The attack on Clark Field

On Monday 8 December 1941, shortly after noon local time, two formations of Japanese twin-engined bombers appeared over Clark Field, an airfield in central Luzon some 80 kilometres north-west of Manila. Lined up on the ground stood American B-17 bombers, which were just being loaded with bombs and fuel, and P-40 fighters that had only just returned from patrol. The bombers were followed by Zero fighters, which for more than an hour strafed from low altitude everything that was not already burning. At the same time another Japanese strike wrecked the fighter airfield at Iba on the island’s west coast. Some nine hours had passed since the command in Manila had learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even so, the Japanese caught the strongest American air force outside the United States on the ground and in a single afternoon destroyed roughly half of its modern aircraft.

The air force that was to defend the Philippines

As late as the summer of 1941 Washington regarded the Philippines as an outpost that could not be held in a war with Japan. That changed in July, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the Philippine army into American service and placed US Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. The General Staff and the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, came to believe that B-17 heavy bombers, the Flying Fortresses, operating from Luzon could threaten Japanese bases and sea lanes and so deter Japan, or at least delay its advance southwards. Through the autumn aircraft, men and equipment were rushed to the island. This was precisely why General George Marshall pleaded in November for every extra week of peace while Washington was drafting its reply to the Japanese proposals.

At the beginning of December the Far East Air Force (FEAF), commanded by Major General Lewis Brereton, was the largest combat formation of the US Army air arm outside the continental United States. It had 35 B-17 bombers and, according to American studies, about 90 serviceable P-40 fighters, as well as obsolete P-35 and P-26 fighters, B-18 and B-10 bombers and reconnaissance aircraft. The main bomber base was Clark Field, where the heavy aircraft stood uncamouflaged on hardstandings, because the surrounding ground was too soft. Fighters were also based at Nichols and Nielson fields near Manila, at Iba and at Del Carmen. Iba had a radar station, and a network of observers, often ordinary postmasters, was to telephone reports of aircraft over the coast.

The risk was known. On 29 November MacArthur wrote to Marshall that the heavy bombers ought to be based south of Luzon, out of the enemy’s reach. On Mindanao the Del Monte airfield was hastily laid out on a pineapple plantation, and at the beginning of December two B-17 squadrons were moved there. The other two remained at Clark Field. Brereton later explained that Del Monte would have had no room for a bomb group due to arrive from the United States. MacArthur’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Richard Sutherland, maintained that the order had covered all the bombers and that the airmen had failed to carry it out.

The night of 8 December

Japanese aircraft struck Oʻahu at 7.48 a.m. Hawaiian time on 7 December, which was about 2.20 a.m. on 8 December in the Philippines. At around 2.30 a.m. a radio operator at the headquarters of the Asiatic Fleet in Manila intercepted the message “Air raid Pearl Harbor. This is not drill” and recognised the sending style of an acquaintance in Hawaii. Within half an hour the message was in the hands of Admiral Thomas Hart, who at once alerted the fleet. According to the American official history, army headquarters heard of the attack only at about 3.30 a.m., and then from a radio broadcast. Sutherland passed the news to MacArthur, who lived in a penthouse on the roof of the Manila Hotel, and put the troops on a war footing. At 5.30 a.m. a signal arrived from the War Department: war with Japan had begun, and MacArthur was to carry out the tasks set by the Rainbow 5 plan, among them air attacks on Japanese forces and bases within range of his aircraft.

The Japanese, meanwhile, were waiting on Formosa. They had known the date of the war since 2 December, when the signal “Niitakayama nobore 1208” was transmitted from Tokyo. The bombers and fighters of Vice Admiral Nishizō Tsukahara’s 11th Air Fleet were to take off from the island’s airfields so as to strike Luzon at dawn, but around midnight a thick fog settled over the airfields and the navy’s aircraft were stuck on the ground. The Japanese commanders were convinced that they had lost the element of surprise: the Americans already knew about Pearl Harbor and could either send their bombers south or, worse, bomb the aircraft lined up on Formosa. In the morning an American message was intercepted and read as the announcement of a raid, and when at about 10.10 a.m. a pilot mistakenly reported incoming B-17s, gas masks were handed out on the airfields.

The dispute over a raid on Formosa

Such plans did in fact exist. At about five in the morning Brereton turned up at USAFFE headquarters and asked for permission to send the B-17s on a daylight raid against the airfields of southern Formosa. He did not see MacArthur. He spoke to Sutherland, who told him to get the bombers ready but to wait for orders. At about 7.15 a.m. Brereton repeated his request and was again told to wait. At roughly that time the chief of the Army Air Forces, General Henry Arnold, telephoned him from Washington and told him what had happened in Hawaii so that, as Arnold later wrote, Brereton would not be caught in the same way and lose his entire air force.

What happened that morning is disputed to this day, because those involved told different stories and documents are almost entirely lacking. According to Brereton, whose diaries were published in 1946, Sutherland refused him permission to attack several times. Sutherland claimed on one occasion that it was Brereton who had first wanted reconnaissance photographs, and on another that he himself had halted the raid because the airmen had no target data. On 27 September 1946 MacArthur declared that Brereton had never proposed an attack on Formosa to him and that such a strike, without fighter cover, would have had no chance whatever. Yet on 8 December 1941 he himself reported to Washington that he would send bombers against the airfields of southern Formosa the following morning. Louis Morton, author of the American official history, concluded that only this much is certain: a raid was proposed, it was postponed in favour of a reconnaissance flight, at about eleven an attack later that day was approved, and after 11.30 a.m. the bombers were on the ground at Clark Field. He also judged that, against more than five hundred Japanese aircraft on Formosa, an expedition by a dozen or so unescorted B-17s would not have stood much chance in any case.

At about eight, when reports came in of Japanese aircraft over northern Luzon, the B-17s at Clark Field were sent aloft without bombs so as not to be caught on the ground, and the fighters were dispatched on patrol. The Japanese army bombers, which had taken off from airfields less affected by fog, bombed only the airfield at Tuguegarao and the barracks at Baguio, the country’s summer capital. At dawn, aircraft from the carrier Ryūjō had attacked the American seaplane tender William B. Preston in the gulf of Davao on Mindanao. At about 10.15 a.m. MacArthur telephoned Brereton and left the decision to him. They agreed that the B-17s would strike Formosa late in the afternoon if reconnaissance had not returned before then. The bombers were ordered to land, and by about 11.30 a.m. almost all of them were standing at Clark Field, being refuelled and loaded with bombs. The fighters, running short of fuel, also came back down.

The raid

The fog over Formosa had lifted in the meantime. At about 10.15 a.m., according to Morton, 108 navy bombers, Mitsubishi G4Ms and G3Ms, took off escorted by 84 Zero fighters. Before 11.30 the radar at Iba detected two large formations still over the sea, more than 200 kilometres from the coast, and coastal observers began telephoning in reports. Fighter command sent out its squadrons but guessed the targets wrongly: some P-40s were sent over Manila and the Bataan peninsula, others over the South China Sea, and the squadron at Del Carmen failed to take off because of dust. A warning of the raid was sent to Clark Field by teletype and by radio, and the officer in charge of the reporting network claimed to have passed it by telephone to some junior officer at the base. It never reached the commander of the bombers. Many explanations were later offered: the radio operator was said to have gone to lunch, and static was said to have jammed communications. The matter cannot be settled.

The first bombers appeared over Clark Field as the fighters of the 20th Pursuit Squadron were taxiing out for take-off. The American official history gives the time as 12.15 p.m., other studies as 12.35–12.40. Two formations of about 27 aircraft each dropped hundreds of bombs from more than 6,000 metres on hangars, barracks, stores and parked aircraft. The shells of the obsolete anti-aircraft ammunition, the newest lots of which dated from 1932, burst hundreds of metres below their targets or not at all. According to one observer, only one in six exploded. Then the Zeros came down low and for over an hour strafed everything still standing. Only three or four P-40s managed to get airborne, and others were hit by bombs as they taxied. Mechanics and airmen fired the machine guns of the grounded bombers and dragged the wounded out of burning buildings. The fire spread to the tall grass around the airfield, and a cloud of smoke and dust hung over Clark Field.

At almost the same time 54 bombers escorted by about 50 fighters struck Iba. The P-40s of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron, returning from patrol with their tanks almost empty, were attacked in the landing circuit. Bombs destroyed the barracks, the stores and the radar station, and, according to Morton, two of the squadron’s aircraft survived. Before dawn the next day seven Japanese bombers also attacked Nichols Field near Manila.

The toll

According to the American official history, of the 35 B-17s only 17 were left after the first day of the war. Fifty-three P-40s, three P-35s and 25–30 other aircraft were destroyed, and many machines counted as serviceable were badly damaged. At Clark Field alone 55 men were killed and over a hundred wounded. In all, the air force lost 80 killed and about 150 wounded that day. The Japanese, according to the same source, lost seven fighters. Detailed tallies differ. Some studies state that of the seventeen B-17s standing at Clark Field twelve were destroyed and four damaged. All agree, however, that the Far East Air Force lost half of its strength that day and ceased to be a force capable of offensive action.

That evening MacArthur reported to Washington that the losses were due to the enemy’s “overwhelming superiority”. Arnold telephoned Brereton and, by Brereton’s own account, asked him how the hell an experienced airman had let himself be caught with his aircraft on the ground. Brereton took this to MacArthur, who told him to get back to the fight and not to worry. No official inquiry into Clark Field was ever held. Arnold wrote years later that he had never learned the true course of events, and that neither Brereton’s diary nor Sutherland’s account “fully explains them”.

The first landings

The Japanese did not wait until they had destroyed the American air force; they began landing at several points in the archipelago at once. The commander of the invasion, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma of the 14th Army, planned six preliminary landings: Batan Island, Aparri, Vigan, Legazpi, Davao and Jolo. The first four were to give him airfields close to Manila for his short-range fighters, the last two bases for the further advance on Borneo and the Dutch East Indies.

The first Japanese soldiers set foot on Philippine soil at dawn on 8 December, before the bombers arrived over Clark Field. About 490 naval infantry from Formosa seized the landing ground near Basco on Batan Island in the Batanes group, halfway between Formosa and Luzon. The Americans did not notice this landing at all, and as late as 9 December MacArthur was reporting that the enemy had landed nowhere. On 10 December the Japanese occupied Camiguin Island further south and set up a seaplane base there.

On the same day, 10 December, two detachments of the 48th Division, each about two thousand strong, landed on the north coast of Luzon. Because of high surf, Colonel Tanaka’s detachment put only two companies ashore near Aparri and the rest at Gonzaga, more than 30 kilometres further east. The Philippine company at Aparri withdrew without a fight, and by 12 December the Japanese were already at Tuguegarao airfield. The Kanno Detachment landed near Vigan on the west coast and took the town before noon, and the airfield at Laoag the following day. The commander of the North Luzon Force, Major General Jonathan Wainwright, took both landings for an attempt to draw his troops away from Lingayen Gulf, where he expected the main blow, and sent no forces against them. The air force gathered its remaining strength and attacked the transports off Vigan, damaging two of them and the light cruiser Naka and sinking a minesweeper. It was the last coordinated effort of the FEAF. In America Captain Colin Kelly, who was killed when his B-17 was shot down on the way back from Aparri, was hailed as a hero. It was announced that he had sunk the battleship Haruna. In reality there was no battleship anywhere nearby, and Haruna was at that time covering the landing in Malaya.

Around noon on 10 December the Japanese bombers finished the job. They bombed Nichols, Nielson and Del Carmen airfields and the naval base at Cavite on Manila Bay. The bombers circled over Cavite for two hours, out of range of its nine anti-aircraft guns. Fire consumed almost the entire navy yard, the power station, the stores and the radio station, and more than two hundred submarine torpedoes were lost under the rubble. The commander of the 16th Naval District, Rear Admiral Francis Rockwell, estimated that some five hundred men were killed or seriously wounded that day. In the evening Hart reported to Washington that Manila was no longer fit to serve as a fleet base, and sent more ships south. The cruisers of the Asiatic Fleet had already left Philippine waters on 10 December. Only submarines and a few smaller vessels remained to defend the archipelago.

Landings in the south

War chronologies often list under 12 December Japanese landings on “the southern islands of the Philippines: Samar, Jolo and Mindanao”. This needs correcting. Early on 12 December some 2,500 soldiers of the Japanese 16th Division from Palau, together with a naval infantry detachment, landed unopposed at Legazpi at the south-eastern tip of Luzon, across the strait from Samar. The nearest American and Filipino troops were more than 200 kilometres away. Before nine o’clock the Japanese held the airfield and the terminus of the Manila railway. They did not land on Samar in December 1941; they took the Visayas only in the spring of 1942. On Mindanao a force under General Shizuo Sakaguchi, some 5,000 strong, landed near Davao early on 20 December and took the town and its airfield the same day. Part of it sailed on to Jolo in the Sulu Archipelago, where it landed on the evening of 24 December despite resistance from three hundred men of the Philippine Constabulary and took the town by the morning of 25 December. From Davao and Jolo the road to Borneo lay open.

The landings in northern Luzon were small, and the airfields taken there were poor and, as it turned out, of no real use to the Japanese. Wainwright, however, summed up the situation briefly: “the rat was already in the house”.

Place in the war

Clark Field was the Philippine counterpart of Pearl Harbor, though overshadowed by Hawaii it long remained less well known. In Hawaii the Japanese destroyed the battleships that were to come to the relief of the Philippines. On Luzon, in a single day and at the cost of a few fighters, they destroyed the air force that was to defend the islands until then. The Far East Air Force fought on with what was left, but between 17 and 20 December the surviving B-17s flew off to Australia, and from then on Japanese command of the air and the sea around the Philippines was unchallenged. Without air cover and without a fleet, MacArthur’s army could only wait for the main landing.

After Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short were relieved of their commands in December, and boards of inquiry examined their culpability throughout the war and after it. MacArthur and his staff escaped any inquiry, although they had had several hours’ warning, which the commanders in Hawaii had not. Marshall was soon to tell a journalist that he did not understand how MacArthur had allowed his aircraft to be caught on the ground. He did nothing about it, however. In the first weeks of the war America needed a hero, and the defender of the Philippines was soon to become one. The dispute between Brereton on one side and Sutherland and MacArthur on the other over the morning of 8 December dragged on in memoirs and studies for decades and was never resolved.