In 1944, when the war situation was critical for Japan, Yamashita was rescued from his enforced exile in China by the new Japanese government after the downfall of Hideki Tōjō and his cabinet, and he assumed the command of the Fourteenth Area Army to defend the occupied Philippines on 10 October. The U.S. forces landed on Leyte on 20 October, only ten days after Yamashita's arrival at Manila.

General Yamashita Arrives in Manila 1944

Japanese army fighter shooting down a american B-24 Bomber, Burma 1943

B-24 Bomber down

Marshal Admiral Mineichi Koga as Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet, 1944. 

Following the death of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto on April 19, 1943, Koga succeeded Yamamoto as Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet. His flagship was the battleship Musashi. Koga attempted to revitalize Japanese naval operations by reorganization of the Combined Fleet into task forces built around aircraft carriers in imitation of the United States Navy, and organized a land-based naval air fleet to work in coordination with the carriers. Operationally, he intended to mount an aggressive counteroffensive in the Aleutians to dilute American forces and to lure the American fleet into a major naval engagement in 1943.[2] However, the losses of Japan's land and carrier based aircraft based in the central Pacific eventually forced a Japanese withdrawal from the Gilbert Islands and Solomons by the end of the year. Koga gradually adopted a more conservative stance, attempting to conserve his remaining forces to inflict maximum damage on the Americans when they closed toward the Philippines.

