Fighting in the southern Philippines

In mid-May 1945, when Europe had been at peace for a week, heavy fighting was still going on in the southern Philippines. Since February, the US Eighth Army under General Robert Eichelberger had been liberating one island after another south of Luzon, and in May its main effort was concentrated on Mindanao, the second-largest island of the archipelago. On 14 May soldiers of the 24th Infantry Division were beating off Japanese counter-attacks west of Davao; in the centre of the island the 31st Division was fighting its way north along the only road through the mountains; and on Negros and Cebu American units and Filipino guerrillas were pursuing Japanese forces that had withdrawn into the interior.

The fighting was not a single event of that day but a campaign that had begun at the end of February and would continue, in the form of sweeps against scattered units, until the surrender of Japan.

The Victor operations

From the outset General Douglas MacArthur intended to liberate the whole archipelago, not just Luzon, where General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army was still engaged in heavy fighting. The attacks on the southern islands were carried out by the Eighth Army in a series of operations code-named Victor. The American official history of the campaign, written by Robert Ross Smith, points out that MacArthur launched them on his own initiative, without any explicit directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, who had envisaged his forces being used above all on Luzon and in preparing the invasion of Japan.

On 28 February the 186th Infantry Regiment landed on Palawan (Victor III). On 10 March the 41st Infantry Division struck at Zamboanga on the western tip of Mindanao (Victor IV), and then at the islands of the Sulu Archipelago – Jolo on 9 April. In the central part of the archipelago, in the Visayas, the 40th Infantry Division landed on Panay near Iloilo on 18 March, and on north-western Negros on 29 March (Victor I). The Americal Division attacked Cebu on 26 March, Bohol on 11 April and south-eastern Negros at the end of April (Victor II). At the beginning of April American troops also took Legazpi and opened the Visayan Passages to shipping.

The Japanese on these islands came under the Thirty-Fifth Army of General Sōsaku Suzuki, who had been on Cebu since the defeat on Leyte. Cut off from Luzon and without air or naval support, he could only defend himself in the mountains. In April he tried to get to Mindanao by sea; he was killed on 19 April when his boat was attacked by American aircraft. Instead of defending the beaches, most of the garrisons withdrew into the interior and dug in among inaccessible mountains and jungles.

The guerrillas

A distinctive feature of the fighting in the south was the role of the Filipino guerrillas. On Panay the forces of Colonel Macario Peralta, numbering some 23,000 men according to American tallies, controlled most of the island even before the landing. On Cebu some 8,500 guerrillas under Lieutenant Colonel James Cushing kept the Japanese in the north of the island in check. On Mindanao there was the 10th Military District of the American officer Wendell Fertig, who over three years had built a guerrilla army many thousands strong and a network of radio stations linking it with MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia.

The guerrillas supplied intelligence on Japanese positions and landing beaches and secured airstrips, and once the Americans had landed they fought alongside them and carried out sweeps in the interior. American historians stress that it was largely thanks to them that the Eighth Army’s losses in the southern islands were relatively light.

The landing on Mindanao

Mindanao was defended by two Japanese divisions: General Jirō Harada’s 100th Division in the Davao area and General Gyosaku Morozumi’s 30th Division in the centre of the island – according to Smith, more than 40,000 soldiers in all, supported by naval and air force personnel. Before the war Davao had been the centre of a large community of Japanese settlers who ran abacá plantations, and the Japanese expected the landing to come from Davao Gulf, which they had heavily mined and covered with artillery.

Eichelberger chose a roundabout route. Operation Victor V was entrusted to General Franklin Sibert’s X Corps, with General Roscoe Woodruff’s 24th Infantry Division and General Clarence Martin’s 31st Infantry Division. While the landing force was already sailing for Illana Bay on the west coast, Fertig reported that his guerrillas had taken Malabang and its airstrip. On 17 April the Americans therefore landed unopposed near Malabang and Parang, and then set off eastwards along the only road crossing the southern part of the island – Highway 1.

The speed of the advance took the Japanese by surprise. For a long time Morozumi regarded the landing in the west as a diversion. On 27 April the 24th Division reached Digos on Davao Gulf, and on 3 May its leading units entered Davao itself – the last large city in the Philippines in Japanese hands. Resistance was weaker than expected: the Japanese destroyed the city as far as they could and withdrew to prepared positions in the hills to the west and north of it. Only there did the real battle for Mindanao begin.

The fighting around Davao in mid-May

West of Davao the Japanese of the 100th Division had taken up positions among the abacá plantations and in dense undergrowth, with bunkers, rifle pits linked by tunnels and numerous guns. The Americans had to take them one by one, in the heat and the incessant rain. Soldiers of the 24th Division later regarded this fighting as the hardest and most exhausting of all their campaigns in the Pacific islands.

Around Libby airfield and the village of Mintal, some 8 km west of the city, the 21st Infantry Regiment was attacked from three sides by a more numerous enemy. On 14 May – the date under which war chronologies record the continuing fighting in the southern Philippines – Private James Diamond was killed there while evacuating the wounded under fire and covering his patrol; he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The division, bled white and exhausted, resumed its attack on 17 May. The 19th Regiment, supported by Fertig’s guerrillas, broke the Japanese eastern flank and by 29 May had taken a string of villages north of Davao. The 100th Division collapsed and began to retreat into the mountains. According to tallies based on the American official history, the fighting on the outskirts of Davao cost the 24th Division some 350 killed and more than 1,600 wounded, and the Japanese 100th Division some 4,500 killed and wounded.

North through the mountains

Meanwhile the 31st Division was advancing north along the Sayre Highway, the only road linking the south of the island with Macajalar Bay on the north coast. Between 6 and 12 May its 124th Infantry Regiment fought the hardest action of this part of the campaign near Maramag: a Japanese battalion, which Morozumi had ordered to be sacrificed to gain time for the 30th Division to regroup, defended itself in camouflaged bunkers and trenches to the last man. The soldiers later called the area of the fighting Colgan Woods, after the chaplain, Captain Thomas Colgan, who was killed while bringing aid to the wounded.

On 10 May the 108th Infantry Regiment of the 40th Division landed from the north, in Macajalar Bay near Cagayan de Oro, and set off south along the Sayre Highway to meet the 31st Division. On 21 May the 155th Infantry Regiment took Malaybalay, and soon afterwards the two columns linked up, opening the whole road. Morozumi’s 30th Division withdrew into the Agusan River valley and the jungle, where, exhausted, it held out until the end of the war.

On the other islands, sweeps continued in May. On Negros the 40th Division fought General Takeshi Kōno’s Japanese, who at the beginning of June began a general retreat into the unexplored mountains. On Cebu General Takeo Manjome had already withdrawn his units to the north of the island in mid-April, where they were pursued by the Americans and Cushing’s guerrillas.

Losses

The casualty figures given in the literature come mainly from American studies and should be treated as estimates. According to tallies based on Smith’s work, the Americans lost some 820 killed and 2,880 wounded on Mindanao. Some 12,900 Japanese were killed in action, and a further 8,200 or so died of hunger and disease. After Japan’s surrender some 22,000 soldiers and nearly 12,000 Japanese civilians came out of the Mindanao jungle to surrender. The 40th Division on Panay and Negros lost some 390 killed and more than 1,000 wounded; the Japanese, according to the same sources, lost some 4,000 killed and around 3,300 dead from hunger and disease. There are no reliable overall figures for the losses of the guerrillas or of the civilian population, which suffered both from the fighting and from the reprisals and requisitions of the retreating Japanese.

The dispute with the Australians

The campaign in the southern Philippines also had a political dimension. In the spring of 1945 resentment was growing in Australia that MacArthur, while using American divisions to liberate one Philippine island after another, had given Australian troops the task of fighting cut-off Japanese garrisons on Bougainville, New Britain and around Wewak in New Guinea, followed by the landings on Borneo that began with the landing on Tarakan. In the press and in parliament people asked whether Australian soldiers were not dying in operations of no significance to the outcome of the war. The Australian official historian Gavin Long later called the dispute the controversy over the “unnecessary campaigns” and observed that the same charge could have been levelled at the American campaign in the southern Philippines – it, too, did nothing directly to hasten Japan’s defeat. Prime Minister John Curtin and the commander-in-chief of the Australian Army, General Thomas Blamey, defended the chosen strategy, although Blamey himself argued with MacArthur over the point of some of the Borneo operations.

MacArthur’s supporters replied that the liberation of the whole archipelago was a political and moral obligation to the Filipinos, and that the airfields and ports in the south were to serve further operations in the Dutch East Indies.

Place in the war

The fighting in the southern Philippines had no significant influence on the course of the war, whose outcome was being decided on Okinawa and in the raids on Japanese cities. It did, however, complete the liberation of the Philippines: by the summer of 1945 the Japanese forces in the south had been destroyed or driven into the jungle, and the Commonwealth government of President Sergio Osmeña was able to take over the administration of one island after another. At the end of June Eichelberger announced the end of organised resistance on Mindanao, although the sweeps continued until Japan’s surrender. A year later, on 4 July 1946, the Philippines gained independence.