“There is no weapon against cruelty, against warped minds and warped souls.”
—PACITA PESTAÑO-JACINTO,
DIARY ENTRY, JANUARY 6, 1945
GENERAL YAMASHITA STEWED IN HIS NEW HEADQUARTERS in the mountain town of Baguio. The fifty-nine-year-old commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines had relocated his headquarters from Manila to the summer capital some 125 miles north to make his final stand against MacArthur. Built like a bear, Yamashita stood five feet nine inches tall and weighed 220 pounds, his girth often pressing against his green army uniform. He was homely, with a bald, egg-shaped head, wide-spaced eyes, and a flat nose. For years he had worn a short moustache, reminiscent of Adolf Hitler, but as it grayed, he finally opted to shave it. His unattractive looks led the Filipinos to nickname him “Old Potato Face,” while an American intelligence report derogatorily described him as “a florid, pig-faced man.” Yamashita’s banal appearance camouflaged the fact that he was one of Japan’s greatest generals. Only three years earlier he had stunned the world by conquering Singapore, earning the nickname the “Tiger of Malaya.”
Yamashita understood better than anyone that the war was nearing its climax—and Japan its defeat. The general could only brood over how his nation’s fortunes had changed so dramatically since those heady early days of victory when pilots had destroyed much of America’s powerful Pacific Fleet anchored in the cool waters of Pearl Harbor. Japanese forces had gone on to capture Guam, Wake, and the Philippines from the United States, Hong Kong and Singapore from the British, and the oil-rich Dutch East Indies from the Netherlands. In a few short months, Japan had built an empire that stretched across twenty million square miles and seven time zones, putting one-tenth of the world under the control of the bespectacled Emperor Hirohito. But Japan’s dream of a Pacific empire had proven an elusive mirage, vanishing with a string of defeats from Midway and Guadalcanal to New Guinea and the Marianas.
With those losses, so, too, went Japan’s vital imports. The lack of oil had crippled the nation’s war machine, forcing the navy to relegate its once-powerful battleships to antiaircraft duty and leading to the creation of the kamikazes that now crashed down on MacArthur’s forces. Japanese civilians likewise suffered. Hungry residents devoured acorns and even sawdust, while new mothers proved too malnourished to nurse. This was the backdrop of Yamashita’s pending clash with MacArthur, a battle over the last major geographic roadblock that stood between American forces and the Japanese homeland. Yamashita’s job was to turn the Philippines into a tar pit, to bog MacArthur down and give Japan time to dig shelters and prepare. The importance of his mission reflected in the final words Hirohito told him: “The fate of the Empire rests upon your shoulders.” Yamashita understood, and just as MacArthur had come to the Philippines to avenge his defeat, so, too, was Yamashita certain of his own destiny.
He had come to die.
Yamashita had traveled a long road to this moment. The son of a rural doctor, he was born on Shikoku—the smallest of Japan’s four main islands—in the remote village of Osugi Mura or “Great Cedar.” As a child, he thrived in the rugged and isolated environment, where for generations families had worn kimonos and wooden sandals and survived by farming rice and fishing. Yamashita loved hiking, exploring the forests, and writing poetry, adopting the pen name Daisan or “Giant Cedar” after a tree in the family’s front yard. “This was a guiding motto for his life,” one Japanese historian later wrote. “He wanted henceforth to be a man of upright character and bearing, looking up skyward like the giant cedar.” The lull of the wilderness eclipsed his interest in academics, leaving his older brother Tomoyoshi to follow his father into medicine, albeit abandoning a rural practice for a move to Tokyo. “If I had only been cleverer or had worked harder,” Yamashita once said, “I would have been a doctor like my brother.”
Yamashita’s parents instead saw a future for him in soldiering, one he later noted was perhaps his fate. He attended the Cadet Academy in Hiroshima, where his earlier dislike of school vanished. Yamashita’s strong performance landed him a spot at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in Tokyo—Japan’s equivalent to West Point—where he graduated fifth in his class of 1908. He applied that same tenacity a decade later at the war college, finishing sixth out of fifty-six officers and earning a sword from the emperor for his achievements. An important lesson for the young officer—one that no doubt hung over him on the eve of his fight against MacArthur—came in 1919, when Yamashita landed as assistant military attaché in Bern, Switzerland. Along with Capt. Hideki Tojo, who would later serve as Japan’s war minister and prime minister, Yamashita toured battlefields on the western front and visited Hamburg, witnessing first hand the crippling inflation and food prices that resulted from Germany’s defeat.
“If Japan ever has to fight any nation,” Yamashita confided in Tojo, “she must never surrender and get herself in a state like this.”
Yamashita returned to Europe again several years later as the military attaché in Vienna, an experience that provided a much-needed reprieve after his home life soured. He had invested in a business selling thermometers started by one of his wife’s relatives, going so far as to guarantee the loans. The business failed, and bailiffs showed up to seize his home. “For a regular officer to have contracted such a debt, however innocently, was a disgrace,” wrote one biographer. “He felt he should resign his commission.” Yamashita’s brother refused to allow him to quit, instructing him to leave for Vienna, while he resolved his debts. The three years in Europe, Yamashita professed, were the best in life. He studied economics at Vienna University and befriended a Japanese widow, who introduced him to a German woman named Kitty, with whom he had an affair. “Before Vienna, I knew little of the world outside military life,” he later said. “There I read many books and made many good and interesting friends.”
Yamashita’s reputation as an eccentric officer grew after he returned to Tokyo. He obsessed over hygiene, refusing to eat fruit unless it was thoroughly washed. He likewise avoided ice water, disliked dancing, and never learned to drive a car. His greatest quirk centered on his habit of falling asleep—often in the middle of meetings—with a guttural snore that became legendary throughout the army. But his rising stature faltered when two captains he had mentored helped lead a failed coup of young officers on February 26, 1936, resulting in the deaths of several senior government officials. Yamashita helped mediate a peaceful end to the standoff, but the damage was done. Not only did he fall out of favor with the emperor, but the young captains whom he loved like sons committed suicide. “When I was posted to Korea, I felt I had been given a tactful promotion but that in fact my career was over,” he later said. “Even when I was given my first fighting company in North China, I still felt I had no future in the Army, so I was always on the front line, where the bullets flew the thickest. I sought only a place to die.”
Yamashita returned to Tokyo in July 1940, where following his success as a frontline divisional commander in the war against China, his fellow officers lauded him as Japan’s finest general. Tojo had since ascended to the role of the nation’s war minister. One of his first moves was to send a delegation to Germany. Born within three weeks of one another, Tojo and Yamashita shared a long history, stretching back to their days at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. Unlike Tojo, who was a political animal, Yamashita had little interest outside the army. “My life,” he once said, “is that of a soldier; I do not seek any other life unless our Emperor calls me.” Despite that, Tojo, who considered Yamashita a “ruthless and forceful commander,” saw a potential rival in his former travel partner, and their relationship soured. “I have nothing against Tojo,” Yamashita said, “but he apparently has something against me.” Near the end of 1940, Tojo tasked Yamashita to lead a team of forty experts on a six-month train tour of Germany and Italy, a move that kept the general out of Tokyo as Tojo solidified his power.
“If you say anything out of place to the newspapers,” a fellow officer warned Yamashita, “Tojo will make trouble.”
In January 1941, Yamashita met with Adolf Hitler in Germany, passing along messages from Tojo and a silver model of a flying crane. Though he publicly praised Hitler, privately he was unimpressed by the German leader, whom he viewed as a little man. “He may be a great orator on a platform, with his gestures and flamboyant way of speaking,” Yamashita said, “but standing behind his desk listening he seems much more like a clerk.”
“All our secrets are open to you,” Hitler assured him.
Despite that promise, Hitler failed to deliver. “There were several pieces of equipment the Germans did not want us to see,” Yamashita said. “Whenever I tried to persuade the German General Staff to show us things like radar—about which we had a rudimentary knowledge—the conversation always turned to something else.”
The two clashed on other points, including Hitler’s desire for Japan to declare war on America. “My country is still fighting in China, and we must finish that war as soon as possible,” Yamashita countered. “We are also afraid that Russia may attack us in Manchuria. This is no time for us to declare war on other countries.”
Yamashita met with Field Marshal Hermann Göring, who gave him an overview of the war in Europe. Yamashita fell asleep—as he so often did—and began to snore. Unaware of Yamashita’s quirk, Göring cut short his lecture, complaining later that the Japanese general must have been drunk. Yamashita took time off to visit Kitty in Vienna, though the reunion warranted only two sentences in his diary. “I visited my friend the widow and in the afternoon Kitty came to see me,” he wrote. “It was memorable.”
The trip convinced Yamashita that Japan should stay out of the war, believing that Germany made a grievous error when it invaded Russia in June 1941. The general called the members of his commission together. “You know the results of our inspection as well as I do,” he told them. “I must ask you not to express opinion in favor of expanding the alliance between Japan, Germany and Italy. Never suggest in your report that Japan should declare war on Great Britain and the United States. We must not and cannot rely upon the power of other nations. Japan needs more time, particularly as there may be aggression against us from Russia. We must have time to rebuild our defense system and adjust the whole Japanese war machine. I cannot repeat this to you often enough.”
Yamashita said much the same in the report he filed upon his return, which infuriated Tojo, who at the time was busy developing plans for war against the United States. Yamashita again landed in exile, this time in Manchuria in July 1941, but his stay in China proved short-lived. In November of that year, Yamashita received orders to report to Tokyo. Despite Tojo’s resentment of his former friend, he could not deny that Yamashita was one of the nation’s great generals. In the coming war against the United States and Great Britain, Yamashita’s services would be vital. He was named commander of the 25th Japanese Army. His orders: seize the Malay Peninsula and the British naval base at Singapore. This was the army general’s dream assignment.
The Malay Peninsula snakes seven hundred miles south of Thailand, a rugged sliver of land that constricts at its narrowest point to just sixty miles wide. Mountains split the peninsula in half, climbing as high as seven thousand feet. Malaya produced nearly 40 percent of the world’s rubber and almost 60 percent of its tin, both vital resources in war. Just off the peninsula’s southern tip sat Singapore, a diamond-shaped island connected to the mainland by a 1,115-yard-long stone causeway. Twenty-six miles long and fourteen wide—or about ten times the size of Manhattan—the island was home to a few villages, rubber plantations, and the city of Singapore, located on the southern coast.
Singapore’s biggest asset was the sprawling naval base that guarded passage from the Pacific to the Indian oceans and served, in the words of one reporter, as “the bolt that fastens the back door of the British Empire.” Construction of the base atop a mangrove swamp had proved nothing less than an engineering marvel, spanning twenty years and costing a staggering $400 million. Workers diverted a major river, leveled hills to fill in swamps, and drove thirty-four miles of concrete and iron pilings, some as many as one hundred feet deep. The base’s towering walls enclosed what amounted to a four-square-mile town complete with churches, cinemas, and recreation facilities, including a swimming pool, seven football fields, and eighteen tennis courts. “The naval base,” proclaimed Life magazine, “is a bedazzling phenomenon.”
Like a jewel thief, Yamashita’s job was to snatch this diamond from the British Crown. The general said farewell to his wife at the Japanese Officers Club behind the Imperial Palace. “I pray for your future in battle,” she told him and bowed.
Yamashita simply nodded.
The amateur poet Giant Cedar instead captured his thoughts over the pending fight in verse on December 4, 1941, the day he departed for the mission:
On the day the sun shines with the moon
Our arrow leaves the bow.
It carries my spirit toward the enemy.
With me are a hundred million souls—
My people from the East—
On this day when the moon
And the sun both shine.
The Japanese had long studied Singapore and understood that the so-called “Gibraltar of the Orient” was, as one American reporter noted in 1940, little more than an “empty shell.” The cash-strapped British, busy battling Germany in Europe, had no permanent fleet to moor in Singapore, despite offering more than twenty square miles of deep-sea anchorage. “Your American fleet,” a British vice admiral quipped to a reporter, “would fit nicely into Singapore.” Air support on the peninsula was likewise weak, consisting of outdated planes that were no match for the Japanese. Many of the troops were poorly trained; barely half were English, the rest Indian, Malayan, and Australian. Beyond those deficiencies, Singapore had what Japanese war planners recognized as a fatal blind spot—the base was designed to repel an attack from the sea. Yamashita instead planned to assault the island from the jungle. To make his attack a success, he needed to move fast, opting for a small force of just thirty-six thousand troops. In a war defined by technology and power, Yamashita resorted to an antiquated weapon.
Bicycles.
Japanese forces sloshed ashore on the Malay Peninsula just north of the Thai border, in an invasion timed to coincide with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Yamashita’s troops set off south, half in motor vehicles and the rest pedaling eighteen thousand bicycles down paved asphalt highways. Navigation consisted of simple school atlases. “With the infantry on bicycles,” wrote chief planner Col. Masanobu Tsuji, “there was no traffic congestion or delay. Wherever bridges were destroyed the infantry continued their advance, wading across the rivers carrying their bicycles on their shoulders, or crossing on log bridges held up on the shoulders of engineers standing in the stream.”
The Japanese overwhelmed the poorly trained defenders, some of whom fought back while many others fled, leaving behind stores of food and abandoned trucks, which Yamashita’s forces dubbed “Churchill’s Allowance.” British Lt. Col. Spencer Chapman, hidden along the side of the road, watched hundreds of Japanese troops pedal past. “The majority were on bicycles in parties of forty or fifty, riding three or four abreast and talking and laughing just as if they were going to a football match.” Excessive heat, coupled with the eighty pounds of gear each soldier carried, at times popped their bicycle tires. Repair squads mended damaged bikes, though some soldiers simply rode on the rims, which made a metallic rattle that terrified retreating forces.
“Here come the tanks!” troops cried.
The British proved slow to grasp the threat from the Japanese, a sentiment best captured by Singapore governor Sir Shenton Thomas after he learned Yamashita’s forces had landed. “Well,” he said, “I suppose you’ll shove the little men off.”
Cities and towns fell one after the other. Japanese forces reached Kuala Lumpur, only to find the British had escaped the night before, which infuriated Yamashita. “I don’t want them pushed back,” he wrote in his diary. “I want them destroyed.”
Prime Minister Winston Churchill fumed over the failure of his forces. Not only had Japanese planes destroyed the battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse—the backbone of British naval power in Asia—but now Yamashita’s so-called “bicycle blitzkrieg” closed in on the island’s rear flank. “Singapore’s back door,” a United Press reporter wrote, “became its front door.” Though many of the island’s guns could swivel to face the peninsula, troops realized that the armor-piercing shells designed to punch through ship hulls were worthless in a fight against ground troops. “The possibility,” Churchill wrote, “of Singapore having no landward defense no more entered into my mind than that of a battleship being launched without a bottom.” The prime minister fired off orders on January 19. “The entire male population should be employed upon constructing defense works,” he wrote. “The most rigorous compulsion is to be used, up to the limit where picks and shovels are available.”
But it was too late.
Yamashita’s forces reached the southern tip of the peninsula by the end of January 1942. In barely eight weeks, his troops had covered some seven hundred miles—an average of more than twelve a day—and fought ninety-five large and small battles. The narrow Johore Strait—barely four feet deep at low tide—was all that stood between Japanese forces and the island. “The Singapore we had once seen in a dream,” Tsuji wrote, “we now saw under our eyes.” The general gathered about forty of his divisional commanders and senior officers at a rubber plantation to give them orders. The officers then raised canteen caps of Kikumasamune, a ceremonial wine. “It is a good place to die,” Yamashita toasted. “Surely we shall conquer.”
Conditions inside the city of Singapore deteriorated. Refugees had swollen the population of 550,000 to nearly a million with as many as thirty people packed per room. Japanese artillery rained down, destroying sewers and reducing the flow of freshwater to a trickle as five out of six gallons bubbled out of broken lines. “The whole island seemed afire,” wrote one reporter. “It was a pyrotechnical display of unbelievable grandeur and terror.” Casualties mounted at a rate of two thousand civilians a day, overwhelming hospitals that stank of blood and entrails and whose lawns were now covered in graves. Between air raids, workers loaded the dead onto trucks for mass burials, while starving dogs feasted on the ones left behind. Troops set fire to oil stores, darkening the skies with a heavy smoke that burned nostrils, teared eyes, and mixed with rain to stain uniforms. “I am sure there is a bright tropic sun shining somewhere overhead,” wrote one reporter, “but in my many-windowed room it is too dark to work without electric lights.”
British forces destroyed the causeway, but Yamashita’s troops had little trouble crossing in collapsible motorboats. Churchill grew desperate, recognizing the stakes were far greater than one island. “There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs,” the prime minister cabled. “Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.”
Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival, the bucktoothed commander of British forces, saw the end fast approaching. “It is unlikely that resistance can last more than a day or two,” he cabled. “There must come a stage when in the interests of the troops and civil population further bloodshed will serve no useful purpose.”
Percival’s superiors disagreed, demanding the general fight house to house if necessary. “So long as you are in position to inflict losses and damage to enemy and your troops are physically capable of doing so you must fight on.”
But Percival could not.
On February 15, 1942, he sent what would prove to be his final telegram. “Owing to losses from enemy action, water, petrol, food, and ammunition practically finished,” he cabled. “Unable therefore to continue the fight any longer.”
Shortly before six p.m. that same day—as news cameras rolled—Percival arrived unarmed at the Ford Motor Company factory at Bukit Timah to surrender to Yamashita. The fifty-four-year-old British commander was dressed, this Sunday evening of his daughter Margery’s twelfth birthday, in khaki shorts and a shirt and wore a steel helmet. An interpreter and two staff officers accompanied him, one clutching the Union Jack, the other a white flag of surrender, which partially dragged on the ground behind. The men marched through the main entrance of the factory, where the roof had collapsed and explosions had blown out many of the windows. Japanese troops inside had chalked out spots on the concrete floor for the senior officers, cameramen, and reporters.
“Exhausted by the strenuous campaign,” one Japanese correspondent observed, “the six-foot Britishers wore haggard expressions.” Tsuji noted the same. “The faces of the four English officers,” he wrote, “were pale and their eyes bloodshot.” Even Yamashita, who arrived a half hour later with his sword in his left hand, was moved by the agony of his vanquished rival, who sat at the table, arms folded in front of him. “Yamashita wanted to say a few kind words to Percival while he was shaking hands with him, as he looked so pale and thin and ill,” the general’s adjutant wrote that day in his diary. “But he could not say anything because he does not speak English, and he realized how difficult it is to convey heartfelt sympathy when the words are being interpreted by a third person.”
The rivals sat down across from each other at a long teak table. The Japanese general kicked off his leather boots, a seemingly arrogant move that masked his fear that the British would discover how small his force really was and that his troops were almost out of ammunition. Shortly before the conference, Yamashita had gambled and ordered his forces to fire a massive barrage at the city, hoping to have a psychological effect on the British. “My attack on Singapore was a bluff—a bluff that worked,” Yamashita wrote in his diary. “I had 30,000 men and was outnumbered more than three to one. I knew that if I had to fight long for Singapore, I would be beaten. That is why the surrender had to be at once. I was very frightened all the time that the British would discover our numerical weakness and lack of supplies and force me into disastrous street fighting.”
“I want your replies to be brief and to the point,” Yamashita began, an interpreter translating his demands. “I will accept only unconditional surrender.”
“Will you give me until tomorrow morning?” Percival asked.
Yamashita refused, telling him he would resume the assault that evening. The Japanese general leaned forward, his left hand resting on the hilt of his sword while he brought his open right hand down on the table like a saber chop. Percival asked for just a few more hours, but Yamashita again balked, his patience waning.
“Yes or no,” Yamashita finally barked.
Percival sat in silence.
“I want to hear a decisive answer,” Yamashita pressed, “and I insist on unconditional surrender.”
The gravity of the situation hung over Percival. Not since Gen. Charles Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781 during the American Revolution had the British suffered such a significant defeat. “We were,” as Gen. Sir Henry Pownall noted in his diary, “frankly out-generalled, outwitted and outfought.”
“Yes,” Percival finally muttered.
With that one word, Yamashita had won.
In just seventy-three days, the son of a rural Shikoku doctor had crushed the British, a feat he accomplished with a force a fraction of the size of his adversary, though with the benefit of air and naval dominance. “With the fall of Singapore,” lamented Life magazine, “an era of empire ended.”
Yamashita’s stunning battlefield victory, however, was marred by a series of atrocities his forces committed, a barbarism that would echo three years later during the general’s desperate fight to hold the Philippines. Near the town of Parit Sulong, Japanese forces killed about 150 wounded Australian and Indian troops, beheading some and shooting others before dousing them in fuel and setting them ablaze. In another case, troops shot and bayoneted more than three hundred doctors, nurses, and even bedridden patients at the Alexandra Hospital, including one on the operating table.
But the worst would come in the weeks after the battle, when Yamashita ordered the “severe disposal” of thousands of Chinese, who were believed hostile to his forces. Over several weeks, troops rounded up and transported Chinese residents—mostly military-aged men—outside the city and slaughtered them in what became known as the Sook Ching Massacre. Japan would later admit to killing five thousand, though leaders of Singapore’s Chinese community would place the number closer to fifty thousand.
Back in Japan, euphoria over the capture of Singapore seized the public. Members of the House of Representatives erupted in shouts of “Banzai,” schools suspended classes, and newspapers published special “Victory Supplements.” Despite rationing, the government announced each family would be given two bottles of beer, rubber goods, and red beans; children under thirteen would receive caramel drops.
“Singapore has fallen!” trumpeted the Japan Times and Advertiser. “Let joy be unrestrained.”
“The ruin of the British Empire is at hand,” announced the Chugai.
“The downfall of Singapore,” declared Osaka Mainichi, “has definitely decided the history of the world.”
Yamashita’s victory earned him the nickname the Tiger of Malaya, which he personally despised. “I am not a Tiger,” he once barked at a German attaché. “The tiger attacks its prey in stealth but I attack the enemy in a fair play.”
Japan’s capture of the British citadel reverberated around the world. Winston Churchill called it “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history” while Australian prime minister John Curtin warned the defeat jeopardized the “fate of the English-speaking world.” For the first time, the American press speculated that the Allies might lose the war. “There can now be no doubt,” observed a New York Times reporter, “that we are facing perhaps the blackest period in our history.”
Yamashita had little time to celebrate.
Many of Japan’s generals wanted Yamashita appointed war minister, a move that threatened Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who feared any potential rival. Tojo retaliated, ordering Japan’s feted war hero back to Manchuria. On the surface, the assignment appeared worthy as Yamashita would serve as the first line of defense against a possible Russian invasion. But since the two nations had signed a neutrality pact in April 1941, and Russia was bogged down fighting the Germans, immediate war appeared unlikely. In reality, Tojo had parked Yamashita on the war’s sidelines.
Yamashita’s fate, in many ways, mirrored MacArthur’s, who despite his own fame was destined to fight only in the war’s Pacific backwater while his former subordinates achieved glory in Europe. Tojo’s humiliation of Yamashita went further. The prime minister barred him any leave in Tokyo, preventing him from visiting his wife as well as from delivering a speech he had written for the emperor. Yamashita instead stopped off in Formosa en route to his new post, where an aide sent him three geishas.
“I know they want to please me with these girls,” the dispirited general said, “but send them back—and don’t forget to tip them.”
The Tiger of Malaya maintained a low profile in Manchuria, positioning his desk, as always, to face the Emperor’s Palace back in Tokyo. He ordered that his dining room be enlarged, and he avoided restaurants. When he was promoted to full general, he celebrated with sweet bean cakes and sake.
As the months turned to years—and Japan’s fortunes fell—Yamashita was powerless to intervene from his perch in the war’s hinterlands.
“I suspect things are not going too well at the moment,” an aide remarked.
“It does not matter what happens in the Pacific,” he replied. “Our eyes and ears do not face south, toward the Pacific. Our duty is to face north, toward Russia.”
After the Marianas fell in the summer of 1944, putting the Japanese homeland within range of American bombers, many knew the war had moved into a deadly new phase, best summarized by the four words Fleet Adm. Osami Nagano muttered.
“Hell is on us.”
America’s capture of the Marianas triggered Tojo’s ouster. With his exit, Yamashita’s exile came to an end. The general was out inspecting his troops on September 23, 1944, when he received word of an urgent message. He rushed back to his headquarters to find a signal announcing his appointment as commander in the Philippines.
Yamashita’s time on the bench was over.
“So it’s come at last, has it?” he told his chief of staff, General Yotsuide. “Well, everything will be the same, even if I go there.”
The general, who understood better than anyone that Japan was destined for defeat, assumed the demeanor of a doomed man. He met with the Manchurian puppet emperor Henry Pu Yi, who remembered how proud and even arrogant Yamashita had been when he first arrived in China. The general stood before him now, a somber soldier. “This is our final parting,” Yamashita said. “I shall never come back.”
The general was the same with his wife. Before he left Manchuria, he presented Hisako with a package wrapped in oilskin. When she finally opened it after the war’s end, she discovered his diaries of the campaign in Malaya and Singapore, along with a copy of the speech he had planned to read to the emperor. Fellow officers in Manchuria urged Yamashita to leave his wife in China where she would be safe, but he disagreed, instructing her to return to Japan, to the land of her ancestors.
“You’d better die with your parents at home,” he told her.
Hisako sensed this was different. “When he went to Singapore, I felt nothing,” she later said. “This time I felt an ill omen. I felt I would never see him again.”
In Tokyo, Yamashita attended a conference, where the chief of war plans outlined the Philippines defense strategy. Yamashita closed his eyes and began to snore. “Perhaps you are tired, General,” the irritated chief said. “Would you like to take a rest?”
Yamashita opened his eyes. “Please continue,” he replied. “I was just considering your plan. How many islands, for example, are there in the Philippines?”
More than seven thousand.
Yamashita was floored. “How do you expect me to draw up a defense plan?” he countered. “The enemy can make an unexpected attack on several of them at once. I must have the guaranteed help of the Air Force and Navy to enable me to defend this territory.”
The general had other concerns as well. “How have you been treating the Catholic population?” he asked.
Individual Japanese commanders, he learned, were responsible for relations with the locals, an answer that drew Yamashita’s scorn. “I do not agree that the Army on the spot should have been allowed to deal with the very large number of Catholics there,” he said. “I think we should have been at great pains to give them leadership. If we have not done so, how can you expect these people to support us?”
Yamashita used his time in Tokyo to call on officers, including Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu, chief of the army general staff, who warned him of the difficult fight ahead. In consolation, Umezu reminded Yamashita that he was Japan’s greatest soldier. Umezu predicted that the main battle for the Philippines would be fought on the island of Luzon; Yamashita agreed.
Yamashita then asked, given America’s continued advance toward Japan along the flanks, how long he was expected to fight.
“If you can crush the Americans on Luzon, we can still win,” Umezu told him, “even if they keep launching hooks to the south and the north.”
Yamashita knew such a victory was impossible, but like a good soldier, he vowed to fight his hardest. He met the next day with Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako, enjoying the formal ceremony Tojo had denied him three years earlier. He saluted Hirohito, describing the moment to an aide-de-camp as the happiest of his life. He then prayed at the Yasukuni Shrine dedicated to Japan’s war dead before calling on Adm. Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister.
Yonai could do little more than bow his head in sorrow.
“Do your best,” he repeatedly told him. “Do your best.”
To all, it seemed, Yamashita was cursed.
One of his final social stops was an October 3 visit to his wife’s father in Kamakura, a seaside resort an hour south of Tokyo where the family had relocated to avoid air raids. A few days later he boarded a plane for the Philippines. “As he caught a final glimpse of the coast of Japan,” one biographer later wrote, “there were tears in his eyes.”
American planes had already begun bombing targets in the Philippines when Yamashita’s plane touched down on October 9, 1944. The general settled into a dormitory at Fort William McKinley, the former U.S. Army base just outside Manila. He summoned his officers the following evening for a meeting in a hall blacked out against air raids. There he leveled with them. “I have been told by our Emperor that the crisis will develop first on this battlefield. This gives us all a heavy responsibility,” he said. “I expect you to fight bravely, bearing in mind that victories are won only by resolute and united men. If we remember this, the Japanese Army must win in the end.”
Yamashita met with the press afterward. He was alarmed to learn how badly relations had devolved between the Japanese and the Filipinos, an issue he had raised back in Tokyo. Guerrilla attacks had increased to the point where Japanese troops discovered dynamite in the basement underneath the officers’ recreation room. As soon as American forces landed on Luzon, Yamashita knew, more Filipinos would turn against them. He had to keep the Filipinos out of the fight. His only solution, this late in the game, was to threaten them, which he did in the press. “Anyone who fights against Japan is our enemy, even if he is a Filipino,” he told reporters. “In war we have to eat or be eaten, and if we do not stamp out the guerrillas we shall certainly be eaten.”
Lt. Gen. Akira Muto, Yamashita’s new chief of staff, arrived on October 20. The fifty-one-year-old Muto had previously served with Yamashita in Manchuria in the late 1930s. Like his new boss, Muto understood the reality of his mission. “There is no general I would rather serve with than Yamashita,” he recalled, “but I knew this appointment was a death sentence.” Muto’s journey from Sumatra, in fact, had nearly killed him. During a refueling stop at Puerto Princesa on the Philippine island of Palawan, he had been caught in an American air raid. He dove into a muddy ditch for cover just as the rear gunner of a B-24 strafed his plane, setting it ablaze and burning up most of his luggage. Exhausted and filthy, he pressed on to Manila.
“It is a good thing that you have come,” a relieved Yamashita told Muto when he reported to headquarters. “I have been waiting for you. Everything is bad.” He sized up his new chief of staff, who stood before him still covered in mud. “Have a bath first,” he told him. “Everything can wait till then.”
The bespectacled Muto confided in his new commander that he had lost his uniforms in the air raid, including his underwear.
“Don’t worry,” Yamashita reassured him. “I’ll lend you some of mine.”
The arrival of Yamashita—the conqueror of Singapore—excited many of the officers. But Yamashita understood that he had inherited a disaster, a fiasco far larger than any one commander could remedy. He had arrived six months too late to make needed preparations in advance of a fight against MacArthur’s superior forces. Of the fifteen officers on his staff, only three had ever served in the islands. Furthermore, outside of Muto, he did not know any of his new staff and had no time to learn their strengths and weaknesses. “We were all extremely troubled,” Muto recalled, “by our lack of knowledge of conditions in the Philippines.”
Japan’s years of defeats, coupled with the army’s lowered physical standards and the exhausting heat of the tropics, showed in the poor physical condition and depressed morale of many of his troops. Yamashita witnessed that when he visited the Manila piers to find lean and lethargic soldiers unloading ships. “You have far too many troops here,” he told the supply officer. “They should be sent to fighting units and not be employed as stevedores. You had better start recruiting civilian labor.”
As the officer explained, given the civilian contempt of the Japanese combined with the guerrilla menace, local labor was scarce and largely unreliable.
Yamashita likewise battled gasoline, vehicle, and rice shortages, the latter a paramount problem considering American submarines and bombers had destroyed as much as 85 percent of the rice shipments from Bangkok and Saigon. He drilled his supply officers on the desperate need for food. “Rice,” he harped. “It is rice that we want.”
To others, he was even more blunt, arguing that absent rice, America would have no trouble seizing Luzon. “They will accomplish it by hunger, not bullets.”
The general’s problems soon magnified. Nine days after he arrived, American troops sloshed ashore on Leyte, some four hundred miles southeast of Manila. Upon learning of the invasion, Muto asked a single question that best captured how ill-prepared the Japanese were to fight.
“Where is Leyte?”
Yamashita himself had never set foot on the island—nor would he ever—ultimately managing the battle with the aid of only a map. He had, however, studied MacArthur, viewing his opponent as “a precise, steady and relentless commander, whose campaigns had been almost without flaw.” That understanding convinced Yamashita that Leyte—a rugged island dominated by mountains and jungle—was not MacArthur’s goal but merely a prelude to the main fight on Luzon, the political and cultural heart of the Philippines. Yamashita was loath to siphon off his forces to defend Leyte, but he was ordered to do so by Field Marshal Count Hisaichi Terauchi, commander of the Southern Army, which was responsible for an area that ranged from Malaya and Burma to French Indochina and the Philippines.
In a heated two-hour meeting, Yamashita fought back.
“This is an order from our Emperor,” Terauchi finally instructed him.
“If our Emperor has consented to this plan,” Yamashita replied, “there is nothing else to do but proceed with it stubbornly.”
Just as Yamashita feared, Leyte proved a disaster. The epic sea battle that opened the campaign cost the Japanese Navy a third of its surface ships, including four aircraft carriers, three battleships, nine cruisers, and nine destroyers. Of the fifty thousand troops Yamashita sent to Leyte, barely half ever made it to the island as American bombers and submarines obliterated the transports en route. “The waters of the sea around us,” recalled one Japanese officer, “were tinted with blood.”
The fight on shore proved equally calamitous. Starving Japanese troops were forced to hunt for coconuts, bananas, and bamboo shoots. A letter later retrieved from the pocket of a dead Japanese soldier captured the horror Yamashita’s troops suffered. “I am exhausted. We have no food. The enemy are now within 500 meters from us. Mother, my dear wife and son, I am writing this letter to you by dim candle light. Our end is near,” the soldier wrote. “Hundreds of pale soldiers of Japan are awaiting our glorious end and nothing else.”
One month into the fight, Yamashita again pressed Terauchi to let Leyte fall. Few reinforcements would reach the Philippines, and each transport loaded with troops that departed Luzon for Leyte only jeopardized Japan’s ability to make a final fight for Luzon. But Terauchi stood firm, urging Yamashita to persevere in the defense of Leyte.
“I fully understand your intention,” Yamashita reluctantly concluded. “I will try and carry the campaign out to a successful end.”
Yamashita’s chief of staff was more cynical.
“The old man expects a miracle victory,” Muto griped as the two officers departed the meeting. “He believes he will get help from Heaven.”
But Heaven never delivered.
Yamashita learned on December 13 that MacArthur’s forces had landed on the island of Mindoro, a little more than one hundred miles southwest of Manila, confirming what he suspected all along about his adversary’s intention. He had no option but to abandon Leyte and prepare for battle on Luzon. Terauchi initially resisted, but eventually agreed.
On Christmas Day 1944, Yamashita sent a final message to Lt. Gen. Sosaku Suzuki, his commander on Leyte, leveling with him. No more help would come; Suzuki was on his own. The message was no doubt painful. Suzuki had served as the general’s chief of staff in Singapore, sharing in that incredible victory. Now Yamashita implored him and his men to make a final stand and die honorably. “We shall seek and destroy our enemy on Luzon Island, thereby doing our part in the heroic struggle of the army and avenging many a valiant warrior who fell,” Yamashita wrote. “I cannot keep back tears of remorse for tens and thousands of our officers and men fighting on Leyte Island. Nevertheless I must impose a still harder task on you. Please try to understand my intentions. They say it is harder to live than to die. You, officers and men, be patient enough to endure the hardships of life, and help guard and maintain the prosperity of the Imperial Throne through eternal resistance to the enemy, and be prepared to meet your death calmly for our beloved country.”
The fight for Leyte resulted in 15,500 American casualties, including 3,500 killed. The Japanese paid a far heavier price, with an estimated 60,000 killed either in fighting or from disease and starvation. “After our losses in Leyte,” Yamashita later said, “I realized that I could no longer fight a decisive battle for the Philippines.” The debacle would reverberate up the chain of command. “Our defeat at Leyte,” recalled Navy Minister Admiral Yonai, “was tantamount to the loss of the Philippines.” That realization was not lost on MacArthur, who crowed over his victory in a Christmas Day communiqué. “The completeness of this destruction has seldom been paralleled in the history of warfare,” he boasted. “General Yamashita has sustained perhaps the greatest defeat in the military annals of the Japanese army.”
But Yamashita refused to give up. If he could not win a decisive battle, he would fight a delaying action; he would tie MacArthur down and make him regret ever setting foot on the sandy shores of the Philippines. “I was absorbed day and night,” he later said, “in planning for the defense of Luzon.”
The general anticipated MacArthur’s forces would land at Lingayen Gulf, the same beaches where Japanese troops had invaded three years earlier. Yamashita decided not to defend the beaches or the more than one hundred miles of central plains that separated Lingayen from Manila, recognizing that the sea of rice fields offered no protection for his troops. The navy and air force wanted to try to hold Manila, but Yamashita disagreed. The city’s strategic value lay in its harbor and airfields, both of which could be rendered useless by blowing up piers, fuel depots, and scuttling ships.
Manila’s liabilities, by contrast, loomed large in a fight. Many of the capital’s concrete buildings were inflammable. The city’s flat, low-lying terrain made tunneling difficult and guaranteed it would take far more troops to defend than he could spare. What would Yamashita do about the city’s nearly one million residents, many on the verge of starvation? Evacuating them was impossible, and he likewise did not want to be responsible for them in battle, particularly since the population’s hostility toward the Japanese meant that many civilians would likely turn on his troops when MacArthur’s forces arrived. Lastly, American carrier planes crowded the skies over Manila, hindering any battle preparations. “Persistent fighter attacks,” Muto griped, “met every vehicle moving during daylight hours, continuing until the target burst into flames.”
Just as he had in Malaya and Singapore, Yamashita planned to use the land to his advantage in what promised to be a titanic battle over an island roughly the size of Virginia. He decided to divide his more than 260,000 troops into three groups, dispatching them throughout the island to mountain strongholds. Lt. Gen. Shizuo Yokoyama would lead the eighty thousand men of the Shimbu Group to defend southern Luzon, including the mountains east of the capital as well as the volcanic Bicol Peninsula, a terrain so rugged that roads at times were little more than one-lane dirt paths, often left impassable from washouts and landslides. A small contingent of Yokoyama’s forces would remain in Manila to maintain order, oversee the evacuation of food, ammunition, and artillery, and then blow up the harbor installations and water supply along with the roads and bridges over the Pasig River. Such moves would not only impede the advance of MacArthur’s forces into the city, but hopefully rob the Americans of a deep-water port for future operations. Maj. Gen. Rikichi Tsukada would command the Kembu Group’s thirty thousand troops, covering the area from Clark Field, just north of Manila, west through Bataan, and including Corregidor, where MacArthur’s men had made a final stand. Yamashita would lead the 152,000 men of the Shobu Group into the mountains of northern Luzon around the city of Baguio. For the general, the pending battle represented a return to his youth, an opportunity for the Great Cedar to wield his experience in the mountains and forests to bleed MacArthur’s army.
The battle for Leyte, however, had exacerbated Yamashita’s earlier problems. “Supply shortages had reached unexpected proportions,” Muto wrote. “With the weapons and ammunition destined for the Leyte campaign lying useless at the bottom of the sea, only meager shares of either were available for the equipment of newly organized forces.” Faced with gasoline, oil, and vehicle shortages, Yamashita could hardly move the few supplies he did have. He counted barely five hundred vehicles per infantry division, a quarter of the more than two thousand America allotted. Throughout the three-year occupation, Japanese forces had allowed the island’s railroads to rot. Beyond that he could find just three working locomotives, a figure he would later raise to a dozen, but still far too few. Logistics struggles forced Yamashita to scale down the 70,000 tons of supplies he initially ordered shipped out of Manila to just 13,000 tons. Even then, on the eve of MacArthur’s invasion, troops proved able to move only around 4,000 tons.
Yamashita ordered all Japanese women and children to return to the homeland, which resulted in pushback from officials in Tokyo, who feared such an exodus would dampen morale. But he remained firm. He understood the horror of war and that Luzon would soon be no place for women and children.
“I know the real state of the battle,” Yamashita said. “It is a very grave moment and I will take responsibility for their reparation.”
Muto watched the women and children file aboard a troopship at the pier, delivering a message to them from Yamashita. “When you return to Japan,” he instructed, “you must become good wives and mothers.”
Yamashita faced another challenge over what to do with the estimated 1,300 prisoners of war and 7,000 civilian internees on Luzon, most crowded in camps around Manila. He wanted no responsibility for them. As soon as MacArthur landed, he informed Field Marshal Terauchi, he planned to turn the prisoners and internees over to a neutral nation, a decision that again drew a rebuke and a demand that he hold on to them unless it was an emergency.
“When the Americans land,” he countered, “there will be an emergency.”
The general prepared to depart, planning to move his headquarters from Fort McKinley briefly to Ipo, just north of Manila, before pressing on to Baguio. Following custom, he hosted a farewell dinner for the navy on December 23. Midway through the evening the power failed, but fortunately a young officer produced candles. The navy reciprocated a couple days later, throwing a party for Yamashita. During an earlier demonstration of a homemade antitank lunge mine, the general had been injured in the thigh.
“Our general has been wounded,” Muto told the hosts. “So I hope you won’t give him too much wine to drink.”
“Don’t be a damn fool,” Yamashita erupted, no doubt showing the stress that had been building upon him. “I’ll drink what I want.”
The general’s outburst stunned many of his junior officers, though he later apologized to his chief of staff that he had, in fact, had too much to drink. He departed Fort McKinley along with about half of his staff on December 26, almost three years to the day after MacArthur evacuated the Philippine capital. The group reached Ipo, setting up temporary headquarters in the superintendent’s hut at the Manila waterworks dam. The general shared a small room at night with Muto.
“Your Excellency snored so loudly last night I couldn’t sleep,” Muto complained the next morning.
“Your snores,” Yamashita countered, “were louder than the noise of the dam.”
The general set off again on January 4 for Baguio. Along the way he met briefly with Shimbu Group commander Yokoyama, whose men were tasked with completing the evacuation of supplies from Manila. In bidding farewell, Yamashita reminded Yokoyama of the importance of the fight ahead, instructing him not to deliberately seek death.
“Your orders,” Yamashita said, “are to fight a protracted battle.”