The capture of Legazpi

On 1 April 1945, Easter Sunday, at around ten in the morning, soldiers of the American 158th Infantry Regiment landed on the beaches of the port of Legazpi in the province of Albay. By one o’clock they had taken the port, the town and the airfield to the north of it without meeting a single Japanese soldier. The only resistance came from a few rounds fired at the beach by one gun before an escorting destroyer silenced it. That same day, more than 1,500 kilometres to the north, the landing on Okinawa began – the largest amphibious operation of the Pacific War – and it was that which held the world’s attention. Beside it the capture of Legazpi was an episode, but an episode with a telling history: it was here, on 12 December 1941, that the Japanese had landed to begin their conquest of southern Luzon.

War chronologies record that the Americans “recaptured Legaspi in Albay province”. The spelling “Legaspi” was common during the war and appears in American documents; today the city’s official name is Legazpi, after the Spanish conquistador Miguel López de Legazpi. The date and substance of the event agree with the American official history.

A town at the end of Luzon

Legazpi lies at the south-eastern tip of Luzon, on Albay Gulf, which opens onto the Philippine Sea, at the foot of the active volcano Mayon. It is the chief port of the Bicol region – a long, ragged peninsula stretching from the Tayabas isthmus all the way to the San Bernardino Strait, which separates Luzon from the island of Samar. The main road and the railway from Manila ran the length of the peninsula, and Legazpi was the railway’s terminus.

In December 1941, at the start of the Philippines campaign, the Japanese took Legazpi on only the fourth day of the war. Some 2,500 men of the 16th Division, brought from Palau, landed there unopposed to seize the airfield and close the San Bernardino Strait; the nearest American and Filipino troops were more than 200 kilometres away. For more than three years the town remained in Japanese hands. In the Bicol region, as throughout the Philippines, guerrillas were active during this period, supplying the Americans with information on the location and strength of the garrisons.

The Visayan Passages

In early 1945, after the landing in Lingayen Gulf and the capture of Manila, the Americans needed secure sea lanes between Leyte, where they had their bases, and Manila Bay. The shortest route led through the so-called Visayan Passages – a network of straits between southern Luzon, Mindoro and the Visayan islands – whose north-eastern gateway was the San Bernardino Strait. As long as the Japanese held its shores, every convoy had either to sail the longer way round the archipelago or reckon with gunfire and air attack.

The task of clearing these routes was divided between two armies. General Robert Eichelberger’s Eighth Army took the islets in the strait itself and on its southern edge in February and March – units of the Americal Division landed on Capul and Biri, among others, and on 3 March on Ticao and Burias; on the first they found no Japanese, on the second they killed some 60 men of a garrison of a hundred. The northern shore, the Bicol Peninsula, fell to General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army, which was fighting for Luzon under the overall direction of General Douglas MacArthur. Krueger decided to strike the peninsula from two sides: the 1st Cavalry Division was to advance from the north, through the Tayabas isthmus, and a landing at Legazpi was to come from the south.

The Bushmasters

The landing was assigned to the 158th Infantry Regiment, operating as an independent Regimental Combat Team which, with its artillery and support units, numbered more than 5,000 men. It was an Arizona National Guard regiment, nicknamed the “Bushmasters” after a venomous snake of the Central American jungle, where it had been stationed and trained in 1942–1943, in the Panama Canal Zone. Many Mexican Americans and Native Americans from Arizona served in its ranks. The regiment had previously fought in New Guinea and on Noemfoor Island; in January 1945 it had landed in Lingayen Gulf, and in March it had cleared the shores of Balayan and Batangas Bays in southern Luzon. It was commanded by Brigadier General Hanford MacNider, a veteran of the First World War.

The regiment sailed from Balayan and Subic Bays aboard the ships of a US Navy amphibious group (Task Group 78.4) under Captain Homer F. McGee. Guerrilla reconnaissance, passed on earlier to XIV Corps headquarters, reported roughly 2,500 Japanese dug in around Legazpi. In fact there were fewer defenders – between 1,500 and 2,000, according to the American official history. About 1,000 were sailors of the 35th Naval Guard Unit, only half of them fit for combat, and 600–700 were soldiers of the 26th Independent Mixed Regiment and personnel of Fourth Air Army units. They were scattered, cut off from General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s headquarters and without supplies.

The landing and the fighting at Daraga

The landing on 1 April went smoothly. The Japanese defended neither the beaches nor the town; they had withdrawn to the hills inland, from where they could control the roads leading north and south. The very next day, 2 April, the regiment’s leading units ran into their positions a few hundred metres south of the small town of Daraga. From 2 to 10 April the Bushmasters fought hard there, in difficult, jungle-covered country at the foot of Mayon.

On 11 April the Americans bypassed the fortifications in the Cituinan Hills and entered the town of Camalig without a fight. The Japanese strongpoints in the hills themselves, however, had to be taken one by one. The fighting lasted until 28 April; it cost the regiment some 40 killed and 235 wounded, and the Japanese nearly 700 killed.

Meanwhile part of the force was sent south. On 6 April the anti-tank company crossed in landing barges to the town of Bacon on the Sorsogon peninsula, followed by the 2nd Battalion. By 16 April the peninsula had been cleared: more than 150 Japanese had been killed or found dead, and 155 Taiwanese labourers from Japanese labour units had surrendered. MacNider reported that no trace of organised resistance remained there. Both shores of the San Bernardino Strait were thus in American hands.

Meeting the cavalry

From the north, the 1st Cavalry Division entered the peninsula on 12 April. The 5th Cavalry Regiment set out from Atimonan and reached Calauag on 14 April, and from 27 April ferried its main body across Ragay Gulf in landing barges. The 158th, having dealt with the defence of the Cituinan Hills, moved north-west on 29 April towards Naga. On 2 May its patrols made contact with the 5th Cavalry in the barrio of San Agustin on Highway 1, some 24 kilometres north-west of Iriga. The whole road from Manila to Legazpi was now in American hands.

Operations on the Bicol Peninsula continued until mid-June, when the 158th handed responsibility for the region to Filipino units that it had itself helped to organise and arm from the guerrillas. Over the whole operation, according to the official history, the Americans lost some 95 killed and 475 wounded; the Japanese more than 2,800 killed and 565 prisoners, including 350 Taiwanese labourers.

Its place in the war

The capture of Legazpi and the Bicol Peninsula closed one of the last stages of the fighting for southern Luzon. The opening of the Visayan Passages shortened the convoy route from Leyte to Manila, and Manila and its bay were becoming the main supply base for further operations in the Pacific – including the planned invasion of Japan. From then on the airfield and port of Legazpi served Allied aviation and shipping.

At the same time Eichelberger’s Eighth Army was liberating the southern part of the archipelago, a campaign begun with the landing on Palawan on 28 February. On 10 March its troops landed near Zamboanga, on 18 March on Panay, on 26 March on Cebu and on 29 March on Negros, and on 17 April the operation began on Mindanao, the largest island in the south. The Philippines were also regaining their own administration: in February MacArthur handed power to the government of the Philippine Commonwealth.

The war on Luzon did not end, however, with the clearing of its southern part. Yamashita’s main forces held out in the mountains of northern Luzon until August 1945, and the general himself laid down his arms only in September, after Japan’s surrender. Legazpi – one of the first towns on Luzon to be taken by the Japanese, and recovered without a shot on the day the world’s attention was fixed on Okinawa – shows how far the balance of power had shifted in three and a half years: the army that had landed here unhindered in 1941 could no longer defend even the beaches in 1945.