Considering that the Japanese preferred everything to be neat and tidy, which was the opposite inclination of the average Ormoc resident, it was easy to see how from their perspective the occupants of the city might be inferior. The residents had been treated accordingly.
To that end, an entire element of the port city’s population was absent. The older boys and men had long since been rounded up to work as slave labor on the Japanese defensive projects, such as the bunkers at Ipil. Without any heavy equipment, most of the work had been done with buckets and shovels, requiring backbreaking effort in the tropical heat. There was little food or rest.
The Japanese were harsh taskmasters. Treated cruelly, given little to eat and forced to work long hours, many of these Filipinos would never return home.
With a battle imminent, it was fortunate that most of the residents had fled. Where they had gone was anybody’s guess, but they had likely hidden in the surrounding forests and rice paddies.
It was only the Japanese who now occupied Ormoc, and they had turned the entire city into a fortress. Sandbags had been placed around the sturdier stucco houses, which now bristled with machine guns. Soldiers had dug trenches at key crossroads and corners, enabling them to command long fields of fire along the city streets.
A few of the bunkers even contained field artillery or antiaircraft guns that had been turned from the skies to the streets to deal with any tanks that appeared.
The tropical buildings typically did not have cellars or basements, but soldiers had created dugouts in the crawl spaces, enabling them to shoot from beneath.
Snipers hid themselves in the upper floors of shops and houses. With some water and a few rations, they waited patiently for the arrival of the Americans.
All in all, capturing Ormoc wasn’t going to be easy.
Ultimately, it was a fight that the Japanese must have known that they could not win, but they were prepared to sacrifice themselves and the city itself if it meant slowing down the US advance.
In a sense, the fight taking place at Ormoc was a microcosm of the Japanese situation. All around the Pacific, the noose was tightening around the Japanese. The strands of the web that held their sprawling empire together were snapping, one by one.
Had the Japanese really believed that they could command an empire that stretched across such a vast expanse? True, Japan was a powerful and determined nation, but it lacked the necessary natural resources to maintain its war machine — chiefly rubber and oil. Its army and navy operated independent of one another, and joint operations were undertaken more in a spirit of grudging cooperation than under a combined command structure. It was no way to fight a world war — but no one seemed to have told that to the Japanese.
Finally, their attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor seemed to have been an act of supreme hubris. They had provoked a powerful nation in the worst way possible. Admiral Yamamoto had said it best, saying that Japan had awoken a sleeping giant.
The people of the United States had willingly joined forces with the beleaguered nations of Europe to fight Nazi Germany. In the view of the US government, the war in Europe came first. For all Germany’s aggression in Europe, Nazi forces had never attacked the US outright — although they had certainly schemed to do so. Sure, Americans fought Nazi Germany because it was a job that needed to be done.
But the Japanese had attacked in the most despicable way possible. In the minds of many, the attack on sleepy Pearl Harbor seemed more like an act of murder than an act of war. Consequently, many Americans felt a special enmity toward the Japanese that had carried over to the island battlefields across the Pacific.
They may have found themselves increasingly surrounded, but the Japanese only fought harder. Their backs were to the wall. Despite tremendous losses, they provided a seemingly endless supply of soldiers and planes and ships. Fewer each day, perhaps, but still a threat.
Although it was far beyond the pay grade of the average soldier, plans were already being made at the highest levels for the eventual assault on the Japanese home islands. Iwo Jima, the smaller Ryukyu islands, and then Okinawa would be in the crosshairs. Losses promised to be heavy.
No one liked to talk about it, but after those large stepping stones would come the attack on Japan itself. Knowing the way the Japanese fought so desperately, the combat losses promised to be almost incalculable. Would the American public be able to stomach such losses? These were the sort of thoughts that kept men like Douglas MacArthur and the president, FDR, awake at night.
But if the military planners remained two steps ahead, the troops on the ground still needed to deal with the business before them. Ormoc and Leyte itself could not be left in Japanese hands.
In Ormoc, there had been fewer blatant atrocities than in other population centers in the Philippines. Instead, the Japanese had primarily controlled the population by threatening to starve them and by abducting their men and boys as slave labor. If they behaved, there were vague promises that their men might be returned.
The vast rice fields in the region were quite productive. Most food production had been channeled to feed the Japanese military, with whatever the farmers produced being taken from them.
If local officials did not cooperate, the supply of rice to the civilian population would be cut off. The threat of famine made a very effective whip.
Although local officials gave the appearance of collaborating with the Japanese, they also walked a dangerous tightrope by also staying in communication with guerrilla forces. It was a dangerous game that they played with the Kempeitai — the Japanese military police, who surely suspected what the local officials were up to and used all the informants at their disposal to catch them in the act.
It didn’t help matters that the Kempeitai was itself corrupt, with everyone from the commander on down working to fill his own pockets with bribes. In addition to black market foodstuffs, there were the profits from brothels and bars to consider. All in all, occupied Ormoc was a tangled web, indeed.
Given this tableau of misery, the people of Ormoc had cheered when news arrived of the US landing on the other side of the island. But now the war had arrived within the city itself, with all its destructive force. There would be a price to pay for liberation.
The sun was still high in the sky when the first US troops crept cautiously down the empty streets. The Japanese held their fire, letting the enemy get well within firing range.
Their fingers on their triggers, they waited.
Deke, Philly, Yoshio, and Danilo were among the first of those soldiers entering the city. Right behind them came Honcho and a handful of the rear-echelon troops who had been pressed into service, mixed with veterans from Captain Merrick’s company.
The more inexperienced men were doing their best to follow Honcho’s orders and imitate the combat men who scurried from one building to another, covering one another in the process.
“It’s awfully damn quiet,” Philly whispered to no one in particular. “I don’t like it.”
“Don’t you worry your pretty head,” Deke said. “I reckon it’s about to get real noisy around here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE