The Xenophile Historian

1941 to 1945

	Japan Strikes
	Life Under Tojo's Heel
	The Forgotten War in Burma
	The Liberation of the Philippines
	The Last Acts
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The Japanese strategy called for a series of lightning strikes upon multiple targets on December 7 & 8, 1941. Within hours of the "day of infamy" at Pearl Harbor, other Japanese air strikes were being launched against Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines, Wake and Midway Islands. Thailand put up a token resistance for a few hours, and then declared itself a member of the Axis. This did not have the expected effect, though, because a rival of Thai Premier Phibun Songgram, Pridi Phanomyong, declared himself to be on the side of the Allies, forming an anti-Japanese political party called the Free Thai. The Thai embassy in Washington recognized the Free Thai as the legitimate government of Thailand; so did the United States, which simply ignored Phibun's declaration of war against the U.S. Meanwhile Japanese armies passed through Thailand to invade Malaya and Burma, while other troops landed on Luzon in the Philippines.

The Japanese offensives proceeded with a speed and rate of success that astonished everybody, including the Japanese themselves. Malaya was taken with almost no British resistance; the Japanese advanced to Singapore so quickly that they outran their supplies of food, fuel, and ammunition. Singapore was considered an impregnable fortress; however, its guns were pointed out to sea, because an offensive through the Malayan jungle was considered impossible. The Japanese quickly proved them wrong; the British managed to turn some of their guns around, but they decided not to fight to the end, and when the city reservoirs were captured, civilian suffering became intolerable. On February 15, 1942, 130,000 British soldiers surrendered to 30,000 Japanese; it was the worst defeat in British history.

On January 10 Japanese troops landed on Borneo. The Allies scraped up all the ships they could find to defend the resource-rich islands, but they were sunk in a three-day battle in the Java Sea at the end of February. With the surrender of Java on March 8, all of the Dutch East Indies passed under Japanese occupation. The campaign in Burma was slowed down by jungles and the size of the territory that was to be occupied, but once again the Japanese won every battle. Here the main objective was the Burma Road, China's last supply line from the other Allied nations. In May the Burma Road was cut, and the last American, British, and Chinese soldiers were chased across the border into India. India itself was threatened afterwards, when Japanese forces took the Andaman Islands and bombed Sri Lanka, but then the Japanese suddenly turned eastward and sent their fleets across the Pacific, leaving India in Allied hands.

The Philippines held out for five months, longer than the rest of Southeast Asia, in part because unlike the other Westerners, the Americans had not worn out their welcome, and there was a genuine fondness for them among the Filipinos. When the attack on Luzon came, the American commander, General Douglas MacArthur, was taken completely by surprise. The forces and budget provided by Washington were too small to defend the islands even under the best of circumstances. Most of the planes were destroyed on the ground in the first attack; by the end of December the Americans and their Filipino partners were withdrawing to the Bataan peninsula, abandoning Manila to the enemy. As long as Bataan remained in Allied hands, the Japanese could not use Manila bay for their shipping, but with no help coming from outside the outcome of the siege was hardly in doubt. Under orders from President Roosevelt, MacArthur took a submarine to Australia, after promising those left behind that "I shall return." Bataan surrendered on April 9, 1942, and the neighboring island of Corregidor flew the white flag on May 6. That ended organized resistance, but some Americans and Filipinos took to the mountains, from which they launched guerrilla raids from time to time. For the first and only time in history, all of Southeast Asia was ruled by one government.

Life Under Tojo's Heel

These tactics did not produce the desired results, because more than a few natives realized that they were not truly free, but only changing their masters. One nationalist who was not fooled, Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, said that driving out the West with Japanese help was like chasing the tiger out of the front door of a house by letting a wolf in the back! Another was the leader of the Thirty Thakins, General Aung San, who began plotting to rid Burma of the Japanese as soon as the British were gone.

The Japanese promised to give their new subjects modern technology, industrial development, and an end to Western imperialism--in short, an equal share in the fruits of the empire. Actually, the Japanese postponed these projects indefinitely, and continued the colonial economy and plantation system set up by the West. Food and raw materials were diverted to supporting the war effort, natives were conscripted into forced labor battalions, and the local economies went from bad to worse. Even Thailand suffered from economic hardship, though officially it was independent from Japanese rule. To keep up with inflation, the Japanese printed more paper money, but that only made the problem worse; in the Philippines, the wartime currency became so worthless that Filipinos scornfully called it "Mickey Mouse money."

Wherever there was resistance, either real or imagined, the Japanese secret police, the Kempeitai, responded savagely, making life for conquered peoples as miserable as its German counterpart, the Gestapo, did. Gradually resistance to Japanese rule arose in the form of guerrilla movements. In 1943 the Japanese tried to stop the growing unrest with political moves, granting "independence" to puppet regimes in the Philippines (under Jose Laurel) and in Burma (under Ba Maw), but this move fooled no one and attracted little popular support.

The most successful guerrillas were communist-inspired. When the war began Southeast Asia's communists took the Marxist view and tried to ignore it, claiming that it was a war between imperialists that did not concern them. That point of view changed in 1940-41, first because of Japan's alliance with Germany, followed by Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. Now the war became a struggle to defend communism, and communists everywhere declared war against the Axis powers, becoming as antifascist as any freedom-loving American or Briton. In 1941 Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam after 30 years of self-imposed exile and set up his headquarters in a series of limestone caves north of Hanoi. His guerrilla army, the Viet Minh, offered membership to anyone who was both anti-French and anti-Japanese, though it was communist-controlled from the start. By early 1945 he was doing so well in anti-Japanese activities that the American wartime secret service, the O.S.S., smuggled supplies to him. Other communist guerilla movements included the People's Anti-Japanese Army (Hukbalahap) in the northern Philippines, the White Flag Army in Burma, and a Chinese movement called the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese army.

The Forgotten War in Burma

Meanwhile the long-expected Japanese invasion of India had begun. The main force tried to capture Imphal, an important Allied stronghold near the Burma-Assam border. Another Japanese force moved northwards, to cut off the supply lines to China and Stilwell, while the Indian National Army accompanied a small Japanese force moving into Bengal from Arakan. Once Imphal and the surrounding objectives were taken, Bengal and Assam would come under Japanese control, providing the population base for later Indian campaigns.

The siege of Imphal began on March 8, 1944. Imphal was surrounded completely but managed to hold out with the help of an Allied airlift that brought in supplies and reinforcements. The northern offensive got as far as Kohima on April 4, but here Allied resistance also did not break, though the town was turned into a charnel house of ruin during the two-week battle before the Japanese were finally turned back. On the Arakan front the Indian National Army failed to start an anti-British uprising, partly because the Allied troops they engaged were not Indian, but from British colonies in Africa. With the beginning of monsoon season Japanese lines of communication and support disintegrated. In July the last Japanese forces retreated from India, and in October the Allied reconquest of central and southern Burma began.

The Liberation of the Philippines

The Philippine campaign began in earnest on October 20 with a massive landing on the island of Leyte, involving some seven hundred warships and transports, two hundred thousand troops, and two million tons of supplies for the first month alone. Four hours after the assault began, MacArthur staged the most famous scene of his career when he waded ashore with Philippine President Sergio Osmena (Osmena's predecessor, Manuel Quezon, had died of tuberculosis two months earlier).

Once MacArthur was on Leyte, the Japanese went for a showdown. Japan's naval chief for the area, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, devised a complex plan to make the most of the few ships and planes he had left. First he planned to use his last carriers to lure away the protective fleet of Admiral William Halsey, which was covering the Americans on Leyte. Next he ordered three other fleets from Singapore, Borneo, and Japan to converge on Leyte and annihilate the nearly naked American support flotilla. The first part of the plan worked perfectly, as Halsey, diverted, steamed northward. After that things went wrong--partly because of lack of coordination, partly because the remaining US ships resisted bravely. Furthermore, because the Japanese fleets no longer had air cover, they lost ships to American ships and dive bombers before they even got close to Leyte. One Japanese fleet was destroyed in the strait between Mindanao and Leyte, and the second was driven away from the same spot one day later. The third and largest fleet, led by Admiral Takeo Kurita, came around Leyte from the north. The largest naval battle in history now began in Leyte Gulf. Kurita had the advantage, and very nearly won, when he suddenly turned around and retreated. Exhausted and confused from lack of sleep, Kurita had mistakenly concluded from intercepted radio messages that Halsey was coming back to get him. In fact, Halsey was far away. Toyoda's decoy plan had worked to snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory.

The debacle in Leyte Gulf destroyed half of Japan's naval tonnage, but the Japanese army was far from finished. Heavy fighting continued on Leyte for the rest of 1944, and resistance did not end until late March 1945. Meanwhile MacArthur had begun landing troops on the nearby islands of Samar and Mindoro. The invasion of the main island, Luzon, began on January 9, 1945. Once the beachhead was secured, the Americans made a beeline for Manila, arriving there at the beginning of February. Manila had escaped damage when the Japanese took it three years earlier; this time the city was not so lucky. The Japanese army commander, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, wanted to spare Manila's civilian population from the ravages of war, but the naval troops in the city were not willing to leave without a fight. The result was a month of bloody house-to-house and hand-to-hand fighting, interrupted by artillery duels, fires that sept through bamboo neighborhoods, and more Japanese atrocities. By the time it was all over (March 4, 1945), there was scarcely a house or building left standing in the city.

The Last Acts

With the taking of Manila and the clearing of Manila Bay, America had control of the most important parts of the Philippines. But MacArthur was not willing to rest until every square inch of American soil was liberated, so the task of rooting out the Japanese from the rest of the archipelago continued. Yamashita's troops were short on supplies and equipment, without air or sea cover; they were isolated not only from Japan but from their comrades on other islands. Their morale was slipping, but they were resolved to contest every piece of ground for as long as it was humanly possible. The mopping-up campaign went on for the rest of the war, and about a fourth of Yamashita's original 450,000-man army lived to see the war's end.

Late in 1944 the headquarters of Japan's Southeast Asian armed forces was moved from Manila to Saigon. By this time native opinion in most areas was clearly favoring an Allied victory. Furthermore, now that France had been liberated by the Allies, it seemed likely that the French government in Indochina would go over to the Allies at the earliest opportunity. In March 1945 the Japanese tried solving both problems by removing the French and replacing them with native-run governments, led by the current monarchs of each country: Norodom Sihanouk (Cambodia), Sisavang Vong (Laos), and Bao Dai (Vietnam). The royal family of Laos immediately split in two, forming anti-French and anti-Japanese factions; their dispute was not resolved before the French returned in 1946. Independence was also promised to the Indonesian nationalists, but no date was set there.

In the spring of 1945, the Japanese retreat from Burma turned into a rout. Mandalay was liberated on March 20, but Rangoon remained in Japanese hands until the first rains of the monsoon season. That could have been a disaster, leaving the Allied armies with the same supply problems that Japan had in India, but the Burmese nationalists saved the day. General Aung San renamed his Burma National Army the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL), defected to the Allied camp, and together they liberated Rangoon on May 3.

The last Southeast Asian campaign of the war involved three joint American-British landings on Borneo in June-July 1945. Most Allied leaders expected the war to last until the end of 1946, so plans were drawn up to conquer the rest of the region. The campaigns on the drawing board included proposals to retake Singapore, an amphibious assault on Vietnam or Java, and an invasion to neutralize Thailand. The eventual goal of all this was to drive the Japanese out of China and provide bases for the final invasion of Japan. However, the Pacific fleets of Admiral Nimitz got to Japan first, and the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki made all other campaigns unnecessary. When Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, more than 70 percent of Southeast Asia's territory was still under Japanese occupation.