The Japanese on Cebu

At dawn on 10 April 1942, the day after the surrender of the forces on Bataan, Japanese transports appeared off Cebu, a long, narrow island at the very centre of the Philippine archipelago. The main body of Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi’s detachment landed at Cebu City, the island’s capital and one of the most important ports in the Philippines, and smaller forces near Toledo on the opposite, western coast. By evening the city was in Japanese hands, and two days later the organised defence of the island had ceased to exist. It was the start of the last stage of the conquest of the Philippines: the occupation of the southern islands, whose garrisons had waited their turn through four months of fighting on Luzon.

The southern islands

South of Luzon lie two groups of islands: the Visayas, with Cebu, Panay, Negros, Leyte, Samar and Bohol, and the great island of Mindanao. From the turn of 1941 and 1942 their defence was the responsibility of Brigadier General William Sharp, who commanded the Visayan–Mindanao Force. When in January he moved his headquarters and most of his troops to Mindanao, however, the Visayas were relegated to second place. At the beginning of March, a week before General Douglas MacArthur left for Australia, the command was divided: Sharp kept the Mindanao Force, while the Visayan garrisons formed a separate Visayan Force under Brigadier General Bradford Chynoweth, until then the commander on Panay. According to the American official history, MacArthur wanted in this way to ensure the strongest possible defence of Mindanao, from which he intended one day to begin his return to the Philippines. It was there, too, that he stopped in March on his way to Australia.

The Visayan Force numbered some 20,000 men in five island garrisons, the great majority of them soldiers of the Philippine Army, poorly trained and poorly armed. On Cebu, where Chynoweth had his headquarters, Colonel Irvine Scudder commanded about 6,500 soldiers: two Filipino infantry regiments, the Cebu Military Police Regiment and smaller units. Since no relief from outside could be expected, the defence plan provided only for delaying the enemy on the coast, demolishing bridges and roads, and then withdrawing into the mountains to wage guerrilla war. While still on Panay, Chynoweth had launched an operation called Baus Au, which in the local language means “to recover”: the removal of food, weapons and supplies to hidden dumps in inaccessible mountains. According to the American official history, these preparations were badly received by the local Filipinos, who expected a decisive battle on the beaches and felt abandoned.

Cebu had another, special significance. An advance quartermaster depot operated there which, from early 1942, had been the main assembly point for supplies for Bataan and Corregidor. Ships slipping through the Japanese blockade from Australia reached Cebu and Mindanao, and from there small vessels tried to carry food farther north through waters patrolled by Japanese warships. They succeeded less and less often. According to the American official history, of some 10,000 tons of food that reached Mindanao and Cebu, about 1,000 tons got through to Manila Bay – four days’ supply for the hundred thousand soldiers and civilians on Bataan. At the beginning of April eight fully loaded ships with food and medicines lay in the ports of Cebu and Iloilo. They were waiting for bombers that were to fly in from Australia and cover their run to Corregidor while the blockade was broken. The bombers reached Mindanao on 11 April, when it was already too late.

The Kawaguchi Detachment

For the first months of the campaign General Masaharu Homma, commander of the Japanese 14th Army, tied down by the fighting on Bataan, took almost no interest in the southern islands. Only when Imperial General Headquarters, uneasy at how long the campaign was dragging on, sent him reinforcements in March was he ordered to occupy the islands at the same time as the final assault on Bataan. One of the units that arrived was the Kawaguchi Detachment: the headquarters of the 35th Infantry Brigade and the 124th Infantry Regiment of the 18th Division, the same troops who at the turn of 1941 and 1942 had taken British Borneo. On 1 April the detachment arrived in Lingayen Gulf, and as early as 5 April, reinforced with support units, it re-embarked and sailed for Cebu. According to the American official history it numbered 4,852 soldiers, experienced and well armed.

Chynoweth received the first report of approaching ships on the afternoon of 9 April: three cruisers and eleven transports were coming up from the south. During the night the convoy split in two, one part sailing along the east coast of the island and the other along the west coast.

Three days

Cebu City was defended by the Military Police Regiment, about 1,100 men under Lieutenant Colonel Howard Edmands. Its task was not to hold the city but to gain time for the teams that were to destroy bridges, roads and dumps. The fighting lasted one day. The military police fell back slowly, and when in the afternoon the fighting moved into the suburbs, the Japanese broke off their attack. Under cover of darkness Edmands withdrew the regiment to a prepared position on a mountain ridge about 16 kilometres inland. Meanwhile, on the other side of the island, the only Filipino battalion defending the Toledo area, which had been thought to be at little risk, put up resistance but had to give way. The Japanese advanced eastwards along the road that crossed the island.

The fate of Cebu was decided the following night. The key to the defence was the road junction at Cantabaco, halfway across the island, where the highway branched towards the east coast. Chynoweth sent there a battalion brought over earlier from Bohol and ordered the reserve to be moved up from the north of the island. He was confident, because demolition charges he had checked himself were waiting along the road. The demolition teams, however, fled at the sight of Japanese armoured vehicles without blowing anything up. The commander of the battalion from Bohol, convinced that the enemy was still far away, drove off to reconnoitre the ground and fell into the hands of a Japanese patrol. The reserve never set off south. By the early hours of 11 April the Japanese were already close to the camp that housed Chynoweth’s headquarters, and his outposts were fleeing in panic. No front could be formed any more from the broken units. On the night of 12–13 April Chynoweth set off north into the mountains with about two hundred men, hoping to organise guerrilla warfare there.

The Japanese announced the complete occupation of the island on 19 April, but Jonathan Wainwright, who after MacArthur’s departure commanded all the forces in the Philippines from Corregidor, had written Cebu off several days earlier. According to the American official history, on 16 April he re-established the Visayan–Mindanao Force and gave Sharp command of the remaining island garrisons. The ships with food for Bataan waiting in port no longer had anywhere to go. Bataan had ceased to exist as a battlefield two days earlier, and its defenders were trudging in the columns of the Death March.

The acting president

On 11 April, during the fighting, the Japanese stopped a car on the road at Barili, on the west coast of the island, carrying José Abad Santos, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines. When President Manuel Quezon left the country in March, he had made Abad Santos acting president in the areas not yet occupied. Abad Santos refused to collaborate with the occupiers. The Japanese held him responsible for the destruction of bridges and roads on Cebu, although he had nothing to do with military operations. At the end of April he was taken with his son to Mindanao, where, according to the findings of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, he was shot on 1 May 1942. According to post-war accounts, Kawaguchi, who announced the sentence to him, opposed the orders to kill Filipino politicians and judges and attributed them to pressure from Colonel Masanobu Tsuji of the army staff.

Panay and Mindanao

The capture of Cebu opened the way to the other islands. On 16 April Homma’s second detachment, some 4,160 men under Major General Saburō Kawamura, who had come from Malaya, landed unopposed at Iloilo and Capiz on Panay, and two days later also at San Jose on the island’s west coast. Colonel Albert Christie’s garrison, about 7,000 men, withdrew to well-stocked bases in the mountains. By 20 April the Japanese had taken the main towns and roads of Panay. The garrisons on Negros, Leyte, Samar and Bohol, much weaker, could be taken at any moment, and the Japanese were in no hurry about it.

On 26 April the Kawaguchi Detachment left Cebu in six transports, handing the island over to a battalion of garrison troops. On 29 April, the birthday of Emperor Hirohito, it landed near Cotabato and Parang on the west coast of Mindanao, and a few days later the Kawamura Detachment came ashore in Macajalar Bay in the north of the island. The last campaign in the Philippines had begun, with Sharp’s Mindanao Force attacked from three sides.

Place in the war

The campaign in the southern islands ended not on the battlefield but with an order. After Corregidor fell on 6 May, Wainwright, by now a prisoner, called by radio from Manila on all forces in the Philippines to lay down their arms. Sharp, whose forces on Mindanao were already being broken up by three Japanese detachments, surrendered on 10 May and passed the surrender order to the Visayan garrisons. Chynoweth, hiding in the mountains of Cebu with the remnant of his men, laid down his arms in May; he survived captivity. The last units on the more remote islands were still surrendering in early June. Many Filipinos, however, and some Americans, did not obey the order and took to the mountains.

It was in the Visayas that the guerrillas proved especially strong. On Cebu command passed to the American mining engineer James Cushing, who organised a force numbering, according to some studies, about 8,500 men. On Panay Colonel Macario Peralta’s guerrillas operated, drawing among other things on the dumps prepared under Baus Au. In 1944 guerrillas on Cebu seized documents containing Japanese fleet plans, which had survived the crash of an aircraft carrying the chief of staff of Admiral Mineichi Koga, and passed them to the Americans. Kiyotake Kawaguchi himself, only a few months after the Cebu campaign, led his brigade on Guadalcanal, where in September 1942 its attack collapsed with heavy losses. After the war a Filipino military tribunal sentenced him to six years’ imprisonment for crimes committed on Mindanao.

Cebu City was liberated in March and April 1945, during the American campaign in the southern islands, in which guerrillas from the mountains of Cebu fought shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers who had come to fulfil MacArthur’s promise.