Philippines campaign (1944–1945)

The Philippines campaign, Battle of the Philippines, Second Philippines campaign, or the Liberation of the Philippines, codenamed Operation Musketeer I, II, and III, was the American, Filipino, Australian, and Mexican campaign to defeat and expel the Imperial Japanese forces occupying the Philippines during World War II.

The Imperial Japanese Army overran all of the Philippines during the first half of 1942. Two years later, the liberation of the Philippines from Japan commenced with amphibious landings on the eastern Philippine island of Leyte on 20 October 1944. While Manila was liberated after intense urban combat in early 1945, fighting elsewhere in the Philippines continued until the end of the war. The United States and Philippine Commonwealth military forces, with naval and air support from Australia and the Mexican 201st Fighter Squadron, were still in the process of liberating the Philippines when the Japanese forces in the Philippines were ordered to surrender by Tokyo on 15 August 1945, after the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet-Japanese War.

Planning

By mid-1944, American forces were only 300 nautical miles (560 km) southeast of Mindanao, the largest island in the southern Philippines – and able to bomb Japanese positions there using long-range bombers. American forces under Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz had advanced across the Central Pacific Ocean, capturing the Gilbert Islands, some of the Marshall Islands, and most of the Marianas Islands, bypassing many Japanese Army garrisons and leaving them without hope of resupply or reinforcement.

American carrier aircraft were already conducting air strikes and fighter sweeps against the Japanese in the Philippines, especially focusing on IJA and IJN airfields. U.S. Army and Australian Army troops under the American General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific Theater of Operations, had either overrun, or else isolated and bypassed, all remaining Japanese Army units on New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands. Before the invasion of the Philippines, MacArthur's northernmost conquest had been at Morotai in the Dutch East Indies on 15–16 September 1944. This was MacArthur's only base within bomber range of the southern Philippines.