The Japanese take Manila

At 5.45 p.m. on 2 January 1942 the first Japanese units entered Manila, the capital of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. Three battalions of the 48th Division, led by the divisional infantry commander, Major General Kōichi Abe, came in from the north; a reconnaissance regiment and an infantry battalion of the 16th Division came in from the south. The city offered no resistance. A week earlier it had been declared an open city, and the American–Filipino army had withdrawn from it and was just completing its retreat to the Bataan peninsula. It is sometimes said that the Japanese also took the naval base at Cavite that day. More precisely, Cavite had ceased to be a base earlier: wrecked from the air on 10 December, it had been evacuated and destroyed by the Americans themselves during December, and units of the 16th Division occupied it without a fight in the first days of January. With Manila taken, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma had accomplished the task set him by Imperial General Headquarters. The forces he was supposed to destroy, however, remained intact.

The road to Manila

The Japanese plan assumed that the capture of the capital would decide the campaign. After the attack on Clark Field on 8 December, which stripped the defenders of their air power, and the landing in Lingayen Gulf on 22 December, Homma’s 14th Army advanced on Manila from two directions. Lieutenant General Yuitsu Tsuchihashi’s 48th Division came down from the north across the central Luzon plain, while Lieutenant General Susumu Morioka’s 16th Division, which had landed in Lamon Bay on 24 December, pushed through the mountains from the south-east. On 23 December General Douglas MacArthur put the pre-war plan WPO-3 into effect and ordered a withdrawal to Bataan, and on 24 December he moved his headquarters, President Manuel Quezon and the American High Commissioner to the island of Corregidor at the entrance to Manila Bay.

The Japanese expected a decisive battle in front of Manila. Instead, Major General Jonathan Wainwright’s North Luzon Force fell back from one line to the next, delaying the pursuit, while Brigadier General Albert Jones’s South Luzon Force slipped past the capital and across the bridges at Calumpit, which were blown on the morning of 1 January. Homma, whose staff expected MacArthur to defend the city, failed to see in time where the defenders were really heading. His divisions drove on the capital rather than on the bottleneck at the entrance to Bataan. Historians count this mistake among the most important of the whole campaign.

The last days of the open city

On 26 December the newspapers printed the proclamation declaring Manila an open city, and a banner reading “Open City. No Shooting” was hung on City Hall. Japanese naval aircraft nevertheless bombed the port and historic Intramuros on 27 and 28 December. Louis Morton’s official American history concedes, however, that the city’s status remained ambiguous until the end of the year: the rear echelon of the USAFFE staff was still in Manila, troops passed through the city and supply convoys rolled through it towards Bataan.

In the last days of the year a ring of fire surrounded the city. Fuel dumps at Fort McKinley and Nichols Field were blown up, oil tanks blazed in the Pandacan district, and burning oil flowed down the Pasig River, setting fire to warehouses along its banks. Across the bay, what was left of Cavite was going up in the air. On New Year’s Eve the hotels and clubs were still open and a ball was held at the Manila Hotel, but the bartenders were smashing bottles so that they would not fall into Japanese hands. On the morning of 1 January the quartermaster warehouses in the port, which were to be burned anyway, were thrown open to the public. Crowds carried off food, and the next day the looting of shops and wholesalers began.

The Japanese did not have to fight their way into Cavite, the largest American naval base in the Far East. On 10 December 1941 several dozen bombers had pounded the navy yard for more than two hours from an altitude beyond the reach of the anti-aircraft guns. They destroyed the power station, the torpedo workshops, the storehouses and some of the vessels alongside the quays. That same evening Rear Admiral Francis Rockwell, commander of the 16th Naval District, ordered the yard abandoned, and over the following days fuel, torpedoes and equipment were removed from it. The surface ships of the Asiatic Fleet had already gone south in the first week of the war. Around 25 December the base was finally abandoned, and on 26 December the fleet commander, Admiral Thomas Hart, left Manila for Java in a submarine. The navy moved the rest of its forces to Corregidor and to Mariveles at the tip of Bataan.

The Japanese enter

On 1 January the leading units of the 48th Division and two tank regiments stood little more than ten kilometres from the northern suburbs, and that evening the 16th Division reached the shore of Manila Bay less than sixteen kilometres south of the city. Homma, however, halted both divisions despite their commanders’ protests. “Had those divisions entered together from the south and the north,” he later explained, “anything might have happened.” Tsuchihashi argued that the troops had to enter the city to save it from the fires. On the evening of 1 January, at a conference in the new headquarters at Cabanatuan, the 14th Army staff rejected the idea of sending only a military commission into Manila to call on the city to surrender, and decided to occupy it. Homma limited the force entering from the north to three battalions and made the Pasig River the boundary between the divisions. Morioka’s troops were also to take Cavite and Batangas province.

On the morning of 2 January MacArthur reported to Washington from Corregidor that the Japanese would enter the city in the afternoon in small numbers and would merely keep order. Manila’s Japanese residents, released from internment that day, came out on to the streets. When the troops arrived in the evening, they acted as their interpreters and guides. The soldiers posted sentries at key points and took over government offices. Morioka reported that “the joyful voices of the Japanese residents were overwhelming”. The rest of the population watched the newcomers in silence from behind closed shutters. Japanese tradition has it that before entering the city Homma assembled several hundred officers and ordered them not to burn, rape or loot, threatening severe punishment. Some historians also cite an account that on the way to Manila he had his columns halt and tidy up their uniforms and ranks, convinced as he was that a slovenly soldier is quicker to turn to plunder.

All night Japanese lorries drove into the city. Soldiers occupied hotels, schools and the buildings of the University of the Philippines. The next morning the only cars on the streets were those flying the Rising Sun or the flags of neutral states and Japan’s allies. The treasury in the Intendencia building was sealed as the property of the Japanese government, banks and restaurants were closed, and the newspapers, briefly suspended, began to appear again under Japanese control.

The occupation

The offices of the Commonwealth were taken “under protection”, the courts were suspended and the public utilities were seized by the army. Japanese officers with interpreters set up tables at crossroads and checked the papers of passers-by. Enemy nationals, Americans and Britons, were ordered to stay at home until registered, and over the following days they were summoned for internment. Almost three thousand civilians – men, women and children – were gathered in the grounds of the University of Santo Tomas in central Manila. The Santo Tomas camp, through which more than three thousand people passed over three years, was the largest internment camp for civilians in the Philippines. In the first months the Japanese did not even provide food there: the internees bought it with Red Cross loans and with the help of Filipinos who passed food through the fence.

Towards the Filipinos the new authorities combined threat with promise. On 5 January a warning appeared on the front page of the Manila Tribune that anyone who injured or attempted to injure a Japanese soldier would be shot, and that if the culprit were not found, the Japanese would take ten influential residents of the neighbourhood as hostages. At the same time Japanese propaganda presented the war as the liberation of Asia from white rule and invited the Filipinos to help build the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The administration was entrusted to the Filipino officials who had stayed in the city. On leaving, Quezon had left his executive secretary, Jorge Vargas, in Manila as mayor of Greater Manila and instructed him to protect the population. On 23 January, by order of the Japanese commander-in-chief, the Philippine Executive Commission was set up with Vargas at its head – a provisional government drawn largely from the pre-war elite. Where protecting the population ended and collaboration began was a question Filipinos went on arguing about long after the war.

Homma, an Anglophile who had served for years in Britain, tried to pursue a relatively mild policy towards the Filipinos, which drew criticism from his superiors in Field Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi’s Southern Army. That does not alter the fact that from its first weeks the occupation rested on the violence of the Kempeitai military police, on requisitions and on collective punishment.

The government on Corregidor

The authority of the Commonwealth survived on the island of Corregidor. On 30 December 1941, in front of the entrance to the Malinta Tunnel, Manuel Quezon took the oath of office for his second term as president and Sergio Osmeña for the vice-presidency. The ceremony, briefly interrupted by an air raid, was meant to show that the lawful government had not capitulated. A few days earlier, on 28 December, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had assured the Filipino people by radio that their freedom would be redeemed and their independence established and protected. Yet the help that the Filipinos and the soldiers on Bataan were waiting for could not come. At the Arcadia Conference in Washington, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill confirmed that Germany had to be defeated first, and on 1 January, the day before the Japanese entered Manila, the Declaration by United Nations was signed there. The Philippines did not accede to it until June 1942, by then as a government-in-exile.

The retreat to Bataan

Manila had fallen, but MacArthur’s army had got away. On 2 January, as the Japanese were entering the capital, the American–Filipino forces were holding the Guagua–Porac line north of Bataan, which was meant to cover the approach to the peninsula. For several days the units defending it held off Japanese attacks despite their losses. On the evening of 5 January the 11th and 21st Divisions of the Philippine Army passed through the bottleneck at Layac, where all the roads leading into Bataan converge on a single steel bridge over the Culo River. Shortly before 2 a.m. on 6 January the last tanks crossed and Wainwright had the bridge blown. Throughout 6 January the covering force at Layac, which included the American 31st Infantry Regiment, held off the Japanese under heavy artillery fire, and that night it withdrew into the peninsula. It was then that Sergeant José Calugas, a mess sergeant with a battery of the 88th Field Artillery Regiment of the Philippine Scouts, led volunteers to an abandoned gun and kept it firing under fire, for which he was later awarded the Medal of Honor.

Twice the Japanese threw away the chance of cutting the defenders off from the peninsula. On 2 January, the day Manila was occupied, Homma learned that the 48th Division, his best unit, and most of his air power were to be taken from him for Java, a month earlier than planned. In its place came Lieutenant General Akira Nara’s 65th Brigade, a garrison formation of poorly trained conscripts that its own commander called “totally unfit for combat”. The 14th Army staff put MacArthur’s strength on Bataan at 25,000 men and was convinced that it would only have to finish off broken remnants. In reality some 80,000 soldiers and 26,000 civilian refugees had entered the peninsula.

Place in the war

The capture of Manila on 2 January 1942 was Japan’s first great triumph in the Philippines and gave it the capital, the port and the country’s administration. Strategically, however, the victory was incomplete. As long as the defenders held Bataan and the fortress on Corregidor, Japanese shipping could not use Manila Bay, one of the finest harbours in the Far East. The Japanese plan had envisaged completing the conquest of Luzon in fifty days. The siege of Bataan, which began a few days later, lasted until 9 April, and Corregidor did not surrender until 6 May 1942.

For the people of Manila three years of occupation began. In October 1943 the Japanese proclaimed a formally independent Second Philippine Republic with José Laurel as president, while a guerrilla movement grew in the provinces. The internees of Santo Tomas, emaciated by hunger, were freed by American troops on 3 February 1945. In February and March 1945, during the battle to retake the city, Japanese sailors and soldiers who had resolved to defend the capital against the orders of General Tomoyuki Yamashita committed mass atrocities against the population. By some estimates around 100,000 civilians were killed, and Manila, spared by the war in 1942, lay in ruins. Homma, who had entered it as a victor, was tried in 1946 before an American military commission in the same city, and the first count of the indictment was the bombing of an open city.