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When American forces landed on Luzon in January and advanced rapidly down the rolling central plains, Gen. Tomoyuku Yamashita told the Japanese people that this was intended as part of the Japanese defensive trap. He was only half kidding.
Probably the General still had hopes of effecting at least a part of his well-planned original strategy for the defense of Luzon, but he was destined to become a victim of two major blunders:.
1. A gross underestimation of effective American air power and the unprecedented skill with which that power would be employed.
2. His own indecision which resulted in chaos and disorganization among his ground forces at the outset of battle.
Within a matter of weeks, the greatest concentrated Jap air force in history was blown to bits, and an uncontested, smoothly-functioning American Air Force proceeded with a systematic reduction of enemy communications and ground installations in a display of air-ground coordination unparalleled in the southwest Pacific.
Admittedly anticipating that the battle of Luzon would prove decisive in the outcome of the Pacific war, Jap military leaders had planned an elaborate defense long before the Allied landing on Leyte. Full air strength was to be an integral part of that defense, and General Tominaga, commander of the Jap Air Force in the Philippines, had drawn into Luzon fighters and bombers from Burma, China, Manchuria, Formosa, the Ryukyus, Japan proper and even the Kuriles.
General Yamashita, meanwhile, had begun to deploy his ground forces where they would have greatest advantage when the invasion came. For example, in the Lingayen area, where our forces eventually landed on January 9, he had planned to place well-reinforced ground troops in the high country on both flanks of the central plains, with a third force across the plains inland along the Agno River line.
Then, while his men would move in on the invaders from three sides, Yamashita was counting on the Jap Navy to stop American supplies and reinforcements from the south. The defense plan was a natural. But it was upset when our landings succeeded on Leyte. The Japanese Command was forced to shift ground forces from strategic positions in central and northern Luzon to reinforce garrisons in the Batangas area south of Manila, to prepare for a possible follow-up landing in southern Luzon.
It was late in December before this movement was reversed. The wily Yamashita apparently had decided that the Luzon invasion would come in the north, in the Lingayen area--but he was too late.
Repeated blows by bombers and fighters of the 5th and 13th Air Forces, and carrier-based naval aircraft already had taken a heavy toll of Jap air strength. With Leyte secure, the 5th, joined by elements of the 13th, began to have a field day blasting Jap troop and vehicle columns as enemy forces attempted to scurry back to planned positions flanking the Luzon central plains to the north.
Maj. Gen. Ennis Whitehead, commanding the 5th, reported to Far East Air Forces Headquarters that his planes between Christmas Day and January 16 had knocked out 79 locomotives, 466 railroad cars, 486 motor trucks, 18 tanks and 67 staff cars.
As our ground forces rolled south from Lingayen Gulf, this drubbing from the air stalled what was left of Yamashita's strategy for the defense of central Luzon. One after another, bridges were bombed out and highways were blocked by strafing fighters with the result that the enemy found movement of his troops and equipment as organized units an impossibility.
No opposition was encountered from the hills along the west flank of the north central plains because no defenders had been able to reach this area. The few troops who straggled into the mountains along the east flank were too disorganized to put up a fight.
Only in the Rosario sector in the north did the Jap line hold, and here Yamashita was able to throw in forces he had retained in northern Luzon and the few reinforcements which had run the gauntlet of American air and sea power to land in such ports as San Fernando up the west coast.
Our forces moving south finally encountered their first stiff opposition in the ridges overlooking Clark Field. The Japs had been determined to hold Clark at all costs. The vast influx of Jap aircraft was destined to prove of little value, however, in the defense of the Clark Air Center. For, in addition to their wholesale destruction by our Air Forces, most of the enemy planes were unable to get off the ground because of an obvious lack of ground and maintenance personnel. This deficiency occurred despite the presence at Clark of the Manila Air Depot, largest Jap installation of its kind south of the Japanese homeland. The air center had been elaborately camouflaged and protected, in addition, by nearly 700 heavy, medium and light antiaircraft weapons supported by some 25 searchlights.
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