The Generals

by Winston Groom

  Meantime MacArthur conducted operations of the South West Pacific Area (SWPA) command in Tacloban from a luxurious two-story estate whose owner, a successful businessman named Walter Price, was murdered by the Japanese after they seized his house for their officers’ club. The building soon became the object of a general attack by Japanese aircraft and snipers.

  Smoking his oversize corncob pipe, MacArthur could frequently be seen day and night pacing the spacious veranda of the Price house. Some of the younger staff members swore they could tell the general’s mood by the way he paced and puffed. When an idea began to germinate in his fertile mind, they said his pace quickened and his pipe smoke resembled that of a choo-choo train. He got little or no exercise other than the pacing but somebody figured out that he paced approximately five miles a day.4

  People were also stunned by MacArthur’s lack of concern during enemy bombing raids. Once as he was briefing senior army and navy people, Japanese planes made a bombing run at the house. Standing at a map with pointer in hand, MacArthur never missed a beat but continued to speak calmly as explosions burst all around them. When he concluded his talk he turned to a subordinate and said, “Better look in the kitchen and outside. That bomb was close and someone may be hurt.” At least three people in the kitchen had been wounded by the bomb and one was killed, according to what Eighth Army commander Robert L. Eichelberger told his chief of staff.

  Another time, a U.S. antiaircraft shell, apparently aimed at low-flying enemy planes, crashed through the wall and landed on a couch in MacArthur’s bedroom. Fortunately it was a dud. MacArthur had it defused and taken to the antiaircraft unit commander with the message, “Bill, ask your gunners to raise their sights just a little bit higher.”5 The Japanese then sent a number of snipers to lurk at the edges of Tacloban waiting for targets of opportunity. MPs and other military units killed a number of these but it is nevertheless astonishing that MacArthur, with all of his public appearances—including the pacing on his veranda or patio—was not a victim.

  A month after the original landings, MacArthur was paid a visit by Turner Catledge and A. H. Sulzberger of the New York Times. Catledge wrote that MacArthur’s quarters were “a principal target,” and had been “strafed repeatedly and was pockmarked inside and out with machine-gun bullet holes. My room had a gaping hole in the wall made the week before by a 20-mm. shell.”

  The two joined MacArthur on his veranda for “one of the most fascinating talks with a public figure that either of us had ever experienced,” wrote Catledge. “As he spoke he was variously the military expert, the political figure, the man of destiny. Sulzberger and I later agreed that we had never met a more egotistical man, nor one more aware of his egotism and more able and determined to back it up with his deeds.”

  Others came away with similar impressions. To a news correspondent, MacArthur began forecasting the future of the world and predicting that “the lands touching the Pacific will determine the course of history for the next ten thousand years.” But as usual he wound up his conversations with a blast against “that crowd in Washington,” who were by now guilty “of treason and sabotage” for not properly supplying the war in the Pacific.6

  It was around this time that MacArthur’s relationship with his imperious chief of staff Richard Sutherland became severely strained. Sutherland, it seemed, had taken a mistress while in Australia, one Elaine Bessemer-Clarke, daughter of the wealthy Sir Norman Brookes, a two-time Wimbledon tennis champion and his wife, Mabel, a leading Australian socialite. Both Elaine and Sutherland were married with children, but while his marriage was somewhat nondescript she was married to Captain Reginald Bessemer-Clarke, the British heir to the Bessemer steel fortune, who was presently residing in a Japanese prison, having been captured when the Australian unit he was serving with surrendered in Malaya.

  The damage to international relations if the affair became public did not seem to factor into Lieutenant General Sutherland’s thinking, for he not only took Elaine along when MacArthur moved from Melbourne to Brisbane, he somehow managed to finagle her into the U.S. WACs (Women’s Army Corps) as an army captain with no qualifications whatsoever. By most accounts she was an unpleasant, domineering person “much like Sutherland himself” whom—speculates MacArthur biographer Geoffrey Perret—Sutherland fell for because “like other bullies who are cowards at heart, he fell in love with her because she dominated him.”7

  A story about Elaine and Sutherland is told by MacArthur’s B-17 pilot Major Henry C. Godman, who some months earlier obtained a jeep for himself that he proudly upholstered in red leather. Elaine coveted the vehicle and one day, when Godman was off flying, she called the motor pool and commandeered it for herself. When Godman returned and found the jeep missing, he discovered the cause and, using his spare keys, quietly liberated it from “Captain Bessemer-Clarke.”

  Within two days the astonished Godman was standing before Sutherland who told him, “You have been transferred from MacArthur’s headquarters. I’m sending you back to combat.” Having already flown the required quota of thirty missions, Godman protested, but to no avail. It remains an amazing and revolting example of people who have such little regard for their fellow man that they would put someone’s life in jeopardy over a jeep.8

  In any event, the affair between the WAC captain—with her husband a Japanese prisoner—and the chief of staff of the supreme commander of the South West Pacific Area first came to MacArthur’s attention when he discovered Sutherland had moved Elaine to Hollandia, New Guinea, and MacArthur ordered him to send her home.

  Imagine MacArthur’s astonishment then, and surprise, when he learned that Sutherland had not only defied his order, he had even moved her to Leyte and installed her in a house that he had ordered built by the corps of engineers—right down the road.

  An enraged MacArthur stormed into Sutherland’s office and began to curse and berate him “using every profanity acquired in a lifetime of military service.” He reminded Sutherland in between oaths that he had given him a direct, written order to get rid of the woman and threatened him with arrest. MacArthur’s browbeating went on for fifteen minutes without cessation and was so disconcerting that the military sentry at the door was said to have put his fingers in his ears. “That woman will be flown out of Tacloban immediately! And if she is not out of here within 24 hours I will court martial you for disobedience of a direct order!” shouted MacArthur.9

  This time the dour chief of staff seemed to get the message for, as a staff officer recalled, the speed with which Sutherland had Elaine shipped out of Leyte reminded him of “the stunt in the Barnum & Bailey Circus of the man shot from the mouth of a cannon.”

  After this incident, it was said that things were never the same between MacArthur and his chief of staff. Why he didn’t fire Sutherland is puzzling, but MacArthur did apparently begin to rely on, as a confidant, his intelligence chief Lieutenant Colonel Courtney Whitney. MacArthur had known Whitney as a Manila lawyer before the war and, in time, it was said that Whitney became MacArthur’s “alter ego.”

  WITHIN TWO WEEKS AFTER THE LANDING at Ormoc, the American army had killed about 50,000 of the estimated 60,000- to 75,000-man Japanese army and took only 386 prisoners. General Eichelberger stated that his Eighth Army, charged with “mopping up,” killed 27,000 more Japanese. The rest are presumed to have escaped north through the jungle, or starved there. (Another 20,000 to 40,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors were thought to have perished in replacement convoys from Japan that were sunk by U.S. Navy planes and submarines.) MacArthur was particularly proud that there were no survivors from the Japanese 16th Division, which had implemented the cruel and disgraceful “Death March” on Bataan. American casualties since the landing at Ormoc were 15,500, with 3,508 killed.10

  MacArthur also assumed civil duties regarding governance of the Philippines, which was then being run by a Japanese-backed puppet regime in Manila. This put him at odds with the difficult and powerful U.S. secretary of the interior Harold Ic
kes. Before the invasion of Leyte, Ickes wrote MacArthur that it was his intention to “take charge” of the Philippine government once the country was liberated, a notion MacArthur found unacceptable. “He seemed to think of the islands as another one of his National Parks,” MacArthur wrote afterward. “It was his claim that the archipelago [the Philippines had been a U.S.-affiliated commonwealth before the Japanese took over] was a ‘possession’ of the United States.”

  After MacArthur made his escape from Corregidor in 1942, and it was clear the country would fall to the Japanese, Philippine president Manuel Quezon, vice president Sergio Osmeña, and other officials made their way to Washington, D.C., to form a government in exile. Upon Quezon’s death in 1944, Osmeña became president. MacArthur had him brought back for the invasion with the intention of formally installing him in office once a beachhead was secured.

  Ickes violently objected to this plan, assuming that because many Filipinos had cooperated with the Japanese they were a traitorous race undeserving of self-government.* It was evident, MacArthur said, that Ickes “intended to shoot or hang any Filipino who had anything to do with the puppet government, no matter what reasons they had for cooperating.”11 Because of his service in the islands before the war, MacArthur was familiar with most of the officials who later cooperated with Japan. Many in high administrative positions, MacArthur said, collaborated in order to alleviate the ordeal and suffering imposed on the people by the Japanese.

  When the war began, the Roosevelt administration had urged MacArthur to assume control of the Philippine government, but he’d resisted that idea on grounds that the Filipinos were capable of governing themselves. Secretary of War Henry Stimson agreed with MacArthur’s plan, which was to restore civil government to each Philippine province as soon as the Japanese were pushed out. As to alleged collaborators or disloyalists, MacArthur promised that they would be brought to a fair trial under terms of the Philippine constitution.

  MACARTHUR’S NEXT BIG GOAL was the island of Luzon and the nation’s capital, Manila. Because the soil of Leyte was so marshy, General Kenney and the army engineers were still unable to provide satisfactory runways for his air force, so MacArthur decided to invade the island of Mindoro, to the north, right below Luzon, and establish airfields there. He ran into trouble when Admiral Kincaid balked at the idea of sailing his light, slow, and unarmed escort carriers with the invasion convoy because they would be highly vulnerable to enemy kamikaze attacks.

  In fact a single kamikaze could sink an escort carrier and had done so during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Sometime in the afternoon of November 30, MacArthur cornered Kincaid in his quarters and began trying to persuade him to change his mind. For more than an hour he belabored the admiral, “giving him hell about [his] fear of kamikazes,” questioning his loyalty, pacing furiously, waving his hands, sometimes whispering, cajoling, and all the while Kincaid was slumped exhaustedly on a bedpost; when he was finished, said Turner Catledge, who witnessed the episode, MacArthur walked up to Kincaid, put his arms on his shoulders, and said, “But Tommy, I love you still. Let’s go to dinner.”12

  Afterward, Admiral Kincaid relented and the invasion got under way on December 12 and landed successfully on December 15. Mindoro was lightly garrisoned, the Japanese were taken completely by surprise, and the operation was successful, although kamikazes smashed through an air cap of P-38s and crashed into two destroyers, three landing ships, and an escort carrier. It was the worst amphibious landing the navy had experienced since a heavy-casualty debacle on Italy’s coast at Anzio earlier that year.

  By December 23 engineers had established two runways, and a third airfield was near completion. Both MacArthur’s Sixth Army under Krueger and Eighth Army under Eichelberger were transferred to Mindoro. This latest invasion also forced Yamashita to cancel a major counterinvasion he had organized because his line of communications had been severed. Landing on Mindoro was a decisive move by MacArthur, without which, the official army history says, MacArthur’s Luzon operations would have been “considerably more hazardous and difficult.”

  The Luzon invasion began with a massive subterfuge. MacArthur had Kenney’s air force fly dummy missions over southern Luzon, and bombers bombed targets in the south. Photographic planes flew over southern targets; Kincaid’s navy cleared mines in southern harbors; PT boats patrolled southern waters; and guerrilla groups were instructed to harass Japanese operations in the south.

  At sunrise on January 9, 1945, nearly a thousand ships lay just offshore in the Lingayen Gulf, a bight in the South China Sea on the northwest coast of Luzon, and the American Sixth Army began landing on the beaches. “No plan ever worked better,” MacArthur said.13

  It was not, however, without travails. As soon as the American convoys were spotted by the Japanese, the kamikazes began their dreadful work. Even though General Kenney had planned to keep an air cap of at least sixty fighters over each U.S. convoy as it came within kamikaze range, some of the suicide planes inevitably broke through. Before it was over, kamikazes had crashed on forty-seven U.S. Navy ships and one Australian cruiser, sinking four and badly damaging the others and leaving more than 2,100 casualties, with 738 men, mostly sailors, dead. The kamikazes seemed to be aiming at the capital ships, which was a relief of sorts to MacArthur who told an aide that if the kamikazes began attacking the troopships they might have to turn back.

  As they neared Luzon, MacArthur could often be seen at the rail of his flagship, the cruiser USS Boise, watching the action: a sky full of whining warplanes, deafening antiaircraft fire, kamikazes splashing into the sea, ships suddenly engulfed in flame.

  When they passed Corregidor in late afternoon, MacArthur became visibly riveted by the sight of Bataan and the entrance to Manila Bay. “I could not leave the rail,” he said. “One by one the staff drifted away, and I was alone with my memories. At the sight of those never-to-be forgotten scenes of my family’s past, I felt an indescribable sense of loss, of sorrow, of loneliness, and of solemn consecration.” As night fell, a Japanese destroyer came barreling out of Manila Bay and was immediately set upon by four American destroyers. Gunfire hit the enemy ship’s magazine and she exploded in spectacular fashion, a sight that could be seen clearly from the decks of Boise.14

  From that point on, the convoys were beset by intensified kamikaze attacks and swarms of Japanese midget submarines, looking to MacArthur like “black whales.” When the hundreds of American ships finally arrived and anchored at Lingayen, the Japanese sent out seventy small suicide motor craft packed with explosives and instructions to ram as many ships as possible. U.S. destroyers took care of most of them but not before they sank two landing craft and damaged four LSTs (landing ship tanks).

  When it was over, MacArthur’s battle strategy proved solid and bold. Once Sixth Army established a beachhead and began moving inland toward Manila, Yamashita would undoubtedly move as much of his army as possible northward to stop the Americans. That’s when elements of Eichelberger’s Eighth Army would land about midway along Luzon’s west coast, which by then, according to plan, should be lightly defended. Once ashore, both armies would then “close like a vice on the enemy and destroy him,” MacArthur said.15

  It has been suggested by more recent historians that Yamashita knew all along that MacArthur would land at Lingayen Gulf but was fearful to meet him on the beaches, instead preferring to dig in on the mountains and hills, then hit the Americans in the flank and cut off their drive south. But the Americans, too, suspected that the Japanese thought they would land at Lingayen, for that was where their own General Homma had landed in 1941, and the area contained the best beaches on Luzon. Even if Yamashita planned to strike the Americans hard on their southward march, there is little evidence that he attempted to do so. Also Yamashita must have recognized the futility of attacking across the broad central plain where the American mechanized forces could best employ their superiority in planes, tanks, and self-propelled artillery.

  Whatever the Japanese strateg
y, the men of four divisions of General Krueger had landed to almost no resistance and, despite Krueger’s misgivings, headed down Route 3, which ran a hundred miles through the center of Luzon’s central plain to the capital city of Manila. Even though MacArthur’s SWPA headquarters intelligence section had forecasted that Yamashita’s remaining army was 152,000-strong, Krueger’s own intelligence people thought he had as many as 250,000.

  MacArthur tried to argue that that figure was too high, but Krueger was unpersuaded. In fact, they were both wrong. The Japanese army on Luzon was 275,000-strong but because of the ravagings of Halsey’s Third Carrier Fleet the Japanese lines of communication were so disrupted that Yamashita was experiencing major shortages of ammunition and other supplies. As a result, Krueger’s army was able to race fifty miles down Route 3 in five days to capture Clark Field and its six airstrips. It had cost the Americans just 250 men killed. The difficulty, however, quickly set in. The Americans soon discovered that the Japanese ensconced in the mountains had the runways under artillery fire and it became necessary for the infantry to assault the mountains and drive the Japanese beyond artillery range so that General Kenney could bring in his P-38s, B-24s, and B-17s.

  MacArthur was elated during this period, having traveled in the forefront of the infantry drive, sometimes even getting ahead of it. At one point, riding with his personal physician, Colonel Roger Olaf Egeberg, MacArthur suddenly shouted for his jeep driver to stop. With Japanese artillery peppering the road ahead, he led Egeberg over to an old black muzzle-loading cannon set in concrete with a plaque and told him, “On that spot, Doc, about forty-five years ago, my father’s aide-de-camp was killed standing at his side.”