Foreword
From the moment of his departure from the Philippines in 1942, General MacArthur was determined to return to the islands and restore the freedom of the Philippine people. Capture of the main island of Luzon in 1945 substantially realized this goal. How his armies accomplished it forms the body of the story unfolded in this volume.
In some respects the Luzon Campaign repeated the pattern of Japanese conquest three years earlier, although with action on a much larger scale and for a much longer period. Unlike the Japanese conquest, the operations of 1945 involved a fierce month-long battle for Manila, the only such protracted action by U.S. forces in a big city during World War II. It also involved a complicated and costly reduction of three mountain positions into which the Japanese withdrew, in one of which there was still a substantial core of resistance when Japan surrendered.
Within the broad scope of this work, covering the intensive operations of two armies for seven months, the author has necessarily concentrated on what is most instructive and significant to the outcome. The clarity, thorough scholarship, and careful mapping of this volume should make it especially useful for the military student, and all who read it will benefit by the author’s forthright presentation of this dramatic and climactic story of U.S. Army operations in the Pacific war.
James A. Norell
Brigadier General, USA
Chief of Military History
Washington, D.C.
15 March 1961
The Author
Robert Ross Smith received a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Duke University. A graduate of the Infantry Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1943, he served on the staff and faculty of the Special Services School at Washington and Lee University and then, for two years, was a member of the G-3 Historical Division at General Douglas MacArthur’s General Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Area. He presently holds a reserve commission as a lieutenant colonel of Infantry.
Mr. Smith has been with the Office of the Chief of Military History, either as an officer on active duty or as a civilian, since January 1947. His first book in the series THE UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II, The Approach to the Philippines, was published in 1953. He is currently working on his third volume for the series, The Riviera to the Rhine. Mr. Smith’s other works include an essay in Command Decisions (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1959, and Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1960) ; an article on tactical supply problems in Military Review; the article on the Pacific phase of World War II in the Encyclopedia Britannica; and an account of the Battle of Ox Hill (1 September 1862) in Fairfax County and the War Between the States, a publication of the Fairfax County (Va.) Civil War Centennial Commission.