School of War - Ep 222: Peter Mansoor on MacArthur’s Return to the Philippines

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Colonel Peter Mansoor, U.S. Army (retired), General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair in Military History at The Ohio State University and authors of Redemption: MacArthur and the Campaign for the Philippines, joins the show to discuss the largest campaign of the Pacific War, the liberation of the Philippines.  ▪️ Times     •      01:08 Introduction     •      01:30 Why West Point?     •      06:11 Petraeus        •      09:55 A huge scale      •      11:25 War Plan Orange            •      16:25 Inevitable          •      20:07 The guerrilla war     •      26:53 Mindanao & Luzon     •      31:33 Leyte Gulf         •      37:52 A do or die campaign      •      40:04 Manila      •      44:34 Command responsibility  Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

What do you think is the largest overseas cemetery for American war dead in terms of the number buried there? Maybe Normandy or one of our World War I cemeteries further east in France? Well, it's actually the Manila American cemetery in the Philippines, with over 17,000 graves and 36,000 more names represented on the wall of the missing. Today, we're going to talk about Douglas MacArthur's fight for the Philippines, especially his efforts to take it back in 1944 and 45. The fighting there has been overshadowed in the American memory by everything else that was going on in those years,

including in the Pacific. But it was effectively a whole war unto itself. Let's get into it. It is for war this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 719, which will live. The experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain, the situation in France. We shall fight on the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Peter Mansour.

He was a retired colonel, the United States Army. Today, he is the General Raymond E. Mason Jr. of military history at the Ohio State University, author of many books and publications following his distinguished career in uniform, and most recently author of Redemption, MacArthur and the Campaign for the Philippines. Peter, thank you so much for joining the show.

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Ellen. So why don't we start with a bit about yourself? Tell us how you grew up. Tell us why the Army, why the Army in West Point? Well, I was raised in Sacramento, California, and when people ask me why I went to West Point, I say that I watched too many John Wayne movies as a kid,

which is probably true. I was interested in playing with Armymen and watching military movies. And then when my mom would take me to the library, which is weekly because she was a schoolteacher, I would walk over to the history section, and then I gravitated to the military history section. And then I joined the military history book club.

And before you know it, I was applying to why. West Point. So that's how I got into the military. And, you know, as you noted, I had a 26-year career. I was an armor officer. Two tours in the Iraq War, the first one, I was a brigade commander in Baghdad and Karbala. And the second one, I was executive officer to General David Petraeus, commander multinational force Iraq during the surge. But, you know, then Ohio State came calling. While I was in uniform, I had earned a PhD at Ohio State to go back to West Point and teach military history for a couple years at any rate. But around the time I was with General Petraeus in Iraq, Ohio State was looking to replace my advisor, my PhD advisor, Alan Millett. And they eventually asked me to apply for the position, which I did and got it.

And I've been here in academia as a second career since 2008. I want to ask you about your Iraq experiences. And I think both of those deployments you wrote books about, right? Yeah. So the first one is a memoir, Baghdad at Sunrise. And then the second one is more of a history. It's surge, my journey with General David Petraeus and the remaking of the Iraq war. But it's more about General Petraeus and the remaking of the Iraq war than it is about my journey.

and that one came out in 2013. I actually wasn't going to write a second book on Iraq for quite some time waiting for things to get the classified and so forth and then write a true history. But right around, I guess, 2010 or 2011, I was in a think tank meeting with a bunch of experts on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they started talking about what the surge accomplished or didn't accomplish. And it was clear to me that none of them had a clue as to the, you know, the totality of the surge. And so I decided right then I'd go ahead and write a book on the surge. And I did a shock to discover that you were in a conversation in Washington, D.C., where people did not know what was going on or had gone on in the battlefield and famous engagement.

Well, it was better because it was in Basin Harbor, Vermont, you know, a very nice place. But, yeah, so that book, I wrote it in kind of light speed, you know, just two years from start to finish. came out in 2013 and well received. But I've moved on from Iraq back to my first love, which is World War II, and the subject of my first book, The GI Offensive in Europe. I was also struck in your bio that before the post-9-11 wars, you served on the joint staff in a, I'm going to forget the exact title, but essentially in a strategic planning capacity during a very busy time in the 90s. And I was sort of, you know, you were involved in, right,

Kosovo and all these other things from the point of view of the Pentagon. And I was struck by a sort of like a strategic planner at the end of history. And I was going to ask you how those experiences, the obvious question is how your Iraq experiences inform your analysis of someone like MacArthur, you know, operating at this juncture of military strategy and politics.

But it actually strikes me your Pentagon experiences in the 90s might be just as relevant. Like, do those, do those experiences in any way inform your work today, or can you speak to how that may be, if so? Yes. So they're bookends, really. I was the special assistant to the director for strategic plans and policy on the joint staff.

And there, I saw kind of how the sausage was made by the joint chiefs. So I saw the Washington end of things. And then later on with General Petraeus in Baghdad, I saw how the local theater commander provided input to strategic planning. So I got a sense of the push and pull between the Joint Chiefs in Washington during World War II and MacArthur in Australia, New Guinea, and the other,

and then the Philippines as a theater commander and how that interplay worked out. So, yes, my experiences actually informed my writing in that case. And characters like Douglas MacArthur, I wonder if there was anyone quite on that scale wandering the halls in the 90s or odds. That's hard to match. Anyone come close?

Well, General Petraeus is the closest example. I, you know, he is, the two are very intelligent. They have a lot of similarities in that regard. MacArthur was first in his class. At West Point, Petraeus was a star man, top 5%. I wrote a PhD dissertation. So they both came at strategy from a sort of intellectual standpoint. MacArthur was much more egotistical than General Petraeus.

I mean, people sort of look at General Petraeus and say, oh, he loved the media and whatnot. But, you know, quite frankly, as a right in surge, he was ordered by President Bush to get out there in the media and put his face forward because he was much more, the American people were much more fond of him than they were of President Bush by the time the surge was implemented. it. So, you know, part of what people hold against General Petraeus was something that he was ordered to do in any case. Douglas MacArthur, on the other hand, was, you know, continually told, you know, tone it down, you're not the only theater in the war. We've got other priorities, and he would use the media to his advantage to get more resources for his theater and to get his way in terms of strategic decision-making. Yeah, the Marine Corps gets a bad rap. Well, it gets a rap. I don't know if it's bad rap for creating its own marina stands wherever it goes these days.

I feel like my former institutions got nothing on Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific area. That place really was kind of a world unto itself, wasn't it? Absolutely. It revolved around Douglas MacArthur, and most of the press releases that came out of the Southwest Pacific mentioned one guy, Douglas MacArthur. you hear a lot or you read a lot in history about General George Patton's Third Army. I mean, it's like they go together, right? Anyone know who the commander of the Eighth Army was or the Sixth Army? No, because it was all rolled up into MacArthur's forces. And as a result, when MacArthur died, that's all the history of the Southwest Pacific sort of faded out of the public imagination.

It's one of the reasons I wrote the book. It was the Philippines campaign was the largest campaign in the Pacific for the U.S. Army and almost no one knows anything about it. Yeah, I wonder how many people to include, you know, people who actually do kind of care about World War II or military history or both are aware that I think it's the American cemetery, the ABMC Cemetery in Manila, right, is the largest American war dead cemetery abroad, which I didn't even know until a few years ago. It still astounds me. I visited it in March, more than 20,000 burials there. And it is magnificent. Now surrounded by skyscrapers and whatnot. It's really, really an awesome experience.

And I would recommend people go there if they find themselves in Manila. Yeah. And it's not even a Pacific War versus European War thing. This is something I've talked about here on the show with John McManus. I mean, people know there was a Pacific War, but they think the naval battles, they think Midway, they think Marines, they think island hop, but these army fights in New Guinea and the Philippines and sort of the also it's you know a different sub-theater but you know the the China into India Burma stuff you know these were vast bloody ground wars on enormous scales any one of them today just the war over the Philippines

which you do such a wonderful job documenting in this book this would be this was a massive war in its own right without reference to anything else absolutely so the invasion of Laité could be likened to the Italian campaign and the invasion of Luzon could be likened to the campaign for Northwest Europe. Not quite on those scales, but still a pretty large-scale conflict and far larger than anything else in the Central Pacific where the Marines invaded so many islands, but also army forces. And, you know, the closest campaign that comes to the Philippines is Okinawa, but even that one

didn't reach the scope and breadth and casualties for that matter of the entire Philippines campaign. So we did a really good episode on the show earlier this year with Jonathan Horn, who wrote a book comparing Douglas MacArthur and General Wainwright and their performance in the Pacific during the war. And in that episode, we spent a lot of time kind of on the front end, 1941, 42 phase of the war in the Philippines. So my plan is to move through that kind of quickly today and then suppose most of our time, kind of as you do in the books, but most of our time on the liberation of the Philippines

and the terrible fighting that was involved in that. But just to rehearse quickly, maybe for those who could use a few minutes on it, tell us just a bit, if you would, Peter, about why we're in the Philippines, about what the original War Plan Orange conception for what's going to happen there in the event of a war with Japan was how Douglas MacArthur intersects with that planning. And just why do things go so horribly wrong by the spring? of 1942. Well, I love Jonathan Horne's book, by the way.

I wrote a review of it so highly recommend it to the readers out there. But we're in the Philippines since the turn of the 20th century. We acquire it as part of the resolution of the Spanish-American War. And we are colonial overlords. The Philippines is a territory of the United States, much like Puerto Rico is today. And we are trying to create the Philippines. in our image. We send over lots of teachers, we create a school system, we build a capital that's very western in nature. By the mid-1930s, though, we've recognized that our colonial days

are behind us, and we put the Philippines on a path to independence. We give them a 10-year period of Commonwealth status, and on July 4th, 1946, they would become independent. This, however, happens right during the run-up to World War II. The plans for defending the Philippines are pretty limited. We realize all the planners realized from the earliest moments of the colonial days in the Philippines that the Philippines are indefensible, especially if attacked by Japan, which is much closer in terms of proximity. And the Philippines lack fortifications.

they lack a navy, a naval presence. They lack so many things. And so the idea is of war plan orange is that the U.S. military forces, which really amount to the Philippine division and a smattering of other troops, would withdraw into the Baton Peninsula, which is proximate to Manila. And they would hold up there until relieved, presumably by the U.S. Pacific Fleet, sailing across from Hawaii with troops to retake Luzon. But it's always fuzzy about when that would happen,

because everyone realizes the troops aren't there. The fleet would have to fight through the Japanese Imperial Japanese Navy, and that most likely this would be a campaign that would result in defeat sooner rather than later. MacArthur comes to the Philippines in the late 30, 30s as the field marshal of the Philippine military. When it became a commonwealth, they could have its own armed forces. And the Filipino president, Manuel Kazon, asked Douglas MacArthur to come and lead up

their armed forces, which MacArthur agrees to partly because he's going to become rich in the process. He gets his salary from the U.S. Army because he's still a U.S. Army general. and he gets an enormous salary from the Filipino government at the same time. So he's trying to build up the Filipino armed forces. And significantly, he changes war plan orange. He decides that instead of withdrawing into the Baton Peninsula, he would put his forces forward on the beaches and prevent a landing in the first place.

And key to this was the acquisition of B-17 bombers, which everyone thought at the time would be much more capable against the naval fleets than they actually proved out to be. And in implementing this plan, which the U.S. Joint Chiefs agreed to, General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army Chiefs staff, approves the plan. MacArthur moves all the supplies out of the Baton Peninsula forward where they end up getting captured by the Japanese. and by the time he does implement the original War Plan Orange, War Plan Orange 3, and withdraws his forces into the Baton Peninsula, there's almost no supplies there to sustain them. And they do a magnificent job defending the peninsula against all odds,

but eventually starvation takes them out as much as the Japanese does. Jonathan Horn and I discussed this a little bit during that episode, but this question of the B-17s kind of haunts me, because in addition to just, you know, relative ineffectiveness against naval targets, it was also, it was just like a few dozen of them, right? But they're spoken of at the time as this super weapon, whereas, of course, if we get to the fall of, I don't know, 1943,

the notion that you're going to accomplish anything with a couple dozen B-17s would have been laughed out of the room, you know, these raids that we're doing later in the war hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these aircraft. So I just wonder these days, you know, 2025, what's our equivalent of the B-17 in our current operational and strategic thinking? What's the thing that we think we've got that's going to change the game, but two years into a conflict will realize we needed it actually at something like 100x of quantity for it to even begin to make a difference?

Yeah, that would be the stealth bombers that we have, which, you know, we have limited numbers. But I make this point in the book that even if everything had gone right, the B-17s would not have changed the outcome of the initial Philippine campaign. have lost. We just sort of lost more slowly. And this is something that McArthur failed to realize. He thought that all supplies, reinforcements, everything should come to him because he was engaged with an Axis power. No one else was. And therefore, everything should come to the Philippines first. He completely misread U.S. strategy, which was Europe first, Germany first, defeat Germany First, build up forces in Great Britain, send minimal forces to the Philippines, and he just

couldn't get it. And eventually he came to realize that as he left the Philippines on order of President Roosevelt and made his way to Australia, he gets to Australia expecting to see this giant army, Navy air force waiting for him to go back and wrestle with the Japanese. And he finds there's almost nothing there. And he goes, oh, my God, you know, what have we done? But he proceeds to build up a headquarters and work his way back. Can I ask?

Because your book is not just an operational history. It is that, but it's really about MacArthur, too. And why doesn't he get it? I mean, is it just willful refusal to accept that the policy preferences of his higher headquarters, as it were, are just different from his own? Or what is the missing link there? Well, that's precisely it. You got to remember that Douglas MacArthur is the son of a prominent general, a three-star general who was in charge of the Philippines for a time. He was chief of staff of the U.S. Army, the youngest chief of staff ever. He has been a general longer than he's been any other rank. And so he's got this elevated view of his own power. And the force of his arguments, logic, and personality thinks he can talk basically the Army and the wider government into backing his strategic plans, which,

you know, at times he does, especially in the decision to invade Luzon versus going to Formosa later in the war. His arguments went out. But at this point where there is very few resources available, the grand strategy is not to defend the Philippines and make that the first priority for the U.S. armed forces, he loses. He loses the argument, and he simply doesn't accept it until it's far too late. So there's two things that really happen now and that matter in the years between 42 and 44. One is, of course, the bloody campaign in the Southwest Pacific Area through New Guinea, well, first the Solomons, then New Guinea and these other areas. The second, Second, which I knew virtually nothing about, and until I was reading your book in preparation

for this interview, it was astonishing to me, not that it existed, but that's in its scale, is the resistance movement, the guerrilla war, in the Philippines itself. Could we talk about that a bit? All these incredible characters who I just never heard of, I might even mispronounce the names because I've only read them on the pages of your book. We're like Wendell Fertig, you know, Walter Cushing, Russell Volkman, Donald Blackburn, and like all these incredible figures, these for the most part, American military officers

sort of left behind, but then obviously huge, huge numbers of heroic Filipinos. Tell us about this war. It is the one part of the book, I think, that differentiates this history from all others is I spend a lot of time discussing the development of the resistance movement. One of the greatest in the history of warfare,

by 1945, there's two, 250,000 gorillas, 50,000 of them active and armed and engaging the enemy, 200,000 auxiliaries. It is an enormous bonus to MacArthur's plans to retake the Philippines. It's one of the reasons he convinces the Joint Chiefs. We can go to the Philippines with the forces we have now. I don't need additional reinforcements where Admiral Limits in the Central Pacific Theater would have needed upwards of 200,000 more troops to invade four months. modern-day Taiwan. But it starts from almost nothing, the unsurrendered elements of American

forces in the Philippines, and more importantly, the unsurrended elements of the Filipino army who take to the hills, bide their time, and slowly work their way up. First, they've got to make contact with MacArthur's headquarters, which takes the better part of a year. But once they do, MacArthur says, we're going to support them. He creates the Allied Intelligence Bureau to do just that. He has a Philippine section that does nothing but think about how to support these gorillas. Dozens of submarines and aircraft that continually move supplies into the Philippines, most importantly radios so that they have better contact with Brisbane, but also weapons and money, which is a tool of war in this case as well. Most of the Philippines is actually under

guerrilla control. The Japanese only control the cities, the key lines of communication, sort of the important parts of the Philippines, but most of the hinterland is under the control of the guerrillas. They're hard-pressed by the Japanese at times, but they persist. And by the time U.S. forces and come back to the Philippines in late 1944, the resistance movements are ready to rise up and strike, which MacArthur then orders them to do. at that time. Russell Volkman, one of the officers you mentioned, he ends up with about 20,000 or so guerrillas under his command and creates, in essence, a division and a half of troops that help the Sixth Army retake Northern Luzon. So these are tangible reinforcements to the U.S. force

structure in the Philippines. Volkman, along with Wendell Fertig, are considered the spiritual fathers of U.S. Army Special Forces, by the way. Volkman ends up as a brigadier general, and you look at the Philippines, and that is the roots of the modern-day green berets. Well, I might be, I might add, is not counterinsurgency, which is what we've used them for lately, but it's actually insurgency. They are supposed to create guerrilla movements behind enemy lines, which is what they did in the Philippines.

Fertig is the one who promotes himself to General, right? Brigadier General, yes. Fertig is a very interesting character. He's a civilian who's turned into an officer. And then in his argument, in order to unite the various guerrilla groups on Mindenau, he needs to outrank all of his fellow guerrilla leaders. And so he says he's a Brigadier General, actually has his Silver Smith pound some metal into a form of a star and puts it on his shoulder.

MacArthur never promotes him to that rank, does make him a full colonel and commander of the 10th military district. But after the war, Fertig never does become a general. Russell Volkman does. Well, I think if fate has dealt you the hand of your duty is to command resistance operations on Mindanao for an indeterminate period of time, you know, I think you can be forgiven

for self-promotion outside of whatever the Army's rules are. They called them bamboo promotions, and there were a lot of them. I mean, there were sergeants that became captains and what. A lot of these are recognized in the end and confirm. But that one, making

a general officer out of someone, that was not done. So you talk about these guys being the, you know, spiritual fathers of the Green Berets. What are, I don't know exactly how to phrase it, the doctrinal influences or how do they figure out how to wage this guerrilla war?

Is it stuff from their U.S. Army training that they're bringing to pass? Is it the influence of the Chinese communists? Is it, you know, the Philippines fought a pretty effective at times insurgency against us 50 years earlier in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War? Like, how do all these different influences intertwine into what actually happens? It's trial and error more than anything else. I mean, there's one of the guerrillas remembers sleeping at night, looking up at the stars and thinking, how weird it was that his West Point training had almost no relevance to what he was doing and that, you know, Chairman Mao's writings or, you know, what he learned in history books

had had more to inform him than anything else. A lot of girl has died of the number of unsurrendered U.S. forces in northern Luzon after the baton campaign, less than a dozen are people are still alive by the time McArthur comes back to Luzon in 1945. So this is trial and error, and it's very much survival of the fittest. Old officers, for instance, they don't survive. It's just too physically grueling for an individual to live the life of a gorilla. So most of these guys, like Volkman is in his mid-30s.

Fertig is in his mid-30s. A lot of other guerrilla commanders, they're in their 20s. So this is a young man's game. So you made reference to this debate that's ultimately resolved in July of 44, whether or not the big muscle movement prior to going up to Okinawa and Japan itself, whether that's going to be the Philippines or whether it's going to be Taiwan or then Formosa. Say a bit more about that decision. And MacArthur's role in driving it, you mentioned the existence of these guerrillas as a major factor. give us your assessment on whether or not that was the right call, given the information that they had at the time? So the decision wasn't whether to go to the Philippines. Everyone agreed that

we should take Mindanao, the southernmost island, which would be within air support distance of the northern westernmost tip of New Guinea. But from there, since we have bases on Mindanao there, The idea is, let's skip over Luzon, whichever one realizes is going to be a massive campaign and go to Formosa, which is much closer to the Chinese mainland. And we have allies there that we need to support. So if we take Formosa, we can open a port on the Chinese mainland to get arms into China. It's also closer to Japan so we can create air bases there. You know, it has a lot of strategic pluses going forward. It's been under Japanese control since the early 20th century, and the people on the island

speak Chinese or maybe Japanese. They don't speak English. It's unknown whether they would support U.S. forces, so we couldn't rely on them as a pool of labor. It's very close to the Chinese mainland, so Japanese aircraft could intervene. We don't even know about the kamikazis yet, but as it turns out, there would have been a of them heading to Taiwan had we gone there. Luzon, on the other hand, MacArthur makes a lot of points. He says, we can shut down the lines of communication between the Dutch East Indies, modern-day

Indonesia and Japan, as easily from Luzon as we can from Formosa. On the other hand, if we go to Formosa first, there's going to be this big Japanese presence behind us in Luzon, and we're going to be basically surrounded. up there, reliance simply on naval forces for our air support, which isn't going to cut it. Also, we have this big pool of indigenous fighters and laborers, the GERL movement I mentioned, but most of the people in the cities in the Philippines have some inkling of English. We can use them for our combat service support needs, supply, transportation, and so forth. And so I don't need this big additional pool of combat service support laborers that

the Central Pacific commander would need if he goes into foremost, about 200,000 extra troops. I can just hire the Filipinos to do that. But the biggest point he makes is we have a moral obligation to liberate the Philippines. It's U.S. territory. It would be like saying the Japanese invade Alaska and we let them keep it. till the end of the war, which we did not, by the way, they took Atu and Kiska, and we took them back. Why is the Philippines any different? Oh, by the way, if we just wait till the end of the war to liberate the Philippines, a lot of Filipinos are probably going to starve because the

Japanese are confiscating all the rice. So we've got this moral obligation. It's better strategically and certainly is better in terms of efficient use of forces. And in the end, he's right. He's right on all three scores. Had we gone to the foremost, I think it would have been a disaster, mainly because of the kamikazis, which we didn't know anything about, so we can't blame that on the Joint Chiefs. But the other points that MacArthur made were also in his favor. We do use the Filipinos as a huge source of labor. The guerrillas are instrumental in helping to liberate their own islands. And the Filipinos are very, very grateful that we come in and liberate them. from a very hated and brutal occupation.

So let's talk a bit about the actual plan for ultimately taking Luzon, which of course does not start in Luzon. We go to Lazy. And, you know, the Battle of Lady Gulf, I'm always struck by how kind of forgotten it is. It's a bit like the Philippine campaign itself. I mean, it's the largest naval battle in human history, and not that many people know much about it. You can make a case.

I have made a case in other contexts that in combination, maybe with the Battle of the Philippine Sea, it kind of, in a weird way, vindicates the warplan orange guys going away. There was a decisive, you know, set of naval engagements that ultimately do settle the war. It just so happens that one of them was in support of this amphibious landing. But why do we go to Lady? How does it go both not only at sea but ashore and why they're first before Luzon? Yeah, so I have a whole chapter on the Battle of Laité, Gulf, and then another chapter on the

ground fighting. I was reading another recently authored book where the author says that Midway was the biggest battle in the Pacific War. So there you go. Again, here's a historian who doesn't understand that, you know, there was this battle called Laita Gulf, where, you know, as you noted, biggest battle in human naval history. The plan was to go to Mindanao, as I noted, because it's closer to airfields in the Guinea and the more Thai Peninsula. And that doesn't come to pass because Admiral Bull Halsey takes the third fleet and starts pounding Mindanao, the airfields there, to reduce Japanese air presence. Then he goes from there into the central Philippines, the Visayan Islands, and pounds them.

And he believes that there's minimal Japanese presence on Laita. And he sends a message to the Joint Chiefs and copies Nimitz and MacArthur. and says, you know, we can bypass Mindanao and go right to Latay. We can do it now. We don't have to wait until December, which was the target date for the invasion of Mindanao. And this sets off a storm of messages in just a very compressed period, less than 24, 48 hours at most. The Joint Chiefs Surup in Quebec at an Allied conference. MacArthur is on a ship heading to the invasion of of Moratai, and he's out of radio, he's in radio silence. And so his chief of staff, Donald Sutherland, gets Richard Sutherland, I'm sorry, Donald Sutherland being the actor. I'm picturing it. It could be,

it actually should be an ironic run as chief of staff. Richard Sutherland gets the message at MacArthur's headquarters and answers for him. The two are so alike in terms of their thoughts that he you know, he bounces it off as air and naval commanders. He says, this is what I'm going to send them. I'm going to basically sign at MacArthur, which he does. And he says, yeah, we agree. We concur. We can bypass them into now and go straight to Laita.

Nimitz chimes in says, I can add a corps to the troop list because we don't have to invade Yap. And we can bypass that as well. The Joint Chiefs get these messages in Quebec. They're at a dinner with their British country. counterparts, they excuse themselves, and in about an hour, they talked themselves into invading Lete First, which leads to a very accelerated planning schedule. From the time that decision is made, it's about a month until the invasion occurs. And it is an amazing exercise in planning and leadership and only a very experienced and well-oiled machine could have pulled it off. But by this point in time,

the Southwest Pacific Theater headquarters is a well-oiled machine, and they get the planning done, and they go into Laité. The fighting there is a lot more tenuous, at least initially, than anyone had anticipated. We've discussed the Battle of Laita Golf, which introduces the kamikaze to the world lexicon, but the Japanese, Imperial Japanese fleet is essentially a rendered combat ineffective after that engagement. But the ground fighting is much, much longer and more tenuous than anticipated. The terrain is horrific. It's jungle, it's swamp, its mountains.

You're in the rainy season, so there's three monsoons that hit the island in less than a 30-day period. Building airfields, which was the primary purpose of invading the island, becomes a force in frustration. But eventually, MacArthur's forces there, there I go again. The Sixth Army prevails after a end-run amphibious invasion around the western coast of the island in early December finally takes the remaining Japanese port at Ormock and prevents the Japanese from continuing to push reinforcements into the island.

The one thing that the invasion of Laité does, it doesn't really preferrish. the air bases that MacArthur wanted, but it essentially destroys the Japanese ability to defend Luzon, because the Japanese command decide that they're going to go all in on defending Lute. And there's a lot of reasons for this. One of the main ones is that they believe that the U.S. fleet has been eviscerated in the Battle of Formosa, which took place. It's an air battle near Formosa, which took place before. the invasion of LATEA.

And in fact, the Battle of Formosa basically eviscerates the Japanese Air Force and naval air forces on the island, making reinforcement of the Philippines almost impossible. But the Japanese believe they've won, and so they'd say, well, we can finish the destruction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet

and MacArthur's forces on Lite, so let's go there. General Yamashita, the Japanese commander in the Philippines, disagrees, but he follows. orders and as a result, instead of 20,000 Japanese troops on Laita fighting to their destruction, upwards of 60,000 Japanese forces end up on Laité, and all of them are destroyed in combat. Step back, if you would, in terms of Japanese strategic thinking, how are they thinking of, well, surviving at this point? You know, there's this, there's this plan with a naval emphasis,

the Shogo that ultimately kind of runs aground, if you'll permit the expression, with Lady Golf. But how are they thinking about dealing with American amphibious landings? There's a shift in thinking at this point, and this dilemma of whether or not you're fighting on the beach or whether or not you're drawing people inland. Talk about that shift. And just they're thinking in general about how they're going to come out of this war with something still intact. Well, first, at the grand strategic level, they realize after the Americans take the Marianas Island in the summer of 44, that the Philippines is their do-or-die campaign.

If the Americans take the Philippines, it'll cut off Japanese access to raw materials in the Dutch East Indies, and that'll be the end of the Japanese war economy. And so the Japanese believe the Americans are going to the Philippines. They believe that that will be the remaining decisive battle in the Pacific War. And if they lose the Philippines, they lose the war. On a more tactical operational level, by this point in time, the Japanese realized that the American fire superiority with their battleships and naval aircraft make defending the beaches impossible. They'll put a screen of forces on the beaches to contest the landing, but the real battles come inland away from American naval gunfire support. and that's where the war, the battles will be fought, which is the case in Laité, the amphibious invasion

goes relatively smoothly. It's a beautiful clear day. The sea is like a glass, according to the observers, and they get ashore pretty easily. But then fighting inland, especially once they come up against Japanese reinforcements in the mountainous spine of Laité, the fighting becomes, as I call it, a case. match. So we go to Luzon, talk a bit about that, but also I want to make sure we spend some time on the climactic Battle of Manila, which is, you know, one of the largest, bloodiest urban fights of the war, maybe, I'm thinking maybe just all in, one of the largest bloodiest urban

fights. I don't know where it would come in in the all-time list. Talk about the thinking here on MacArthur's side of things for how to conduct the Luzon campaign, and then on the Japanese side of things, you know, why is Manila in the end fought for block by block? Why do they not declare it an open city like MacArthur did on his way out the door? So the first thing that MacArthur needed was airfields. He didn't. They couldn't create the airfields on Leite that they wanted to. The terrain and the weather just wouldn't cooperate. And so the first thing they do in December is they invade the island of Mindoro, which is north of Leite and west of Luzon. And there they're able to create three or four airfields, which they then use to support the

further invasion of Luzon, which occurs on the 9th of January, 1945, up in Lingayan Gulf. Same place the Japanese invaded in 1941 for the same reason. It's got good beaches, protected anchorage, and access to the central plain, which is the high-speed terrain highway to Manila. Manila is the crown jewel because with Manila you get the ports, you get to the airfield at Clark Air Base, you get all the things you want to ensure that you can use to lose on as a base for invading Japan later in the war. McCarthy thinks this is going to take six weeks max.

We're going to go in and we're going to get down in Manila and we're going to take it pretty easily, and this will be over. We'll wrap it up pretty quickly. The first three weeks go fine. They invade Linguine Gulf. They head down to Manila, and they get there the first week of February, and they, most importantly, in MacArthur's mind, they liberate the internees at Santo Tomas' internment camp in Bilibit prison. These are the people that have been there who were taken captive in Baton and Corregador, they were always on his mind. And he finally gets there and has a very emotional meeting with the now emaciated survivors of those campaigns. But then he believes, as you noted, that the Japanese would just give up, that they would declare Manila in open city.

It's indefensible. By this point, it's pretty clear that Yamashita's strategy is to defend the mountainous interior of Luzon. and Manila doesn't play a role in that. The problem for MacArthur and for Yamashita is the guy in charge of the Japanese defenses in Manila, is Rura Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, and he has no intention of letting Manila go. And so he fortifies the about of the third of the city, the commercial and industrial heart, the old Spanish walled city of Inframuros as well. and he basically hunkers down with about 20,000 Japanese, mostly naval forces, some army troops as well.

And there is McArthur to come root him out, which Sixth Army does in a three-and-a-half-week slug fest, which destroys a good portion of Manila, kills thousands of Filipinos. the green books, the Army official history, say 100,000, but I have a footnote in redemption. You know, where did they get that figure? Well, the Filipino government gave them that figure without attribution. And so we think the number, I think the number is far less, but still substantial. And so you have this just brutal, brutal urban combat. It is the largest urban battle, I think, in U.S. military history and in World War, In World War II, there's other urban battles that are more ferocious, Stalingrad, comes to mind.

But this one is right on up there, at least in the top five. And it's a tragedy for everyone concerned. But MacArthur, I don't think he had a choice. But to take Manila, you can't simply bypass the city. It's the reason you're going in to lose on. You have to rehabilitate the ports and the airfields in order to support the ongoing invasion of the Japanese home islands, and that's what he does. You know, for all that he does not order the defense of the city, Yamashita, of course, is ultimately held culpable for what happens there,

along with a lot of other things. You know, talk about that side of things and the civilian deaths and atrocities as well. He's hung, right? In 46? Yeah, he's hung. So the Japanese army behaves really badly in the Philippines, especially after the American forces invade. In Manila, they rape and kill thousands of Filipino women. These are non-combatants by any stretch of the imagination, and they wantonly slaughter them, entire families out in the hinterland. They eventually come to the conclusion that everyone is supporting the guerrilla movement. therefore everyone is a viable military target. They go into villages and simply wipe them off the face of the map.

After the war, there's so much evidence that this has taken place. No one can believe that it wasn't done on the Army commander's orders. They can't find a written document. There is one written document that basically says you will suppress the guerrilla movement. But the chief of staff, Yamashida's chief of staff, said that did not refer to non-combatants. My belief is that that's the way the Japanese subordinate commanders took the document, basically suppressed agriullos, all Filipinos are guerrillas, therefore we can kill them all if we want to or have to. Yamashita, in the end, is brought up on war crimes charges, and they can't pin anything on him. He was basically out of contact up near Bajio in the northern part of Luzon.

He didn't have any sort of ability to command and control his forces. They eventually convict him on a new charge, which is command responsibility, that he was responsible for the conduct of his troops under his command, whose conduct was so egregiously bad and so widespread that he must have known. And if he didn't know, it's part of his command responsibility to have known. and therefore he's responsible. Unfortunately, this thought has been with us all the way to the present day. And as I note in the conclusion to the book,

it's probably time for the issue of command responsibility to be taken out of war crimes, tribunals. Because in this case, I think Yamashita, you know, he gets a bad rap for sure. I don't think he intended for Manila to happen. He didn't intend for his troops to wantonly slaughter the Filipino population. That's what they did, and he ended up paying the price. There's a lot more to the MacArthur story. He'll end up being our pro-consul, essentially. In Northeast Asia, there's the Korean War.

There's a lot more to tell. But just where we are here in the story, as we come to the conclusion of World War II, based on the last few years you've spent with the man, what is your assessment of him as a commander, as a man? And there's so much we haven't discussed. You know, he builds this staff, which you sort of refer to as built on the basis of the baton gang. And that staff has its own particular characteristics and ups and downs. And they stay with him too.

I mean, some of these figures are figures in the Korean War years later. Just give us your read on this historical, controversial guy. Well, when MacArthur is good, he's very, very good. And when he's bad, he's terrible. and in the Philippines in 44-45, he was at its best. It was the right decision to go there. The campaign was executed magnificently. It was really, I think, the high point of his career.

He quickly moves on to other things. He only visits the Philippines. After he goes to Japan, as pro-consul, he only visits the Philippines one other time later in life. But, you know, he gets it right. in the run-up to the Philippines and in retaking the islands, his strategic reasoning is sound. He makes some tactical errors, but those can be overcome through the courage of his forces and the competence of his subordinate commanders.

He gets a big leash from President Roosevelt, who realizes his political backing among the Republican Party in the United States. But a future president, Herius Truman, doesn't give him that. And so when MacArthur tries basically the same sorts of things with MacArthur vis-a-vis Korea that he did with Roosevelt vis-a-vis the Philippines, Truman relieves him and for good, good cause. So MacArthur, as I note, is egotistical, he's vain-glorious, so sure of himself that he often simply ignores evidence and intelligence that contradicts his chosen courses of action. But in this one case, in terms of liberating the Philippines, he's right.

And just because he's being glorious doesn't mean he's wrong. And I think we need to realize that. Peter Mansour, author of Redemption, MacArthur, and the Campaign for the Philippines. Thank you for coming on the show. It's been a really interesting conversation. Yeah, thanks. I really enjoyed it. This is a nebulous media production.

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