Second World War at Sea: Java Sea
Attack on the Philippines
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
December 2023

In the early decades of the 20th Century, defense of the Philippines obsessed American naval planners. The United States took possession of the archipelago in 1898, and successive administrations feared that foreign predators would try to take it. At first this attention focused on the Russians, newly aggressive in the region since taking Port Arthur as a naval base in 1895. But the Japanese destroyed Russian naval power in the Pacific a decade later, and American fears shifted to this new, dynamic player.

A squadron of American cruisers operated out of Cavite, on Manila Bay just south of the colony’s capital, but they were not expected to repel an enemy attack. In the decade between the Russo-Japanese War and the outbreak of the First World War, the Americans fortified Manila Bay against a possible Japanese invasion.

The Philippines saw no combat as a result of the war; the Philippine-American War had only ended in 1913. In 1917, the recently-established Philippine Legislature raised a 25,000-men National Guard that it offered for service with the American Expeditionary Force, but it was only inducted on Armistice Day and disbanded soon afterwards.

During the Great Depression, right-wing American politicians pointed to Filipino workers as a cause of mass unemployment within the United States. In 1935, the U.S. Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, laying out a ten-year path to independence for the islands. It immediately turned Filipinos into aliens rather than U.S. nationals and took away free immigration to the continental United States, substituting a quota of 50 (fifty) Filipino immigrants per year. Filipinos also became subject to the 1924 Asian Exclusion Act, and the 1935 Philippine Repatriation Act shipped Filipinos already resident in the United States back to the islands (this would be ruled unconstitutional in 1940).

As part of the path to independence, the Philippines would also have its own armed forces. The heart of this new defense establishment would be the Philippine Commonwealth Army, eventually to number ten divisions. Filipinos could also enroll in the U.S. Army’s Philippine Scouts, regular regiments of both infantry and cavalry. Small naval and air forces also began organization, but new equipment for them arrived very slowly. The Philippine government hired former U.S. Army chief fo staff Douglas MacArthur to oversee this buildup, granting him his requested rank of field marshal and a salary that made him the highest-paid soldier in the world.

The ancient armored cruiser Rochester moored in Subic Bay. October 1941.

In the summer of 1941, the United States awakened to the pending danger of Japanese attack and began to ship reinforcements and equipment to the Philippines, though much of this had not arrived when the war broke out in December. MacArthur, recalled to active service, became commander of all American and Philippine forces in the Far East.

The Philippine Navy (formally the Offshore Patrol Force) operated five motor torpedo boats. The Philippine Army Air Corps had sixty obsolescent fighters (P26 and P35 types) and two bombers (Martin B10). American defenses would rest on the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic Fleet and the U.S. Army Air Forces’ Far East Air Force.

The Far East Air Force had minimal strength, just 88 operational combat aircraft on 7 December 1941: 54 P40 fighters and 34 B17 heavy bombers, plus the outdated Filipino planes. Most flew out of the air bases around Manila, chiefly Clark Field, with a few stationed on the big southern island of Mindanao. More fighters had arrived and not yet been assembled, tested, or flown; more B17 bombers were on their way, but ran into Japanese fighters as they landed at Hickam Field in Hawaii. By the spring of 1942 the Philippines would be protected by hundreds of first-line fighters and heavy bombers. But it was not yet the spring of 1942.

The Asiatic Fleet similarly had just a handful of ships: one heavy cruiser, one obsolete light cruiser (plus a modern light cruiser that had just escorted a convoy from the U.S. West Coast to Manila) and thirteen over-aged destroyers. Admiral Thomas Hart’s only true asset was his force of 27 submarines, 21 of them modern and very capable boats, but defective torpedoes would limit their impact. He also had a patrol wing with 28 modern PBY Cataline flying boats, and four seaplane tenders to service them including the former aircraft carrier Langley.

The Japanese wildly over-estimated American capabilities, crediting the Far East Asir Force with 206 combat aircraft plus 70 more U.S. Navy planes; whether they counted the Philippine Air Corps in this total or ignored them is not clear. They estimated American naval strength at two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, 15 destroyers and 25 submarines – not far off the true count.

Hart reported to Washington, not to MacArthur in Manila, who repeatedly insulted the small naval presence, and Hart himself, as “Small Navy, Big Admiral.” Despite their mutual dislike, Hart hoped to fight a Japanese invasion with his fleet, seeking out the vulnerable invasion convoys, but instead of permission to attack the Japanese he was told to retreat into Dutch waters at his own discretion.

Hart recalled his ships from their stations on Chinese rivers and at Chinese ports, and began sending them south into the Dutch East Indies. The old light cruiser Marblehead and five destroyers went to Tarakan, and the destroyer tender Black Hawk with four more boats to Balikpapan. The heavy cruiser Houston went to Cebu in the central Philippines along with the powerful light cruiser Boise, which had not quite arrived when the Japanese attack began.

Fort Drum, the Concrete Battleship, guarded the entrance to Manila Bay.

MacArthur received word of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at 0220 local time on 8 December; while the bombing was underway. Yet the Japanese did not attack the Philippines simultaneously; unknown to the Americans, heavy fog over the Japanese-ruled island of Formosa delayed their strikes. MacArthur denied Far East Air Force commander Lewis Brereton’s request to bomb the Formosa airfields – his chief of staff, Richard Sutherland, eventually told Brereton to stop calling headquarters – but Brereton received orders from Washington not to allow his planes to be caught on the ground, and he sent almost all of them aloft at 0800. But they had almost all landed again when the Japanese finally arrived at 1240.

The initial Japanese airstrikes destroyed half of the Far East Air Force, and almost all of the remainder would be lost over the next two days. The Japanese quickly had control of the air over the Philippines, and would have given Houston and her consorts the same treatment meted out to Force Z had they remained in the area.

Landings began on the same day as the first air strikes, with the Japanese occupying islands off the northern coast of Luzon, the main island of the Philippines. They came ashore on Luzon itself on the 10th; the Far East Air Force made its only coherent attack on that same day, striking the beachhead at Vigan where B17 bombers damaged two warships and two transports and a P-35 fighter sank a Japanese minesweeper in a strafing attack.

The vaunted Asiatic Fleet submarine force, of which so much had been expected, proved even less effective than the heavy bombers. Seawolf torpedoed the Japanese seaplane carrier Sanyo Maru on the 14th; the Mark 14 torpedo bounced off without exploding. Operating without aerial reconnaissance and with an insecure home base subject to enemy air attack, the submarines had no successes against the invading Japanese and soon had to withdraw to Australia.

A27 attack planes at Nicholls Field, Philippines. November 1941.

The major landings came on 22 December, using the transports and escorts that had landed Japanese troops in Malaya earlier in the month. They now brought ashore major formations at Lingayen Gulf in northern Luzon, and Legazpi in south-eastern Luzon, allowing a two-pronged advance against Manila. On the 26th, MacArthur declared the Philippine capital an open city, but the Americans continued to use it as a logistics center and the Japanese continued to bomb it. Japanese troops finally entered Manila on 2 January.

The American and Filipino forces would hold out on the Bataan Peninsula until April, and the island of fortress of Corregidor lasted for another month. Resistance never really ended as Americans and Filipinos waged a guerilla war against the Japanese until American forces returned in October 1944. But the naval and air struggle ended well before fighting ceased on the ground; it was essentially over in less than a week.

The Asiatic Fleet had been a plum pre-war posting, giving it the pick of officers and enlisted men, but those long-established peacetime patterns made it difficult to prepare for war. The crews of its cruisers and destroyers certainly fought very well in the Dutch East Indies, and pre-war policy of relying on mobile support ships rather than fixed bases certainly helped (though the submarines’ stockpile of useless Mark 14 torpedoes would be lost along with the Cavite Navy Yard).

The “fleet” was never intended to defend the Philippines. Its ships showed the flag on the China coast and asserted American presence and power. Naval power would come in the form of the Pacific Fleet, when it crossed the ocean to relieve the Philippine garrison, but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, years would pass before such an offensive became possible.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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