The landing on Corregidor

At 8.33 a.m. on 16 February 1945 the first American paratrooper landed on Topside – the highest, western part of the island of Corregidor at the entrance to Manila Bay. After him, more men of Colonel George M. Jones’s 503rd Parachute Regimental Combat Team jumped from Douglas C-47 transport aircraft. Two hours later, at 10.30 a.m., landing craft from Mariveles put ashore the reinforced 3rd Battalion of the 34th Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division, on San José beach at the southern foot of Malinta Hill. It was one of the boldest airborne assaults of the Pacific War: thousands of men were dropped onto two patches of ground the size of a sports field, surrounded by cliffs falling away to the sea.

For the Americans the small, tadpole-shaped island held a special significance. It was from here, in March 1942, that Douglas MacArthur had left the Philippines on President Roosevelt’s orders, and here, on 6 May 1942, after the Japanese landing, that General Jonathan Wainwright had surrendered the fortress and all the American and Filipino forces in the islands. Corregidor – “the Rock” – had been the last major stronghold the United States lost in the first months of the war. Three years later the roles were reversed: now it was the Japanese who were holding out in the tunnels that in 1942 had housed MacArthur’s headquarters and Wainwright’s hospital.

Why Corregidor

By February 1945 the fighting on Luzon – the most important part of the Philippines campaign – was in its fifth week. Since 3 February the Americans had been fighting in Manila, where in the Battle of Manila Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi’s naval troops were defending the city house by house. The port of Manila, however, was useless as long as Japanese guns on Corregidor and the neighbouring islets guarded the entrance to the bay. Meanwhile General Charles Hall’s XI Corps, which had landed in Zambales at the end of January, had cleared the Bataan peninsula; on 15 February one of its units took the port of Mariveles at the southern tip of the peninsula, only a few kilometres from Corregidor.

The island was less than 6 km long. Its broad western part, Topside, rose to about 150 metres and dominated every spot where a landing from the sea was possible. In 1942 the Japanese had paid for their landing on the island’s eastern “tail” with heavy losses. The staff of General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army therefore concluded that Topside had to be taken from the air, simultaneously with a landing from the sea. The plan was risky: the only drop zones were the former parade ground and the golf course beside the ruined barracks, both surrounded by buildings, bomb craters and cliffs. The planners were prepared to accept up to 20 per cent casualties in the jump itself; Colonel Jones reckoned with as many as 50 per cent. An intelligence assessment also favoured this solution: according to MacArthur’s staff, the island was defended by only some 850 Japanese.

The Japanese garrison

That estimate was – as the US official history (Robert Ross Smith, Triumph in the Philippines) admits – little more than guesswork. In reality there were more than 5,000 Japanese on Corregidor, most of them sailors; Japanese estimates cited in the literature put the figure as high as about 6,700. The island and the neighbouring forts at the entrance to the bay were held by Captain Akira Itagaki’s Manila Bay Entrance Force, subordinate to Iwabuchi in Manila. Itagaki expected a seaborne landing and placed his strongest positions in the ravines running down to the beaches and in the tunnels beneath Malinta Hill, where huge quantities of ammunition were also stored. He did not anticipate an attack from the air.

The preparations took several weeks. From 23 January heavy bombers, including Consolidated B-24 Liberators, bombed the island daily, and from 13 February cruisers and destroyers joined the bombardment, under whose cover minesweepers cleared the waters around the island. On 14 February a Japanese shell hit the destroyer USS Fletcher; the sailor Elmer C. Bigelow, who fought a fire on board and was badly injured in doing so, died the next day and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The bombing destroyed the Japanese communications centre on Topside, which proved crucial in the first hours of the battle.

The jump on Topside

The paratroopers took off from airfields on Mindoro, where the 503rd Parachute Regimental Combat Team had been based since the December landing. After dawn on 16 February Liberators and Douglas A-20 attack bombers pounded the island once more. The first lift – some thousand men of the 3rd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, artillerymen with light 75 mm howitzers, engineers and part of the staff with Colonel Jones – jumped in sticks of six to eight men, because each aircraft had to make several passes over the narrow drop zones. The wind was blowing at more than 30 km/h, and the first aircraft dropped men from 160–180 metres instead of the planned 120. Many paratroopers were carried onto the cliffs, onto the rubble of buildings or onto the narrow beaches below the rocks; some later had to be evacuated by boat from below Wheeler Point.

Even so, surprise was complete. The Japanese, stunned by the bombing, probably took the approaching C-47s for more bombers and stayed in their shelters. On Topside the paratroopers encountered only a few small groups with machine guns. By 9.45 a.m. the first lift was on the ground and assembled. One of the “stray” drops had particular consequences. Captain Itagaki, warned of landing craft gathering off Mariveles, had gone out with a small guard to an observation post near Breakwater Point to watch the expected seaborne landing. It was onto this very post that the wind carried 25–30 paratroopers. A brief fight ensued in which eight Japanese were killed, among them – according to the US official history – Itagaki himself. The Japanese garrison, already cut off from communications, lost its commander in the first hour of the battle and fought to the end without unified command.

At 12.40 p.m., 25 minutes late, the second lift jumped: the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd with more artillerymen. It landed more accurately, although it now came under fire from Japanese machine guns. In all, some 2,050 men jumped onto Corregidor on 16 February. According to Smith, casualties in the jump came to about 280 men, or 14 per cent – fewer than the planners had expected: some 20 were killed by fire or by hitting buildings, some 210 were injured on landing and some 50 were wounded in the air. Because resistance proved weaker than expected, Jones asked for the third drop to be cancelled. On 17 February the 1st Battalion of the 503rd came over to the island by landing craft, and only supplies were dropped from the air.

The landing on Bottomside

The seaborne force set out from Mariveles. At 10.30 a.m. the first waves of Lieutenant Colonel Edward M. Postlethwait’s 3rd Battalion, 34th Infantry, went ashore on San José beach on Bottomside – the low neck of land linking Topside with Malinta Hill and the island’s eastern “tail”. The first waves met no resistance; then fire began from the ravines and cliffs. Vehicles ran onto mines: a medium tank, a self-propelled howitzer and an anti-tank gun were blown up. Nevertheless, by 11 a.m. Companies K and L had taken the crest of Malinta Hill, losing only two killed and six wounded in the landing itself.

On Malinta Hill the Americans found themselves literally on the roof of the Japanese fortress. Hundreds of Japanese – by later estimates as many as some 2,000 – were sheltering in the tunnels beneath them. On the very first night the battalion beat off small counter-attacks from the tunnel mouths; 10 Americans and about 35 Japanese were killed. On 17 February the infantry cleared the roads across Middleside so that the paratroopers could evacuate their wounded and receive supplies. From then on the fighting turned into the laborious capture, or sealing with explosives, of one cave, bunker and gallery after another. Over the following nights the Japanese repeatedly attacked Topside and Malinta in banzai charges; the strongest of them, during the night of 18–19 February, cost them – by American count – nearly 500 dead.

Who landed on Corregidor

Both parts of the assault were placed under a single command – Colonel Jones’s Rock Force – which after landing came under General Hall’s XI Corps. According to the US official history, it consisted solely of United States Army units: the 503rd Parachute Regimental Combat Team and the reinforced battalion of the 34th Infantry, later relieved by a battalion of the 151st Infantry. The frequently repeated statement that “American paratroopers and Philippine Commonwealth troops” landed on the island is therefore a simplification. Filipinos were fighting alongside the Americans all over Luzon at the time – especially in guerrilla units – and some of the defenders of Corregidor in 1942 had belonged to the Philippine Commonwealth Army. The available sources, however, record no participation of Filipino units in the assault of 16 February itself.

Significance

The assault of 16 February decided the island’s fate within a few hours: the Americans held Topside and Malinta, and the Japanese garrison had lost its commander and its communications. The price was that the battle broke up into dozens of separate clashes with men determined to die, hidden in a labyrinth of tunnels and caves. It went on for another ten days, until 26 February, and ended with a series of suicidal explosions in the underground ammunition stores that killed hundreds of Japanese and dozens of Americans. By the beginning of March Manila Bay was open to Allied shipping, and on 2 March MacArthur returned to Corregidor and had the American flag raised on a surviving flagpole.

The recapture of Corregidor mattered above all symbolically and logistically. For MacArthur and the veterans of 1942 it wiped away the disgrace of the surrender; for the Sixth Army it was a precondition for using the port of Manila, where fighting was still going on. The operation also went down in the history of airborne forces as an example of a successful jump onto extremely difficult terrain, in which surprise and coordination with the seaborne landing decided the outcome. At the same time it showed how wrong intelligence estimates could be: instead of 850 defenders, the Americans met several times as many. Defence from underground tunnels, fighting to the last man and the almost complete absence of prisoners were to be repeated on a much larger scale in the weeks that followed on Iwo Jima, where US Marines landed on 19 February.