Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army had also brought bicycles to the Philippines, where American money had also provided excellent paved roads – Highways 3, 5, and 13, which funneled down through a broad valley from the invasion beaches to Manila. In the capital, people were scrambling in droves to escape.
“The roads back into the hills were black with people striving to reach their native villages,” writes Clark Lee of the evacuation of Manila in his book They Call it Pacific. There were paved roads on the evacuation routes too, and good railways on Luzon as well. “The few trains still running into the provinces were literally jammed to the car tops.”
“To the native population of Manila, it seemed like the end of the world,” writes Charles Van Landingham in his article, “I Saw Manila Die,” published in the Saturday Evening Post on September 26, 1942.
“In the brief period of seven days, from Christmas Eve to the year’s end, there had been a radical change in the situation in northern Luzon,” writes Louis Morton in the official history of the campaign. “The Japanese, who on 24 December had just secured their beachhead, now threatened Manila and the road net into Bataan. The enemy had broken out of his initial lodgment and was now moving rapidly in two columns down the broad central plain of Luzon.”
The inexperienced and lightly equipped Philippine Army divisions, the 11th, 21st, and 91st, bore the brunt of the Japanese assault, and endured the confusion of the staged withdrawals under fire that were part of the Luzon defensive strategy. The US Army’s 26th Cavalry Regiment had twice held the IJA 48th Division for extended periods of time, inflicting heavy casualties, but they had suffered greatly themselves, and General Jonathan Wainwright, commanding the North Luzon Force, had been forced to pull them out of action to regroup.
Having pulled back to their D-2 Defensive Line at the Agno River at Christmas, the North Luzon Force reached D-3, between Santa Ignacia and San Jose, on December 27, as Homma had halted at the Agno to bring up the preponderance of his artillery and armor from the beachhead.
Hammered by the Japanese with renewed ferocity, the three Philippine Army divisions, acting independently, each straggled back to D-4, between San Miguel and Cabanatuan between December 28 and 30. At the same time, Homma was sending his 4th and 7th Tank Regiments wide to the east in attempt to outflank the defenders.
By New Year’s Eve, with the tanks on their right flank, the North Luzon Force had withdrawn roughly 50 miles from D-1, to the last Defensive Line, D-5, where the 11th and 21st Divisions had dug in at Bamban and on the north side of Mount Arayat. The 91st Division on the North Luzon right flank, however, took the main hit from the 48th Division coming south on Highway 5, and from the two tank regiments, and was pushed well south of the line.
On the opposite end of D-5, troops at Fort Stotsenburg were busy shipping the post’s stores, including 8,000 pounds of fresh beef and 100,000 containers of dry rations, to Bataan. Lieutenant Colonel Wallace Durst, the base quartermaster, reported that he burned 300,000 gallons of gasoline and saved about 50,000 gallons by shipping it out in every available container and filling the tanks of every available vehicle.
While two divisions held the left end of D-5 as planned, the 91st was pushed back nearly 20 miles to Baliuag. This put Homma’s spearhead barely 40 miles from the edges of Manila, but, more critically, it placed the Japanese barely 10 miles from a vital road junction at Baliuag on the highway between Manila and Bataan. The North Luzon Force tenaciously and successfully fought through most of December 31, supported by Brigadier General James Weaver’s Provisional Tank Group, which would be an important unit supporting the actions of the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, Homma had missed an enormous opportunity when he had failed, all week long, to destroy the railroad and highway bridges across the Pampanga River at Calumpit, which were the main conduit of supplies going into Bataan. Japanese bombers were attacking Manila, destroying facilities that would later be necessary to the occupation, but neglected this strategically important target.
The supply situation on Bataan was critical, and Homma might have made it worse. Originally, WPO-3 had called for moving food to sustain 43,000 troops for six months into Bataan when a war broke out. This goal would not be met. On top of this, MacArthur would have 47,500 troops, plus around 32,500 other personnel and 25,000 civilians to feed.
By the end of the last day of 1941, the North Luzon Force withdrew from D-5 to take up positions guarding the Bataan evacuation routes. As Louis Morton writes,
the first part of the withdrawal had been completed. Although it had been successful, there had been difficult moments. Communications had broken down at times, supply had proved difficult, and some of the bridges had been blown too soon. The defense lines had sometimes been hastily and inadequately manned, or not occupied at all.
To the south, the two regiments of Susumu Morioka’s 16th Division, who had landed at Lamon Bay on Christmas Eve, had overcome the more rugged, mountainous terrain in that area, and were nearing the southern edge of Manila by December 31.
Inside Manila, New Year’s Eve was greeted with melancholy and resignation. Although Radio Tokyo had acknowledged the open city proclamation on December 26, the Japanese aircraft that had attacked the city occasionally throughout the week did not. A major air strike, involving multiple waves of bombers, had struck on December 27. Both the Philippines Herald and Manila Bulletin reported that night clubs were open for New Year’s Eve, and a dance was held at the Fiesta Pavilion of the Manila Hotel, but the mood was subdued and those party-goers who were on the street dodged piles of garbage that had gone uncollected for days.
On New Year’s Day in the capital, they were still waiting for the Japanese, but they had been following the news of their inexorable march ever since Homma’s men had broken out of the Lingayen Gulf beachhead on Christmas Eve. The city, which had had a prewar population of 285,000, seemed all but deserted. Those who had not fled, especially the expatriates, stayed home, correctly assuming that internment was coming and that they might not see their homes again for years, if ever.
As the sun came up over the Philippine Commonwealth on the first day of 1942, the objectives of Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army appeared to have been substantially completed. Undefended Manila lay between the jaws of a Japanese vise like a nut waiting to be cracked. Homma knew of MacArthur’s withdrawal into the Bataan Peninsula, but dismissed the challenges of capturing it as negligible. He had been given two months to capture the Philippines, and he had done so much in just one week. In that time, his troops had captured an area ten times the size of Bataan, and they were geared up with momentum. How hard could it be to pluck that one last plum?
Most of the 14th Army personnel assumed that they would greet the new year by marching into Manila on January 1, but the cautious Homma ordered them to halt with the city in sight. As he explained after the war, “If those divisions went in together from south and north, anything might happen.”
At 10:40 am, Lieutenant General Yuitsu Tsuchihashi, the 48th Division commander, contacted Homma, reminding him of the huge fires that had been raging in the vicinity of the port, whose facilities would be needed by the Japanese, and he offered to go in and “to rescue Manila from this conflagration.”
At 8:00 pm, from his 14th Army headquarters in Cabanatuan, Homma approved the proposal, but ordered Tsuchihashi to wait until daylight the following morning. General Morioka of the 16th Division was ordered to move out at the same time and occupy the naval yard at Cavite, about 10 miles south of Manila, before entering the city.
It was 5:45 pm on January 2 when Major General Koichi Abe finally led his 48th Division infantry group, the Japanese spearhead, into Manila. The rest followed, flooding into the city to occupy all of the government buildings, and taking over hospitals for Japanese wounded.
As General Morioka writes in his operational report, “the joyful voices of the Japanese residents were overwhelming.” Meanwhile, British and American residents were ordered to register as “enemy aliens” and report for internment. Almost 3,000 people were sent to Santo Tomas University, where they would spend the next three years in confinement under increasingly difficult conditions.
Three days later, after the newspapers resumed publication, they carried a proclamation from Homma’s Kempeitai military police that:
anyone who inflicts, or attempts to inflict, an injury upon Japanese soldiers or individuals, shall be shot to death [but] if the assailant, or attempted assailant, cannot be found, we will hold ten influential persons as hostages who live in and about the streets or municipalities where the event happened … the Filipinos should understand our real intentions and should work together with us to maintain public peace and order in the Philippines.
As both sides prepared for the imminent battle of Bataan, MacArthur reorganized his command, redesignating the North Luzon and South Luzon Forces as I Philippine Corps and II Philippine Corps, commanded respectively by General Jonathan Wainwright and General George Parker. The two were of roughly equal size, with 22,500 and 25,000 men, respectively. Fortunately for MacArthur, Homma was operating under the assumption that the total force on Bataan was 25,000. Because the topography of Bataan is centered on a steep central mountain range, the two corps were divided geographically, with I Corps to the west of the mountains, and II Corps in the east, where Bataan’s major thoroughfare, Highway 110, ran along the coast. In their rear, around the port of Mariveles, at the tip of Bataan, MacArthur established a Service Command Area, where supplies were stored.
Bataan afforded excellent defensive opportunities. As Colonel Harry Skerry, the North Luzon Force engineer, wrote in his after-action report, “taking it all in all, the rugged terrain of the Bataan Peninsula, covered as it was by a thick jungle, concealed the works of the defender even when the enemy had constant air superiority and air observation.”
The Japanese, meanwhile, also reorganized the 14th Army. As previously planned, the 48th Division was pulled out and reassigned to General Hitoshi Imamura’s 16th Army for operations in the Dutch East Indies. On the eve of the Bataan campaign, Homma was now losing the largest unit under his command, and the one which had proven to have been the most effective in the Philippines campaign thus far. The veteran 5th Air Group was also being transferred out of 14th Army control.
Fortunately, Homma had accelerated the departure from Taiwan of the 65th Brigade, under Lieutenant General Akira Nara, which had been earmarked to join the 14th Army on January 22 as an occupation force. It was smaller and less capable than the 48th Division, but it was manpower which Homma would need, and it arrived in the Philippines on January 1 with 6,700 officers and men.
The opening skirmishes of the Bataan campaign followed directly after the Japanese breached the USAFFE’s D-5 Defensive Line on December 31. Carrying forward with the momentum of the preceding week, the Japanese turned west to converge on Layac, a crossroads town at the neck of the Bataan Peninsula. As the Japanese moved forward, the defenders fought a determined holding action to permit the establishment of the main battle line across the peninsula.
This line lay 15 miles south of Layac, and about 40 highway miles north of Mariveles. It ran from Mauban in the west to the Mabatang–Abucay area in the Highway 110 corridor on the east coast. At its center was 4,222-foot Mount Natib. A secondary, fall-back, or reserve battle line was planned for about 15 miles farther south between Bagac and Orion. Most of the defensive positions were placed along the coastal roads, and there was some concern about protecting the rugged, almost impassible center of the peninsula, but the Japanese would not fully employ this difficult terrain.
By midnight on January 5 the last of the Bataan force had reached Bataan, the last bridge demolition, designed to slow the Japanese advance, had been completed, and the defenders were as ready as they could be. They had three days to catch their breath.
The main battle of Bataan got underway at 3:00 pm on January 9 with a thundering artillery barrage, faulty intelligence regarding the main defensive line, and an unrealistic estimate of the strength and determination of the American and Filipino troops. Each of the five defensive lines south of Lingayen had been breached in about 24 hours, and Homma planned on a repeat of this timetable on Bataan. In retrospect, Homma also erred in assigning Nara’s inexperienced 65th Brigade to the initial ground assault. The 16th Division was not committed to the battle until January 18.
According to Louis Morton, a postwar interrogation of Lieutenant General Maeda, Homma’s chief of staff, revealed that:
Homma and the majority of the 14th Army staff believed that American resistance on Bataan would be weak and that operations there would be quickly concluded. The plan for the attack, therefore, was conceived of as a pursuit rather than an assault against a strongly fortified position in depth.
Nara’s plan called for sending two regiments under Colonel Susumu Takechi against I Corps on the Highway 110 corridor in the east, and Colonel Takeo Imai’s 141st Infantry Regiment against I Corps in the west. Both would be supported by mobile artillery.
For about a week, the two sides traded fire, probing efforts, attacks, and counterattacks, without any appreciable changes in position. It was not until late on January 16 that Nara was able to break through the II Corps left flank, which had been weakened in the heavy fighting. He knew that if he could move quickly enough, he could exploit this breakthrough to encircle the American and Filipino troops and pin them against Manila Bay. As it was, the line held.
On January 15, Homma had made the decision to commit elements of the 16th Division to the battle. These centered on the 16th Infantry Group, commanded by Major General Naoki Kimura, who had led the landing at Legaspi on December 10. Known as the Kimura Detachment, this unit included the 20th Infantry Regiment, supported by artillery. It reached the west coast opposite Wainwright’s I Corps on January 18, and successfully scored a breakthrough on the American and Filipino right flank inland from Mauban on January 21. After several days of fierce fighting, I Corps was forced to withdraw from the line.
Meanwhile, Parker’s II Corps line near Abucay, which had held on January 16, came under pressure from the 65th Brigade, was pushed back, but restored its position through a counterattack on January 22. However, that night, based on the pressure being felt against the entire line, MacArthur ordered a general withdrawal to begin the following day.
Both corps reached their positions in the reserve line on January 24, having held off the Japanese for over two weeks.
The Japanese had not anticipated their tenacity. Despite their having pushed the American and Filipino troops from one line to another, they too had suffered. Nara’s 65th Brigade lost about a quarter of its strength, causing him to admit that his unit had “reached the extreme stages of exhaustion.”
While the withdrawal to the secondary line was clearly a setback for the American and Filipino troops, it had been done in an orderly fashion, and it would take some time for the Japanese to reach their new position.
Frustrated with the slow pace of the overland campaign, Homma borrowed from Yamashita’s successful campaign along Malaya’s west coast, by authorizing a bold amphibious flanking maneuver along Bataan’s west coast to outflank I Corps and cut it off from its supplies. A force, numbering approximately 2,000 troops of the 2nd Battalion of the Kimura Detachment’s 20th Infantry Regiment, was dispatched to execute three landings in the American and Filipino rear, in the Service Command Area near Mariveles.
This maneuver, which would have been called “bold and decisive” if it had worked, met with difficulties almost immediately. The terrain was a jagged coastline studded with rocky points and inlets, all of which were nearly impossible to see in the dark, especially from boats in high seas.
On the night of January 22–23, the first landing party was discovered in the darkness by Lieutenant John Bulkeley’s PT-34, and two boats were sunk. The rest of the force landed on Longoskawayan Point near Mariveles, and managed to get ashore to set up defensible positions. Two further landings over the next several days managed to secure beachheads on points farther north, but none of the landing parties was able to move beyond its initial perimeter.
The Japanese troops were attacked from ashore by infantry, tanks, and artillery, and from the sea by the guns of the minesweeper USS Quail, but held on in caves and other positions until early February. The last survivors escaped inland on February 12, but were caught and cornered by the 26th Cavalry on February 16. What came to be known as the Battle of the Points was a victory for the defenders, but it only served to show how vulnerable their position at the tip of Bataan really was.
As February began, the reserve line between Bagac and Orion still held, but with one eye on the jungle and the other on their dwindling food stocks, it was hard for the defenders not to grow fatalistic. On the day that they had marched back down the road to the reserve line, Lieutenant Henry Lee of the Philippine Division sat down and wrote a poem entitled “Abucay Withdrawal,” in which he writes that ironically:
Bataan was saved for another day
Saved for hunger and wound and heat
For slow exhaustion and grim retreat
For a wasted hope and a sure defeat.
Lee later died in captivity, but his notebook was recovered, and his poems published posthumously in 1947 in the book Nothing But Praise.