A World at Arms (63 page)

^c
There is an interesting repetition here of the situation on the Western Front in the spring of 1918. Once the initial German offensive there had failed to win the war for them, they could strike additional blows–and did so–but had already lost whatever opportunity for victory they might have had.

^d
It is about this campaign in particular that we may expect new information as a result of a more open approach to history in the former U.S.S.R.

^e
The British ambassador to the Soviet Union, Sir Stafford Cripps, may have inadvertently aggravated Soviet suspicions by repeatedly–in direct violation of his instructions–warning the Soviets that their attitude could affect British reactions to German peace offers. Graham Ross (ed.),
The Foreign Office and the Kremlin: British Documents on Anglo-Soviet Relations,
1941-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 10-11, and doc. 2.

^f
In this connection, the heavy German reliance on horses proved a major handicap; by this time, the surviving horses were often simply too weak to pull artillery in the deep snow. See the von Bock Diary, 16 December 1941, BA/MA, N 22/9, f. 176-78.

^g
All the evidence indicates that the Germans were not originally aware of the fact that the Soviet Union had completed a railway from Baku to Astrakhan, and therefore believed that railway communications into the Caucasus could be cut by the seizure of Stalingrad.

^h
The intended fate of most Russian prisoners of war also helps explain why the Germans rejected Soviet efforts to have prisoners treated according to the relevant international conventions (Streit,
Keine Kameraden,
pp. 224-37).

ⁱ
It was also at this meeting that the United Nations declaration of war aims was prepared and signed.

6

HALTING THE JAPANESE ADVANCE, HALTING THE GERMAN ADVANCE; KEEPING THEM APART AND SHIFTING THE BALANCE: DECEMBER 1941 TO NOVEMBER 1942

JAPAN’S OFFENSIVE

The Japanese launching of war in East Asia was designed to secure control of the resources of Southeast Asia as rapidly as possible; the attack on the United States navy at Pearl Harbor being designed to shield the flank of this operation from American interference, as the neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union and the maintenance of substantial forces in Manchuria were to protect its rear from Soviet intervention. These were, however, subsidiary moves. The major objective was a rapid seizure of the Philippines and Malaya as a preparatory step for the conquest of the Netherlands East Indies. Combined with an occupation of Burma and the seizure of added portions of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, this new empire would assure Japan both control of the oil, rubber, and tin producing lands she coveted and a perimeter of bases from which to defend that empire against any who might try to wrest it from her.

The detailed military plans to implement this program had been carefully worked out in the fall of 1941, but while they included careful schedules for the offensive operations, they were totally deficient in two critical ways. There was no agreed plan for going forward thereafter if the planned conquest succeeded and there was no plan to go back if it failed. As the Germans had, earlier in 1941, assumed that the war on the Eastern Front would end when their armies had reached the Archangel-Astrakhan line, so the Japanese assumed that their war would end when it had reached the perimeter of their newly won empire. But there was never any prospect of this happening; had there ever been one, they had themselves eliminated it with the attack on Pearl Harbor, because the
calculation that the Americans would never expend the blood and treasure to reconquer for others a whole host of islands and other places most of them had never heard of, and did not care about if they had, was invalidated by the way in which the Japanese had started war with the United States. It took them until 1945 to discover their error because, even after the tide of battle had turned against them, they invariably returned to the same fundamentally erroneous strategic concept of trying to raise the cost for the Americans to a level the latter would not pay. But there was a long and dramatic string of Japanese victories before any of these new considerations came to enter the picture.

The decision to include war with the United States as a part of the move south was related to the belief that it was simply not safe to by – pass the Philippines; and since the Japanese did not believe they could wait until the Americans left those islands in 1946, as the latter had already decided to do, those islands had to be invaded. Conquered by Japan, they would themselves provide an excellent base for the invasion of the Netherlands East Indies and a fine station along the route into the southern empire.

The Japanese planned to knock out American air and naval power in the Philippines, correctly believed to be concentrated on the large northern island of Luzon, to land two divisions on that island to seize air bases on it, and then to crush the remaining American and Filipino army units in a short campaign on Luzon, the large southern island of Mindanao and several of the other islands. The naval and air bases in the Philippines could thereafter be utilized for the invasion of the Netherlands East Indies in which, it was anticipated, many of the Japanese units involved in the Philippine operation would themselves also participate.
¹

The original American plan for the defense of the Philippines had called for a concentration on defense of Manila Bay and the withdrawal of the major United States army forces to the Bataan peninsula, with the hope that they could hold out there for half a year until a relief force from Hawaii could reach the islands. This latter part of the plan was in reality a wistful thought rather than a serious possibility; and American contingency planning for war, with its assumption that Germany constituted the greater danger and must be defeated first by the United States fighting alongside Great Britain and the Soviet Union, implied a defensive posture in East Asia, assumed the early loss of Guam and the Philippines, and looked to a victory over Japan in some distant future after the defeat of Germany.

For some time this perspective – and the anticipated total departure of Americans from the islands in 1946–had meant that it made little sense to allocate scarce equipment and men to the doomed territory, but all this changed in two interrelated developments in the fall of 1941. The energetic and optimistic former U.S. Army Chief of Staff and now commander in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur, was training a Philippine army for the day of independence and thought the existing defense plan with its implicit abandonment of most of the islands, with a besieged garrison as a tiny beam of hope, a very poor project indeed. He preferred to defend the whole island of Luzon on the beaches. And he thought that a building up of the Philippine army could be combined with a second new development: the creation of an effective air force, including the new B-17 Flying Fortresses, in whose ability to deliver unescorted and devastating blows to enemy installations and landing forces not only the United States army air force but also the American government and military leaders generally had a vast faith. This faith is difficult to understand in retrospect when one recalls the really minute numbers involved: thirty-five were in the Philippines at the time that MacArthur’s new plan for defending the islands was approved at his insistence in Washington.

There was indeed some hope in Washington that the building up of the army and air force in the Philippines, in addition to the stationing of a small fleet consisting primarily of submarines, might deter the Japanese from attacking at all, a hope which must be seen in connection with the simultaneous British transfer of warships to Singapore, which will be discussed in connection with the disasters there. It is, of course, theoretically possible that a longer period of building up forces might have had a deterrent effect on the Japanese; but the Japanese did not intend to wait, in part precisely because they could see the United States rearming.

The Japanese insistence that surprise at Pearl Harbor take precedence over everything else and the time differential between the Philippines and Hawaii meant that MacArthur had plenty of warning that war had started by the time the Japanese began their attack on the Philippines hours later. But on that fatal morning-December 8 on the East Asian side of the international date line – there was only confusion at his headquarters. The confusion was accentuated then as at times subsequently by MacArthur’s Chief of Staff, General Sutherland, who kept others, in this case the air commander, General Brereton, from seeing the Commander-in-Chief. The result was that some ten hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, the planes of the U.S. Far East air force were for the most part caught on the ground by Japanese attacks and more than half
destroyed along with their installations.
^a
This disaster, which included fighter as well as bomber aircraft, left the navy bases and repair facilities open to Japanese attack, and this in turn forced the naval commander, Admiral Hart, to pull out what was left of his units to participate in the defense of the Netherlands East Indies.
²
They had proved of little help to the Philippines, as the submarines were useless against the ships carrying and escorting the Japanese invasion forces, partly because of poor handling, partly because of defective torpedoes.
^b

The Japanese plan of attack called first for small landings on the northern shore and southeast corner of Luzon to secure air bases to cover the main landing forces that would seize Manila Bay; in addition, there were to be even smaller landings to seize Davao on Mindanao as well as the island of Jolo between Mindanao and Borneo, to cut off the Philippines from reinforcement and prepare the way for subsequent advances south. These landings all succeeded on December 10; and over the next ten days the Japanese landing detachments advanced inland while the air force destroyed most of what was left of the Far East air force and chased the United States navy’s ships out of the archipelago. The main landing forces began to go ashore on the eastern coast of Lingayen Gulf north of, and at Lamon Bay south of, Manila on December 22. The Japanese 14th Army of General Homma Masaharu had one reinforced division, the 48th, for the Lingayen Gulf landing and portions of another, the 16th, for Lamon Bay. With these approximately 50,000 men the Japanese struck at a force of American and Filipino troops that was more than twice as large in nominal strength but consisted overwhelmingly of recently inducted, untrained, and often unequipped Filipinos.

In the very first days of fighting it became obvious that the defenders could not hold back the Japanese. MacArthur’s beach defense plan might conceivably have worked half a year later; it guaranteed disaster in December 1941. Within two days he had decided to reverse course and fall back on the earlier plan to pull the forces into Bataan and try to hold out there. Only a portion of this plan could now be implemented. While many of the Filipino troops had fled or surrendered, others fought bravely and these, together with most of the American soldiers, staged
a successful fighting retreat into Bataan, forming a line across the peninsula to hold back the Japanese and deny them use of the great harbor of Manila Bay as originally intended. But the related portion of the original plan, the stocking of supplies on the peninsula to support the beleaguered garrison, could not be implemented as quickly. Many of the supplies had been moved forward to support the beach defense plan while others could no longer be transported in the confused situation because MacArthur had refused to allow a beginning of such movement in the two weeks preceding his order to switch from beach defense to the Bataan defense on December 23. By then it was too late, and the troops arriving in Bataan found themselves without adequate food, munitions, and medical supplies.

In the two weeks from December 24 to January 8, 1942, the American–Filipino forces held defensive lines long enough to avoid encirclement and also to enable the southern Luzon force fighting the Lamon Bay landing to pull back through central Luzon into Bataan. Now that many of the untrained Filipinos had fled, the rest fought hard, and the Americans learned quickly. Homma did not push his forces forward as rapidly as he might have, and the Japanese air force rested on its laurels instead of attacking the Americans crowding the roads into Bataan. American and Filipino bravery and Japanese hesitations would lead to a far longer campaign than Tokyo had imagined.

The first major Japanese attacks on the American-Filipino forces on Bataan in mid-January forced a retreat to the main defensive line across the peninsula, called the Bagoc-Orion line after towns on the western and eastern coasts of Bataan peninsula. Their attack on that line in late January was defeated by the defenders with heavy losses to the Japanese, and the attempts of the latter to land at points on the southwest coast of Bataan were also beaten off. There followed two months of stalemate during which the Japanese rebuilt their forces, the American and Filipino soldiers wasted away from hunger and disease, while the desperate efforts directed from Washington to send supplies through to the doomed garrison produced a mere trickle in the face of distance, shortages, and the Japanese.