The strongest link in the Corregidor fortress was an object located 6.5 kilometers south of the island. It was a real masterpiece of fortification art - Fort Drum
American engineers completely demolished the island of El Frail and erected an unsinkable reinforced concrete battleship in its place. The thickness of its walls ranged from 7, 5 to 11 meters, and the vaults - 6 meters! The structure was crowned with two armored towers with two 14-inch (356-mm) cannons each. And that's not counting the four 152-mm casemate guns that shot through the nearest approaches.
The Americans considered Fort Drum to be impregnable and invulnerable. Indeed, the only real threat to this structure could be a direct hit of a large-caliber artillery shell in the gun turret. This was an unlikely event at the time, but even in this case, the fort (if the armor had been broken) lost only half of its firepower. Drum was even less vulnerable to aviation. The planes of that time, especially the Japanese ones, could only lift relatively small bombs. In order for such a bomb to acquire speed sufficient to penetrate the armor, it had to be dropped from a decent height. In fact, at least a few kilometers. But in this case, accuracy suffered greatly. This is when we talk about dive bombing. Conventional bombers, carrying out bombing from horizontal flight, could use heavier bombs, but in this case, hitting such a small object became an extremely unlikely event. Imagining a weapon that could break through reinforced concrete walls is completely difficult. During the siege of Sevastopol, the 3.5-meter concrete vaults of battery No. 30 withstood the impact of a 600-mm shell fired from the German mortar Karl. At the same time, the concrete cracked, but was not broken. Needless to say, the Japanese did not have anything like Karl, and the vaults of Fort Drum were almost twice as thick.
To defend the Philippine archipelago, the Americans had an entire army of 10 Philippine and one American divisions. However, in the native divisions in command positions, up to non-commissioned officers, were, as a rule, Americans. Plus, the Corregidor garrison, special units, aviation, navy.
The Japanese were able to allocate for the capture of the archipelago the 14th army, consisting of two divisions and one brigade, not counting the various reinforcement units - tank, artillery and engineering.
In order to imagine the scale of the task facing the Japanese, it is enough to indicate that the largest island of the archipelago, Luzon, stretches from north to south for more than 500 kilometers and has an area of more than one hundred thousand square kilometers. And in total, the Philippine archipelago includes 7, 107 islands.
The operation to capture the Philippines began on December 8, 1941, the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, landing on the small island of Batan, but the main attack against Luzon in Lingaen Bay began on December 22. On January 2, the Japanese entered the capital of the Philippines, Manila. The Americans crowded together the remaining troops on the Bataan Peninsula, which juts into the Gulf of Manila.
Here, on a narrow 30-kilometer front, more than 80,000 US-Philippine troops were concentrated. The Japanese, considering their task practically completed with the fall of Manila, withdrew the 48th division from the 14th Army to participate in the capture of Java. To eliminate the last hotbed of resistance, one, the so-called "separate mixed brigade" was allocated. It must be said that the organization of the Japanese army, in comparison with the Russo-Japanese War, practically did not undergo any changes. Not surprisingly, the winners are reluctant to transform. In addition to the formations of the first line - infantry divisions (among the Japanese they were simply called divisions), there existed a number of separate mixed brigades approximately equal in number to them. These were somewhat worse armed formations (although the divisions of the first line were armed, to put it mildly, not so hot), poorly trained and staffed with senior personnel. Their analogue of the times of the Russo-Japanese War - "kobi", or, as they are often called, reserve battlefields. They were intended to solve auxiliary tasks for which it was a pity to distract parts of the first line - occupying secondary directions, filling the voids between the advancing formations, and so on. But they could be successfully involved in the conduct of hostilities.
The 65th Brigade was precisely such a formation, which on January 10 began the assault on Bataan. By this time, the Americans had already dug themselves into the ground, deployed artillery. The ratio of forces at the front was approximately 5: 1 in favor of the defenders. In short, the Americans managed to fight back, the Japanese lost up to half of their available strength, the spirit of the defenders strengthened. The struggle took on a positional, protracted nature.
Both sides, but primarily the besieged, suffered from malnutrition and disease. There were times when the Japanese could only deploy three battalions in the field. On January 22, they managed to penetrate the enemy's defenses, but they could not develop this success with such insignificant forces. By January 30, the Japanese offensive was completely exhausted.
This was the only modest American success in the first phase of the war. The Japanese were forced to transfer another division to the Philippines - the 4th, to strengthen the artillery. On the night of April 3, a decisive assault began, and on April 7, American troops on the Bataan Peninsula surrendered. 78 thousand soldiers and officers surrendered to captivity. The Japanese were shocked to learn how much the defenders outnumbered their own. This time their reconnaissance failed.
It was the turn of the impregnable Corregidor. What could the Japanese have done with the mighty fortress, surrounded on all sides by water and covered by forts? True, for some reason it so happened that the Americans did not think to create sufficient reserves of provisions on Corregidor. His 15,000-strong garrison suffered from malnutrition and was morally depressed. In Port Arthur, the 40-50 thousandth garrison (not counting at least 30 thousand civilians) withstood the siege for 8 months, and at the time of the surrender there was at least another month of food left. This is just for information.
The Japanese commander, General Homma, subjected the fortress to artillery fire and aerial bombardment. But what could field artillery and light aircraft do against permanent fortifications? The Japanese took a desperate step - having assembled an improvised landing craft and loaded a couple of thousand soldiers on them, they embarked on a landing. Under heavy fire, only six hundred attackers managed to reach the coast. All they could do was create and maintain a tiny foothold on the island.
As expected, the gamble ended in failure. At least that's what Homma thought. At that moment, the American commander announced by radio that the fortress was surrendered. This is a turnover! Homma (here it is oriental deceit) did not agree! He also demanded the surrender of all the American-Filipino troops in the archipelago, and the Japanese had not even landed on the second largest island, Mindanao. The Americans agreed to this too. On May 6, 1942, the campaign in the Philippines ended.
About 15 thousand US-Filipino troops surrendered to a landing party of a thousand Japanese
According to American data, the losses of the defenders amounted to 25 thousand killed, 21 thousand wounded, 100 thousand prisoners. About 50 thousand of them were Americans. The Japanese lost 9 thousand killed, 13, 200 wounded, 10 thousand sick and 500 people were missing.
Thus fell the stronghold, for the defense of which the Americans had been preparing for 43 years, with all their energy and enterprise. The stronghold, which was named "Gibraltar of the East" and declared impregnable.
