By 1941, Yamashita was the commanding general of the Twenty-Fifth Army. His plans for taking Singapore were already underway. On December 8, 1941, he struck, marching his troops for nine weeks through supposedly impenetrable jungle to pounce on Great Britain’s “Gibraltar of the East.” On February 15, 1942, Yamashita prevailed, when British Lt. Gen. Sir Arthur Percival and 130,000 Empire troops surrendered. It was the largest surrender in British history.

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Five months later, Yamashita was transferred to the backwaters of Manchuria, the victim of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s jealousy and Yamashita’s often-voiced dislike of the warlord’s policies. For the next two years that is where Yamashita stayed, watching his command dwindle away as his soldiers were called to fight in more active theaters. Then, in the fall of 1944, when the Pacific War had reached its zenith, Yamashita received orders to command the defense of the Philippines. It would be his final call to destiny.

By then the Allies had swept the emperor’s soldiers away from most of their fanatically defended island bastions. Yamashita already knew that the Philippines were next on the Allied list for liberation. He also knew that the Philippines were an absolutely vital link in the shrinking supply lines of Japan’s crumbling empire. Yamashita had no illusions about his chances for success. At best he hoped to deprive the Allies of the Philippines as a forward operating area for as long as possible. He reached Manila on October 5, 1944, two weeks before his last battle would begin.

Meanwhile, MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific area forces were on board hundreds of troopships bound for the Philippines. On October 20, Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army stormed ashore almost unopposed on the east coast of Leyte. As soon as Yamashita learned of the invasion, he reluctantly ordered troops stationed on Luzon to reinforce Leyte’s outnumbered garrison. More troops were brought in from Korea and Manchuria. By November, the Japanese had 45,000 soldiers facing MacArthur and more were on the way. Eventually, 75,000 Japanese soldiers would be thrown into the fight on Leyte.

The battle raged for more than two months. Before it concluded in late December, Yamashita had lost 60,000 soldiers killed. U.S. Army casualties were 3,500 killed and 12,000 wounded. MacArthur called the battle for Leyte “perhaps the greatest defeat in the annals of the Japanese army.” Still ahead, however, were the grim battles for Luzon and the Philippine capital, Manila, the prewar “Pearl of the Orient” and MacArthur’s adopted home.

The opening gambit of the battle for Luzon started on December 15, 1944, when MacArthur ordered troops ashore on the nearby island of Mindoro. MacArthur knew that if he attacked Luzon without overwhelming superiority the invasion would be a bloodier repeat of the 1942 Japanese conquest. To that end he needed airfields to gain air superiority and protected supply routes that avoided Luzon’s still dangerous air force.

Young Japanese kamikaze pilots already were crashing their planes onto the decks of Allied ships. The first American ship lost to the suicide planes had gone to the bottom on October 25, when planes from the hastily formed kamikaze squadron of Vice Adm. Takijito Onishi’s First Air Fleet sank the escort carrier St. Lô. In all, 16 ships would be sunk off the Philippines and another 80 damaged before the Americans gained total control of the air.

The invasion of Mindoro surprised Yamashita. He had anticipated that MacArthur would develop airfields farther south, thinking that it would take too long to build runways on the marshy ground of Mindoro. Within eight days of landing, however, American and Australian engineers had two fighter strips in operation. A week later they added a bomber base for Fifth Air Force medium bombers.

Within three weeks of landing on Mindoro, Allied aircraft were striking hard at Luzon. More than half the ships carrying supplies to Yamashita were sunk. Thousands of fresh troops drowned, and those that managed to get ashore had nothing to eat.

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