The landings at Zambales and Nasugbu

At dawn on 31 January 1945, covered by destroyers and aircraft, landing craft approached the beaches near the small town of Nasugbu in Batangas province, some 70 kilometres south-west of Manila. Troops of Major General Joseph Swing’s US 11th Airborne Division came ashore. Resistance was weak, and that same day the soldiers set off inland towards the mountains separating the coast from the capital.

The landing at Nasugbu was the second of two American landings carried out on Luzon outside Lingayen Gulf at the end of January. Two days earlier, on 29 January, General Charles P. Hall’s XI Corps had landed unopposed on the island’s west coast, in Zambales province, north-west of the Bataan peninsula. The formula found in chronicles of a “second invasion of Luzon on the west coast” in fact combines two separate operations: XI Corps landed on the west coast on 29 January, and on 31 January the 11th Airborne Division came ashore on the south-west coast, on the South China Sea. Both were subsidiary to the main advance, which General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army had been pressing from the north since the landing in Lingayen Gulf on 9 January.

Why further landings

At the end of January the Sixth Army’s XIV Corps was advancing across the central plain of Luzon towards Manila and fighting for the Clark airfields, while I Corps covered the beachhead’s eastern flank against Japanese forces in the mountains. General Douglas MacArthur was pressing for the capital to be taken as quickly as possible: he wanted to free the civilians and prisoners of war held there, to secure the port and Manila Bay and also – as his biographers note – to make a triumphant return as soon as possible to the city he had left in December 1941. Krueger, who did not know the enemy’s intentions and was anxious about his flanks, preferred to advance more cautiously.

The additional landings were meant to solve several problems at once. The landing in Zambales, code-named Mike VII, was to cut the Japanese off from the Bataan peninsula. The American planners remembered that it was there, in 1942, that American and Filipino troops had held out against the Japanese for three months during the Philippines campaign, and they did not want the roles reversed now. XI Corps was also to take the port of Olongapo on Subic Bay, a former US Navy base, and open a supply route eastwards to the plain where XIV Corps was fighting. The landing at Nasugbu, Mike VI, carried out by General Robert Eichelberger’s Eighth Army, was to tie down Japanese forces in southern Luzon and create a second arm of the advance on Manila – from the south.

In reality General Tomoyuki Yamashita had no intention of defending either Bataan or Manila. His main forces had taken up positions in the mountains of northern Luzon, west of the Clark airfields and east of the capital. On the roads across the neck of Bataan and south of Manila, however, he left detachments to delay the American advance.

Zambales: a landing without an enemy

On the morning of 29 January ships of the Seventh Fleet put XI Corps ashore – the 38th Infantry Division and the 34th Infantry Regiment of the 24th Infantry Division, some 30,000 men in all – on beaches near San Antonio and San Narciso. The planned naval bombardment was called off at the last moment, because Filipino guerrillas had sent word that there were no Japanese on the coast. The Zambales guerrilla units, commanded by Captain Ramon Magsaysay, later President of the Philippines, had already taken control of much of the province and welcomed the troops on the beaches. That same day the Americans took San Marcelino airfield, and on 30 January the 34th Regiment entered Olongapo; at the same time Grande Island, which closes the entrance to Subic Bay, was occupied.

The trouble began inland. Route 7, leading east from Olongapo across the neck of Bataan, wound through wooded hills at a spot the Americans called Zig Zag Pass. It was defended by Colonel Sanenobu Nagayoshi’s detachment, numbering about 2,700 men according to the US official history, with well-concealed positions in the jungle. From 31 January the 38th Division spent two weeks fighting its way through these positions, taking heavy losses; its commander, Major General Henry Jones, was relieved by Hall during the fighting. The pass was finally forced only in mid-February.

Nasugbu and the Tagaytay Ridge

The 11th Airborne Division was an unusual formation: smaller than a normal infantry division, made up of glider regiments and a parachute regiment, and lightly armed. Eichelberger, who accompanied the landing in person, had originally been meant to carry out no more than a reconnaissance in force at Nasugbu and to decide on any further advance according to the resistance met. On 31 January the division’s two glider regiments, brought from Leyte, came ashore. When it turned out that the Japanese were not defending the beaches, Eichelberger decided to push on at once.

The division set off inland along Route 17. On 1 and 2 February it ran into Japanese positions in the defile between Mount Aiming and Pico de Loro, which it broke through after heavy fighting. On 3 February the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment was dropped onto the Tagaytay Ridge, which overlooks Lake Taal and the road to Manila, from Douglas C-47 Skytrain aircraft flying from Mindoro – the island taken by the Americans after the landing in December 1944. Some of the paratroopers landed far from the designated drop zone, but the ridge was taken without a fight. The division linked up with the units advancing from the coast and on 4 February reached the southern outskirts of Manila, where it was halted before the Japanese fortifications of the Genko Line.

In connection with the two drives on Manila – the Sixth Army’s from the north and the Eighth Army’s from the south – some historians write of a rivalry between Krueger and Eichelberger which MacArthur is said to have deliberately encouraged in order to speed up the capture of the capital. The race was won by the Sixth Army: on the evening of 3 February the leading elements of the 1st Cavalry Division drove into the northern part of the city and freed more than 3,500 civilians interned in a camp in the grounds of the University of Santo Tomas.

The raid on Cabanatuan

The day before the landing at Nasugbu, during the night of 30–31 January, an action took place behind Japanese lines on the central plain of Luzon that passed into legend. Some 120 men of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci’s 6th Ranger Battalion, supported by scouts of the Alamo Scouts and several hundred Filipino guerrillas under Captain Juan Pajota and Captain Eduardo Joson, marched several dozen kilometres through Japanese-controlled territory and attacked the prisoner-of-war camp near Cabanatuan. It held the last prisoners – mostly Americans, among them survivors of the Bataan Death March and defenders of Corregidor – whom the Japanese had not managed to ship to Japan.

The attack took the guards by surprise, while Pajota’s guerrillas held off at the bridge over the Cabu River the Japanese troops trying to come to the camp’s aid. According to the most frequently cited figures, about 520 people were freed – nearly 490 prisoners of war and several dozen civilians – who, emaciated and sick, were carried to the American lines in carts drawn by water buffalo. The Rangers lost two men killed; Japanese losses, running into hundreds killed, are given very differently in the sources. The Americans were spurred to haste by reports of the Palawan massacre, where in December 1944 Japanese guards had murdered 139 American prisoners, and by fear that the prisoners at Cabanatuan might meet the same fate. The raid on Cabanatuan became one of the most famous rescue operations of the war and a forerunner of others – in Manila and at Los Baños.

Place in the war

The landings at Zambales and Nasugbu opened the race for Manila, but the city itself could not be taken quickly. Contrary to Yamashita’s intentions, the capital was defended by more than ten thousand sailors under Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi. The Battle of Manila, fought from 3 February to 3 March 1945, left the city in ruins, and the massacre committed by Japanese troops against the civilian population, together with the fighting, cost the lives of some hundred thousand Filipinos, according to the most frequently cited estimates. On 23 February units of the 11th Airborne Division and guerrillas freed more than two thousand internees in the Los Baños raid.

After breaking through the defences of Zig Zag Pass, XI Corps cleared the Bataan peninsula in February, and on 16 February American paratroopers and infantry attacked Corregidor, which was secured by the beginning of March. Manila Bay and the port on Subic Bay became bases for further operations, while the fighting against Japanese forces in the mountains of Luzon went on until the end of the war – Yamashita surrendered only on 2 September 1945. For the Filipinos and for MacArthur himself, the return to Bataan and Corregidor three years after the defeat of 1942 had a symbolic dimension: it closed a story that had begun with the largest surrender in the history of the US Army.