Battle of Luzon

Name and dates

The Battle of Luzon is the name given to the fighting for Luzon, the largest and most important island of the Philippines, from the American landing in Lingayen Gulf on 9 January 1945 until the end of the war in the Pacific. It was the largest land campaign fought by the United States Army in the war against Japan: in time ten American divisions and several independent regiments fought on the island, supported by tens of thousands of Filipino guerrillas. Measured by the number of enemy troops put out of action, it was also – as the US official history stresses – one of the largest campaigns the US Army fought in the entire war.

The battle is taken to begin on S-day, 9 January, although American warships had been bombarding the shores of the gulf for several days beforehand and kamikaze aircraft had been attacking the invasion forces. The end is harder to fix. With the capture of Manila and Manila Bay in February and March 1945 the strategic aim of the campaign had been achieved; on 30 June General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army handed Luzon over to the Eighth Army, and on 5 July General Douglas MacArthur announced the liberation of the Philippines. Even so, several tens of thousands of General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s troops were still holding out in the mountains of northern Luzon, and the fighting against them continued until the ceasefire. The end of the battle can be dated to 15 August 1945, when Japan announced its acceptance of the surrender terms; some accounts give 5 August, and Yamashita himself did not lay down his arms until early September.

The Battle of Luzon formed part of the wider Philippines campaign of 1944–1945, which had opened with the Battle of Leyte and the landing on Mindoro. It comprised several separate but connected operations: the landing in Lingayen Gulf and the advance across the central Luzon plain, the fighting for the Clark airfields, the landings in Zambales and at Nasugbu, the Battle of Manila, the recovery of Bataan and Corregidor, the fighting against the Japanese groupings in the mountains east of Manila, and the long campaign in the mountains of the north of the island.

Background

The return to Luzon

Luzon was the heart of the Philippines: it held the capital, the main ports, the most important airfields and most of the archipelago’s population. It was here, in that very same Lingayen Gulf, that the Japanese had come ashore in December 1941 (the landing in Lingayen Gulf); on 2 January 1942 they occupied Manila, and after the defence of Bataan and the surrender of Corregidor in May 1942 they brought the Philippines campaign to a close. The memory of the Bataan Death March, and of the thousands of prisoners of war and interned civilians still held in camps on the island, was for the Americans one of the arguments for a swift return.

Whether to take Luzon at all was disputed in Washington for much of 1944. The Navy proposed bypassing the island and striking at Formosa, while MacArthur insisted on liberating the whole archipelago, invoking America’s obligation to the Filipinos. In early October 1944 the Joint Chiefs of Staff finally set the landing on Luzon for December. The protracted fighting on Leyte and difficulties in building airfields there pushed the date back, first by a few weeks and then to 9 January 1945. To provide air cover, the Americans first seized Mindoro, while the carriers of Admiral William Halsey’s Third Fleet struck at airfields on Luzon and Formosa.

Yamashita’s plan

From October 1944 the defence of the Philippines was in the hands of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the conqueror of Malaya and Singapore, commander of the 14th Area Army. Against his wishes his best forces had been sent to Leyte, where they were destroyed. On Luzon he was left – according to the US official history – with some 275,000 army and navy personnel, many of them poorly trained and equipped, with little air power, no hope of reinforcement and dwindling stocks of fuel and food.

Yamashita concluded that he could not defend the beaches or the central Luzon plain, where American superiority in artillery, tanks and aircraft would be crushing. He decided to withdraw his main forces into the mountains and fight a long defensive battle there that would tie down as many Americans as possible for as long as possible, delaying their advance towards Japan. He divided his army into three groupings. The Shobu Group – some 150,000 men under his personal command – was to defend the mountainous north of the island, including Baguio and the Cagayan Valley, the richest farming region, which was to feed it. General Rikichi Tsukada’s Kembu Group, about 30,000 men, was to hold the Clark airfields and the mountains to their west for as long as possible. General Shizuo Yokoyama’s Shimbu Group, about 80,000 men, occupied the mountains east of Manila, which commanded the dams and water sources supplying the capital, as well as southern Luzon.

Yamashita did not intend to defend Manila. He knew that a city of more than a million inhabitants could be neither defended nor fed, and he ordered the army’s troops to withdraw from it after destroying the bridges and depots. The Navy, however, had plans of its own: Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi and his forces – some 16,000 sailors and soldiers – resolved to defend the city to the end. This divergence would have tragic consequences for Manila.

American forces

The operation was conducted by General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army, which had already taken Leyte. Two corps went in in the first wave: General Oscar Griswold’s XIV Corps (37th and 40th Infantry Divisions) on the right, near the town of Lingayen, and General Innis Swift’s I Corps (6th and 43rd Infantry Divisions) on the left, around San Fabian. Reserves followed behind them, and over the following weeks further divisions were brought to the island, among them the 1st Cavalry Division, together with General Charles Hall’s XI Corps. The invasion force numbered more than 200,000 men.

At sea the operation was covered by Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet, with Vice Admiral Jesse Oldendorf’s bombardment group and escort carriers, and at a distance by Halsey’s fast carriers. Aircraft of the Fifth Air Force, part of General George Kenney’s Far East Air Forces, operated from airfields on Leyte and Mindoro. MacArthur was in overall command, and was soon to step ashore at the place from which he had been forced to withdraw three years earlier.

Course of the battle

Kamikaze on the way to the gulf (2–13 January)

The invasion convoys sailed from Leyte at the beginning of January and came under air attack at once, mostly from kamikaze suicide aircraft. On 4 January a kamikaze sank the escort carrier Ommaney Bay. The heaviest attacks came on 6 January, when Oldendorf’s ships entered Lingayen Gulf to bombard the shore and sweep it for mines: more than a dozen ships were hit, and among those killed aboard the battleship New Mexico was the British General Herbert Lumsden, Churchill’s personal liaison officer to MacArthur. The attacks continued on the day of the landing and for several days after; on 9 January the battleship Mississippi and the cruiser Columbia were among the ships hit.

According to American figures, over these days kamikaze and other air attacks sank or damaged several dozen ships, and the Navy’s losses ran to several hundred dead. In these attacks, however, Japanese air power in the Philippines spent the last of its strength: after mid-January there were practically no Japanese aircraft left over Luzon.

S-day in Lingayen Gulf (9 January)

At 9.30 a.m. on 9 January 1945, after a naval bombardment lasting several days, the first waves of the Sixth Army landed on the beaches along the southern shore of Lingayen Gulf. In line with Yamashita’s plan, the beaches were undefended. On the right, XIV Corps took Lingayen and Dagupan almost without loss; on the left, I Corps came under artillery fire from the hills above San Fabian and Damortis, where the Japanese positions began. By evening some 68,000 troops were ashore, and the beachhead was more than ten kilometres wide and several kilometres deep. MacArthur came ashore a few hours after the first waves.

Across the plain to the Clark airfields (10–31 January)

Once ashore, Krueger faced a dilemma. On his left flank, on the mountain side, he was threatened by the strongest Japanese grouping, the Shobu Group, and Sixth Army intelligence feared a counter-attack on the beachhead. MacArthur, on the other hand, was pressing for the fastest possible drive on Manila – for the sake of freeing the prisoners and internees, for the port, and for prestige. Krueger therefore advanced cautiously: XIV Corps set off south across the broad, flat central Luzon plain, along the highway and railway to Manila, while I Corps shielded its left flank against an attack from the mountains.

For a long time XIV Corps’ advance met almost no fighting – destroyed bridges and rivers were more of an obstacle than the Japanese. Everywhere villagers came out to greet the troops, and Filipino guerrillas supplied information on the enemy’s dispositions. On 23 January the leading units of the 40th Division reached Bamban and ran into the positions of the Kembu Group covering the Clark airfield complex and the former US Army base of Fort Stotsenburg. The fighting for the airfields and the hills to their west lasted into early February; Tsukada withdrew the remnants of his forces into the Zambales Mountains, where over the following months, cut off and starving, they wasted away through disease and skirmishes. For the Americans the Clark airfields were of enormous value: bombers were soon flying from them against Formosa and the Chinese coast.

The left flank: San Manuel and Muñoz

On the left flank, I Corps was engaged from the first days in heavy fighting with Shobu Group units guarding the mouths of the roads into the mountains – at Damortis, Rosario and Pozorrubio. Yamashita did not launch the great counter-attack that Krueger feared, but his troops defended the hills stubbornly and sold every position dearly. Out on the plain, in the small towns of San Manuel, Muñoz and Lupao, the Japanese 2nd Tank Division had dug in, burying its tanks as fixed strongpoints. In late January and early February the 6th and 25th Infantry Divisions destroyed it in a series of bloody battles for these towns; Muñoz fell on 7 February. The Japanese lost almost all the tanks they had in the Philippines, and I Corps reached San Jose, cutting the road that linked the Shobu Group with the Shimbu Group.

The raid at Cabanatuan (30 January)

On the night of 30–31 January a company of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci’s 6th Ranger Battalion, together with scouts from the Alamo Scouts and several hundred Filipino guerrillas under Captains Juan Pajota and Eduardo Joson, attacked the prisoner-of-war camp near Cabanatuan, some 30 kilometres behind the front line. The camp guards were killed, while the guerrillas held off Japanese reinforcements at a bridge over a nearby river. More than 500 prisoners were freed – most of them Americans, among them survivors of Bataan and Corregidor – and, exhausted and sick, they were carried back to the American lines in carts drawn by water buffalo. The attackers’ losses were light. The Raid at Cabanatuan became one of the most famous rescue operations of the war; one of the things that spurred the Americans to haste was news of the Palawan massacre, where Japanese guards had murdered prisoners in December 1944.

The landings in Zambales and at Nasugbu (29–31 January)

To speed up the capture of Manila and cut off the Japanese forces on Bataan, MacArthur ordered two additional landings on the west coast of the island. On 29 January General Charles Hall’s XI Corps (the 38th Infantry Division and a regiment of the 24th Division) landed unopposed around San Antonio in Zambales province, north-west of Bataan. The guerrillas had already secured the beaches. The next day, 30 January, the Americans took the port of Olongapo on Subic Bay, but on the road across the neck of the peninsula they ran into strong Japanese positions at Zig Zag Pass; the fighting for the pass lasted until mid-February and cost the 38th Division heavy casualties.

On 31 January the 11th Airborne Division – part of General Robert Eichelberger’s Eighth Army – landed south-west of Manila, near Nasugbu in Batangas province. On 3 February its parachute regiment was dropped on Tagaytay Ridge, from where the division advanced on Manila from the south. Although often called the “second invasion of Luzon”, both landings were subsidiary to the main thrust from Lingayen Gulf.

The Battle of Manila (3 February – 3 March)

At the turn of January and February MacArthur ordered the 1st Cavalry Division to form “flying columns” to reach the capital as quickly as possible. On the evening of 3 February the cavalry spearhead drove into the northern part of Manila and freed nearly 3,700 interned civilians – mainly Americans and Britons – held in the grounds of the University of Santo Tomás. The next day the 37th Infantry Division freed the prisoners and internees in Bilibid Prison. The 11th Airborne Division was closing in from the south.

As they withdrew to the south bank of the Pasig river, the Japanese blew up the bridges and set fire to much of the northern districts. South of the river, Iwabuchi’s forces turned government buildings, hospitals, churches and the old walls of the Spanish city of Intramuros into fortifications. On 6 February MacArthur prematurely announced that Manila was in American hands – in reality the heaviest fighting was only just beginning.

For four weeks the American infantry took the city street by street and building by building. MacArthur forbade aerial bombing, but to limit their own losses commanders made ever wider use of artillery, which levelled whole blocks. Meanwhile the cut-off Japanese sailors and soldiers committed mass atrocities against the civilian population: shootings, burning people alive in buildings, rapes and killings in hospitals and churches. This wave of violence is remembered as the Manila massacre. On 23 February the Americans stormed Intramuros; around 26 February Iwabuchi took his own life in one of the besieged government buildings. The last pockets of resistance in the government buildings fell on 3 March.

Manila is often listed – alongside Warsaw – among the most devastated Allied capitals of the war. By generally accepted estimates some 100,000 civilians died, killed by the Japanese or in the crossfire, including American artillery fire. According to the US official history, the US Army lost about 1,000 killed and more than 5,500 wounded in the city, and the Japanese some 16,000 killed. On 27 February MacArthur ceremonially handed over authority in the country to the President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, Sergio Osmeña. This month of fighting for the capital is known as the Battle of Manila.

Bataan and Corregidor (February)

Opening Manila Bay to shipping required control of Bataan and the islands at the bay’s mouth. Having broken through at Zig Zag Pass, XI Corps cleared the Bataan Peninsula within a few days; on 15 February a force landed from the sea at Mariveles on its southern tip. The Japanese did not repeat the long defence that the Americans and Filipinos had put up there in 1942.

On 16 February the assault on Corregidor began. The 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment was dropped onto the rocky plateau of Topside, right beside the ruined barracks, while a battalion of the 34th Infantry Regiment landed from the sea. American intelligence had put the island’s garrison at around 850 men; in fact – according to later findings – it was defended by 5,000 to 6,000 Japanese, mostly naval personnel. They fought almost to the last man, and their remnants blew themselves up in underground ammunition stores, including the tunnels beneath Malinta Hill, killing attackers too. By 26 February resistance had died out. On 2 March MacArthur came by sea to the island he had left three years earlier on the President’s orders, and had the American flag raised once again. The fighting there is known as the Battle of Corregidor (1945).

On 23 February, while the fighting in Manila was still going on, units of the 11th Airborne Division together with guerrillas carried out the second great rescue operation – the Los Baños raid, which freed more than 2,000 civilians from an internment camp on the shore of Laguna de Bay.

The mountains east of Manila: the Shimbu Group (February – June)

General Yokoyama’s Shimbu Group manned a chain of fortified positions in the mountains east of the capital, from Antipolo to the dams on the rivers that supplied Manila with water. In mid-February Yokoyama made an unsuccessful attempt at a counter-attack to help the forces besieged in the city. From the end of February XIV Corps, and later XI Corps, waged a gruelling offensive in these mountains across densely wooded ridges riddled with caves and bunkers. The most important objectives were the dams: the Ipo Dam on the Angat river, taken on 17 May by the 43rd Division with the help of guerrillas, and the Wawa Dam on the Marikina river, captured on 28 May by the 38th Division. Without them Manila, whose waterworks the Japanese controlled, struggled with a shortage of drinking water. The Shimbu Group lost most of its men, and its remnants withdrew deeper into the Sierra Madre, where they held out until the end of the war.

At the same time XIV Corps – the 11th Airborne Division, placed under the Sixth Army from 10 February, and the 1st Cavalry Division – was clearing southern Luzon: the provinces of Batangas, Laguna and Tayabas; and on 1 April one of its regiments landed near Legazpi on the Bicol Peninsula.

The north: Villa Verde, Balete and Baguio (February – May)

The hardest fighting awaited the Americans in the north, where Yamashita had concentrated the Shobu Group. Its positions covered a mountain triangle between Baguio, the summer capital of the Philippines, and the Cagayan Valley, which could be reached from the plain by only a few roads: the highway from the west coast through Baguio, the Villa Verde mountain trail, and Highway 5 through Balete Pass into the Cagayan Valley. Once the fighting in Manila was over, Krueger sent Swift’s I Corps, reinforced with further divisions, against the Shobu Group.

On the Villa Verde Trail – a narrow track that had to be widened under fire – the 32nd Infantry Division fought from February until the end of May, in the rain and on steep ridges, sometimes advancing only a few hundred metres in a week. On Highway 5 the 25th Infantry Division spent more than three months taking one hill after another before Balete Pass; the pass fell on 13 May, and at the end of May the two thrusts met near Santa Fe. In the west, the 33rd and 37th Infantry Divisions approached Baguio from the coast; the city had already been abandoned by Yamashita and by the puppet government of President José Laurel, and it was taken on 26–27 April.

The USAFIP-NL guerrillas and the Cagayan Valley (April – June)

Filipino guerrillas played a huge part in the fighting in the north. The USAFIP-NL (United States Army Forces in the Philippines – Northern Luzon) under Colonel Russell Volckmann, an American officer who had refused to surrender in 1942 and stayed in the mountains, numbered some 20,000 men by 1945 and operated almost like a regular division. The guerrillas took control of most of the north-west coast of Luzon, supported the capture of San Fernando in La Union province, and in June, after heavy fighting, captured Bessang Pass, opening the way into the mountains from the west.

In June the 37th Division pushed down from Balete Pass into the Cagayan Valley, advancing rapidly northwards through shattered and starving Japanese units. On 23 June a parachute task force from the 11th Airborne Division was dropped near Aparri, at the northern tip of the island, and on 26 June it linked up with the units advancing from the south; the guerrillas had already taken Aparri itself. The Cagayan Valley, on whose harvests Yamashita had been counting, was lost.

The final phase (July – August)

On 30 June the Sixth Army ended its operations on Luzon and handed responsibility over to Eichelberger’s Eighth Army so as to prepare for the invasion of Japan. On 5 July MacArthur announced that the entire archipelago had been liberated. Yet the remnants of the Shobu Group – more than 50,000 men by American estimates, and in reality more – were still holding out in the mountains of the Cordillera Central, in the Asin Valley and around Kiangan in Ifugao province, where Yamashita set up his last command post. They were opposed by the 6th, 32nd and 37th Infantry Divisions and the USAFIP-NL guerrillas. Worn down by hunger and disease, the Japanese units were no longer capable of offensive action, but they held out until the end of the war.

On 15 August Japan announced its acceptance of the surrender terms. Yamashita made contact with the Americans and on 2 September came down from the mountains near Kiangan; on 3 September, at Baguio, he signed the instrument of surrender of the Japanese forces in the Philippines. Present at the ceremony were Generals Jonathan Wainwright and Arthur Percival, only recently freed from Japanese captivity.

Guerrillas and civilians

The Battle of Luzon was very much a Filipino war as well. Dozens of guerrilla organisations were active on the island – from groups led by American officers who had not gone into captivity in 1942 to units formed by Filipino officers and local leaders. Some of them had been placed under MacArthur’s command before the invasion and were supplied by submarine. The guerrillas gathered intelligence, guided the Americans through unfamiliar terrain, covered their flanks, mopped up in the rear and took part in the hardest fighting – in the raids on Cabanatuan and Los Baños, at the Ipo Dam, at Bessang Pass and in the Cagayan Valley. A separate force in central Luzon was the Hukbalahap, a communist-led anti-Japanese guerrilla movement that the Americans distrusted; in 1945 some of its leaders were arrested and its units disarmed, foreshadowing the conflict to come.

The civilian population paid an enormous price. Manila’s fate was the most tragic, but elsewhere too Japanese units, increasingly desperate and hungry, committed killings and looting, particularly where they suspected collaboration with the guerrillas. In the countryside people died under artillery fire and bombing, and in the mountains of northern Luzon, where tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers lived on whatever they could take from the inhabitants, there was famine. The number of civilian deaths across the whole island is hard to establish; frequently cited estimates put it at 120,000–140,000 Filipinos killed, including some 100,000 in Manila alone.

Losses

According to the US Army’s official history (Robert Ross Smith’s Triumph in the Philippines), the Sixth Army’s ground forces lost about 8,300 killed and nearly 30,000 wounded on Luzon up to 30 June 1945; non-battle casualties from disease and exhaustion were also very high. Including the Navy’s losses to kamikaze attacks and those killed in the fighting in July and August, the number of Americans killed is usually put at around 10,000. The losses of the Filipino guerrillas were never precisely counted.

According to American estimates, the Japanese lost between about 190,000 and over 200,000 killed and dead on Luzon, a great many of whom died not in combat but of hunger and disease in the final months, in isolated groupings in the mountains. By the end of June a few thousand soldiers had been taken prisoner; after Japan’s surrender a further 50,000 or so laid down their arms on Luzon.

Significance

The Battle of Luzon completed the road the Americans had set out on at Leyte in October 1944, a road whose naval flank had been secured by victory in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The recovery of Manila, Manila Bay and the airfields of central Luzon cut Japan off from the raw materials of South-East Asia, since the sea routes from the Dutch East Indies and Malaya came within range of American aircraft. Luzon became a huge base where troops and supplies were assembled for the planned invasion of Japan. While the fighting on the island went on, the Battle of Iwo Jima and the Battle of Okinawa were being fought, and the Eighth Army was liberating one island after another in the central and southern Philippines.

Yamashita’s plan largely succeeded: for more than seven months his troops tied down a large part of the American ground forces in the Pacific on Luzon, and they were not defeated before the war ended. But they paid a terrible price for it, and the plan itself could not change the outcome of the war. Some historians point out that MacArthur, eager for a quick victory and spectacular successes, played down the strength of the Japanese groupings in the mountains, and that his announcement of the liberation of the Philippines in July 1945 ran many weeks ahead of reality.

The heaviest legacy of the battle was the destruction of Manila. The crimes committed in the city became the basis of Yamashita’s trial before an American military commission in Manila in the autumn of 1945. The general, who had not ordered the defence of the city and – so he maintained – had not known of the crimes committed by Iwabuchi’s sailors, was held responsible for the acts of his subordinates, sentenced to death and hanged on 23 February 1946. The trial is still debated by lawyers and historians; the principle of a commander’s responsibility for the crimes of his subordinates, formulated in this case, passed into international law.

For the Philippines the battle meant the end of the Japanese occupation, but also a ruined capital, a devastated country and immense loss of life. On 4 July 1946 the Philippines gained independence. The tensions that had surfaced during the fighting – above all between the authorities and the Hukbalahap guerrillas – grew in the following years into open rebellion in central Luzon.