Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [188]
On Leyte the campaign ground slowly ahead. The Japanese had good defensive positions, the weather was bad with heavy rains turning the roads to mud, and the supply buildup went more slowly than planned. The Japanese managed to put together a defensive line running along the mountainous spine of the island and there they held on. Once Yamashita had a chance to assess the full impact of the loss of the naval battle, he recommended that Leyte be abandoned. His superiors turned him down, however, so he continued to filter troops into the island and determined to make a fight for it as long as he could.
Exerting gradually increasing pressure, the American vise slowly closed around the Japanese. By the first week of December the western Leyte ports through which the Japanese reinforced were taken by amphibious assault, and they were cut off. They launched one last offensive, designed to seize American airfields, an offensive notable for one of the rare appearances of Japanese parachute troops, but they lacked the resources to hold on to their gains. By mid-December the defense was collapsing, and by the end of the year the Americans had entered the mopping-up phase, which in fact lasted for another four months, while isolated and roving bands of Japanese were rounded up. In the end the Leyte campaign had destroyed the Japanese Navy, exhausted most of their Philippine air strength, and cost them 70,000 ground force casualties, seriously weakening their ability to hold the rest of the islands.
In mid-December, while the fight for Leyte still went on, units from the U. S. 8th Army, the follow-up force to 6th Army, landed on Mindoro, a smaller island just off Luzon, and rapidly set up airstrips. MacArthur planned to invade Luzon by way of Lingayen Gulf, the same route used by the Japanese in 1941, and drive down the central plain to Manila. Krueger’s forces landed on January 9 after heavy suicide attacks on the invasion fleet by Japanese planes that sank twenty ships and damaged another two dozen. Yamashita had 250,000 troops still on the island, but shortage of equipment and transport plus the superior mobility of the Americans had forced him into a static defensive role. He had organized his forces into three main groups, each assigned a sector of the island, and told them to fight to the end.
Therefore, as the Americans drove south from Lingayen, in some places they met relatively light opposition, and the chief problem of their advance was logistical; but in other places they came up against the Japanese in prepared positions and had to fight hard for every yard. One of their major concerns was the rescue of American prisoners of war and civilian internees. These victims of 1942 had suffered tremendous deprivations at Japanese hands; several thousand had been shipped off to Japan itself, but other thousands still remained in camps on the island, and the Americans were afraid the Japanese might well massacre them as the battle went against them. One of the determinants of the progress of operations thus became the quick capture of prison camps before the guards could kill the inmates.
As Krueger’s soldiers fought their way south from Lingayen, MacArthur utilized to the full the amphibious and airborne capability he now possessed. Landings at unexpected points along the coast kept the Japanese off balance, and they were further dislocated by airborne drops, including one on the island of Corregidor in February, and a later one in the suburbs of Manila itself. In 1942 MacArthur, uncertain of his exact relation with the Filipinos, had declared Manila an open city. Yamashita was constrained