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Armies in flight do not blow bridges at 6:15 AM. They blow them at midnight, or at three, or not at all.
When Japanese troops reached Calumpit on New Year's morning 1942, they found two spans lying in the Pampanga River, timed to the minute. No abandoned guns on the road. No wounded in the houses. No prisoners. Tens of thousands of men had crossed in darkness with their vehicles and their artillery — and left nothing behind but concrete in the current.
The 14th Army had been chasing this force for ten days across Luzon. Every position they took was the same — emptied, swept, useless. Their bombers flew over retreat columns packed bumper to bumper and never attacked. Their staff concluded the enemy was broken and running into a swamp. Tokyo agreed, and made a decision based on that conclusion that could not be undone.
Five weeks later, Japanese officers walked into the American positions on Bataan and wrote down what they found. Their own words, recorded in their own reports, destroyed the estimate the entire campaign had been built on.
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Armies in flight do not blow bridges at 6:15 AM. They blow them at midnight, or at three, or not at all.
When Japanese troops reached Calumpit on New Year's morning 1942, they found two spans lying in the Pampanga River, timed to the minute. No abandoned guns on the road. No wounded in the houses. No prisoners. Tens of thousands of men had crossed in darkness with their vehicles and their artillery — and left nothing behind but concrete in the current.
The 14th Army had been chasing this force for ten days across Luzon. Every position they took was the same — emptied, swept, useless. Their bombers flew over retreat columns packed bumper to bumper and never attacked. Their staff concluded the enemy was broken and running into a swamp. Tokyo agreed, and made a decision based on that conclusion that could not be undone.
Five weeks later, Japanese officers walked into the American positions on Bataan and wrote down what they found. Their own words, recorded in their own reports, destroyed the estimate the entire campaign had been built on.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the morning of January 1, 1942, the forward troops of the Japanese Tanaka Detachment walked
00:06into the town of Kalumpit, 30 miles north of Manila, and stopped at the edge of the Pampanga
00:11River. They had come up from Plaridel through the night, moving slowly, waiting for the shooting to
00:16start. It never started. The town was empty. Ahead of them, the Pampanga ran deep and wide and could
00:24not be waited. Where the highway bridge and the railroad bridge had crossed it, there were two
00:29rows of broken concrete and a tangle of steel in the current. The far bank was occupied. Men were
00:36dug in over there, watching. What was not there mattered more. No abandoned guns on the approaches,
00:43no trucks shoved into the ditches, no ammunition dumped in the fields, no wounded left in the
00:48houses, no prisoners. There was none of the wreckage an army leaves when it comes apart,
00:55and these soldiers had been trained on the assumption that a western army in the tropics
00:59came apart quickly. In the last hours of darkness, tens of thousands of men had crossed those two
01:05bridges with their vehicles and their guns. Then the bridges had gone into the river behind them
01:10at a quarter past six that morning, and the road had been swept clean. These men had been chasing this
01:16army for ten days, and had not yet cut off one major piece of it. You can read that scene
01:22two ways.
01:23A Japanese officer on the north bank could tell himself the enemy was running, running so hard
01:29he would not even fight for a river line. That is close to what was reported up the chain that
01:34week.
01:35Or he could notice something colder. Armies in flight do not blow bridges at a quarter past six.
01:42They blow them at midnight, or at three, or not at all. A demolition timed to the minute,
01:50with the last unit across and nothing left behind, is not panic. It is a schedule.
01:57And if this enemy was moving on a schedule, he was going somewhere on purpose, and the 14th army
02:03had spent ten days doing what he wanted. Within five weeks, they would learn which reading was right.
02:11What Japanese troops found in the American positions they took, and I mean found in the literal sense,
02:17written into their own reports as they walked in, changed three times over.
02:22The third version broke the man standing over the map.
02:28Before we go further, if this is the kind of history you want more of, told out of the documents
02:33on both sides, hit like and subscribe. It helps these stories reach the men who care.
02:39To understand what they were looking at, go back nine days, to a decision made in a tunnel
02:45on Corregidor. The main Japanese landing came ashore in Lingayen Gulf on the 22nd of December.
02:52By the evening of the 23rd, it was clear that MacArthur's plan to stop the invasion on the
02:57beaches had failed, and he threw it out for the one he had inherited and disliked,
03:02War Plan Orange 3. Give up almost all of Luzon and fall back into the Bataan Peninsula.
03:10That sounds like flight. It was the opposite. Bataan is a thumb of jungle and volcanic mountain
03:17jutting into Manila Bay, and an army inside it denied Japan the finest harbor in the Far East,
03:23the one it needed to run the war south into the oil of the Indies.
03:29The object was not escape. It was to get an army into Japan's throat, whole, with its guns,
03:36in time to dig. The arithmetic was brutal. His forces were in two pieces, north and south of Manila,
03:44and both had to funnel into one road at the base of the peninsula. Everything from the south had to
03:50cross the Pampanga first, and the only crossing was those two bridges. One river, two spans.
03:58To hold that door open, Major General Jonathan Wainwright was handed a mission most officers
04:04would call a nightmare. He was to fight backward, across the central plain, along five lines,
04:11standing on each just long enough to make the Japanese halt, deploy, and prepare a proper attack.
04:18Then leave. Not win. Be late on purpose, by exactly the right number of hours, five times running,
04:28with troops who in many cases had been in uniform four months. Facing him, General Masaharu Homa had a
04:35clock of his own. Tokyo had given him 50 days to finish Luzon, and his eyes were on Manila. One
04:42of his
04:42generals, Morioka, described the Americans in a phrase the staff enjoyed. The enemy, he said,
04:49was like a cat walking into a sack. Hold on to that phrase. You will want it later,
04:55when somebody works out who was holding the sack. By the last day of December,
05:00the sack was nearly shut. Japanese tanks had broken through at Cabana Tuan,
05:04and were driving for the Kalumpit crossing. If they got there first, everything south of
05:10the river was finished. They did not get there first. The reason they did not is that on the
05:17afternoon of the 31st, a 23-year-old lieutenant off a tobacco farm in Kentucky was ordered to do
05:23something with 10 light tanks that American doctrine said should never be done with them. Late on the
05:28afternoon of December 31st, 1941, Japanese tanks came down Route 5 and stopped at the eastern edge of
05:34Baliwag, waiting for their infantry to close up before they went into the town. Nine miles behind
05:40them lay the Kalumpit bridges. Everything south of Manila had to cross there before 6 in the morning,
05:46because at 6, the bridges were coming down, whether the last man was over or not.
05:52Baliwag was the cork in that bottle, and the Filipino divisions holding it were pulling out.
05:57Watching the enemy mass, General Albert Jones had no infantry he could trust for this.
06:02He had 10 light tanks. They belonged to Company C of the 192nd Tank Battalion, and the man who took
06:09them in was First Lieutenant William Gentry, 23 years old, from Harrodsburg, Kentucky.
06:16His National Guard tank company had no armory before the war, so the town's two tanks had been housed and
06:22serviced on his family's tobacco farm, and he had earned his promotion points driving them into town for
06:29drill. He had finished one year of college and expected to spend his life as a hand on that farm.
06:36He had spent the previous day hiding his tanks under Nipah huts, the local houses built 10 feet up on
06:42bamboo stilts, and covering them with brush. At about 5 in the evening, he took two platoons across the stream
06:50and drove straight into the town. What followed was the first tank battle the United States Army ever
06:57fought in the Second World War. And it was a street fight. The Stuarts went up and down the narrow
07:04lanes,
07:05firing into houses, smashing through the huts as though they were paper, scattering infantry to both
07:11sides. Japanese tanks and American tanks chased each other through the same streets in failing light,
07:18while enemy foot soldiers fired rifles at armor plates. The Japanese crews could not crank their
07:24turrets around fast enough. When Gentry broke off, eight Japanese tanks had been knocked out and his own
07:30losses were trivial. Now understand what that action was, because it is easy to file it as a small victory
07:37and move on. American doctrine did not use light tanks that way. They were for reconnaissance,
07:43for screening, for exploiting a hole somebody else had made, not for charging into a built-up town
07:49held by enemy armor. Gentry attacked because the clock demanded it, and the object was not to take
07:55baliwag. The object was to buy ours. Nobody in that fight was trying to hold ground, and every man in
08:02it
08:03knew he would be gone by dawn. Remember that, because it is the tell. An army that counterattacks with the
08:09wrong weapon in the wrong way in order to protect a timetable is not a fleeing army. It is an
08:15army
08:16working to a plan, and its enemy has not yet noticed. The last of Gentry's tanks crossed the
08:22Columpet Bridge at about half past two in the morning. Behind them came the infantry. The 51st Infantry,
08:29holding the road up from Plaridel, started pulling out at four. The Japanese were close enough to hear
08:36the trucks starting, and they rushed forward and fired into the tail of the column, and hit the
08:41rear-most vehicles, and did no damage. They had no motor transport of their own. They could not follow.
08:49At about five, the 51st crossed the Pampanga, the last unit over. Which brings us to the thing that
08:56actually decides whether a withdrawal is a schedule or a route, and it is not courage. It is who is
09:04willing to be left behind. At five, General Wainwright asked his commanders whether all their people were
09:10across. All of them said yes. Then his engineer spoke up. Colonel Harry Scarry was the man directly
09:19responsible for putting those bridges in the river. And he pointed out that a platoon of demolition
09:25engineers under Lieutenant Colonel Narciso Manzano was still somewhere on the road to the south.
09:31Nothing had been heard from them since noon the day before. Scarry asked that the demolition be held as
09:38long as the situation allowed. Wainwright agreed. The charges were checked, the covering force pulled
09:45clear, and the order stood for six o'clock. It was still dark. There was no bombing and no shelling,
09:53only rifle fire drifting up from the south, and the Filipino troops on the bank fidgeted and stared
09:59across the water. At a quarter to six, there was still no sign of Manzano's men. Wainwright pushed the
10:06time back to a quarter past. Dawn came, and the firing from the south got louder. Wainwright turned to his
10:15engineer and told him they could not wait any longer, and to blow the bridges. At 6.15, the charges
10:22went.
10:23A flash, a roar, a rush of air, and the Kalumpit bridges came down into the Pampanga in a mass
10:30of falling debris.
10:31And here is the question the men on that riverbank were asking as the smoke cleared.
10:35The one Scarry was still chewing on years later. For two days, a solid column of trucks, buses,
10:43artillery, and civilians had stood nose to tail on an open road, in daylight, under total enemy air
10:50superiority. Where was the Japanese Air Force? The answer is that the Japanese had already decided
10:57what kind of enemy they were chasing, and every decision after that followed from it.
11:02On the 31st of December, those two bridges at Kalumpit were the most inviting target in the
11:08Philippines, packed with demolition charges, defended by two anti-aircraft batteries, and nothing more.
11:15The 48th Division, closest to the ground and the most alarmed, urged that they be bombed. There were
11:22heated arguments about it at 14th Army Headquarters. The man who won them was Colonel Monjiro Akiyama,
11:29the Army's Air Officer, whose view was that destroying the bridges would be of little value.
11:35The order that went out sent the 5th Air Group to harass the retreating enemy and to try for some
11:40bridges further west, near Lubao. Follow the logic, because it is the whole campaign in miniature.
11:48If you are chasing a broken enemy, you do not need to cut his line of retreat. Broken enemies are
11:54collected, not trapped. Ridges only matter if the man crossing them intends to use what is on the other
12:01side. So on New Year's Day, with the road from Kalumpit to San Fernando packed bumper to bumper
12:07for miles, and civilians walking both shoulders, Japanese bombers came over on their way to other
12:13targets. Colonel Collier, of MacArthur's staff, watched them cross the road and recross it,
12:19the rising sun bright on their wingtips. He saw no dive bombing. He saw no strafing.
12:27Had they hit that road, he wrote afterward, the withdrawal into Bataan would have been seriously
12:32crippled. Scary put it more simply. He was amazed. Meanwhile, the 5th Line was doing its work.
12:41At Banban, at half past one in the morning on New Year's Day, a company of Japanese infantry came
12:46peddling down the road on bicycles toward a bridge the engineers had already dropped.
12:51Waiting on the high ground above the road was Company C of the 23rd Infantry, and it fired into
12:57the middle of them. The survivors backed away, leaving 35 casualties, an assortment of bicycles
13:03and swords, and one wounded sergeant. Nobody present spoke Japanese, and he spoke no English,
13:10and he died before anyone could ask him anything. The Japanese brought up a regiment and artillery
13:16and pushed at that river line all afternoon. They got nowhere. Then, with fresh infantry closing
13:22up on the north bank and the light going, they stopped and did not try to cross.
13:28Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained why. At nightfall, the whole 21st Division stood up
13:34and walked away, Company C wading the shallow river to rejoin them. The Japanese followed cautiously
13:40next morning and did not reach Angelus until half past 11. The pattern held all the way down.
13:47At 2 in the morning on the 2nd of January, the last American tanks rolled into San Fernando,
13:53the junction every man on Luzon had to pass through. They found it, in the words of one tanker,
13:59truly a ghost town. Empty streets, nothing to capture. They blew the bridge there and drove south
14:07down Route 7. The Japanese did not get across the Pampanga until 4 that afternoon and did not enter
14:13San Fernando until half past 6 in the evening, 16 hours behind the men they were chasing.
14:20That is what the 14th Army kept finding. Not a beaten army. A used building with the lights turned off.
14:28Then came the last gate. On the night of the 5th of January, everything still outside the peninsula,
14:35two divisions, the cavalry and the tanks, had to funnel across a single steel bridge over the
14:41Kulo River at Lyak Junction, marching men, trucks, buses, artillery, horses, staff cars. One officer said it
14:51looked like the parking lot of the Yale Bowl. Another, Colonel O'Day, watched the infantry come
14:57through and wrote that it was a painful and tragic sight, men trudging under enormous loads,
15:03many carrying their kit slung from bamboo poles between two of them, having marched since dark the
15:09night before. They came through anyway. By midnight, the last guns of the 21st Field Artillery were over.
15:17Within the hour, the foot troops were across, shepherded by the scouts of the 26th Cavalry.
15:24The tanks cleared the bridge shortly before two in the morning. Then Wainwright turned to Captain
15:29Chanco of the 91st Engineer Battalion. And the charges went off. And the span came down. And the
15:36last gate into Bataan was shut. Now look at the ledger, because the numbers are the story. In two weeks,
15:44under constant pressure, an army in two separated halves had crossed the width of Luzon and gone
15:50into the peninsula. Not one major unit had been cut off or lost. Only once, at Cabana Tuan, had a
15:59line
15:59failed to hold long enough. Inside Bataan now were roughly 80,000 soldiers and 26,000 civilians. And in
16:08Manila that week, the Japanese were writing their own account of the same two weeks. On the 2nd of
16:14January, as his troops walked into the capital, General Homa was handed a message from Southern
16:19Army concerning the 48th Division, the best formation he had. The reason he accepted what
16:25it said without much of a fight is the same reason he had not bombed the bridges. On the 2nd
16:30of January,
16:301942, at a quarter to six in the evening, Japanese infantry marched into Manila. The capital had
16:37fallen. Homa had accomplished the mission Imperial General Headquarters had assigned him.
16:43The message waiting for him that same day said that the 48th Division would soon be transferred
16:48out of his command. Here is where it came from. Late in December, General Count Tarauchi of Southern
16:56Army and Admiral Kondo had jointly recommended to Tokyo that the invasion of Java be moved up by
17:02roughly a month. The Allies were off balance. Strike now, while they were still reeling.
17:08Tokyo liked it. And in weighing whether Homa could spare his best division, the planners looked at the
17:14reports coming out of Luzon, saw an enemy that had abandoned the capital and run into a swamp,
17:20and concluded that the Philippines could be finished later, after Java.
17:23They knew the redeployment might cause trouble. They accepted the risk.
17:30Difficulties would undoubtedly arise in the Philippines, ran the reasoning,
17:33but the Philippines could be taken care of once Java was done.
17:38I want you to sit with what just happened, because it is the hinge of the whole campaign,
17:43and it happened in an office 2,000 miles from Bataan.
17:48The 48th Division was the formation that had driven from Lingayen to Manila in three weeks.
17:54Homa also lost most of the 5th Air Group. Staff officers from Southern Army arrived in the
18:00Philippines on the 5th of January to supervise the transfer. 14th Army's own view, recorded at the
18:06time, was that this showed a failure by higher headquarters to understand the situation.
18:12Now, what did Homa get in exchange? The 65th Brigade under Lieutenant General Akira Nara. And here is what
18:20that brigade actually was. It had been raised in early 1941 as a garrison unit, meaning an occupation
18:27force, meaning men to guard installations in territory somebody else had already conquered.
18:35Total strength, about 6,500. Its three infantry regiments had two battalions each instead of three.
18:42It had almost no vehicles and no artillery unit of its own. Its signal element was described as no
18:50larger than a telegraph platoon. Most of the enlisted men were conscripts, and their training on
18:56Formosa had lasted a month. Unit training had progressed as far as the company level and no
19:02further, meaning these men had never practiced fighting as a battalion.
19:08Nara's own assessment of the brigade he was bringing into Bataan was that it was absolutely unfit for combat
19:14duty. They landed at Lingayen Gulf on New Year's Day and were ordered to walk to Tarlac. They reached
19:21Angeles on the 6th. They had made their march, Nara said proudly, but they were foot-sore and exhausted.
19:29So the arithmetic that would decide the Pacific for the next four months now read like this.
19:35To take a peninsula held by an intact army, Homa had a division with a poor reputation for fighting
19:42quality, a garrison brigade its own commander called unfit, one tank regiment, and fewer than 70
19:49aircraft. He did not think this was a problem, and to be fair to him, his intelligence officer had told
19:55him it was not one. 14th Army staff estimated the Americans had 40 to 45,000 men on Bataan and
20:02Corregidor
20:03combined. On Bataan itself, Homa was told, there were 25,000. Stop there. The real figure inside the
20:12peninsula was about 80,000 soldiers, plus 26,000 civilians. Homa was told to expect one man in four.
20:21Air reconnaissance gave him no reason to believe the Americans had built any strong installations,
20:26and his staff had a picture of the enemy's condition too. Units badly cut up, rations halved,
20:34heavy desertion among the Filipinos. They noted as evidence that bodies of Philippine soldiers had
20:40been found tied to trees, which they took to mean the Americans were using terror to stop men from
20:45surrendering. Some of that was true. The half-rations were real, ordered on the 5th of January because an
20:52inventory on the 3rd had shown only a 30-day supply of unbalanced field rations. But a starving enemy
20:58is not the same thing as a beaten one. And this is where the misreading turned operational.
21:05Homa's chief of staff, General Maeda, later summarized his commander's thinking in one sentence.
21:11Homa thought only in terms of continuing the pursuit.
21:15Pursuit. That word is the key to everything that follows. Pursuit. Not assault.
21:22The plan for Bataan was drawn up as the chase down of a fleeing enemy, not as an attack on
21:27a
21:27fortified position in depth. And Homa handed the job to Nada's untrained garrison brigade,
21:34with orders to advance in two columns down the two coasts and converge on Mariveles at the tip,
21:39with the annihilation of the enemy on Bataan as their objective. There is one more thing about
21:45that estimate. It assumed the enemy's fighting spirit was broken. In the second week of January,
21:52Homa dropped a surrender demand from the air behind American lines, telling MacArthur his men were doomed,
21:57that the rations had already been cut in half, that honor had been satisfied. The answer he received
22:03was not a message. The answer was artillery. At three in the afternoon on the 9th of January,
22:09the Japanese guns opened the battle for Bataan with a barrage on the American right that shook the
22:14northern end of the peninsula. Nars infantry moved out, and the second corps guns answered,
22:20in the words of the Japanese report, particularly ferociously. Tons of explosive came down on troops
22:27strung along the east road and backed up four miles behind it. That was the first correction to the
22:33estimate, and it arrived in about 90 seconds. But there was a second error inside Nara's plan
22:38that no barrage could correct. Nara had put the American left flank about three miles north of
22:45where it actually was, and the enemy outpost line off by three or four. So when his regiments advanced
22:51on the 9th and hit nothing, when they walked forward unopposed hour after hour through country where his
22:58map said Americans should be, he did not conclude that his map was wrong. He concluded what he had
23:04been primed to conclude. Both forward regiments sent back optimistic reports, and Nara recorded that
23:11the Americans had made a general withdrawal and fled into the jungle without putting up a fight.
23:17Two days later, he was writing something different. His reports, in sequence, are the clearest record we
23:23have of a man discovering what he had walked into. By the 11th, his units had strayed off
23:29their axes, gains were small, and the troops were becoming disorganized. His forward units,
23:36he complained, did not know each other's intentions or positions. Then the line that tells you the most
23:42about that army in that jungle. Imperfect maps, he wrote, were the greatest drawback as far as directing
23:48the battle was concerned. His signal unit was inexperienced, and the men kept getting lost.
23:55American artillery made it worse. An hour of radio conversation a day, he said,
24:00was considered good, and even that was not always possible. Read that again as a soldier.
24:07The commander of the main effort against Bataan was fighting a battle in which he could speak to
24:12his own regiments for one hour out of twenty-four. Meanwhile, his men were finding out what the
24:19pursuit was going to cost. On the night of the 11th, a Japanese battalion worked into a cane field
24:25150 yards in front of the 57th Infantry, the Philippine scouts holding the coastal end of the line.
24:32That field had deliberately not been cleared, on the theory that American artillery would stop anyone
24:37using it. Just before midnight, they came out of the cane in a bonsai attack across moonlit ground,
24:44straight into point-blank fire from the 75s of the 24th field artillery.
24:50Wave after wave went forward. Men in the leading wave threw themselves onto the barbed wire so the
24:56waves behind could cross on their bodies. Company one gave ground, its commander badly wounded,
25:03its executive officer dead. The scouts fed in a reserve company, and the attack stalled.
25:10At dawn, they counterattacked and took back nearly all the original line. When it ended on the morning
25:16of the 12th, there were an estimated two to three hundred Japanese dead on that ground. Some had
25:22infiltrated behind the line during the night, and the scouts spent the next day digging them out,
25:27man by man, hand to hand. After losing several men doing it the hard way, they organized sniper
25:35parties, riflemen paired with demolition engineers, and worked the sector methodically until it was
25:41clean. Leading one of those parties, 2nd Lieutenant Alexander Nininger of the 57th was killed. He was
25:49awarded the Medal of Honor, the first of the Second World War. Now hold two things side by side. On
25:57the
25:579th, Nara reported that the Americans had fled into the jungle without a fight. On the 12th, his men were
26:05being hunted through the undergrowth by pairs of scouts working a grid. Four days later, near Kulis, another
26:12sergeant showed the same thing from the other end of the line. Japanese howitzers, directed by observation
26:19planes the Americans could not touch, were destroying the scout batteries one by one. When a gun of the 88th
26:26Field Artillery was knocked out and its crew killed or wounded, Jose Kalugas, a mess sergeant from another
26:32battery, left his kitchen and ran a thousand yards across open ground under that fire. He got to the gun,
26:39organized a
26:40volunteer squad out of whoever was near, put the piece back into action, and fired it, the position
26:46still under heavy shelling. He was 34, from a farming village on Iloilo, and had joined the scouts at 23.
26:54He would also receive the Medal of Honor. That is what pursuit had turned into by mid-January,
27:01a mess sergeant sprinting toward the guns instead of away from them. And Nara still had not found the
27:07thing waiting for him. His men had not yet reached the main American positions, dug and wired and
27:14camouflaged over three weeks by soldiers who knew there was nowhere behind them to go. When the Japanese
27:20finally walked into those positions, they wrote down what they saw. It is the plainest passage in the
27:26whole campaign, and it demolished the estimate the invasion had been planned on. This is the passage.
27:33When the Japanese reached the 2nd Corps line, they recorded finding field fortifications of the
27:38strongest sort. Covered rifle pits and machine gun emplacements formed the skeleton of the fire network,
27:45with foxholes sighted in between. Fields of fire had been cleared, the camouflage was thorough, and the
27:52communication net running back from the line had been laid out carefully and completely. Read that as an
27:59intelligence document, because that is what it is. Every clause in it contradicts something 14th Army
28:05believed three weeks earlier. Covered emplacements are not dug by men who expect to leave. Cleared fields
28:13of fire take days of labor with axes and bolos, in heat, by troops who have just marched a hundred
28:20miles.
28:22Thorough camouflage means they had time and knew they would need it against an enemy with total command of the
28:28air. And that last item, the rear communications net, is the one a professional soldier reads twice.
28:36Wire laid deliberately, from the front line back through the depth of the position, is the signature
28:42of an army that intends to fight a long defensive battle and control it while it happens. Remember what
28:49Nara had been told he would find? 25,000 demoralized men who had run into a swamp. No strong installations
28:57built. The whole thing a mopping up job. Remember his own note of the 9th. They fled into the jungle
29:04without putting up a fight. They had not fled anywhere. They had walked, on schedule, into three weeks of
29:12digging. And now hold that Japanese sentence next to the road at Callum Pit on New Year's Day.
29:17The bombers that did not come. The bridges Colonel Akiyama judged not worth destroying. The 16 hours
29:24the 14th Army spent behind the men it was chasing at San Fernando. All of that time went into the
29:31ground
29:31on Bataan and came back out as covered rifle pits and wire. That is the second answer to what the
29:38Japanese
29:38found in the abandoned American positions. The first answer was empty trenches. The second answer,
29:46three weeks later, was the thing those empty trenches had bought. The men who built it did
29:52it with almost nothing. A small number of picks, shovels, and axes, with bayonets and mess kit covers
29:58substituting for entrenching tools. With that, they cleared fields of fire, dug foxholes and trenches and gun
30:06emplacements and built overhead cover. A double apron of barbed wire ran as far west as the 51st division.
30:15There was one place it could not be done, and the Japanese eventually found it. On the core left,
30:21the line ran up onto the jungled slopes of Mount Natib, 4,200 feet of volcanic rock with no water
30:29on it,
30:30and no proper line could be organized in that country with the time and tools available. Patrols
30:37could barely move there. The two American corps never established physical contact across that mountain.
30:44It was through that gap, on the 16th of January, that Nada's regiments finally turned the Abukai line,
30:50after a week in which his brigade lost 1,472 men. By the 22nd, Sutherland came over from Corregidor,
30:59talked to General Parker, and concluded that the position had to be given up.
31:04Watch what happens next, because it is the same thing again, and by now you know how to read it.
31:10The order for the general withdrawal from the Abukai line went out on the night of the 22nd,
31:15and it was detailed. Heavy artillery and service installations out first,
31:19then the front line units falling back through a covering force, then a shell left in the original
31:25positions, one rifle company and one machine gun platoon per battalion, plus a battery of guns per
31:30regiment, holding the empty line so the enemy would not know it was empty. The speed with which those
31:36orders appeared tells you they had been written in advance. The Abukai line was never meant to be
31:42the last stand. It was bought time, exactly like the five lines on the plane. It cost.
31:49The night of the 24th was chaos at one road junction, men and vehicles pouring in from every
31:55direction with no military police to sort them, movement stopping altogether at times.
32:01One tank battalion commander wrote that all you could do was keep the mass moving to the rear,
32:06praying, talking to yourself out loud, gesticulating, trying to make yourself understood.
32:13He called it a nightmare. Officers agreed afterward that artillery on that junction would have made the
32:19losses appalling. They did not. And at about three in the morning on the 25th,
32:26the last Americans of the 31st infantry walked out of their positions under covering fire from the
32:32tanks. And an officer of the regiment described them as looking like walking dead men, bearded,
32:39blank eyed, uniforms in shreds. Those walking dead men reached the new line and dug in again.
32:47And when the Japanese came up against that new line and pushed and pushed again, something happened
32:53that nobody on either side had thought possible in January. On the 8th of February, at San Fernando,
33:02Houma's staff sat down to argue about whether to stop. On the 8th of February 1942, at 14th Army
33:08headquarters in San Fernando, the staff of the army that had taken Manila in three weeks argued about
33:14whether it could go on fighting. The end of January had been the deadline. Under the pre-war plan,
33:21Luzon was to have been finished by then. Instead, the offensive Houma launched on the 26th of January
33:28had failed on every axis. Nara had gotten nowhere against the 2nd Corps. Of the 20th Infantry,
33:36one battalion had been destroyed in landings on the west coast, another was trapped at Anyasan and
33:41Silaim points, and the rest of the regiment was cut off behind the American lines.
33:46The attacks against the 1st Corps were producing nothing. Two positions emerged in that room.
33:53Colonel Moto Nakayama, senior operations officer, argued for pressing the offensive hard, shifting the
34:01main effort to the east coast and controlling it directly from army headquarters. General Masami Maeda,
34:07the chief of staff, argued for stopping altogether – break off on Bataan, tighten the blockade,
34:13occupy the rest of the Philippines, and let starvation finish the job. The victory would then cost almost
34:19nothing. Houma listened and made his decision, and it is worth being precise about what it was.
34:26He accepted Maeda's argument that offensive operations had to stop. He refused Maeda's argument that hunger
34:33alone would do the work. Instead, he would rest the army, reorganize it, tighten the blockade,
34:40and ask Tokyo for reinforcements to launch a fresh offensive later. That night, he issued orders for
34:47a general withdrawal. Understand the size of that. Six weeks earlier, a Japanese general had described
34:54the Americans as a cat walking into a sack. On the 8th of February, the man holding the sack
35:00ordered his own troops to back away from it, and asked Tokyo for more men.
35:05Pulling out was not simple. Nada disengaged easily enough, but Morioka's men were too closely engaged,
35:12and the whole 20th infantry was still behind the American line. So around the 13th, Houma ordered a
35:18diversion. Vehicles were run up and down the road between Abukai and Dinalupihan to simulate heavy
35:24troop movements. Artillery and aircraft opened up. Then, skeleton units, less than a battalion,
35:31advanced toward the American lines, deployed as though for an assault, opened fire, and went no
35:36further. The Americans logged it as heavy patrol activity and made no changes. Houma concluded that
35:44the deception had worked, and that troops had been shifted to meet it. Now the ledger, and these are
35:49Japanese figures. From the 6th of January to the 1st of March, 14th Army casualties came to nearly 7,000.
35:582,700 killed, over 4,000 wounded. Beyond that, 10 to 12,000 more were down with malaria, beriberi,
36:07dysentery, and other tropical disease. The 20th Infantry had been virtually destroyed.
36:14By the 24th of February, the effective infantry strength of the entire 16th Division on Bataan
36:20did not exceed 712 men. The 65th Brigade had entered Bataan with about 5,000 infantrymen.
36:28By mid-February, the brigade and its attachments had lost more than 4,000, 1,142 killed, 3,110 wounded.
36:40Many of the survivors were sick and exhausted, and could hardly be counted as troops at all.
36:46Four years later, on trial for his life in Manila, Houma was asked about that period. His army, he said,
36:54was in very bad shape. He estimated that he had three infantry battalions still capable of effective
37:00action. And he told the tribunal that if MacArthur had launched a major counterattack at that moment,
37:06the American and Filipino troops could have walked to Manila without meeting much resistance.
37:12Three battalions.
37:15That is the third answer, and it is the one that closes the question we started with.
37:19What the Japanese found in those abandoned American positions, in the end, was not empty trenches,
37:25and not even the fortifications those trenches had bought. It was the evidence of a trade they had
37:31already made and could not undo. Ten days of clean, timed withdrawal on the plain, converted into three
37:39weeks of digging on the peninsula, converted into an army that could not take Bataan.
37:45And because Tokyo had read the same withdrawal as a route, it had already taken away the division
37:50and the aircraft that might have made the difference, and sent them to Java. That is the whole mechanism.
37:56The Americans did not win by holding ground. They won time, and the enemy's own misreading of how they
38:03won it took away his margin. They did not know any of this on Bataan. What they saw was that
38:09the
38:09Japanese in front of them had stopped. Morale went up sharply. One staff officer wrote to his chief
38:16that there appeared to be nothing on their right except dead Japanese and tons of abandoned equipment,
38:22which was being collected, and that prisoners gave the impression Japanese morale was far down.
38:28For a few weeks in February, the starving men on Bataan believed they were winning. And they were right,
38:35in the only way that ever mattered. The reinforcements Homa asked for arrived,
38:39and on the 3rd of April, 1942, he opened his second offensive against a garrison that by then
38:45was living on a fraction of a ration. Bataan surrendered on the 9th of April. Corregidor held
38:52until the 6th of May. More than 70,000 men went into captivity, the largest American army ever to surrender.
39:01What followed was the Bataan death march and the years in the camps that killed far more men than
39:07the fighting had. But go back for a moment to the bank of the Pampanga on New Year's morning,
39:13to the Japanese soldiers standing in an empty town looking at two bridges lying in the water,
39:18and count what that timing bought. Japan had allotted 50 days for Luzon. It took 148.
39:28The 48th Division went to Java on schedule, and the men who replaced it were ground down to nothing
39:34on a peninsula their own commander had not been told was fortified.
39:39Manila Bay, the harbor the whole southern campaign was supposed to run through,
39:44stayed shut to Japanese shipping until May. And for four months, at the lowest point of the war,
39:49when the news from every other direction was surrender, one American army was still fighting,
39:56and everybody at home knew it. That is what the withdrawal was for. Not escape. Not even survival.
40:04Time. Taken from an enemy who did not understand he was giving it away. And spent.
40:11As for the men in this story, Lieutenant William Gentry, of the tobacco farm in Harrodsburg,
40:16Kentucky, received the Silver Star for Bollywog. Two weeks after the fight, a United Press
40:22correspondent interviewed him in a hospital bed, where he was down with fever, and the story of the
40:27ten little tanks ran in newspapers across America in January 1942, when there was almost no other good
40:35news to print. He survived the death march, though he had malaria, and his own tankers carried him for
40:41three or four days of it. He was still a prisoner at Kavanatuan on the 30th of January 1945, when
40:49the
40:49army rangers raided the camp and brought the men out. He came home to Harrodsburg and lived until 2000.
40:57Of the 66 Kentucky guardsmen from that town, 37 came back. Colonel Harry Scarry, the engineer who asked
41:05Wainwright to wait for the men on the wrong side of the river, was awarded the Distinguished Service
41:10Cross for actions later that January, when he walked ahead of a column on the Bagok Road to make sure
41:17the
41:17mines laid that morning had all been lifted. He survived the march and the prison camps. Years afterward,
41:25when the army's historians were reconstructing the campaign, Scarry wrote them 21 separate sets of
41:31comments. Much of what you have heard about those bridges and the timing and the waiting exists
41:37because he sat down after the war and wrote it out. Sergeant Jose Calugas, the mess cook who ran a
41:44thousand yards to a dead gun crew, survived the death march and eight months at Camp O'Donnell, escaped
41:51and fought with the guerrillas until the Americans came back. He received his Medal of Honor in April 1945.
41:59He stayed in the army and retired as a captain, then settled in Tacoma, Washington, took a business
42:05degree in his 50s, and worked at Boeing until 1972. He died in 1998 at 90 years old. His daughter
42:15-in-law
42:15said afterward that he never talked about any of it, and the family had to read about what he had
42:20done.
42:21Lieutenant Colonel Narciso Manzano, the officer whose lost demolition platoon made Wainwright hold the
42:27charges twice, made it out. Second Lieutenant Alexander Nininger did not. He is buried in the
42:34country he was killed defending. General Masaharu Homa was relieved of command after Bataan and never
42:41held a field command again. He was tried in Manila in 1946 for the treatment of the prisoners and executed
42:49in April of that year. And here is what the whole thing comes down to. What Japanese troops found in
42:57those American positions, over and over, was nothing. No guns, no prisoners, no wreckage, no army. It took
43:08them five weeks to understand what nothing meant. It meant every hour they had spent walking into an empty
43:16town was an hour some American had spent digging. And by the time they read that, the war in the
43:22Philippines had already cost Japan more than it could afford.
43:26Thank you for watching this one all the way through. If it was worth your time, a like really
43:31does help the story reach other people who care about these men. And I hope you will subscribe and
43:36turn on the bell so you do not miss what comes next. I would like to know where you are
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43:41so tell me in the comments. And if you had a father, an uncle, a grandfather who served in the
43:48Second World War, in the Pacific or anywhere else, I would consider it a privilege if you told us his
43:54name and where he served. This channel exists because of men like him, and their stories deserve
44:00to be said out loud.
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