Overview of WWII Context

By the spring of 1941, rising nationalistic tensions between the United States and Japan indicated the two countries were headed for conflict.[i] Since 1931 with its invasion of Manchuria, Japan had engaged in several battles with China, but full-scale war did not start until the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 1937, with the Japanese attack of a bridge route near Beijing. This attack, as well as the subsequent Nanking Massacre, placed Japan at odds with the United States, which had diplomatically supported the Open Door Policy toward China.[ii] By 1940, conservative elements within the Japanese government gained control, and pushed for a policy centered on the complete conquest of the Pacific Rim. With Europe’s colonial powers distracted with the war with Germany, Japan’s plans also included the colonial holdings of Britain, France, and the Netherlands.[iii] Primarily motivating such an ambitious plan was Japan’s continual need for raw resources that it lacked, namely coal, oil, and iron, resources that the war with China was already depleting.

The American-held Philippines lay in their immediate path and would be necessary for Japan’s aerial dominance of the Pacific. The United States had acquired the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War with Spain in 1898, and it secured its colonial ambitions through the subsequent Philippine-American War of 1902, which involved a brutal subjugation of the Philippine insurrection.[iv] A U.S. commonwealth since 1935, and one of the United States’ most strategic locations in the Pacific, plans were nevertheless underway to grant the Philippines their independence in 1946. The U.S. War Department was focused in 1939 on Europe and Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland. But it also implemented War Plan Orange, a primarily defensive plan that sought to maintain a dominant U.S. position in the western Pacific, and for the army and navy to hold Manila Bay as a base for the U.S. Pacific Fleet.[v] 

The War Department, however, seemed to view the Philippines as too far away for it to ever fully defend against a Japanese attack, and, with more pressing concerns emerging in Europe and with significant budget restrictions, it only provided for a minimal defense of the islands, particularly Bataan and Manila Harbor.[vi] Despite a massive pre-war military build-up beginning in 1940, the isolationist policies of the 1920s and 1930s had made America’s military small in size and unprepared for war. That partially explains why the War Department depended so much on National Guard regiments to supplement thousands of enlisted Army, Navy, and Army Air Corps personnel in the summer of 1941 in the Philippines. Together, MacArthur had 80,000 troops, which included 20,000 Americans and 15,000 Filipino army regulars, and the rest untrained, poorly supplied, Filipino volunteers, to face the battle-hardened Japanese 14th Imperial Army.[vii] Numbers were in the defenders’ favor, but within weeks after battle began American supplies, food, and medicine soon dwindled due to the large size of the allied forces.[viii]

In a war against the United States, time was Japan’s weakness. Japan was a relatively isolated group of islands lacking in raw mineral resources like oil and iron; in fact, Japan’s primary source of iron and steel had been the United States.[ix] It could not sustain a long war with the resource-rich America, and therefore had to strike fiercely and decisively, sparing no delays[x]. No evidence exists indicating Japan sought the conquest of the United States; rather, it bargained a quick taking of its Pacific Rim targets and the neutralization of the Philippines and Guam would lead to the United States acquiescing and agreeing to an

agreement in favor of Japan.[xi] In September 1940, U.S. ire and concern increased with Japan’s incursion into French Indochina in September, as well as Japan entering into the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, establishing the so-called Axis Powers. Though perhaps the men of New Mexico’s National Guard were mostly unaware of the war looming in the Pacific, America’s leaders were quite the opposite. With the Tripartite Pact in place, and war with Germany just a matter of time, war with Japan seemed inevitable. It was, after all, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941 and the Philippines a few hours later that officially brought the United States into World War II.

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[i] Shockley, Nancy. The Life and Death of 1^st Lt. Albert Fall Chase. Master’s Thesis, NMSU, December 2003, 45-49; also Louis Morton. United States Army in World War II: The War in the Pacific, the Fall of the Philippines. (Washington D.C. Government Printing Office, 1953).

[ii] Morton, 108.

[iii] Louis Morton. Command Decisions. (Washington D.C.: Center of Military History, Department of the Army, 2000). 100-103.

[iv] Wolff, Leon. Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century’s End. Reprinted by History Book Club, 2006. Original copyright 1960

, 290-298.

[v] William H. Bartsch. December 8, 1941: MacArthur’s Pearl Harbor. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003). 15

[vi] Bartsch, 16.

[vii] Morton, 103.

[viii] Ricardo T. Jose. The Battle for Bataan. (Manila: Ateno de Manila University Press, 1992). Also, Louis Morton. United States Army in World War II: The War in the Pacific, the Fall of the Philippines.

[ix] Morton, 101, 105.

[x] Bartsch, 26-27. Also Morton and Jose.

[xi] Morton, 107-110.

[xii] Image from Louis Morton’s, Fall of the Philippines (Washington: Center of Military History, 1953)

Submitted by Christopher Schurtz, grandson of Paul Shurtz, who died at Bataan