Fighting on Bataan in February 1942

At around 3 p.m. on 13 February 1942 men of the 57th Infantry Regiment, Philippine Scouts, came out onto the beach between the mouths of the Anyasan and Silaiim rivers on the west coast of the Bataan Peninsula. They found abandoned equipment, uniforms shed by Japanese soldiers who had tried to escape by swimming, and decomposing bodies. So ended the Battle of the Points, fought since 23 January, in which American and Filipino troops destroyed two battalions of the Japanese 20th Infantry Regiment landed behind their lines. Four days later, on 17 February, the defenders recovered the last stretch of their line that the Japanese had seized inland. February was the best month of the defence of Bataan: Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army lost its second offensive, withdrew to the north and had to ask Tokyo for reinforcements. At the same time, however, the defenders were living on half rations, and malaria and diseases of malnutrition were spreading through their ranks, which no victory could halt.

War chronologies speak, under 7 and 13 February, of Americans defending Bataan against Homma’s forces. This needs qualifying: of the roughly 80,000 soldiers on the peninsula, most were Filipinos – from the divisions of the Philippine Army, from the Philippine Scouts (Filipinos serving in the regular US Army) and from the Philippine Constabulary. Americans numbered some ten to fifteen thousand.

Three battlefields

In the last days of January the defenders fell back from the Abucay–Mauban line to a second and final line of defence along the Pilar–Bagac road, from Orion on Manila Bay to Bagac on the South China Sea. For the first time both corps – General George Parker’s II Corps in the east and Major General Jonathan Wainwright’s I Corps in the west – formed a continuous front, and the ground held by the defenders shrank by almost half. Some 80,000 soldiers and more than 20,000 civilian refugees were crowded into an area of about 500 square kilometres, dominated by the Mariveles massif and covered in jungle.

Homma gave them no rest. From 26 January to mid-February the defenders’ positions were attacked in three places at once. In the east Lieutenant General Akira Nara’s 65th Brigade, reinforced by Colonel Susumu Takechi’s 9th Infantry Regiment, attacked Brigadier General Clifford Bluemel’s sector along a path known as Trail 2. In the centre, units of Colonel Yorimasa Yoshioka’s 20th Infantry Regiment broke through a gap in the I Corps line and dug in in the jungle behind it. On the west coast, on rocky headlands, battalions landed from the sea to cut the West Road, I Corps’s only supply artery, were holding out.

Nara’s attack collapsed fastest. From 27 January the Japanese repeatedly attacked at night the positions of the Filipino 41st Infantry Regiment by Trail 2, convinced that they were attacking only an outpost line. The Filipinos, supported by artillery emplaced on the slopes of Mount Samat, held. Takechi began withdrawing his regiment on the night of 31 January – 1 February, and on 3 February units sent to counter-attack met no further resistance. The threat of a breakthrough in the east had passed.

Quinauan: dynamite on the cliffs

The fighting on the west coast lasted longest. On Quinauan Point some 600 Japanese of the 2nd Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, had been holding out since 23 January in dense jungle above the cliffs. From 28 January they were attacked by Major Dudley Strickler’s 3rd Battalion, 45th Infantry Regiment, Philippine Scouts, supported by a company of the 57th Regiment and by airmen without aircraft. Progress was measured in metres: unseen snipers in the treetops and machine-gun nests hidden a few paces from the attackers killed anyone who moved. On 1 February Strickler went forward to the front line to reconnoitre and never came back. The battalion lost half its strength.

The breakthrough came only with cooperation between infantry and the M3 tanks of the 192nd Tank Battalion, sent to the west coast on the orders of MacArthur’s headquarters. The first attacks on 2 and 3 February failed because the tanks got stuck among tree trunks and had no communication with the infantry. On 4 February Colonel Donald Hilton placed the tanks in line, assigned each a soldier with a radio and directed them from a command vehicle. By evening the Japanese were crammed into a strip a hundred metres deep above the cliff. Some of them threw off their uniforms and jumped from the rocks; others took refuge in caves at the foot of the cliff. Wainwright, who visited the front line almost daily, recalled that the “old rules of war” began to change in him rapidly at that time, and he remembered the mine General Grant had exploded at Petersburg. On 6 February engineers lowered boxes of dynamite with time fuses on ropes from the cliff edge and then threw down bundles of four sticks of dynamite. On 8 February two armed navy launches and two boats carrying airmen of Captain William Dyess’s 21st Pursuit Squadron came in from the sea and wiped out the last pockets of resistance. In the fight for Quinauan the defenders lost almost 500 men; the Scout battalion came out of it with two hundred soldiers out of five hundred. The 2nd Battalion of the 20th Regiment ceased to exist. Homma later said that it had “vanished without a trace”.

Anyasan and Silaiim

A third, accidental Japanese beachhead came into being on 27 January, when a company sent with supplies to Quinauan mistook the beach in the darkness and landed less than two kilometres short of its objective, between the mouths of the Anyasan and Silaiim rivers. The names of the coastal points, coves and rivers were so repetitive that a telephone operator asked by an officer where he was reportedly answered “somewhere between Asinine and Quinine”. The Philippine constables guarding this sector fled, and the first troops thrown against the Japanese were airmen of the 17th Pursuit Squadron, some of whom only asked on the way how to fire a rifle.

Lieutenant General Susumu Morioka, commander of the 16th Division, who had taken over the fighting against I Corps, decided to reinforce the landing. On the night of 1–2 February, under a full moon, a flotilla of a dozen or so barges carrying Major Mitsuo Kimura’s 1st Battalion, 20th Regiment, headed for Quinauan. The defenders, forewarned by an order found on a dead Japanese officer, prepared the first coordinated land, sea and air strike of the campaign. The last four P-40s of the Far East Air Force bombed the barges, the artillery fired some thousand rounds, and the torpedo boat PT-32 attacked the minelayer covering the landing. About half the battalion was killed at sea or turned back. The rest landed at Anyasan and Silaiim.

From 2 February the sector was cleared by Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Lilly’s 57th Infantry Regiment, Philippine Scouts, with a battalion of the 45th Regiment, constables and airmen. It was a riflemen’s fight: artillery firing through the tall trees hit its own troops, and the tanks, moving in single file along the only track, were defenceless against Japanese magnetic mines until four infantrymen were assigned to each of them. On 9 February the exhausted battalion in the centre was relieved by the fresh 2nd Battalion, 57th Regiment, which on 11 February reached the mouth of the Anyasan and pushed the Japanese back onto Silaiim Point.

Morioka knew by now that the landing force was lost. On the night of 7–8 February Japanese engineers in thirty boats tried to evacuate the men, but turned back under fire. The following night they took off 34 wounded, and that was the last attempt. Morioka then dropped to Kimura, in bamboo tubes, an order to save himself as best he could, on rafts or by swimming, with detailed information on tides and moonrise. Copies of the order fell into the hands of the defenders, who manned the beaches. At dawn on 12 February Kimura with some two hundred men struck at a gap in the line of the 45th Regiment’s battalion, overran the positions of the 17th Pursuit Squadron’s airmen and mortally wounded its commander, but the Scouts of the 57th Regiment closed the breach. On 13 February they reached the beach. Some eighty Japanese broke through northwards across the rear of I Corps and were wiped out by the 26th Cavalry Regiment only a few days later. Kimura’s battalion, some 900 men, ceased to exist just as its predecessor had. The defenders lost about 70 killed and 100 wounded here.

Few Japanese were taken prisoner. MacArthur’s headquarters, in the first attempt at psychological warfare in the campaign, sent a loudspeaker truck and two Nisei interpreters but failed to supply the text of an appeal. The Scouts, who had earlier found behind the Japanese lines the mutilated bodies of their comrades with their hands tied, were not inclined to take prisoners, and the truck was never used.

The pockets

At the same time the Battle of the Pockets was being fought inland. On 28 and 29 January Yoshioka’s units, some thousand men, passed through the gap in the I Corps line along the valleys of the Cotar and Tuol rivers. Two pockets were formed: the Little Pocket, in the middle of the Filipino 1st Division’s sector, and the Big Pocket on the Tuol River, also called the Tuol Pocket, from which the Japanese blocked Trail 7, an important road behind the front. The first counter-attacks, including those with tanks, achieved nothing: by 4 February the Japanese had destroyed three of the four tanks of the platoon sent there. On the night of 6–7 February Morioka attacked to relieve the encircled troops and drove a wedge, known as the Upper Pocket, into the line of the 11th Division.

The defenders’ offensive began on 7 February. The Little Pocket fell on 9 February. The Big Pocket was tightly surrounded, and when the Filipino 92nd Regiment cut the Japanese off from the water of the Tuol River, their situation became desperate: they were living on horsemeat and tree sap and had more than a hundred wounded. On 11 February Yoshioka began leading his men out through the thinly held northern side of the encirclement. On 13 February the Filipinos combed the deserted pocket and found some 300 dead, 150 graves and a few captured horses and mules. Yoshioka reached the Japanese lines with 377 men on 15 February. Of the 20th Infantry Regiment, which had begun the Bataan campaign some 2,700 strong, at most 650 remained, most of them sick or wounded.

The last was the wedge of the Upper Pocket. The tanks, helpless in the tangle of bamboo and vines, were helped by Igorot tribesmen from the mountains of northern Luzon serving in the 11th Infantry Regiment, who sat on the hulls cutting a way with bolo knives, firing pistols and guiding the drivers by tapping with sticks. The Japanese, whose only remaining task was to cover Yoshioka’s escape, fell back, and on 17 February the defenders restored their former line without a fight.

Homma halts the attack

On the Japanese side the decision had been taken before the fighting ended. On 8 February two positions clashed at 14th Army headquarters in San Fernando. The operations officer, Colonel Motoo Nakayama, wanted to continue the offensive, concentrating it on the east coast. The chief of staff, Lieutenant General Masami Maeda, advised breaking off the attack, tightening the blockade, occupying the rest of the archipelago and waiting for hunger to force the defenders to surrender. Homma accepted half of this advice. On the evening of 8 February he ordered a general withdrawal: the 16th Division was to fall back to the hills north of the Bagac and Gogo rivers, and the 65th Brigade behind the Tiawir and Talisay rivers. Instead of waiting for hunger to take effect, however, Homma asked Imperial General Headquarters for reinforcements for a final assault. On 15 February, to divert attention from the withdrawing 16th Division, the 65th Brigade feigned an attack on II Corps and then it too fell back to a line near Balanga.

The 14th Army was by then in a sorry state. Between 6 January and 1 March it lost some 2,700 killed and more than 4,000 wounded, and 10,000–12,000 soldiers were down with malaria, beriberi and dysentery. According to the American official history, on 24 February the 16th Division had at most 712 infantrymen fit for combat on Bataan. Homma himself testified after the war before the tribunal in Manila that he had then had only three battalions fit for action, and that had the defenders counter-attacked they could have reached Manila “without much resistance”. The defenders knew nothing of this. Among the soldiers, on the other hand, a rumour circulated that Homma had committed suicide over his defeat in MacArthur’s apartment in the Manila Hotel, and the command believed it as readily as the men.

After the February battles morale on Bataan was higher than at any time since the war began. Patrols got as far as the old Abucay line, and General Bluemel proposed a reconnaissance in force and a return to it. The command rejected the idea. A local victory did not change the position of an army cut off by sea and air, and every attack required more food, fuel and ammunition, all of which were lacking. Both sides dug in on either side of the no man’s land, and a lull settled over the peninsula.

On half rations

The enemy the defenders could not defeat was within their own ranks. Since 5 January everyone had been on half rations, but in practice what was issued was whatever was in the depots. In January and February the daily ration averaged less than 850 grams of food, against about two kilograms in peacetime, and in mid-February it fell lower still. According to the doctors, the ration provided some 2,000 calories in January, 1,500 in February and only 1,000 in March, whereas a soldier fighting in the jungle needed 3,500–4,000. Meat was scarce: carabao were slaughtered until in February the command banned unauthorised killing, and later the horses of the 26th Cavalry Regiment and the pack mules followed. The soldiers hunted monkeys and lizards.

Disease came on top of hunger. By January most of the men were infected with malaria. In February it was still held in check by prophylactic quinine, but supplies were dwindling fast. Beriberi, scurvy and dysentery appeared. Commanders noticed that the men were becoming apathetic and ever harder to get moving into an attack. Major Harold K. Johnson of the 57th Regiment, later Chief of Staff of the US Army, wrote that prolonged malnutrition destroyed the will to fight almost completely. In those weeks a song attributed to the war correspondent Frank Hewlett spread among the soldiers: “We’re the battling bastards of Bataan, no mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam.” No help was coming, and attempts to run food through the Japanese blockade in small ships and submarines yielded only crumbs.

Place in the war

The Battles of the Points and the Pockets were the last victory of the defenders of the Philippines. At a time when the British were losing Singapore and the Dutch one island of the East Indies after another, an army made up mostly of Filipino recruits stopped the 14th Army and bled it white. For the Japanese it was a serious blow to their timetable: Luzon was to have been taken by the end of January. Homma, who had occupied Manila at the beginning of January and had counted on a swift end to the campaign, began to lose the confidence of his superiors in Tokyo, who considered him too slow.

The victory, however, changed nothing in the position of the Philippines. On 8 February President Manuel Quezon, in a cable to Roosevelt, proposed the neutralisation of the archipelago, and Douglas MacArthur reported to Washington that his troops were “near the end”. Roosevelt rejected Quezon’s idea, and on 22 February he ordered MacArthur to move to Australia. Homma, meanwhile, occupied the weakly defended island of Mindoro on 27 February to seal off access to Manila Bay more tightly. In March he got what he had asked for: the 4th Division from Shanghai, a detachment of the 21st Division, heavy artillery and bombers. On 3 April he attacked the starving and sick defenders, whose rations had fallen to a thousand calories, and on 9 April 1942 General Edward King surrendered on Bataan. Some 76,000 men went into captivity, and thousands of them died on the Death March. Corregidor held out until 6 May. The February victories bought the defenders of the Philippines almost two months, for which they paid in hunger.