Behind Japanese Lines Read Free

remained as quarrelsome as ever, so we had lapsed into disgruntled isolationism, vowing never again to bedrawn into their disputes. At the Washington Naval Conference (1921-22) we limited our fleet and agreed not to upgrade our military installations in the Far East. This left the Philippines, only 600 miles off the coast of Asia, defended mostly by naval bases 5,000 miles eastward in Hawaii and 7,000 miles away in California. In 1934 we promised the Filipinos their independence twelve years later. Soon after, we declined to fortify Guam. Tokyo observed this sequence of events and, not surprisingly, concluded that America was withdrawing from the Orient. The British, the Dutch, even the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, regarded our heedlessness with foreboding since their colonies and their interests now lay, thinly defended, beneath the shadow of Japan. Meanwhile the depression had descended, distracting the attention of Americans even more from foreign affairs and strengthening the voices of all those who always want to spend money on domestic programs and trust to good luck for national defense.
    In the Philippines money for defense was chronically short, so all things were done late and in a half-hearted, slovenly manner. To be sure, this dismal situation began to improve in 1941. On July 26 the Philippine army was reincorporated into the U.S. Army. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was soon named supreme commander of these combined forces, and he began to assemble a capable staff. By then, too, a few thousand Philippine Scouts, who were part of the regular American army, had been made into effective soldiers.
    Nonetheless, these reforms came too late in the day. The bulk of the Philippine army was still virtually untrained, badly armed, and almost impossible to command since the men spoke something like seventy different dialects. Airfields remained too few, their runways too short and unpaved. Intelligence was poor everywhere. Ominously, thousands of Japanese “tourists,” “fishermen,” “merchants,” even bird fanciers, roamed the archipelago at will. They mapped everything, purchased land, bought into businesses, and smuggled in more of their countrymen. To top off this amalgam of heedlessness and folly, West Point was able to find room for cadets from many countries, even Japan, but for a long time could accommodate only one Filipino per year. Even in 1941 there were only a handful at the Point; thus, a permanent shortage of well-trained top-ranking Filipino officers was insured.
    Manuel Quezon, the president of the Philippines, was keenly aware of these deficiencies, but he was as heedless as Washington in dealing with them. In fact, he made the situation worse; in 1939 he visited Japan and returned convinced that Filipinos could never defendtheir country successfully. Soon after, at his behest, the Philippine legislature stopped military construction, cut the defense budget, deemphasized ROTC, halved reserve training, and postponed the mobilization scheduled for 1940, though money was found to build new roads, bridges, and public buildings, and especially to begin construction of Quezon City, adjoining Manila, to immortalize the Philippine president. Quezon justified this course, which in retrospect looks suicidal, by declaring that defense of his homeland from foreign aggression was the responsibility of the United States. 1 Informed Filipinos hoped that somehow General MacArthur, whom they virtually deified, would see that everything turned out all right.
    The failures and derelictions of our military leaders on December 8, 1941, are harder to account for than are those of the American people or even the Philippine government, since our professional soldiers
had been expecting
war. Yet many hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor half the American Far Eastern air force was wiped out by bombing and strafing as the planes sat in rows on the runways at Clark and other fields on Luzon