The recapture of Corregidor

On 26 February 1945, shortly after 11 a.m., a huge explosion shook the eastern “tail” of the island of Corregidor. Japanese troops hidden in an underground arsenal beneath Monkey Point had blown up the ammunition stored there. Where a small hill had stood there was now a hollow; rock fragments fell almost a kilometre away on Topside and on a destroyer lying 2 kilometres offshore, and an American medium tank was hurled several dozen metres. According to the US Army’s official history (Robert Ross Smith, Triumph in the Philippines), the blast killed more than 200 Japanese and about 50 Americans and wounded some 150. It was the last organised act of resistance: at 4 p.m. paratroopers of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment reached the eastern tip of the island. Ten days after the landing of 16 February, the fortress that the Americans and Filipinos had lost in May 1942 was back in American hands.

The recapture of Corregidor is sometimes credited to “American and Filipino forces”, but with one qualification. According to American sources, Colonel George M. Jones’s Rock Force, which fought on the island, consisted of US Army units – the 503rd Regimental Combat Team, a battalion of the 34th Infantry Regiment and a battalion of the 151st Infantry Regiment that relieved it. Filipinos were fighting shoulder to shoulder with Americans all over Luzon at the time, including at Los Baños, but these sources record no part played by Filipino units in the fighting on Corregidor itself.

Ten days on the Rock

The first day brought the Americans swift success: the paratroopers took Topside and the infantry Malinta Hill, and the Japanese commander, Captain Akira Itagaki of the Imperial Navy, was killed in a chance clash with a group of paratroopers blown off course by the wind. The garrison, however – not 850 men, as intelligence had assumed, but more than 5,000, most of them sailors – did not surrender. Without a unified command it fought in scattered groups from caves, bunkers and ravines, going over to counter-attacks at night.

The most dangerous of these came on the night of 18/19 February. According to Smith, shortly after 2 a.m. about 40 Japanese blew themselves up together with an ammunition dump near Breakwater Point, killing or wounding 15–20 paratroopers who occupied a building above it. Almost simultaneously nearly 400 sailors attacked from Cheney Ravine and from near Wheeler Point at the south-western end of Topside; some of them got as far as the barracks and were driven out only after 8 a.m. Accounts by veterans of the 503rd put the start of the fighting at 10.30 p.m. on 18 February and speak of about 500 attackers, whose assault was held off for several hours by some 50 men of F Company by the light of flares fired from ships. That day cost Rock Force more than 30 killed and 75 wounded, and the Japanese – by American count – nearly 500 dead. The paratroopers named the place “Banzai Point”. The first three prisoners were also taken then. It was the last major Japanese attack on Topside; the last organised resistance in the western part of the island died out on 23 February.

On Malinta Hill the 3rd Battalion, 34th Infantry Regiment, beat off sorties every night from the Malinta Tunnel and its side galleries, which in 1942 had housed the headquarters of Douglas MacArthur and then the command post and hospital of the defenders. The Americans feared that the Japanese would blow up the tons of ammunition stored in the tunnels. This happened on the night of 21/22 February. At 9.30 p.m. a deafening explosion shook the hill: flames shot out of the tunnel entrances, fissures opened on the slopes, and a landslide buried six men of A Company alive. Smith surmises that the Japanese – an estimated 2,000 men in the tunnels – had planned a controlled explosion under cover of which they would attack or break out to the east, but that the blast got out of control and killed an unknown number of their own men. Several hundred nevertheless managed to get through to the tail of the island. On the night of 23/24 February further explosions shook the hill, which the Americans took to be mass suicides by the soldiers hiding in the tunnels. According to some accounts, engineers afterwards poured petrol into the galleries and set it alight.

The attack on the tail and the explosion at Monkey Point

On 24 February, after an exceptionally heavy bombardment from the air, from the sea and by their own howitzers, the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 503rd advanced eastwards across the narrow, low-lying part of the island beyond Malinta Hill. They met their first serious resistance at Engineer Point, and then at Infantry Point on the north shore, where some 600 Japanese had gathered for a counter-attack; according to Smith, half of them were killed by artillery and infantry fire before the attack had properly got going. By the evening of 24 February the Americans held the whole island except for the last three kilometres of the tail; the next day they advanced another kilometre, and by evening their line ran from Cavalry Point to Monkey Point. That afternoon many Japanese tried to escape by swimming to Bataan or to the neighbouring islet of Caballo; those who refused to surrender were shot by gunners on PT boats, engineer landing craft and aircraft.

Meanwhile the exhausted 3rd Battalion, 34th Infantry, had to leave the island – the 24th Infantry Division was preparing on Mindoro for operations in the southern Philippines. It was replaced by the 2nd Battalion, 151st Infantry Regiment, of the 38th Division, brought over from Mariveles. On 26 February came the explosion at Monkey Point. The blast also destroyed an M4 Sherman tank supporting the attack, killing most of its crew, and landslides buried soldiers of both sides. The battalion surgeon, who spent an hour and a half evacuating the wounded, recalled that when he had finished he sat down on a rock and wept. The cause of the explosion is uncertain: most authors regard it as a deliberate suicidal demolition of the arsenal, while some accounts link it to fire from an American tank directed at a sealed tunnel entrance.

The toll

By the afternoon of 26 February organised resistance on Corregidor had ceased. Over the following days the paratroopers hunted down the last groups of Japanese in the shoreline caves and blew them up, working in haste because the 503rd was due back on Mindoro by 10 March. The end of the fighting is usually dated to 26 February, although Major General Charles Hall and Colonel Jones fixed the official end of the operation only on 2 March. By that day Rock Force had lost – according to Smith’s tally – 210 killed, 450 wounded, 340 injured in accidents (mainly during the jump) and 5 missing, about a thousand men in all.

Japanese losses were almost total. The Americans counted some 4,500 dead and took only about 20 prisoners; another 200 or so Japanese were said to have died trying to swim away, and at least 500 were probably buried in caves and tunnels. According to Japanese estimates cited in the literature, there were some 6,700 men on the island, of whom a few dozen survived. The last group of about 20 Japanese soldiers, hiding in the tunnels, came out and surrendered only on 1 January 1946. The defenders, brought up in the spirit of bushidō and convinced that captivity was a disgrace, preferred to die or take their own lives rather than surrender – which is why a few square kilometres of rock were fought over until almost the entire garrison had been wiped out.

Place in the war

The capture of Corregidor opened Manila Bay. At the beginning of March Allied ships could enter the harbour, although in Manila itself, fought over since 3 February, the Japanese were still holding out in Intramuros and the government buildings – the Battle of Manila ended only on 3 March. The remaining forts at the entrance to the bay were taken in March and April; the concrete “battleship” of Fort Drum on the islet of El Fraile was captured by the Americans by pumping a mixture of oil and petrol into its interior and setting it alight.

On 2 March 1945 MacArthur, who had left the island three years earlier, returned to Corregidor. He arrived by PT boat, just as he had departed in March 1942, accompanied by the officers who had shared those days with him (the “Bataan Gang”). Colonel Jones reported to him: “Sir, I present you Fortress Corregidor.” MacArthur, pointing to the surviving flagpole, ordered the American flag to be run up it and said that no enemy should ever haul it down again. For him, for the veterans of Bataan and Corregidor, and for the thousands of prisoners of 1942, many of whom had died in the camps, this modest ceremony closed the chapter of humiliation from the beginning of the war. For the Japanese the struggle for Corregidor was one of the first examples of a defence fought to the end from underground tunnels – the kind of defence that the garrison of Iwo Jima was conducting on a much larger scale in almost the same days.