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By Root 856 0

himself, fifty-nine in 1944, had acquired three reputations: first, as an intensely nationalistic political soldier; second, as an outstanding commander; third, as possessing the loudest snore in the Imperial Army, a vice which made his staff reluctant to sleep anywhere near him. The general had been sidelined from high command in 1936, following an equivocal role in an attempted coup against the Tokyo government, but his abilities and popularity among junior officers earned his recall in 1941. As commander of 25th Army in Malaya he achieved his greatest triumph, securing the surrender of a superior British force at Singapore. Yet the government, nervous of his new status as a national hero, once more sidelined Yamashita. Japan’s ablest commander was serving in Manchuria when the summons to the Philippines arrived. He said quietly to his chief of staff: “So it’s come at last, has it? Well, my going won’t change anything. It’s my turn to die, isn’t it?” When his wife suggested that she should stay in Manchuria, the general said: “You’d better go home and die with your parents.” The Manchurian puppet emperor Pu Yi claimed that Yamashita covered his face and wept at his official leave-taking before embarking for the Philippines. “This is our final parting250,” said the Japanese. “I shall never come back.”

In Tokyo en route to Manila, at a series of meetings with the nation’s leaders, “Hobun” Yamashita strove in vain to persuade them to share his own brutally realistic appraisal of the strategic situation. A clever and good-natured man who had travelled widely in Europe, he knew the war was lost. Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister, already privately committed to negotiating a way out of the war, merely shook his head sorrowfully in the face of the general’s blunt words and said: “Do your best, Hobun, do your best.” Yamashita attended a formal farewell ceremony with Hirohito, which he seemed to enjoy. He told an aide as he left the Imperial Palace that he felt as happy as he ever had in his life. Having saluted his emperor, he was ready to die.

In Manila, the general was unimpressed by the staff which he inherited, and even more dismayed by the quality of the troops he inspected, most of them rendered slothful by long occupation duty. Subordinates shared his misgivings. Lt. Suteo Inoue of the 77th Infantry Regiment, for instance, recorded in his Philippines diary: “Soldiers here lack comradely spirit. I have never seen such an undisciplined outfit as this one. To be strong, units need a sense of shared identity. This regiment is the worst in the Japanese army…It took a hundred men almost seven hours to cross a river 150 metres wide…due to lack of barges. I presume this reflects Japan’s general lack of resources. We have underestimated the importance of material strength, and are now suffering the consequences. If this state of affairs continues for another year, Japan will be in trouble, and our withdrawal from Greater East Asia will become inevitable.”

Yamashita ordered a supply officer to transfer service troops to combat duty, and to draft Filipino labour to shift stores in their stead. To his chagrin, he was told that local people could not be trusted in such a role. The commander of 14th Army now had only days in which to prepare for the coming of the Americans. He knew that months would not have sufficed.

LUZON, in the north, is the Philippines’ principal landmass, seconded by Mindanao, in the south. Between lies a jumble of densely populated lesser islands, of which Leyte is among the easternmost. In October 1944 this was MacArthur’s choice for a first lodgement. Some 115 miles long and 45 miles broad at its widest point, it was inhabited by 915,000 of the Philippines’ 17 million people, in modest towns of sun-bleached stucco and villages of straw-thatched huts. Leyte Gulf lies open to the ocean, and thus to an invasion fleet. The immediate American objective after securing the beaches was the rice and corn belt of Leyte Valley. There MacArthur planned to build airfields to relieve his dependence on carrier