What mistake did General Douglas MacArthur make in December 1941?
1 Answer
The only thing I can think of is his change of strategy in the middle of the invasion of the Philippines to abandon the fighting opposing the invading forces to, instead, withdraw to the Bataan peninsula.
Explanation:
My opinion is quite superficial/personal and probably not the only one dealing with this topic.
We have to think that at that time (after Pearl Harbor) the Americans knew that the Philippines were going to be invaded but where not really aware of the exact locations of the Japanese landings (although their convoys were spotted by several submarines) and of the strength at each landing so I think that MacArthur's strategy to fight immediately at the landing sites was quite difficult to sustain ("He who defends everything defends nothing"...I think it is from Frederick the Great).
However, once it was chosen, the strategy to fight on the beaches should have been maintained (easy to say now!) because it gave continuity and order to the maneuvers of the US/Filipino armies and allowed the slow but constant depletion of the Japanese momentum (the defender has normally an advantage on the attacker, he knows the terrain, can hide himself and basically retreat when he wants/needs) delaying their advance, damaging or destroying their hardware and maybe give time for a combined action to attack the Japanese fleet and isolate the Japanese force.
Without the possibility of receiving supplies the Japanese could have been even stopped and engaged in a war of attrition.
We have also to remember that the Japanese were limited by the need of fuel for their ships and aircrafts and each drop of the precious liquid was vital for them (one of the reasons of securing the Philippines was to screen and protect the real goal of the Japanese, The Dutch West Indies and their oilfields).
The order to retreat to Bataan also produced a kind of panic/despair feeling in the troops that even without fighting or being near a Japanese formation started to think of being surrounded or being beaten resulting not in an organized and strategically efficient movement but in a kind of desperate run (abandoning good positions or hardware and interfering with the action of other units).
After the first initial Japanese successes on the beaches, MacArthur decided to abandon his original plan and call all the armies to close themselves into the Bataan peninsula thinking it was impregnable.
I think (but, again, at the time probably was not so easy to see) that MacArthur’s mistake was to change his strategy in the middle of a campaign that has been planned in a way and now had to be completely changed.
[Japanese advancing during the drive on Manila]
