Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [171]
Yamashita held out until the end of the war in his mountain fastnesses on Luzon, though the Americans had destroyed most of his forces. By August 1945 his Shobu group had been driven back into a forty-two-square-mile redoubt near Bontoc, and its supplies were almost exhausted. In the last six weeks of the war, these remnants killed some 440 American soldiers and Filipino guerrillas—but themselves lost 13,000 men. The general gave an interview at his headquarters to the Domei News Agency, in which he said—surprisingly to those who suppose all Japanese commanders to have been brutes: “I think Japan has made a big mistake, in the way it has conducted foreign occupations. We lack any experience of this, and it is one of our weaknesses. We simply haven’t tried to understand other societies. Relatively speaking, Japan is poor. We can’t compete scientifically with the West. Nor do we use the skills of our women as we might. They should be educated, albeit differently from men.” For Yamashita and his comrades, however, such revelations of sensitivity came too late. He himself was burdened with the appalling crimes of the Japanese occupiers of the Philippines, and would soon be called to account for them.
It is a striking feature of the Second World War that the populist media of the democracies made stars of some undeserving commanders, who thereafter became hard to sack. MacArthur’s Philippines campaign did little more to advance the surrender of Japan than Slim’s campaign in Burma, and was conducted with vastly less competence. Its principal victims were the Philippine people, and MacArthur’s own military reputation. Before the landing at Leyte, this stood high, probably higher than it deserved, following the conquest of Papua New Guinea. The early blunderings of that campaign were forgotten, and the general received laurels for the daring series of amphibious strokes which achieved victory. In the Philippines, however, instead of achieving the cheap, quick successes he had promised, his forces became entangled in protracted fighting, on terms which suited the Japanese. MacArthur’s contempt for intelligence was a persistent, crippling defect. On Luzon, where he sought to exercise personal field command, his opponent Yamashita displayed a nimbleness in striking contrast to the heavy-footed advance of Sixth Army. Stanley Falk has written of MacArthur: “On those occasions487 when the Japanese faced him with equal or greater strength, he was unable to defeat them or to react swiftly or adequately to their initiatives.” “The…South-West Pacific commitment488 was an unnecessary and profligate waste of resources, involving the needless loss of thousands of lives, and in no significant way affecting the outcome of the war.”
Japanese barbarism rendered the battle for Manila a human catastrophe, but MacArthur’s obsession with seizing the city created the circumstances for it. The U.S. lost 8,140 men killed on Luzon. Around 200,000 Japanese died there, many of disease. If the exchange ran overwhelmingly in America’s favour, those same enemy forces could have gone nowhere and achieved nothing had the Americans contented themselves with their containment. SWPA’s supreme commander compounded his mistakes by embarking upon the reconquest of the entire Philippines Archipelago, even before Luzon had fallen. MacArthur presided over the largest ground campaign of America’s war in the Pacific in a fashion which satisfied his own ambitions more convincingly than