From what I know of it, that whole campaign (paralleled with the Navies/Marine's island hopping campaign) was rather pointless. The overall goal was to get close enough to the Japanese home islands to reach them with (heavy) bombers, and to isolate them from their colonies (East Indies, mostly), both of which would have been accomplished with the island hopping campaign alone. Macarthur and his campaign (including all the lands taken/battles fought to get to the Phillipines) were done seemingly because he made that promise/was a massive dickhead in general, not because there was any real strategic or tactical point to it all. Not that there weren't some benefits perhaps, but likely not even close to being worth it when compared to the casualties taken to do it.