Tears in the Darkness by Michael Norman Page B

and their best guess was sobering: the Japanese, they believed, were among the finest fighting men in the world, “aggressive, well-trained . . . superbly led,” and “dogged in combat.” 10
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    AN ARCHIPELAGO of 7,100 islands lying on an axis some 1,150 miles long, the Philippines was too diffuse for a garrison to defend and too far away—almost 7,000 miles from American shores—for a battle fleet to reach them in time to thwart an invasion or relieve a garrison under siege. And for more than forty years, from December 1898 when America took possession of the Philippines, until December 1941 when the Japanese attacked, this conundrum, this classic problem of assembling “forces in space” and “forces in time,” as Carl von Clausewitz called it, kept military planners spinning.
    Across the years a succession of admirals and generals in Washingtonand Manila wrote and rewrote a war plan, code-named Orange, that tried to anticipate Japan’s ambitions and America’s answer. With almost every revision of Orange, and there were many, military planners reached the same conclusion: the islands would fall and the garrison would be captured or slaughtered. Brigadier General Stanley D. Embick, a respected strategist who had served in the Philippines, believed that if war came, America should abandon the islands, bide its time, build up its fleet, then return in strength to retake what it had lost. But to sacrifice territory without a fight, and to give up America’s only major naval base in the western Pacific, was to risk the opprobrium of the other Western powers. All of which left American commanders in the Philippines in a tactical quandary: How was the army to defend the indefensible, and how could commanders convince their men to hold out for help when those commanders knew well that help would never come? 11
    In the decades before World War II, the top American officers in the Philippines talked about two strategies: an “active defense” of meeting the invaders at the water’s edge, and a “defense in depth,” which called for an orderly withdrawal down Luzon’s central plain to the mountainous peninsula of Bataan whose east shore faced Manila Bay. There, in a last stand, the army would be able to deny the enemy the use of the bay and Manila harbor and would try to hold out for six months until the Pacific Fleet arrived to save them. 12
    Both stratagems were fictions, fictions because the generals who conceived them and the colonels in charge of translating them into action knew that the garrison would be outmanned and outgunned, constantly under siege and cut off from home. “Active defense” and “defense in depth” were euphemisms, military bunkum for what was really going to happen—the defeat, or annihilation, of the garrison. 13
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    MACARTHUR had his own plan.
    By 1940 Congress, now inured to the cries of the isolationists, voted for a military draft and for funds to rebuild the army and navy. It takes time, however, to retool factories and manufacture the matériel of war, time to stockpile armaments and mobilize men. That winter and spring the armed services were still understrength, and military planners wanted America to stay out of the war “as long as possible,” long enough, at least, to get the country’s factories going and enlist and trainhundreds of thousands of men. At length Washington settled on a strategy to buy that time, a strategy that worried more about Europe than the Pacific. Germany seemed ready to reduce the British Isles and occupy all of Europe, so for the moment Washington decided to put “Europe First,” as the plan was nicknamed. America would concentrate what resources it had on its Atlantic defenses; it would bolster the English and try to bluff the Japanese, long enough at least to let America build its stockpiles and prepare for a two-ocean war. 14
    Ignoring the