MacArthur announces the liberation of the Philippines

On 5 July 1945 General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Manila issued a communiqué that opened with the sentence: “The entire Philippine Islands are now liberated and the Philippine campaign can be regarded as virtually closed.” For MacArthur it was a moment of personal triumph. Three years earlier, after escaping from besieged Corregidor, he had promised in Australia: “I came through and I shall return”, while the soldiers and Filipino allies he had left behind on the islands went into Japanese captivity after the surrender of Corregidor.

The statement found in war chronologies that MacArthur “announced the liberation of the Philippines” is accurate as to the date and the content of the communiqué. It must be added at once, however, that the announcement did not end the fighting. In northern Luzon tens of thousands of General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s soldiers were still holding out, and on Mindanao and other southern islands the hunt for broken Japanese units went on. The last of them laid down their arms only after Japan’s capitulation.

The communiqué of 5 July

The communiqué was a characteristic MacArthur summary of the whole campaign. According to its text, an area of 115,600 square miles (about 300,000 km²) with a population of 17 million had been liberated. MacArthur claimed that the Japanese had committed 23 divisions to the Philippines, totalling some 450,000 men, and that all of them had been “practically annihilated” by 17 American divisions. He called this one of the rare instances in history in which, in a long campaign, a numerically weaker army had completely destroyed a larger opponent. He also listed the campaign’s objectives: splitting the Japanese empire in two, gaining bases for further operations, cutting Japan off from the raw materials of South-East Asia, liberating the Filipinos and freeing prisoners of war and interned civilians.

Historians have pointed out what the communiqué left out. It made no mention of the fact that Japan had been cut off from its supplies largely by the American navy and air forces, not just by the army in the Philippines. Little space was given to the Filipino guerrillas, who throughout the years of occupation had gathered intelligence and fought, and who by 1945 were operating almost like regular units. The figures for Japanese forces and losses – like those in many communiqués from MacArthur’s headquarters – were rounded in the Americans’ favour.

The announcement coincided with a reorganisation of the forces. On 30 June 1945 General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army, which had been fighting on Luzon since the landing in Lingayen Gulf in January, ended its operations there and was withdrawn to prepare for the invasion of Japan. From 1 July responsibility for Luzon passed to General Robert Eichelberger’s Eighth Army, which had already been conducting the fighting in the southern Philippines. In the language of headquarters its task was now merely “mopping up”.

The road to July 1945

The campaign began on 20 October 1944 with the landing on Leyte. After the Battle of Leyte and the occupation of Mindoro, the Americans landed on Luzon on 9 January 1945. In February and early March they fought hard for Manila, ending with the capture of the last Japanese strongpoints in the ruined city. At the same time they recovered Bataan and Corregidor, and on 27 February MacArthur handed civil authority to the President of the Philippine Commonwealth, Sergio Osmeña.

In the spring the Eighth Army carried out a series of landings on the central and southern islands – Palawan, Panay, Negros, Cebu, Bohol and Mindanao. On Luzon the American forces fought three Japanese groupings: Shimbu in the mountains east of Manila, Kembu west of the central Luzon plain, and the strongest, Shobu, commanded by Yamashita himself in the mountains of the north. By the end of June Balete Pass, Baguio and the Cagayan Valley had been taken, and organised Japanese defence on most of the islands had been broken.

A war that went on

The reality in the mountains of northern Luzon looked different from the communiqué. The remnants of the Shobu Group – according to American estimates at the time more than 50,000 men, in fact more – were holding out in the Cordillera Central, in the Asin valley and around Kiangan in Ifugao province, where Yamashita had set up his last command post. They were fought by the American 6th, 32nd and 37th Infantry Divisions and by Filipino guerrillas of Colonel Russell Volckmann’s USAFIP-NL. The Japanese soldiers, worn down by hunger, malaria and dysentery, were no longer capable of attacking, but they defended themselves stubbornly, and the fighting in July and August continued to cost lives on both sides.

On Mindanao the Japanese 30th Division and other units withdrew into the jungle of the Agusan valley and the mountains of the island’s interior, where they were pursued by Americans and guerrillas. It was the same on Negros, Cebu and the smaller islands. Eichelberger, whose army had already taken over the “mopping up” of Leyte from the Sixth Army once the end of organised resistance there had been announced, later recalled bitterly that his soldiers had fought and died in operations officially described as no more than “mopping up” a finished campaign.

Only Japan’s capitulation brought the fighting to a final end. After Japan announced its acceptance of the surrender terms on 15 August, Yamashita made contact with the Americans; on 2 September he came down from the mountains near Kiangan, and on 3 September at Baguio he signed the instrument of surrender of the Japanese forces in the Philippines in the presence of General Jonathan Wainwright, newly freed from captivity. On Luzon alone some 50,000 Japanese soldiers laid down their arms, and on Mindanao about 22,000 soldiers and nearly 12,000 Japanese civilians. Individual soldiers hid in the jungle for years afterwards; the best known of them, Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, surrendered on the island of Lubang only in 1974.

The cost of liberation

The casualty figures for the Philippines campaign of 1944–1945 come mainly from American studies and are estimates. According to the official history of the US Army, the Sixth Army’s ground forces lost about 8,300 killed and nearly 30,000 wounded on Luzon alone up to 30 June; with Leyte, the southern islands and the navy’s losses to kamikaze attacks, the number of Americans killed ran to well over ten thousand. According to American estimates the Japanese lost between about 190,000 and more than 200,000 killed and dead from other causes on Luzon, and in the campaign as a whole – counting Leyte and the southern islands – about 300,000 or more; most of them died not in combat but of hunger and disease in the isolated groupings. The losses of the Filipino guerrillas were never precisely counted.

The highest price was paid by the civilian population. In the fighting for Manila and the accompanying Manila massacre – according to frequently cited estimates – some 100,000 civilians were killed, and on Luzon as a whole 120,000–140,000. Together with the victims of repression, hunger and disease during the years of occupation, the number of Filipinos who died during the war is estimated at about a million, though these figures are highly uncertain. Manila is often named, alongside Warsaw, as one of the most devastated Allied capitals of the Second World War.

The Philippine Commonwealth and the road to independence

Liberation restored the authority of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, an autonomous territory of the United States that an act of 1934 had promised independence after a ten-year transition period. Osmeña’s government took over the administration of one island after another, and in June 1945 the Philippine Congress met for the first time since 1941. The state, however, had to deal with enormous destruction, hunger and the problem of collaboration: many politicians, including Manuel Roxas, had served in the puppet Second Philippine Republic, which was dissolved in August 1945. MacArthur defended Roxas, regarding him as a member of the resistance. The conflict with the communist Hukbalahap guerrillas, whom the Americans were disarming, also remained unresolved.

On 4 July 1946, almost exactly a year after MacArthur’s communiqué, the Philippines gained independence, and the first President of the Republic of the Philippines was Roxas, who had defeated Osmeña in the election of April 1946.

Place in the war

The announcement of the liberation of the Philippines was above all of political and propaganda significance: it closed the chapter of defeat of 1941–1942 and allowed MacArthur to turn his attention to the next objective. The Philippines, and Luzon in particular, became a great staging base for Operation Downfall, the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. Krueger’s Sixth Army was to land on Kyushu in the autumn of 1945, and Eichelberger’s Eighth Army was to take part in the second stage, the landing on Honshu in the spring of 1946. The invasion never took place, because Japan capitulated in August, and on 2 September MacArthur accepted its surrender in Tokyo Bay.

The communiqué of 5 July also became an example of MacArthur’s style of command, with his readiness to proclaim victories before the fighting had really ended. Yamashita’s plan to tie down American forces in the mountains of Luzon for as long as possible largely succeeded: his army was not defeated before the end of the war, though it paid a terrible price for this and could not change the war’s outcome.