The Second World War (134 page)

On the morning of 3 February, the US Eighth Air Force launched its heaviest raid on Berlin, killing 3,000 people. The Reichschancellery and Bormann’s Party Chancellery were hit. Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and the People’s Court were badly damaged. Roland Freisler, the Court’s president who had screamed abuse at the July plotters, was crushed to death in its cellars.

Zhukov, meanwhile, faced the classic quandary of any successful general after a rapid advance. Should the Red Army attempt to push on to Berlin, when the enemy was in turmoil and had no defences, or should it consolidate, to allow its exhausted men to rest, resupply and service their tanks? The debate among his generals was lively, with Chuikov of the 8th Guards Army arguing fiercely that they should attack immediately. The issue was settled on 6 February by Stalin in a telephone call from Yalta in the Crimea. Before attacking Berlin, they must first join with Rokossovsky to clear ‘the Baltic balcony’ of Pomerania on their northern flank, where Himmler, to the despair of Guderian and other senior officers, had taken personal command of Army Group Vistula.

45

Philippines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Tokyo Raids

NOVEMBER 1944–JUNE 1945

S
oon after General MacArthur landed so triumphantly on Leyte in October 1944, his Sixth Army faced a much harder fight than he had expected. The Japanese reinforced the island, and rapidly established air superiority. Admiral Halsey’s carriers had departed and the ground was too sodden to construct airfields, after thirty-five inches of rain had fallen in the monsoon. Although the Japanese had intended to reserve their strength for the defence of Luzon, the main island of the Philippines, Imperial General Headquarters insisted that more reinforcements should be sent to the fighting on Leyte. Aircraft were also transferred from as far afield as Manchuria, but by then five American airstrips were in action and Halsey’s fleet carriers had returned.

Fighting on Leyte continued well into December, partly due to excessive caution displayed by Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, who commanded the Sixth Army. The fiercest fighting was for ‘Breakneck Ridge’ near Carigara in the north of the island, furiously defended by Japanese troops. Krueger was, however, helped by a disastrous Japanese counter-attack against the airstrips. But by the end of December the Americans estimated that they had killed 60,000 Japanese. Ten thousand Japanese reinforcements drowned when their tranports were sunk approaching the island. Some 3,500 Americans were killed and 12,000 wounded. Mac-Arthur, never prone to modesty, proclaimed it ‘perhaps the greatest defeat in the military annals of the Japanese Army’.

The insistence of Imperial General Headquarters on continuing to reinforce Leyte with troops from Luzon made the invasion of the main island, now planned for 9 January 1945, considerably easier. But first the island of Mindoro, just to the south of the main bulk of Luzon, had to be taken to create more airfields. The landings and ground operation went well, but the invasion task force suffered heavily from kamikaze attacks.

General Yamashita, the commander on Luzon who had objected in vain to the strategy of defending Leyte in strength, knew that he could not hope to defeat the forces heading in his direction. He would withdraw with 152,000 men, the bulk of his troops, to the hills of northern central
Luzon. A smaller force of 30,000 would defend the air bases round Clark Field, while another 80,000 strong in the hills above
Manila
would be able to deprive the capital of its supplies of water.

MacArthur intended to invade the island from the Lingayan Gulf in the north-west, with a subsidiary landing to the south of the capital. This roughly followed the Japanese invasion plan of three years before. His escorting fleet during the first week of January suffered waves of kamikaze attacks, emerging low over the island. An escort carrier and a fleet destroyer were sunk while another carrier was severely damaged, as well as five cruisers, the battleships USS
California
and
New Mexico
and numerous other vessels. Many attackers were shot down by anti-aircraft fire and escort fighters, but it was impossible to deal with them all. The landing ships were let off lightly, and the invasion itself on 9 January was virtually unopposed. Filipino guerrillas had informed the American command that there were no Japanese in the area so there was no need to pummel the sector first, but Rear Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf felt obliged to stick to his orders. Great destruction was wreaked on homes and farms causing no damage to the enemy.

While I Corps on the left soon encountered strong Japanese resistance in the hills, XIV Corps on the right pushed south over flatter country towards Manila. General Krueger suspected that MacArthur’s pressure on him to advance rapidly was influenced by a desire to be back in Manila by his birthday, on 26 January. This was probably unfair. MacArthur wanted to liberate Allied prisoners held in camps and if possible seize the port of Manila before the Japanese destroyed it. A detachment of US Rangers, greatly aided by Filipino guerrillas, managed to free 486 American prisoners of war from the Bataan death march in a successful raid on a camp near Cabantuan ninety-five kilometres north of Manila. MacArthur’s impatience mounted because of the slow progress, caused more by the small rivers, rice paddies and fish ponds than by Japanese resistance. MacArthur stepped in to send the 1st Cavalry Division on ahead. He wanted to rescue other Allied prisoners held in the University of Santo Tomás.

Another landing, with 40,000 men from XII Corps, took place on 29 January north of the Bataan Peninsula, but they soon came up against a very strong Japanese defence line. The other landing south of Manila by the 11th Airborne Division appeared to produce more rapid results than the advance down the plain. On 4 February they reached the Japanese defence line just south of Manila, although they did not yet know that they had been beaten to the capital the night before. A dramatic dash forward by a flying column from the 1st Cavalry on the north side, storming across a bridge after a naval lieutenant cut the burning fuse to the demolition charges, had brought them into the northern section of Manila. That
evening their tanks smashed through the perimeter walls of the Santo Tomás University where 4,000 Allied civilians were interned.

The Philippines, an archipelago with some 7,000 islands, had offered ideal terrain for guerrilla resistance and the Filipinos, more than any other nation in the Far East, had begun to prepare for their liberation soon after the Japanese occupation began. Partly out of trust in the Americans, who had promised them full independence in 1946, and hatred for the arrogant and cruel Japanese, with their torture and public beheadings, guerrilla groups had formed on most of the islands. A few were led by American officers who had been cut off there in 1942. Many of the Filipino troops had hidden their arms at the time of the surrender. Once MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane had confirmation of the size of the movement, submarines brought in more weapons, radios and medical supplies, as well as the MacArthur propaganda items.

In the large areas where Japanese troops seldom ventured, the local groups organized civic life and workshops and even issued their own currency, which was preferred to the Japanese occupation banknotes. Coast-watchers with radios passed information on Japanese shipping, which US submarines were able to use with devastating results. The main danger came from Japanese radio detection units. There was little risk of denunciation by the local population, who helped carry the bulky equipment if a Japanese army sweep approached. The Philippines produced remarkably few collaborators. Most of those in Manila, who worked for the Japanese administration, provided as much intelligence as they could to the resistance.

Japanese revenge was conspicuous after MacArthur’s forces landed, especially in the fighting for the capital. Yamashita had not intended to defend Manila, and the local army commander had planned to withdraw according to his orders, but he had no control over the navy. Disregarding Yamashita, Rear Admiral Iwabachi Sanji told his men to fight on in the city. The remaining army units felt obliged to join them, making a force of some 19,000 men. As these troops withdrew to the centre, the old Spanish citadel of Intramuros and the port area, they destroyed bridges and buildings. Raging fires spread across the poorer areas, where the houses were made of wood and bamboo. In the centre, however, most of the buildings were concrete and could be turned into defensive positions.

MacArthur, who wanted to organize a victory parade, was dismayed by the battle which then developed in the city with more than 700,000 civilians trapped in the war zone. The 1st Cavalry, the 37th Infantry and the 11th Airborne Division became involved in house-to-house fighting. As with the attack on Aachen, the Americans soon recognized the need to attack each building from above and fight their way down, using grenades, sub-machine guns and flamethrowers. American engineers used
their armoured bulldozers to clear roadblocks. The Japanese naval and army defenders, knowing that they were all going to die, massacred Filipinos and raped the women mercilessly before killing them. Despite Mac-Arthur’s refusal to use aircraft in an attempt to spare civilian lives, around 100,000 Manila citizens, more than one in eight of the population, died in the fighting which lasted until 3 March.

The most urgent priority for General Krueger’s troops was to eliminate the Japanese force east of Manila, which controlled the city’s water supplies. Once again the Japanese had constructed caves and tunnels in the hillsides and once again the Americans had to clear them out with phosphorus grenades and flamethrowers. They blew the entrances to the tunnels, then poured gasoline and explosives in the main opening to burn, suffocate or bury those left inside. P-38 Lightnings dropped napalm, which proved much more effective than conventional bombs. The process was greatly aided by a regiment of guerrillas who reached the main dam first in a sudden rush. The Japanese had no time to blow their demolition charges. The survivors slipped away into the hills at the end of May.

Even while the fighting continued in Manila, MacArthur launched a drive with Lieutenant General Eichelberger’s Eighth Army to retake the central and southern islands of the Philippines, secure in the knowledge that the Japanese could not reinforce them. He regarded this as more urgent than finishing off Yamashita’s main force in the hills of northern Luzon, since they could be bottled up and bombarded at leisure. One amphibious attack followed another, all supported by air power. Eichelberger claimed to have conducted fourteen major landings and twenty-four minor ones in just forty-four days. In many cases his troops found that Filipino guerrillas had done their work for them, dealing with the smaller garrisons.

On 28 February, the long western island of Palawan stretching between Mindoro and North Borneo was invaded. These forces discovered the charred bodies of 150 American prisoners of war, who had been doused in gasoline and set on fire by their guards in December. On 10 March they invaded Mindanao, where an American engineer, Colonel Wendell W. Fertig, led a large guerrilla force and secured a landing strip. C-47 transports touched down before the attack, bringing two companies of the 24th Infantry Division. Marine Corsair fighters then arrived to use it as a forward base. On Mindanao, the close cooperation between American infantry, guerrillas and Marine air support forced the Japanese survivors on its western Zamboanga Peninsula to take to the hills. But the operation to reduce the main eastern mass did not start until 17 April.

Once again, Fertig’s guerrilla forces managed to secure an airfield and American troops advanced inland, some by a bad road, while a regiment embarked on boats and barges and escorted by sub-chasers sailed up the
broad Mindanao river, taking Japanese garrisons by surprise. They knew that they were in a race against the monsoon. Slowed by the jungle and gorges, where the Japanese had destroyed almost every bridge and mined every approach, the fighting took far longer than expected. It did not end until 10 June, a month after the end of the war in Europe. General Yamashita in the northern cordilleras of Luzon resisted, prolonging the fighting to the very end. He emerged to give himself up only on 2 September 1945, the day of the official surrender.

In China, the Ichig
Offensive had finished in December 1944. Japanese forces had probed towards Chungking and K’un-ming, but their supply lines were vastly over-extended. Stilwell’s successor, General Wedemeyer, flew in the two American-trained divisions of X-Force from northern Burma to form a defence line, but the Japanese had already begun to withdraw. The two divisions returned to Burma, and at the end of January finally joined up with Y-Force on the Salween. The remaining Japanese troops retreated into the mountains and the Burma Road was finally open again. The first convoy of trucks reached K’un-ming on 4 February.

Slim’s advance meanwhile came to a temporary halt along the River Irrawaddy, after Lieutenant General Kimura Hoyotaro pulled the remnants of the Burma Area Army behind this formidable defensive barrier. Slim made a great show of mounting a major crossing with the XXXIII Corps, having secretly withdrawn his IV Corps on its flank. A dummy headquarters remained behind transmitting messages, while its divisions marched south under radio silence, then crossed the river much further down unopposed to threaten Kimura’s rear. The Japanese had to withdraw rapidly, and Mandalay was captured on 20 March after a hard battle.