Hello and welcome to episode 102 of the Unauthorized History of the Pacific War podcast.

My name is Seth Parrott and historian and deputy director of the Mississippi Armed Forces Museum here at Camp Shelby, and with me, as always, is my esteemed co-host, retired Navy Captain Bill Toaddy,

former skipper of the Fast Attack Submarine USS Indianapolis, Commodore of Submarine Squadron 3 in Pearl Harbor, and many other postings that make a list about as long as my arm. How you doing, Bill?

I'm doing well. Asaph. Happy to be here again. Excellent. Yeah, same here. Same here. So today we're going to discuss what happened after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and specifically the invasion of the Philippines and why things went south so fast for the Americans in the Philippines

in the latter days of 1941 and the early days of 1942. So within hours of the Japanese

attack on Pearl Harbor, an attack that devastated the U.S. Pacific fleet and seemingly allowed

Japan a free hand in the Western Pacific, or anywhere, really, let's be honest. The Japanese attacked the Philippine islands from the air. Days later on December 10th, a small landing force invaded Luzon near Vigan. This was followed a couple of days later by landings on several other islands in the archipelago, including Lengai and

Gulf on the 22nd of December. Now, the forces are raid for this campaign, at least numerically

on paper, were in the defender's favor. The United States and the Filipinos possessed a three

to two numerical advantage on the ground, and while that sounds imposing, it really wasn't. The majority of those listed as combatants really were not. The majority were service troops or Air Corps, and it was called the Air Corps in 1942. Actual combat troops available for defense were only around 9,500 men. The Americans also possessed a contingent of Army Air Corps fighters and bombers,

P-40s and B-17s, as well as many other obsolete aircraft, but they didn't make much of an impact

on the campaign at all. Their lack of an impact is one of the more sour points of the Philippine

campaign, as we shall see. But let's start at the beginning. Bill, why did the Japanese invade

the Philippines in the first place? The Philippines were the crossroad of the Southern Pacific,

and if the Japanese were going to defend their sources of raw materials from places like

Java, Malaya, Borneo, that all of that had to flow past the Philippines

up towards Formosa and to the island's homeland of Japan. So if America continued to control

the Philippines, particularly with air power, all of those commercial operations between where the Japanese

got most of the raw materials and where they needed it to arrive would be under constant

attack. So there was never any real doubt that Japan would need to take the Philippines.

In fact, the Philippines was actually more valuable to Japan from a, you know, commercial

standpoint than Hawaii was.

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