The fall of Corregidor

At noon on 6 May 1942 a white flag was raised over the island of Corregidor at the entrance to Manila Bay. A dozen or so hours earlier, on the night of 5/6 May, Japanese infantry had landed on the eastern end of the island, and in the morning tanks had joined the fighting. Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright, commander of United States Forces in the Philippines (USFIP), wanted to surrender only the four fortresses in the bay. Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma accepted the surrender only once Wainwright agreed to order all American and Filipino forces in the archipelago to lay down their arms. Some 11,000–13,000 men went into captivity on Corregidor itself and in the neighbouring forts. The surrender ended five months of defence of the Philippines, though, contrary to what is often written, it was not the last: units on Mindanao and in the Visayas went on laying down their arms for another month.

The Rock under fire

Corregidor, known to the Americans as “the Rock”, had since the beginning of the 20th century been the main fortress guarding the entrance to Manila Bay. Together with the smaller Forts Hughes, Drum and Frank it formed a harbour defence system whose guns were aimed against ships, not against artillery firing from land. Since the surrender on Bataan on 9 April the Japanese had had exactly that advantage: on the southern tip of the peninsula, a few kilometres from the island, they had emplaced dozens of guns, including 240-millimetre howitzers, and for almost four weeks they methodically destroyed batteries, searchlights and fortifications. Army aircraft attacked the island every day. According to Louis Morton’s US official history, the garrison lost about six hundred men between 9 April and the beginning of May.

Besides the crews of the coast artillery and Colonel Samuel Howard’s 4th Marine Regiment, the island held some two thousand soldiers and sailors who had escaped from Bataan at the last moment, as well as civilians, wounded and nurses. According to a mid-April return, more than 13,000 people were on Corregidor itself. Life went on in the Malinta Tunnel, bored into a rocky hill, which housed the headquarters, stores and a thousand-bed hospital. The men at the guns and on the beaches lived in the open, on half rations, under almost constant fire.

On 1 May the Japanese artillery began its final preparation for the landing. On 2 May a 240 mm shell pierced the magazine of Battery Geary. The explosion shook the island and tossed the ten-ton barrels of the 12-inch mortars about like matchsticks. On 3 May the submarine USS Spearfish took off the last group of evacuees, among them a dozen or so nurses, together with payrolls, a roster of the living and the last mail from the Philippines. On 4 May came the heaviest bombardment of the whole campaign: according to Morton about 16,000 shells fell on the island in twenty-four hours. That day Wainwright, asked by General George Marshall for a frank assessment, replied that his chances of repelling an assault were “somewhat less than even”. On 5 May the Japanese struck with everything they had. By evening, as the commander of the harbour defences, Major General George Moore, recorded, the beach defences on the north shore were “practically non-existent”, and the telephone lines had been cut.

The landing at North Point

The assault was entrusted to Lieutenant General Kenzō Kitano’s 4th Division. Homma’s plan called for two landings on two successive nights: on the night of 5/6 May Colonel Gempachi Satō’s 61st Infantry Regiment, reinforced with tanks of the 7th Tank Regiment, was to land on the narrow eastern “tail” of the island and take Malinta Hill by dawn, and the next night a stronger group under Major General Kureo Taniguchi was to come ashore below Topside, in the western part of the island.

The landing went wrong from the start. The barges set off from Lamao in darkness. The Japanese had assumed that the current off Corregidor ran the same way as off the Bataan shore, but it ran the opposite way and carried the boats about a kilometre east, towards North Point. Battalions became mixed up and landed at different times and in different places. The first came ashore at about 11 p.m. The second, arriving nearly an hour later under a rising moon, ran into the fire of the surviving guns: two camouflaged 75 mm guns, 37 mm guns, the last mortar of Battery Way and mortars from Fort Hughes. Observers on both sides described a slaughter on the water. A Japanese officer later claimed that of some two thousand men only eight hundred reached the shore. Morton cites estimates of losses in the first battalion reaching half or three-quarters of its strength. The Americans put between half and two-thirds of the Japanese landing craft out of action.

Even so, the Japanese managed to hold their beachhead. The tail of the island was defended by a single Marine battalion, which had only one platoon in the landing sector. By 1.30 a.m. Satō’s men had taken the ridge by the old Denver Battery, cut across the island and isolated the Americans at its eastern end. Tanks and light artillery began coming ashore. Colonel Howard threw in reserve after reserve, finally including the 4th Provisional Battalion, made up of some five hundred sailors who, as one officer put it, were merely “five hundred sailors with five hundred rifles”. A counter-attack launched at 6.15 a.m. pushed the Japanese back a few hundred metres, but without supporting weapons it bogged down.

On the other side of the channel Homma spent the night in dread. He knew he had only part of his force on the island, and believed it faced well over ten thousand defenders. He had just twenty-one boats left to ferry reinforcements. The divisional staff seriously considered postponing the second landing, and ammunition on the beachhead, as a Japanese staff officer recalled, would have run out at about eleven. Homma later said that the capture of Corregidor was the third critical moment of the whole campaign, and when the counter-attack was reported to him he is said to have exclaimed that the assault had failed.

The decision

The Japanese did not know that the defence was already at the end of its tether. At about 10 a.m. three tanks landed on the beachhead went into action. Their appearance caused panic in the line, which the officers barely managed to contain. There were no reserves left, almost all the guns had been destroyed, and fire from Bataan made both advance and retreat impossible. According to Morton 600–800 defenders had already been killed and about a thousand wounded. Artillery fire on James and Cheney ravines heralded another landing the following night, and there would be no one to repel it. What Wainwright feared most, however, was what would happen when the Japanese reached the Malinta Tunnel, where about a thousand wounded lay.

At 10 a.m. he decided to surrender. He knew he could do so on his own responsibility: on 9 April President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had lifted his February ban on surrender and left him complete freedom of decision. By noon all the guns and every weapon heavier than a .45 pistol had been destroyed, along with codes, radio sets and documents. A finance officer and his assistants cut up more than two million pesos of the Commonwealth government’s reserve with scissors. Colonel Howard ordered the colours of the 4th Marine Regiment to be burned. Wainwright reported to the President that “with broken heart and head bowed in sadness but not in shame” he must arrange terms for the surrender of the fortified islands of Manila Bay. “Please say to the nation,” he wrote, “that my troops and I have accomplished all that is humanly possible.”

Wainwright tried to save what he could. At 10.30 a.m. his chief of staff, Brigadier General Lewis Beebe, read out over the Voice of Freedom radio station an offer of surrender addressed to Homma that covered only the four islands in the bay, and it was repeated several more times in English and Japanese. At the same time Wainwright sent an order in cipher to Major General William Sharp on Mindanao, handing him command of all forces in the Philippines apart from the forts and instructing him to report to Douglas MacArthur in Australia. The aim was to surrender as few men as possible: if Sharp was no longer under Wainwright, Wainwright could not surrender him. This order coincided with a signal from MacArthur himself, who on hearing of the fall of Corregidor had taken Sharp under his direct command.

The meeting at Cabcaben

The Japanese did not answer the broadcasts, and their infantry, told to ignore white flags, kept advancing towards the tunnel. At about 1 p.m. Wainwright sent the Marine Captain Golland Clark forward with a white flag, a bugler and an interpreter. A Japanese officer, after contacting Bataan, agreed to take the American general to Homma. Wainwright went to the front line and there met Colonel Motoo Nakayama, operations officer of the 14th Army, the same man who a month earlier had received General Edward King’s surrender on Bataan. When Wainwright said he wished to surrender only the forts, Nakayama answered with an outburst of anger: the surrender must cover all forces in the Philippines. Wainwright declared that he would speak only to Homma himself.

At about 4 p.m. a barge took him across to Cabcaben on Bataan. At 5 p.m. Homma arrived by Cadillac at a house near the landing stage where the group of Americans was waiting. Every witness remembered the contrast between them: Homma, tall and massive, in a fresh uniform with rows of ribbons, and Wainwright, known to his fellow officers since West Point as “Skinny”, emaciated, in khaki, without decorations, leaning on a bamboo cane. A Japanese correspondent wrote that he looked “like a crane”.

Homma did not even take the surrender document in his hand, but had it read out in Japanese, and then declared that he would accept only the surrender of all American and Filipino forces in the archipelago. Wainwright maintained that the troops in the Visayas and on Mindanao were no longer under him but under Sharp and MacArthur. Homma replied that since MacArthur’s departure in March American radio had repeatedly presented Wainwright as commander of all forces in the Philippines, and when Wainwright said he had no communication with Sharp, offered him a Japanese aircraft for a liaison officer. In the end he stood up and said that since the man before him was merely the commander of a single unit, there was no reason to talk to him. Wainwright, mindful of a disarmed garrison at the mercy of the Japanese, agreed after a brief consultation with Beebe to surrender all the forces. But now Homma refused: the general had disowned his own authority, so let him go back to Corregidor, think the matter over and surrender to the divisional commander on the island. With that he left.

A signature at midnight

While Wainwright was on Bataan, the Japanese had worked round Malinta Hill and entered the tunnel. Brigadier General Charles Drake, the USFIP quartermaster, negotiated with a Japanese major, through interpreters speaking Russian, that the men could stay in the tunnel provided they left a clear passage. By about 4 p.m. the tunnel was in Japanese hands, and its occupants, apart from the wounded and the hospital staff, were marched out at bayonet point. In the evening the second group landed on the island as planned.

Wainwright returned late in the evening after a rough crossing. Japanese campfires were burning all over the island. In the ruined settlement of San Jose, at the foot of Malinta Hill, he met Colonel Satō. There were no more negotiations. The document, signed at about midnight on 6/7 May, contained all of Homma’s terms: Wainwright undertook to surrender all forces in the Philippines within four days, including those in the Visayas and on Mindanao, and the Japanese army and navy would cease operations only when they judged that the orders were being carried out “faithfully”. The Japanese made it clear that they regarded the prisoners from Corregidor as hostages. Wainwright testified after the war that they called them not prisoners but hostages, and that his greatest fear was a massacre of the men on the fortress islands if the troops in the south did not surrender. There is no direct evidence of such a threat, but Wainwright and his staff believed in it.

An order for the whole archipelago

On the morning of 7 May the 14th Army’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hikaru Haba, came to Wainwright. Wainwright wrote a letter to Sharp in which he resumed command over him and ordered him to surrender, warning that failure to comply “can only have the most disastrous results”. In the afternoon he was taken to Manila. Just before midnight on 7 May, over radio station KZRH, in a voice breaking with emotion, he read the surrender order addressed to Sharp and to the commanders of units in the mountains of northern Luzon. It was also heard by the troops on Mindanao and Cebu.

Sharp found himself in an even more difficult position than Wainwright. MacArthur, to whom he reported the broadcast, replied that Wainwright’s orders “have no validity” and told him to break his forces up into small detachments and go over to guerrilla warfare. To Marshall he reported that in his view Wainwright had “temporarily become unbalanced”. Sharp had already released the island commanders for guerrilla operations, but on 10 May at Malaybalay Wainwright’s emissary, Colonel Jesse Traywick, laid before him what threatened the prisoners on Corregidor. That day Sharp capitulated and revoked his earlier orders. Nothing but absolute necessity, he cabled MacArthur, had compelled him to do so.

Carrying out the order took weeks. Brigadier General Bradford Chynoweth on Cebu at first regarded it as given under duress and not binding, Colonel Albert Christie on Panay resisted for a long time, and on Negros the commander several times obtained extensions of the deadline from the Japanese because his men would not come down from the mountains. The last units laid down their arms on 9 June, and only then did the Japanese accept that organised resistance in the Philippines had ceased and grant the captives prisoner-of-war status. Thousands of soldiers, mostly Filipinos but some Americans too, never came down from the mountains, however. In northern Luzon, on Panay and on Mindanao, where Wendell Fertig soon took command, they became the nucleus of a guerrilla movement that fought on until the Americans returned.

The numbers

Exactly how many men went into captivity on Corregidor is not known. Wainwright spoke of “nearly 11,000” men on the island, and this figure is adopted by the US official history. Other tallies, which also include Forts Hughes, Drum and Frank, sailors and civilians, give up to 13,000. The frequently cited figure of 12,000 prisoners falls within this range. Among them were Americans of the army, Marine Corps and navy, Filipinos of the Philippine Scouts and the Philippine Army, and several dozen army nurses, who were later interned in the Santo Tomas civilian camp in Manila. According to estimates cited in American literature, the Japanese lost about 900 killed and 1,200 wounded in the fighting for the island, but these figures are uncertain.

The prisoners from Corregidor were not driven on a death march like the defenders of Bataan. For about two weeks they were held in the heat, with almost no water or food, in the former motor pool of the coast artillery, the so-called 92nd Garage, on the south shore of the island. On 23 May they were shipped to Manila. The Americans were marched on foot through the city to Bilibid Prison, as a spectacle for the inhabitants, and from there taken to the camp near Cabanatuan.

Place in the war

The fall of Corregidor closed a campaign that the Japanese had meant to finish in 50 days and that had lasted five months. In the United States Corregidor, like Bataan, became a symbol of endurance in a hopeless situation, and the last signals from the Malinta Tunnel went round the American press. In the same week the Japanese took Mandalay in Burma and landed on Tulagi, opening the operation that was to give them Port Moresby. It was the last week of their unbroken run of victories: on 7 and 8 May the Coral Sea saw a clash of carriers that for the first time halted the Japanese advance, and a month later came the defeat at Midway.

For the victor the triumph proved bitter. Homma was unable to explain the four-month delay to Tokyo. In August 1942 he was recalled from the Philippines and, according to Japanese personnel records, placed on the reserve list on 31 August. Some English-language literature, and many other works following it, give the year as 1943, which is not borne out. He spent the rest of the war without a post, and in 1946 an American military commission in Manila sentenced him to death for crimes committed by his troops against prisoners.

Wainwright, the highest-ranking American prisoner of the war, passed through camps at Tarlac, on Taiwan and in Manchuria, where in August 1945 he was freed by American intelligence agents. Throughout his captivity he was tormented by the thought that at home he was regarded as a coward, and he was astonished to be welcomed as a hero on his return. On 2 September 1945 MacArthur placed him on the deck of the battleship Missouri directly behind himself as he accepted Japan’s surrender, and a few days later President Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor, which MacArthur had opposed in 1942. The Americans began retaking the Philippines in October 1944. They recaptured Corregidor in February 1945 with a parachute and seaborne assault, and its Japanese garrison was almost entirely wiped out.