Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [108]
Java was gone by the first week of March. ABDA was gone; the United States Asiatic Fleet was gone. The triumphant Japanese were through the Malay Barrier and ranging into the Indian Ocean.
For the British it was unmitigated disaster. The fall of Singapore was a military defeat of the first rank, and a humiliating one at that. Nothing could be worse, but things almost as bad were still to come. In cutting off Malaya and the East Indies from India, the Japanese moved west through Thailand and north into Burma. Burma had been British territory since 1885, a prosperous, relatively quiescent backwater of empire. It was also an isolated territory, only tenuously connected by land with India; it was rich in rice and oil, and the Japanese decided it would make an ideal buttress for the western bulwark of their new empire.
They moved out of Thailand in December, striking against the weak British forces in southern Burma. The panhandle of Tenasserim was quickly occupied. Rangoon came under heavy air attack. The British tried to hold as far south and east as they could, but they overreached themselves. The Japanese were better in the jungle than they, the enemy had air control, as always, and the British found themselves constantly flanked and driven back. Rangoon fell on the 7th of March, and the litany of retreat began all over again. With help from the Chinese, the British tried to hold at Prome, a hundred miles north of Rangoon; they could not do it, and by the end of April the Japanese were in Mandalay and Lashio. China was cut off for fair, the Burma Road was gone, and the tired, wasted columns of British, Indians, and Chinese were trekking back along the narrow paths to the mountains and the Indian frontier. It looked as if they would do well to hang on there. A Japanese naval force raided into the Bay of Bengal, mounted air strikes at Colombo and hit the naval base at Trincomalee on Ceylon. They caught an aircraft carrier and two cruisers and sank them, as well as 100,000 tons of merchant shipping on the east coast of India. By late April, the only Allied forces left in the Northern Hemisphere between Ceylon and the Hawaiian Islands were the Americans in the Philippines. And they were soon to go.
The Philippine Islands, one of the largest and most beautiful archipelagoes in the world, had been ruled by the United States since Admiral Dewey had steamed into Manila Bay in 1898 for the commencement exercises of the new United States Navy. Among the more benevolent of the area’s unending stream of foreign rulers, the Americans had promised the Filipinos they would receive their independence in 1946, and through the thirties had made moves toward preparing them for self-government. The threat of war increasingly hung over Philippine development, however. As 1941 moved along, General Douglas MacArthur was reinstated in active duty and entitled Commander United States Army Forces Far East. As with ABDACOM, the title was more grandiose than the forces under him. Though there were officially about 130,000 troops in the Philippines, only a fifth of them, one infantry division, and armor, engineer, and support troops were American, and these were the only ones ostensibly fully trained or up to normal establishment. The Filipinos themselves consisted of a large number of training cadres, still in a state of organization, and a few small units fully worked up, such as the Philippine Scouts.
Washington had for practical purposes written off the Philippines anyway, when it made its Germany-first decision. MacArthur, however, was not one to accept decisions made by someone else. He was convinced that he could hold the islands, and