Lost Evidence: Luzon (You Tube)

The American fleet of over 800 ships approaches Luzon and are met by kamikaze.

The New Mexico is hit.

Luzon.

The planned American drive.

The commander of the Japanese troops on Luzon.

He splits his troops into three groups.

The Americans kill around 2500 of the Japanese and they retreat deep into the mountains.

MacArthur wants to save the American POWs. The Japanese were planning to kill all of them.

19 days into the battle, this is the territory now held by the U.S.

Planes try to get pictures of the POW camp, and a group called the Alamo Scouts is sent in to try to get to the camp. There are 200 Japanese guarding 500 American prisoners.

Actual footage of the raiding party as they are getting started. They are working with Filipino guerrillas.

They find out there are 7000 Japanese to the west, and another 1000 to the north of the camp. The group to the West ends up moving away.

There's diagrams of all of this. It takes only a half hour to free all the prisoners, but they still all have to get back to safety.

23 days in to the battle and the Americans keep advancing. MacArthur wants his troops to move faster so they can free the men held in the other prisoner camps around Manila.

600 soldiers, tanks and trucks race down the road to Manila, stopping for nothing. They get there and race towards one of the POW camps to liberate it. Another camp is liberated, and over 5000 people, civilian and military both, are freed.

Manila will be the only Pacific theater house-to-house battle.

MacArthur had hamstrung the U.S. troops, saying they would get no air support and they couldn't use heavy artillery, since he didn't want civilian Filipinos killed, but the Japanese set about blowing everything up and starting fires themselves. U.S. casualties start running so high that MacArthur gives the go-ahead to use the heavy artillery.

The Americans have to re-take Corregidor so Manila's harbor can be used to bring in supplies.

Aerial photography spotted when the paratroopers hit the ground on the island. The intelligence was wrong, though, and the men are facing not 1,000 Japanese, but 6,000. The Japanese actually outnumber the Americans 3:1. A lot of the fighting is also vicious hand-to-hand fighting.

The vast majority of the Japanese were underground, and the fighting had to be blowing up their hiding places or burning them out. The Japanese would also use banzai charges which just resulted in such groups being slaughtered.

The Japanese start committing suicide by setting off explosives. One huge cache of explosives goes off and shakes the entire island. The Americans end up with about 220 men dead. Japanese deaths were probably near the limit, around 6000. As the Americans took over Manila, they found that the Japanese had slaughtered Filipino civilians. The Japanese military caused the death of 100,000 Filipino civilians.

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