The landing on Palawan

On 28 February 1945 units of Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger’s US Eighth Army landed near Puerto Princesa on Palawan – a long, narrow island on the western edge of the Philippine archipelago. The landing, carried out by the 186th Infantry Regiment of the 41st Infantry Division, met no resistance. It was the first step in the campaign to liberate the southern Philippines, and it was also meant to give the Allies an airfield on the South China Sea.

Many chronologies of the war record under this date that “American and Filipino forces invaded Palawan, an island of the Philippines”. The date is correct. It is worth adding only that the troops who went ashore were American, while Filipino guerrillas – few in number and poorly armed on Palawan – joined the operations only in the following days, as guides and scouts.

Why Palawan

After the landing in Lingayen Gulf in January 1945, the main forces of the US Sixth Army were fighting on Luzon, and from 3 February also for Manila. General Douglas MacArthur, however, had intended from the outset to liberate the whole archipelago, not just its most important island. The MUSKETEER II plan of September 1944 provided that after Luzon the Eighth Army would take the central and southern islands, and that the South West Pacific forces would then strike at the Dutch East Indies.

According to the US Army’s official history of the campaign, written by Robert Ross Smith, Palawan mattered above all for its airfields. These lay some 400 km south-west of the bases on Mindoro and much further west than Clark Field. Aircraft based there could patrol the shipping lanes across the South China Sea by which Japan brought oil and raw materials from the East Indies, and in future support the invasion of Borneo and its oilfields. That is why on 6 February 1945 – three days after the Americans entered Manila – MacArthur ordered the seizure of Palawan, and a week later issued instructions for operations on the Zamboanga Peninsula of Mindanao and in the Sulu Archipelago.

In American studies the Palawan operation bears the code name Victor III, as one of a series of Victor operations against the southern islands of the archipelago.

The landing at Puerto Princesa

The land operations were entrusted to Major General Jens Doe’s 41st Infantry Division, which formed the Palawan Force under its assistant commander, Brigadier General Harold Haney. Its core was Colonel Oliver Newman’s 186th Regimental Combat Team; together with anti-aircraft units, airfield construction engineers and services, the force numbered some 8,150 men. The troops embarked on Mindoro aboard the ships of Rear Admiral William Fechteler’s task group. On the evening of 26 February the convoy put to sea, escorted by Rear Admiral Ralph Riggs’s cruisers and destroyers.

The coast of Palawan, fringed with sandbanks, coral reefs and mangrove forests, was unfavourable for a landing; Puerto Princesa Bay itself lacked beaches suitable for ordinary landing craft, so the first waves went in on amphibious tracked vehicles. On 28 February, after a half-hour naval bombardment, the first waves of the 186th Regiment landed on the north shore of the bay at about 8.50 a.m. At about 10.30 a.m. the troops took the town of Puerto Princesa, and before noon the two airstrips to the east of it. According to Smith, the regiment did not encounter a single Japanese that day; on 1 March, too, as it combed the lowland around the town, it found no enemy. The engineers immediately began work on the airfield.

Traces of the massacre

At Puerto Princesa the Americans reached the place where, in a prisoner-of-war camp whose inmates were building an airfield for the Japanese, the Palawan massacre had taken place. On 14 December 1944 Japanese soldiers, convinced that an American landing was imminent, drove 150 prisoners into air-raid shelters, doused them with petrol and set them alight; eleven survived. The accounts of the escapees, evacuated with the help of guerrillas in January 1945, were already known to the American command, and news of the crime influenced the decisions to rescue prisoners on Luzon – from the Cabanatuan raid of 30 January to the raid on Los Baños on 23 February.

Now the crime could be documented. In March soldiers of an American quartermaster company carried out an exhumation on the camp site and found the remains of 79 victims; the remains were later buried in a mass grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis. The evidence gathered at the time was used after the war in trials before American military tribunals.

Clearing the island

According to Smith, the Japanese garrison of Palawan numbered some 1,750 men: two rifle companies of the 102nd Division, about 900 air force personnel and about 250 sailors. Instead of defending the coast, it withdrew into the mountains. The only organised resistance the Americans met was in the hills a dozen or so kilometres north-west of Puerto Princesa, where between 3 and 8 March units of the 186th Regiment took two or three stubbornly defended strongpoints.

After that the operations on Palawan turned into a series of land patrols and landings carried out by Americans and Filipino guerrillas on an island more than 400 km long. The Japanese avoided combat and fought only when cornered, so the greatest obstacles were the trackless terrain and the distances. On 9 March the Americans took the island of Dumaran, on 9–17 April Coron and Busuanga between Palawan and Mindoro, and on 12–21 April Balabac and Pandanan off the south-western tip of the island. By July, when they were relieved on Palawan by units of the 93rd Division, the Americans had lost, according to Smith, about 10 killed and 45 wounded; the Japanese 890 killed or found dead and 20 taken prisoner.

The airfield that was too late for Zamboanga

The construction of the air base went more slowly than planned. The air forces had counted on a fighter strip being ready on Palawan by 5 March to cover the landing at Zamboanga. The engineers of the Thirteenth Air Force found, however, that the ground around Puerto Princesa compacted poorly, and instead of building a new strip they extended the Japanese concrete runway. The airfield became operational only on 20 March – too late to support the landing on Mindanao.

Later Palawan fulfilled its purpose. Bombers based there operated over wide areas of the South China Sea and attacked targets on the coasts of French Indochina and southern China, while navy patrol aircraft stationed at Puerto Princesa hunted Japanese shipping. Aircraft from Palawan also supported the fighting in eastern Mindanao and on Borneo. Smith judged that although the war ended before the base had realised its full potential, its strategic value was worth the small price paid for it.

Place in the war

The landing on Palawan opened the campaign for the southern Philippines. The day before had seen the restoration of the Philippine Commonwealth government in Manila, where the fighting was drawing to a close – after the recapture of Corregidor on 26 February the Americans controlled the entrance to Manila Bay. On Luzon, however, the main forces of General Tomoyuki Yamashita were holding out in the mountains, and the Battle of Luzon would last until the end of the war.

On 10 March 1945 the 41st Division landed on the Zamboanga Peninsula, and in the following weeks the Eighth Army made landings on Panay, Cebu, Negros, Bohol and in the Sulu Archipelago, and in April on Mindanao. MacArthur undertook most of these operations on his own initiative, without an explicit directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which some historians criticise as a dispersal of forces. From the airfields on Palawan and at Zamboanga, aircraft supported the Australian landings on Borneo from May to July 1945 – at Tarakan, in Brunei Bay and at Balikpapan.