#2 Mac tossed War Plan Orange and sent an untrained Philippine army to 'fight them on the landing beaches' losing two weeks of moving men and materials to Bataan, not to mention that even with a clear warning left his air assets sitting in one spot to be bombed out of effectiveness in the subsequent battle. - cite
Even with such incompetence and dealing with literally chaos in situation, the army was able to grind down the Japanese into a stalemate by February. It took the reinforcement with those troops released from the Malaysian campaign to launch another systematic attack in April to overrun the defenders who by that time barely could operate because of disease and malnutrition. |