Top Photo: Gen. Douglas MacArthur wades ashore during initial landings at Leyte, Philippine Islands. October 20, 1944. U.S. Army Signal Corps officer Gaetano Faillace. National Archives (NAID) 531424

On October 20, 1944, General Douglas MacArthur addressed the Filipino people by radio from a beach on the island of Leyte. 

“People of the Philippines, I have returned!” he told them. “By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples.”

The radio address was the dramatic culmination of a campaign by the general that had lasted more than two years having faced both the enemy on the battlefield and naysayers among his fellow commanders. The landing did not mark the end of the battle for the Philippines, but instead the beginning of one of the most hard-fought and brutal campaigns in the deadly final months of the war in the Pacific.

A Complicated History

The Philippines occupied a unique position in the early 20th-century US history. The islands had been a Spanish colonial possession for centuries until the Spanish–American War in 1898. The United States then purchased the entire island chain from the Spanish as part of the Treaty of Paris ending the war. Done without Filipino consent, this development was unwelcome to many locals who did not want to trade the rule of one far-away colonial power for that of another. A violent insurgency against American rule broke out and officially lasted for two years, though sporadic resistance continued for decades. 

One of the key American commanders in this period was Arthur MacArthur Jr.— father of the future WWII general. MacArthur Jr. fought first against the Spanish, then the insurgency, and eventually was appointed US military governor in 1900. However, just over a year later he was replaced by a civil governor— future president William Howard Taft. In 1901, Congress passed a law creating the  under the command of American officers to help fight the ongoing insurgency. 

The Philippines were now ruled by a governor general appointed by Washington. Over the ensuing decades, Filipino delegations repeatedly petitioned for independence and the right to form their own government, but there was little progress. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office, the US agreed to a 10-year plan to move toward potential independence. This new transitional government was called the Philippine Commonwealth with a constitution approved by Roosevelt and the Filipino people in 1935. Independence was now planned for 1946. 

The Commonwealth elected its own president— Manuel L. Quezon— and US influence was now exerted through a high commissioner reporting back to Washington rather than a governor general making decisions directly. Under this new arrangement, a new untrained and underequipped national army was created, serving alongside better-equipped American and Philippine Scout units. All this history would come into play with the sudden Japanese invasion in December 1941 and in the years to come. 

MacArthur’s Vow

General Douglas MacArthur was already one of the most famous US generals by 1941. Born in 1880, he attended West Point and graduated in 1903 at the top of his class. The young MacArthur served in France during World War I, receiving both the Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Cross. After the armistice, MacArthur assumed the duties of the Superintendent of West Point and in 1922 was appointed commander of the Manila district in the Philippines.[1] 

After a brief sojourn as head of the American Olympic Committee, MacArthur was appointed commander of the Philippine Department. With this assumption, he became the top American military officer in the colonial outpost. Throughout the 1920s, he developed a close relationship with Quezon. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover appointed MacArthur Chief of Staff of the Army. Controversy followed in this new position, however, when in 1932 MacArthur personally led the troops removing the Bonus Army marchers—impoverished WWI veterans looking to cash in their service bonus certificates—from the National Mall in Washington, DC.[2] Three years later, MacArthur retired from the Army after a conflict with the new president, Roosevelt. His old friend Quezon now offered MacArthur a position helping develop the Philippine armed forces in preparation for eventual independence. In late 1935, MacArthur returned to the Philippines to take on the new role carrying the title of field marshal.[3]

As tensions rose in the Pacific with Japan, MacArthur continued training his army and began preparing for a defense of the Philippine Islands. Military planners recognized that the Philippines could become a target for the Japanese given the archipelago’s strategic location and proximity to British, French, and Dutch colonial possessions. However, resources were in short supply. The US economy was still recovering from the Great Depression, with military preparations a low priority. Yet as tensions began to rise, Washington knew that the Philippines might become a target of Japanese aggression. In July 1941, Roosevelt recalled MacArthur to active duty and appointed him commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), giving him authority over both Filipino and American troops in the region.[4]

However, the resources to actually fight were still not forthcoming. By December 1941, MacArthur had far fewer bombers and fighters stationed at Clark Field near Manila than he believed required to defend the island chain.[5] Much of the available military hardware and munitions dated back to World War I or before, giving the Japanese a material advantage. MacArthur’s plan was to prevent an enemy landing on the key island of Luzon using a combination of naval guns and sea mines. In the event that the enemy did land, he planned to declare Manila an open city and withdraw his ground forces to the Bataan Peninsula, ideally using the peninsula’s position at the entrance to Manila Bay to his advantage. The island fortress of Corregidor in the bay itself, with deep tunnels and extensive fortifications, could serve as a last redoubt and command center.[6] In total, MacArthur’s forces consisted of around 100,000 Filipinos and 20,000 Americans. 

On the morning of December 8, 1941, MacArthur’s plans faced operational reality when Japan attacked the Philippines hours after the strike on Pearl Harbor (due to the time difference, the attacks took place a day apart). Japanese fighters and bombers destroyed half of the American B-17 bomber fleet on the ground at Clark Field near Manila, depriving MacArthur of critical air support.[7] As the wider military crisis unfolded across the Pacific, promised reinforcements, supplies, and weapons on convoys from the mainland were rerouted elsewhere, leaving MacArthur’s defenders to fight with what they had. The Japanese land invasion began in the north of Luzon on December 22 and faced little resistance. Two days later, Japanese forces invaded southern Luzon and began pushing toward Manila. MacArthur ordered a retreat to Bataan and withdrew to Corregidor. More than 80,000 men and more than 25,000 refugees arrived on the peninsula, far more than MacArthur’s planning had anticipated. Both populations stretched his supplies and forced the general to reduce rations by half. With air resupply impossible, the American and Filipino garrison faced starvation. On January 10, 1942, the Japanese commander offered surrender terms, which MacArthur ignored.[8] 

Map of Luzon, Philippines showing Japanese landings and advances from December 8,1941, to January 8, 1942. United States Army Center of Military History

As fighting continued and became increasingly desperate, MacArthur was rarely seen outside his command tunnel on Corregidor, leading some of his men to insultingly dub him “Dugout Doug.”[9] As the situation continued to deteriorate, Roosevelt ordered MacArthur and his family to withdraw from Corregidor to avoid capture by the Japanese and continue the fight from Australia. Despite initial reluctance, MacArthur, his wife and young son, and a select group of officers slipped out of Corregidor in the dark by PT boats on March 11. Dodging a series of Japanese patrols, he reached the island of Mindanao and two days later flew on to Australia. After arriving in Melbourne, MacArthur memorably promised the Filipino people, “I shall return.” 

Back in Bataan, the situation deteriorated for the American and Filipino garrison. On May 6, Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered remaining troops on Bataan and Corregidor, along with the Philippine Islands. Thousands of the survivors died or were executed by their captors in what became known as the Bataan Death March. Only a fraction would survive to see the end of the war.

Fulfilling a Promise

For the next two years, MacArthur pushed to prioritize a return to the Philippines. American strategy called for Admiral Chester Nimitz’s fleet to push into the central Pacific islands from the west, relying on Marines to land and secure key objectives. Simultaneously, MacArthur’s army would advance from Australia, and by mid-1944, MacArthur delivered success in New Guinea, capturing more than 1,200 miles of territory. In June, the Navy and Marines captured the Mariana Islands after years of bloody fighting, putting US bombers within striking distance of Tokyo. 

Seeing his opportunity, MacArthur successfully convinced Roosevelt to allow a push toward first Leyte Island, then to Luzon, followed by a thrust to the capital.[10] This decision was made over the objections of commanders including Chief of Naval Operations Ernest J. King, who wanted to bypass the Philippines entirely and push toward Japan. Yet MacArthur’s view won the day. According to historian Stanley Weintraub, “MacArthur had maintained a moral obligation to recover ‘American’ territory, and argued it would be cheap. It would not be cheap, but his pride in returning was paramount.”[11]

The US plan for the liberation of the Philippines was complicated, involving joint operations between the Army and Navy including hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men. Historian Max Hastings has referred to the Philippines campaign as “by far the U.S. Army’s largest commitment of the Asian war.”[12] On the morning of October 20, a vast fleet approached Leyte and began the landings. Unlike other landings in the Pacific, Japanese defenses were light and American casualties were limited. 

That afternoon, MacArthur went ashore personally, walking out from a Higgins landing craft accompanied by the Philippine president, Sergio Osmuna, resulting in the famous photo of the group’s arrival.[13] On the beach, his public relations team established a radio connection for his famous broadcast to the Filipino people: “People of the Philippines, I have returned!”[14] It was a moment more than two years in the making. “It was MacArthur’s day,” historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote. “He was more than a general; he was a symbol.”[15] 

General Douglas MacArthur (center), accompanied by Lieutenant Generals George C. Kenney and Richard K. Sutherland and Major General Verne D. Mudge (Commanding General, First Cavalry Division), inspecting the beachhead on Leyte Island, 20 October 1944. Note the crowd of onlookers. The swamped LCVP in the right background is from USS Ormsby (APA-49). Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives.

The Battle Continues

MacArthur’s landing at Leyte was symbolically important, but it was hardly the end of the war in the Philippines. Over the weeks and months to come, Japanese troops inflicted heavy casualties on his ground forces as resistance stiffened and the defenders refused to surrender. At sea, the Battle of Leyte Gulf just days after MacArthur’s landing threatened to destroy the American fleet and cut off the land forces but ended in a decisive American victory.[16] Following this victory MacArthur was promoted to five-star general later in the year.

On January 9, 1945, MacArthur landed with his men on the island of Luzon and began the push south toward Manila. Along the way, his troops liberated prisoners of war, who in some cases had remained captives since his departure in 1942. In other areas, Allied prisoners were massacred by their captors. American troops entered Manila in early February, but Japanese troops refused to give up the city. Over the ensuing weeks, bitter urban combat inflicted heavy casualties on both sides and reduced much of the historic city to ruins.[17] In July 1945, MacArthur issued a communiqué formally declaring major combat operations completed in the Philippines. 

On September 2, 1945, Japan formally surrendered to the Allies, ending the war in the Pacific. MacArthur himself signed the surrender documents on behalf of the Allies on the deck of USS Missouri. In a moving moment, he presented a pen used in the ceremony to Wainwright, who had survived years of captivity after the surrender of Corregidor and had been liberated just weeks before. 

The multiyear battle for the Philippines came at a steep cost. The US lost more than 8,000 killed and missing in 1945 on Luzon alone.[18] As many as one million Filipino civilians were killed in the course of the war, along with tens of thousands of soldiers. Manila largely lay in ruins. Historians today still debate whether MacArthur’s insistence on focusing on the Philippines rather than islands closer to mainland Japan was correct, and the extent to which his personal experience and feelings affected his decisions. In the judgment of historian Max Hastings: “MacArthur presided over the largest ground campaign of America’s war in the Pacific in a fashion which satisfied his own ambitions more convincingly than the national purposes of his country.”[19] 

In 1946, MacArthur, then overseeing the occupation of Japan, was present when the US formally granted the Philippines independence on the original timeline. In 2016, Filipino veterans of the war were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in recognition of their sacrifice.