The landing on Mindoro

On 15 December 1944, less than two months after the landing on Leyte, American troops went ashore on Mindoro, a mountainous island lying just south of Luzon. Not a single shot was fired on the beaches near San Jose, in the south-western corner of the island. Mindoro was not an end in itself: the aim was to secure ground for airfields from which fighters could cover the great invasion of Luzon planned for Lingayen Gulf. Although on land the operation resembled an exercise, at sea and in the air it was paid for in blood – before the landing force had even reached its objective, a suicide pilot struck the task group’s flagship.

The landing was preceded and covered by carrier strikes of Admiral William Halsey’s Third Fleet against the airfields of Luzon. From the morning of 14 December aircraft of the fast carriers attacked Japanese bases north of Manila. Among them was Air Group 80 from the carrier USS Ticonderoga, which, according to war chronicles, flew seven strikes that day against Japanese positions in northern Luzon.

Why Mindoro

After the landing on Leyte in October 1944, General Douglas MacArthur wanted to shift the weight of operations to Luzon as quickly as possible – the largest island of the archipelago, home to Manila and to the main Japanese army in the Philippines. For an invasion of Luzon, however, he needed land-based air power. The airfields being built on Leyte were a disappointment: monsoon rains turned the runways into mud, and the fighting for Leyte dragged on far longer than expected. The carriers of the US Navy could cover a landing for only a few days, and from the end of October Japanese suicide pilots were attacking American ships with growing success, as the kamikaze attacks on the carriers in November demonstrated.

Mindoro, the third-largest island of the Philippines, was suitable as a springboard for a simple reason: Lingayen Gulf, on the west coast of Luzon, lay within fighter range of its south-western tip. The island itself was uninviting – mountainous, covered in jungle, with rain almost every day and malaria everywhere. The best ground for airfields lay in the north-east, but there the weather was worse and the distance to the Japanese bases on Luzon dangerously short. The planners therefore chose the area around the small town of San Jose in the south-west, near Mangarin Bay, the island’s best anchorage. According to American intelligence – which proved accurate – the Japanese garrison numbered about a thousand men, including two improvised infantry companies subordinate to divisions stationed on Luzon, together with some two hundred survivors from ships sunk on their way to Leyte.

Postponement from 5 to 15 December

MacArthur had originally set the Mindoro landing for 5 December and the landing in Lingayen Gulf for 20 December. The plan soon fell apart. The Japanese kept sending reinforcements to Leyte, airfield construction on the island was behind schedule, and General George Kenney’s aircraft did not yet control the skies over the central Philippines. The commander of the Seventh Fleet, Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, did not want to send amphibious ships into the confined waters of the Visayas without reliable air cover; at one point he even proposed replacing both operations with a slow island-by-island advance. In the end he agreed to send escort carriers to Mindoro. Under pressure from Kinkaid, Kenney, Halsey and Admiral Chester Nimitz, MacArthur – “with much more reluctance than enthusiasm”, as the American official history puts it – postponed the Mindoro landing by ten days on 30 November, to 15 December. The Luzon landing was later put back to 9 January 1945.

A “blanket” over Luzon

MacArthur entrusted the Mindoro operation to Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army, and Krueger created a separate command for it – the Western Visayan Task Force under Brigadier General William C. Dunckel. Its core consisted of the 19th Regimental Combat Team from the 24th Infantry Division and the independent 503rd Parachute Regimental Combat Team. The paratroopers were originally to be dropped over the island, but there was no room for transport aircraft on crowded Leyte, and in the end they sailed in ships together with the infantry. Since the objective was airfields, the force included an unusually large number of aviation engineers: four American battalions and a construction squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force. In all, some 12,000 combat troops, nearly 6,000 service troops and about 9,500 air force personnel were to be sent to Mindoro. The naval side of the operation was led by Rear Admiral Arthur D. Struble, and the convoy was screened by cruisers, destroyers, old battleships and escort carriers of the Seventh Fleet.

Distant cover was provided by the Third Fleet. Its fast carriers, grouped in Vice Admiral John S. McCain’s Task Force 38, left Ulithi atoll on 11 December and from the morning of 14 December began bombing the airfields of Luzon north of Manila; the bases south of the capital and in the central Philippines were left to the land-based aircraft of the Fifth and Seventh Air Forces. McCain used a new method: instead of individual raids, his aircraft circled over the Japanese airfields without a break, from dawn to dusk, destroying every aircraft that tried to take off. The Americans called this the “big blue blanket”. Part of the “blanket” was Air Group 80 from the Ticonderoga, equipped with, among others, Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters, which had been attacking targets in the Philippines since November. The strikes lasted three days, until 16 December; the task force then withdrew eastwards to refuel. According to figures cited in the American official history, from the beginning of December Allied aircraft destroyed some 450 Japanese aircraft in the Philippines, of which the Third Fleet claimed nearly 270 – though these were pilots’ claims, usually inflated.

Kamikaze over the Mindanao Sea

The convoy carrying the Western Visayan Task Force left Leyte Gulf on 12 December, passed through the Surigao Strait at night and headed west across the Mindanao Sea. Japanese aircraft shadowed it from the morning of 13 December but held off their attack, not knowing where it was bound. In the afternoon, off the south-eastern coast of Negros, a group of ten naval aircraft from the airfield on Cebu – three of them kamikaze – caught up with the force. One pilot came in low over the water, undetected by radar, and crashed into the light cruiser USS Nashville, Struble’s flagship – the same ship in which MacArthur had sailed to Leyte in October. The explosion of the bomb and of the ship’s own ammunition wrecked the flag bridge, the communications office and the combat information centre. According to the American official history, more than 130 men were killed, including the chiefs of staff of Struble and Dunckel and the commander of the 310th Bombardment Wing, who was to direct air operations on Mindoro; about 190 were wounded, among them General Dunckel, who suffered burns. The commanders transferred to the destroyer Dashiell, and the Nashville turned back to Leyte. The same afternoon another kamikaze badly damaged the destroyer Haraden.

The next day the Japanese, convinced that the landing was aimed at Panay, Cebu or Negros, searched for the convoy in the wrong place, and aircraft from the escort carriers shot down some thirty machines before they could get close to the ships.

The landing near San Jose

The weather on the morning of 15 December was good. At 7.30 a.m. the 19th and 503rd Regimental Combat Teams began landing on the beaches of Mangarin Bay, while destroyers covered them with gunfire and anti-aircraft fire. No resistance at all was met on land; an observer from one of the engineer brigades wrote that for the beach parties the operation was “practically a manoeuvre”. By the afternoon the troops had established a beachhead line some 11 kilometres inland and taken the pre-war airstrip near San Jose. Unloading went so smoothly that Struble sailed with most of his ships as early as 7 p.m. The Japanese garrison, too weak to face the landing, withdrew into the interior; the stiffest resistance came from some 300 Japanese manning an air-warning post in the north, which was attacked by a company of paratroopers. According to figures cited in the literature, the Japanese lost about 200 killed and 375 wounded on Mindoro, and the rest hid in the mountains, where some of them survived until the end of the war.

The real fighting took place over the water. On 15 December about 25 aircraft from the Clark Field area on Luzon and a dozen or so from around Davao on Mindanao tried to attack the amphibious fleet. Many of the Luzon aircraft were destroyed on the ground by Halsey’s planes, and over Mindoro Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters from Leyte and aircraft from the escort carriers shot down eight of fifteen kamikaze. The others, however, hit two tank landing ships (LSTs), which had to be abandoned and scuttled. The destroyer Moale, which went alongside the burning LST-738, loaded with aviation petrol and ammunition, to rescue survivors, was damaged by the explosions but picked several dozen men out of the water. The destroyer Howorth and the escort carrier Marcus Island suffered lighter damage. By 16 December the air attacks had cost the Americans – mostly sailors – some 155 killed and 235 wounded. On land the Western Visayan Task Force suffered no casualties during this time.

The airfields and the Japanese response

On the very first day engineers of the 1874th Engineer Aviation Battalion and the Australian construction squadron began laying out a new runway, as the airstrip near San Jose could not be enlarged. The first airfield, named Hill, was ready on schedule on 20 December and at once received P-38 fighters and Northrop P-61 Black Widow night fighters. The second, Ellmore, was ready for limited use on 23 December and for regular dry-season operations on 28 December, a week ahead of schedule.

The Japanese grasped the island’s importance belatedly. Around 20 December naval aviation in the Philippines received several dozen aircraft from Taiwan, and on 21 December it resumed attacks on the supply convoys. The Southwest Area Fleet command in Manila also sent a small naval force to Mindoro under Rear Admiral Masatomi Kimura: the heavy cruiser Ashigara, the light cruiser Ōyodo and six destroyers. The force left Cam Ranh Bay in Indochina on 24 December, was spotted by American submarines, and on the evening of 26 December was attacked by more than a hundred aircraft from the new airfields on Mindoro. Even so, at around 11 p.m. the Japanese shelled the beachhead and the airfields for some forty minutes, without doing great damage, and in the roadstead sank a Liberty ship and a PT boat. The Americans lost 26 aircraft – many of them crashed in darkness and bad weather when pilots, unable to land on the shelled runways, tried to reach Leyte. On the Japanese side, bombs and a torpedo from a PT boat sank the destroyer Kiyoshimo, and both cruisers were damaged. It was one of the last sorties of the Japanese surface fleet into Philippine waters. Between 28 December and 4 January 1945 kamikaze sank several more ships carrying ammunition and aviation fuel off Mindoro, and a night raid on 2/3 January destroyed 22 aircraft on the ground; after that, Japanese aviation had to turn its attention to the convoys heading for Luzon.

The guerrillas

War chronicles sometimes state that “Americans and Filipinos” landed on Mindoro. Strictly speaking, the landing force was American (with Australian aviation engineers), whereas the Filipinos played a major part once ashore. On Mindoro, as on the other islands of the archipelago, a Filipino resistance movement had been active since 1942, largely in contact with MacArthur’s headquarters. From 19 December the Western Visayan Task Force patrolled the island’s coasts, rounded up Japanese stragglers, secured places where the Japanese might land reinforcements from Luzon, and set up radar stations, including on small islets offshore. According to the American official history, the Mindoro guerrillas carried out most of these patrols and played a large part in clearing the island. After the Japanese raid Krueger reinforced the beachhead with the rest of the 21st Infantry Regiment, and on 1 January 1945 the task force came under the command of Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger’s Eighth Army. By the end of January ground operations on Mindoro had cost the Americans 16 killed, 71 wounded and 4 missing, not counting the victims of air attacks.

Place in the war

Mindoro was the first step of the Luzon campaign and fulfilled its purpose. Fighters from the Hill and Ellmore airfields covered the convoys sailing towards Lingayen Gulf, and B-24 Liberator bombers from Mindoro attacked Japanese shipping between Taiwan and Luzon and in the South China Sea, helping to cut Japan off from its conquests in South-East Asia. Feints against southern Luzon were also mounted from the island to draw Japanese attention away from the real direction of the attack. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, in command of the defence of the Philippines, had no intention of defending the beaches of Luzon in any case – he was preparing for a long defence in the mountains.

For the fleet, December 1944 proved costly for another reason as well. When Halsey’s carriers withdrew to refuel after the strikes on Luzon, the Third Fleet ran into a typhoon that sank three destroyers and took the lives of some 790 sailors; because of its effects the next series of strikes was called off and the fleet returned to Ulithi. The heavy losses to kamikaze off Mindoro, meanwhile, foreshadowed what awaited the ships on their way to Lingayen in the first days of January 1945.

On 9 January 1945 the Sixth Army landed in Lingayen Gulf, beginning the Battle of Luzon, which lasted until the end of the war. Mindoro remained an important air base and PT-boat base, and in 1945 landings on nearby smaller islands and on Palawan were launched from it. An operation carried out with modest forces and without fighting on the beaches, but paid for with heavy losses at sea, set the pattern of the last year of the war in the Pacific: American superiority on land was already overwhelming, and Japan responded above all with suicide attacks from the air.