, conditions were ‘the most deplorable I have ever seen and the death rate was appalling’. Bombing wrecked almost every facility above ground on the fortress island of Corregidor; thousands of sick and wounded were crowded into its Malinta Tunnel.
Thirty-year-old Texan nurse Lt. Bertha Dworsky found that one of the worst aspects of her work was personal acquaintance with many of the terribly wounded men brought in: ‘They were usually people that we’d been with at the Officers’ Club, or they were our friends. It was a tremendously emotional experience. We just never knew who they were going to bring in next.’ The wounded often asked if they were going to survive, and doctors disputed whether it was best to tell them the truth. Dr Alfred Weinstein wrote: ‘The argument raged back and forth with nobody knowing the correct answer. Most of us followed a middle course, ducking the question…If a patient looked as if he might kick the bucket, we called in the chaplain to give him last rites, collect personal mementoes and write last messages…More often than not they didn’t have to be told.’
The condition of the besiegers was little better than that of the besieged: the Japanese, too, suffered heavy losses to malaria, beriberi and dysentery – more than 10,000 sick by February. Tokyo was increasingly exasperated by American defiance, and by the triumphalist propaganda which the saga of Bataan promoted in the United States. On 3 April, Homma’s reinforced army launched a major offensive preceded by a massive bombardment. Filipino units broke in panic before Japanese tanks; every movement by the defenders provoked strafing from the air; many men were so weakened by hunger that they could scarcely move from their foxholes. The Japanese pushed steadily forward, breaching successive American lines. On the evening of 8 April, Maj. Gen. Edward King on his own initiative decided he must surrender the peninsula, and sent forward an officer bearing a white flag to the Japanese lines. From jungle refuges all over Bataan, groups of defenders emerged, seeking paths towards Corregidor island, where Wainwright still held out.
On the morning of the 9th, King met Col. Motoo Nakayama, Homma’s operations officer, to sign a surrender. ‘Will our troops be well treated?’ King asked. The Japanese answered blandly, ‘We are not barbarians.’ Some 11,500 Americans and 64,000 Filipinos fell into enemy hands. The transfer of these debilitated men to cages became known to history as the Bataan Death March. Scores of Filipinos were casually killed, some used for bayonet practice. An American private soldier saw a weakened compatriot pushed under an advancing tank. Blair Robinett said: ‘Now we knew, if there had been any doubts before, we were in for a bad time.’ Sgt. Charles Cook described seeing captives bayoneted if they tried to get water. Staff-Sergeant Harold Feiner said: ‘If you fell, bingo, you were dead.’ More than three hundred Filipino prisoners were butchered in a ravine near the Pantingan river. Their killers explained that if the garrison had surrendered sooner they might have been treated mercifully, but as it was, ‘we suffered heavy casualties. So just pardon us.’ An estimated eleven hundred Americans and more than 5,000 Filipinos perished on the Death March.
The Japanese now concentrated artillery fire on Corregidor, little larger than New York’s Central Park; on 3 May Wainwright reported to MacArthur in Australia that every structure above ground had been levelled, the island denuded of vegetation. Conditions became unspeakable in the hot, stinking Malinta Tunnel, packed with fearful humanity. That night the submarine Spearfish evacuated the last party to escape safely to Australia, twenty-five strong, including thirteen women. A few hours later, the Japanese landed amphibious forces to storm Corregidor. At noon on 6 May, after two days of fighting, Wainwright surrendered all remaining US forces in the Philippines, first signalling to Washington: ‘With profound regret and with continued pride in my gallant troops I go to meet the Japanese commander…Goodbye, Mr. President.’ An American navy doctor among the garrison, George Ferguson, sat down and wept, ‘just so disappointed in the good old U.S.A.’. Amid emotional and physical exhaustion, however, many men were simply glad the battle had ended. Only later did they discover that the ordeal had scarcely begun for 11,500 Americans who became prisoners of the Japanese.
The four-month defence of Bataan and Corregidor, which cost 2,000 American dead and 4,000 casualties among the invaders, was made possible in part by Japanese incompetence. The initial invasion force was weak, and composed of troops with nothing like the training and experience of Yamashita’s army in Malaya. If Homma and his officers had displayed more energy, the Philippines saga would have ended sooner, as Tokyo’s angry high command asserted. But nothing can detract from the gallantry of Wainwright, who did his duty more impressively than MacArthur, and of his garrison. They created a legend in which Americans could take pride – and of which Churchill was envious. To put the matter bluntly, US soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor showed themselves more stalwart than British imperial forces in Malaya and at Singapore, albeit likewise in a doomed cause.
Brigadier Dwight Eisenhower, who had served unhappily under MacArthur a few years earlier, wrote in his diary: ‘Poor Wainwright! He did the fighting…[MacArthur] got such glory as the public could find…MacArthur’s tirades, to which…I so often listened in Manila…would now sound as silly to the public as they then did to us. But he’s a hero! Yah.’ At home in the US, news commentators squeezed every ounce of glory from Bataan, from skirmishes at sea and manifestations of America’s embryo mobilisation. But in the Pacific, no one was fooled. Every Allied soldier, sailor and airman knew that the enemy was making the weather in every corner of the theatre. Lt. Robert Kelly of MTB Squadron 3, which evacuated MacArthur from Corregidor, said: ‘The news commentators had us all winning the war. It made us very sore. We were out here where we could see these victories. There were plenty of them. They were all Japanese. Yet if even at one point we are able to check an attack, the silly headlines chatter of a “victory”.’
Kelly, like Eisenhower, failed to grasp the importance of legends, indeed myths, to sustain the spirit of nations in adversity. American dismay in the face of those early defeats was assuaged
