All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [361]
Leyte island was secured at the end of December; thereafter, on 9 January 1945 US forces landed on the main Philippine island of Luzon, to begin a campaign which lasted for the rest of the war, against Japanese forces directed with stubborn skill by Gen. Tomoyoki Yamashita, the 1942 ‘Tiger of Malaya’. Manila, the capital, was razed to the ground during weeks of fighting, in which forces of Japanese sailors fought almost to the last man. These men also committed massacres of civilians which lacked the smallest military purpose, but demonstrated Japan’s determination to impose death upon every victim within reach, often accompanied by rape and mutilation, before meeting its own fate.
Many Filipinos who escaped Japanese savagery perished under American artillery fire; Manila was reduced to rubble, making a mockery of its liberation. Up to 100,000 of its citizens died in the ruins of their capital, alongside a thousand Americans and 16,000 Japanese. Yamashita retreated to the mountainous, densely forested centre of the island, where he sustained a shrinking perimeter until August 1945. The US Eighth Army under Eichelberger continued successive amphibious operations throughout the Philippines until the end of the war, occupying islands one by one, after battles that were sometimes fierce and costly. MacArthur could claim that he had reconquered the archipelago, and inflicted defeat on its Japanese occupiers. But since those soldiers could not have been transported to any battlefield where they might influence the war’s outcome, they were as much prisoners in the Philippines as was Hitler’s large, futile garrison in the German-occupied British Channel Islands.
‘The Philippines campaign was a mistake,’ says modern Japanese historian Kazutoshi Hando, who lived through the war. ‘MacArthur did it for his own reasons. Japan had lost the war once the Marianas were gone.’ The Filipino people whom MacArthur professed to love paid the price for his egomania in lost lives – something approaching half a million perished by combat, massacre, famine and disease – and wrecked homes. It was as great a misfortune for them as for the Allied war effort that neither President Roosevelt nor the US chiefs of staff could contain MacArthur’s ambitions within a smaller compass of folly. In 1944, America’s advance to victory over Japan was inexorable, but the misjudgements of the South-West Pacific Supreme Commander disfigured its achievement.
Germany Besieged
In the first days of September 1944, much of the Allied leadership – with the notable exception of Winston Churchill – supposed their nations within weeks of completing the conquest of the Third Reich. Many Germans were of the same opinion, making grim preparations for the moment when invaders would sweep their country. A German NCO named Pickers wrote to his wife in Saarlouis: ‘You and I are both living in constant mortal danger. I have written finis to my life, for I doubt if I’ll come out of this alive. So I’ll say goodbye to you and the children.’ Soldier Josef Roller’s father wrote to him from Trier: ‘I have buried all the china and silver and the big carpet in the stables. The small carpet is in Annie’s cellar. I have bricked in Annie’s china where the wine used to be. So if we should have gone you will find it all, but be careful in digging, so that nothing gets broken. So, Josef, all the best and keep your head down, fondest greetings and kisses from us all, your papa.’
The German people understood that if the Russians broke through in the east, all was lost. ‘Then there’ll be nothing left but to take poison,’ a Hamburg neighbour told Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg, ‘quite calmly,