The Generals

by Winston Groom

  From his headquarters in the Malinta Tunnel on the island of Corregidor, MacArthur had a panoramic view of the siege the Japanese had laid against his army. At any time, day or night, he could see and hear the fiery explosions and columns of smoke from artillery shells and bombs, or watch as scores of the badly wounded were brought into the tunnel’s hospital lateral after being ferried from Bataan. The entrance to the lateral was drenched in blood, and ambulances would often wait in line to pick up blanket-covered corpses for burial between bombing attacks.

  The bomb-impervious tunnel had been completed in the 1920s, carved through the stone and dirt that composed Malinta Hill. It was more than a quarter of a mile long and had fifty laterals, or branches, some of which were four football fields long. Life in the tunnel was miserable; at times it contained as many as 10,000 men and a few army nurses.† Bomb blasts often sent choking clouds of dust and acrid smoke into the excavation and the electricity frequently went out, leaving everyone in the dark. About the only bright spot was when MacArthur’s four-year-old son Arthur, dressed in a sailor’s suit, would respond to the siren by rushing up and down the tunnel shouting, “Air raid! Air raid!” At least that gave some people a chuckle.4

  THE JAPANESE CAME ON IN GREAT RUSHES and were killed by the thousands. Unfortunately for MacArthur, however, the Japanese sent troop transports with replacements to the tune of 100,000 men, “while I could only bury my dead,” he said bitterly. Laudatory messages poured into MacArthur’s headquarters from President Roosevelt, Secretary of War Stimson, the king of England, General Pershing, and other notables with encouraging remarks and comments—but that did not take the place of food, men, and supplies, which were fast running out.

  The troops were filthy, many barefoot, wearing tattered clothes over their bony skin. They would grin when they saw MacArthur among them, he said—“that ghastly skeleton-like grin of the dying”—and then roar in unison, “We’re the battling bastards of Bataan, no papa, no mama, no Uncle Sam.”

  “They asked no quarter and they gave none,” he continued. “They died hard, those savage men—not gently like a stricken dove folding its wings in peaceful passing, but like a wounded wolf at bay … and around their necks as we buried them would be a thread of dirty string with its dangling crucifix. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stank. And I loved them.”5

  By the end of February it had become apparent that Bataan was on the verge of collapse and Corregidor was unsafe. The question arose of what to do with MacArthur. The spectacle of him as a prisoner being paraded in chains through the streets of Tokyo was bad enough, and Tokyo Rose had announced gleefully that, if captured, MacArthur “would be publicly hanged on the Imperial Plaza in Tokyo.” Or what if he should die with his men as he had promised? The army would lose one of its most brilliant and prestigious commanders.

  Chief of Staff Marshall told Roosevelt the only way MacArthur would leave the Philippines would be if he received a presidential order to do so. Roosevelt so ordered it. MacArthur objected, but in the end he agreed to go to Australia and take command of all U.S. forces in or bound for the Far East.

  On March 12 MacArthur, his wife Jean, his son Arthur, the Cantonese nanny Ah Cheu, and seven staff members boarded one of four PT boats and roared off toward Mindanao, six hundred miles south. There, at a Del Monte pineapple plantation, he was to meet a B-17 bomber sent from Australia to complete his deliverance. As he stepped on board MacArthur heard someone ask, “What’s his chance, Sarge, of getting through?” and came the gruff reply, “Dunno, he’s lucky. Maybe one-in-five.” It was an excruciating journey, according to MacArthur, as extremely rough seas tossed the boats around like corks and made everyone seasick. He later compared the experience to “spending two days inside a cement mixer.”6

  By 9 a.m., March 16, MacArthur and party arrived in Darwin, Australia, just in time for a major Japanese air raid on the city. Luckily, MacArthur’s party had left the airfield ten minutes before Japanese dive-bombers roared in and obliterated it. He remarked later to his chief of staff Dick Sutherland, “It was close, but that’s the way it is in war. You win or lose, live or die—and the difference is just an eyelash.”

  It was here that MacArthur made his famous proclamation to reporters about the Philippines: “I came through, and I shall return.” It was vintage MacArthur. The phrase was printed and broadcast around the world. It was stamped on the covers of matchbooks provided by the army to GIs in the Pacific theater. The proclamation was headlined in newspapers and featured in radio broadcasts. It was glazed into pottery, engraved on cigarette lighters, and scrawled above public toilets, and it slipped easily into the American lexicon. MacArthur had become a legend in his own time.

  MACARTHUR WAS AWARDED the Medal of Honor for his role in the Philippines, but there were undertones that he had received it only to offset any criticism to his reputation for leaving during the fight. It was made worse when news reached him three weeks after his arrival in Australia that the American army in the Philippines had surrendered to the Japanese.

  By the first of April it was clear that the food issue was critical. A quarter-ration can keep a man alive, but his ability to be active is greatly diminished. When the Japanese began a large offensive all hope was lost. One unit reported taking 2 percent casualties per hour from enemy artillery alone.

  On April 9 an artillery major at the American headquarters in the Malinta Tunnel reported seeing General Wainwright on the phone with General Edward P. King, one of the senior commanders on Bataan. “ ‘You can’t surrender!’ he shouted, ‘You can’t!’ As Wainwright listened intently, his gaunt frame seemed to sag, and tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘Why don’t you attack with I Corps?’ he asked. We clearly heard a voice say, ‘I Corps no longer exists.’ General Wainwright slumped into his chair.”7

  What ensued over the next week remains a prime example of studied cruelty in the history of the world. Starving and ill, the 78,000 troops on Bataan, unarmed and helpless, started northward on the infamous sixty-five-mile Bataan Death March. About 10,000 soldiers perished from starvation or thirst or were murdered by sadistic Japanese guards. Anyone who thought reports of Japanese atrocities in China were exaggerated was soon set straight. Private First Class Blair Robinett’s first encounter with a Japanese soldier went poorly. “He stepped out, came across, and took my canteen out of its cover. He took a drink, filled his canteen, and poured the rest of my water on the ground and dropped my canteen at my feet. When I bent over to pick up my canteen he turned around and hit me over the head with his rifle butt.”8

  Screaming at the prisoners in Japanese, the guards began to sort the men into groups of a thousand or so, with sixteen guards to a group. There was much shouting, clubbing, and prodding with bayonets. When one American fell behind he was bayoneted in the throat. “He gasped for air, then was dead,” a witness testified. When the marchers passed a sugarcane field several men went toward it to break off pieces of the cane. “When they reached the edge of the field the Jap guards shot them down, and clubbed the wounded survivors to death.”9

  Several survivor accounts recall a grisly incident in which an obviously ill American soldier was staggering along when a column of Japanese tanks appeared from the opposite direction. A Japanese guard “grabbed this sick guy by the arm and guided him to the middle of the road. Then he just flipped him out across the road. A tank pulled across him. Well, it killed him quick. There must have been ten tanks in that column and every one of them ran over him. When the last tank left there was no way you could ever tell there’d been a man there. The man had disappeared, but his uniform had been pressed until it had become a part of the ground.”10

  After robbing the prisoners of such things as watches, money, and wallets, the Japanese guards began pulling out gold teeth and chopping off fingers to get wedding rings. Two soldiers were carrying their captain, who had become prostrate with dysentery, when a guard rushed up and ran his bayonet through the captain’s stomach. Anyone who lagge
d behind was murdered. For men in the rear of the march it was particularly traumatic since they had to pass by all the thousands of mutilated bodies who had died ahead of them.

  At last they reached their destination, Camp O’Donnell, a half-completed American airfield. It was as close to hell on earth as any of the survivors could imagine. The camp commander, Captain Yoshio Tsuneyoshi, greeted them with a ranting, jumping-up-and-down harangue in which he compared the prisoners to dogs and concluded by telling them, “You think that you are the lucky ones? Your comrades who died on Bataan are the lucky ones!”11 In the ensuing days the death toll rose for the 68,000 miserable prisoners—150, 200, 250, 300 lifeless skeletons a day, until it leveled off at 500 dead per day.

  FOR HIS FIRST ACT AS SUPREME COMMANDER of the South West Pacific theater, MacArthur met with the Australian prime minister John Curtin and reassured him that “We two, you and I, will see this thing through. We can do it, and we will do it. You take care of the rear, and I’ll take care of the front.”

  The situation MacArthur found himself in was nothing short of desperate. The bulk of Australia’s ground troops were fighting the war in the Middle East under British command when suddenly the Japanese came knocking at the door. To counter an invasion that was expected “momentarily,” the Australians had devised a defensive plan that sacrificed more than three-quarters of their country to the enemy in order to defend a line from Brisbane to Adelaide that protected the most populous cities.

  MacArthur rejected the proposal on grounds that it was a “passive defense” that would “result only in eventual defeat.” Even if it was successful, MacArthur predicted it would “trap us indefinitely on an island continent ringed by conquered territories and a hostile ocean,” with no hope of taking the offensive. He opted instead to move the fight fifteen hundred miles northward to the mountains of Papua New Guinea, where the Japanese invasion force was struggling up the Kokoda Trail, rung by grueling greasy rung, on the steep far side of the towering Owen Stanley Range.

  MacArthur’s legendary good luck was reinforced by the arrival of Major General George C. Kenney who, at the request of MacArthur’s chief of staff Richard Sutherland, had come to replace General George Brett as commander of the Allied air force. Sutherland was thought of as high-handed, even rude—especially by airmen. But because he spoke for MacArthur, or at least thought he did, most gave Sutherland a wide berth. Kenney was a diminutive, feisty pilot who set Sutherland straight the first time he met him. Waiting for a meeting with MacArthur, Kenney found himself in Sutherland’s office on the receiving end of a lecture on how to run his air force.

  Kenney listened for a while, then went over to a table and picked up a blank sheet of paper. He took out a pencil and put a dot in the center of the paper and handed it to MacArthur’s chief of staff. “That dot I just put there represents what you know about the use of airpower. All the rest of this sheet of paper represents what I know about the use of airpower,” he told the startled staff officer. After that, Kenney had little trouble out of Sutherland, and within an amazingly short period Kenney put on a dazzling display of the proper use of airpower that saved the faltering New Guinea campaign.

  Still, the lingering problem for MacArthur was how to pull together an Allied force with enough strength to attack the Japanese before they reached Port Moresby on the southern shore of the island, which was only three hundred miles across the Torres Strait from the tip of Australia. The Japanese had already tried an amphibious landing at Port Moresby but were thwarted by a U.S.-Japanese naval engagement that came to be known as the Battle of the Coral Sea. Each side lost a carrier but it caused the Japanese to recall their transports with the troops to seize Port Moresby.

  By then, MacArthur had only one American infantry division, a National Guard outfit that was undersized, undertrained, and undersupplied. The air force consisted of obsolete, mostly grounded planes with few spare parts, and his navy was without any capital ships whatsoever. To make matters worse, New Guinea was possibly the most undesirable place to fight a war.

  The Owen Stanley Mountains were a 15,000-foot-high barrier that ran the length of the island and featured some of the most inhospitable land on earth. Below were swamps consisting of “a stinking jumble of twisted, slime-covered roots and muddy soup,” trails that were “a sea of mud,” and man-high stands of treacherous razor-edged kunai grass. Among the diseases awaiting the defenders were malaria, dengue, the nearly always fatal blackwater fever, amoebic dysentery, hookworm, ringworm, scrub typhus, and billions of insects to bite, sting, or suck. New Guinea was in a state of nature nearly antithetical to human coexistence, and modern man had not made appreciable inroads. In addition to disease, encounters were to be had with leeches, scorpions, an astounding variety of ants, crocodiles, poisonous snakes such as the death adder and taipan, huge constrictors like the python, and the cassowary, a five- to six-foot-tall man-killing flightless bird with powerful legs and a daggerlike claw on its toes.

  When they arrived, the Japanese were completely surprised to find that MacArthur had occupied Port Moresby and began bombing it twice a day. At stake for both sides was air control of the Coral Sea, and for Japan the freedom to bomb and invade Australia at will.

  New Guinea natives believed that the Kokoda Trail that ran up and across the Owen Stanleys was haunted. It rained incessantly—300 inches a year—in blinding deluges that left men knee-deep, and sometimes waist-deep, in filthy mud. The trail was so steep that, in some places, men slept roped to jungle plants or trees. One man was found, so the story goes, after being attacked while asleep by a large constricting python. His body was said to be completely flattened, like a deflated balloon, as if every bone in it had been crushed.

  Thanks to the successes of U.S. marines on Guadalcanal in the nearby Solomon Islands, in early September some five thousand Japanese troops were pulled out of New Guinea and sent to deal with the upstart Americans, and the Japanese push to take Port Moresby was postponed. But this still left around ten thousand Japanese infantry on the north shore of the island, dug into a position between two villages, Buna and Gona. The Allied troops first had to cross the Owen Stanleys—the Australians by the Kokoda Trail and the Americans by the lesser-known Kapa Kapa Trail, which was so remote no white man had been known to climb it since 1917.

  The U.S. divisions (by then MacArthur had two) were “un-battle-hardened,” meaning they were undertrained and out of shape. The strain of days of climbing in the leech-infested jungle left many prostrate along the trail. Officers went to the rear but, in many cases, could not get the stragglers to move. At one point along the route, “reek[ing] with the stench of death,” lay the corpse of an enemy soldier on a crude stretcher, abandoned by his comrades in retreat. “The flesh is gone from his bones and a white bony claw sticks out of a ragged uniform sleeve, stretching across the track.”12

  On the far side of the mountains the Americans were flabbergasted when they stumbled on the Japanese positions at Buna and Gona. The surrounding terrain was waist-deep sago palm muck and jungle. The only practical approaches were heavily fortified by preregistered Japanese mortars, machine-gun nests, and direct artillery fire from protected coconut-log bunkers. Snipers were everywhere—in trees, behind trees, and in root jungles beneath trees. It was one of the most obnoxious positions from the attacker’s point of view in the entire war.

  MacArthur soon became aware of reports that the behavior in some of his units was marginal at best. There were accounts of soldiers refusing to obey officers’ orders and stories of outright cowardice. MacArthur summoned his new corps commander, Major General Robert L. Eichelberger, and told him to go to Buna and relieve the commander of the 32nd Infantry Division, and also to relieve anyone else who wouldn’t fight and replace him with someone who would—even if it meant putting sergeants in charge of battalions and corporals in charge of companies. Then he gave one of the most extraordinary orders to be issued in modern times (George Patton excepted). “Bob,” MacArthur said, “I wa
nt you to take Buna or not come back alive.” And, as if for emphasis, he pointed a long forefinger at Eichelberger’s startled chief of staff, saying, “And that goes for your chief of staff, too.”

  WHAT EICHELBERGER FOUND BEFORE BUNA was a miserable excuse for a U.S. military outfit. The 32nd Division was a National Guard unit composed of Wisconsin and Michigan natives, every man of them running a malarial fever. One of the inspecting officers wrote: “They wore long dirty beards. Their clothing was in rags. Their shoes were uncared for, or worn out … When Martin and I visited a regimental [headquarters] to observe what was supposed to be an attack, we found it four and a half miles behind the front line. The regimental commander and his staff went forward from this location rarely, if ever. The attack had been ordered and it could be entered on the headquarters diary, but it didn’t exist.”

  Eichelberger visited the front, with MacArthur’s “don’t come back alive” orders ringing in his ears, only to discover there was no front. Everything was so jumbled no one seemed to know who was who or what was what. Eichelberger ordered the fighting—such as it was—halted for two days so things could be sorted out. Then he started firing people.

  When the two days were up Eichelberger ordered an immediate attack, as it was obvious that in any stalemate the Japanese would win, “for they were living among the coconut palms along the coast on sandy soil while our men lived in swamps.” Eichelberger took a personal hand in the assault, in which he claimed to MacArthur that the men were “fighting hard.” But as one of his regimental commanders remarked, “We have hit them [the Japanese], and bounced off.”13

  The American soldiers were repelled by more than bullets. At one point, odors emanating from the Japanese positions, blown directly at them by a prevailing onshore ocean breeze, began causing severe nausea. When at last on December 14, 1942, Allied forces carried the Buna stronghold, what they found was beyond revolting. “Rotting bodies, sometimes weeks old, formed part of the fortifications. The living fired over the bodies of the dead, slept side by side with them.” Inside one trench they found the body of a Japanese soldier who could not stand the strain. “His rifle was pointed at his head, his big toe was on the trigger, the top of his head was blown off.” Almost worse, there were obvious signs of cannibalism. Parts of carved-up Allied bodies—which the Japanese apparently preferred to eat before eating their own—were scattered around the position.14