Belatedly recognizing his beach-defense scheme was a shambles and that the capital could not be defended, MacArthur had reported to the President and War Department in Washington his decision to declare Manila an open city, occupied only by civilians, while belatedly pulling back his military forces, in conformity with War Department plan WPO-3, to the thirty-mile-long Bataan Peninsula. His own headquarters would move farther back still, to the island of Corregidor, a four-mile-long fortress isle, replete with deep tunnels, guarding the entrance to Manila Bay. In so doing, however—despite months to make contingency preparations, as the War Department had instructed him—MacArthur had failed to ensure sufficient provisions were sent back to the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor. One depot, for instance, at Cabanatuan, on the central plain of Luzon, had held enough rice to “feed U.S. and Filipino troops for over four years,”24 but was not relocated. Instead, MacArthur had airily assured the War Department—and President Quezon, whom he took with him by boat to Fort Mills, Corregidor, on Christmas Eve, 1941—that his Army of the Philippines could hold out against the Japanese for six months in the difficult, jungle Bataan Peninsula territory, until reinforcements could be dispatched from Hawaii or the United States.
Not the lack of men or weapons but the lack of food had thereafter become the single most critical factor in the defense of Bataan—MacArthur having completely underestimated the number of mouths he must feed. In his cables to the President and War Department in Washington, he had claimed his army numbered only forty thousand men, while the enemy numbered eighty thousand.25 In actuality it was the other way around. With the Army of the Philippines bottled up on the Bataan Peninsula, the Japanese could, by blockading it, simply starve out its opponents.
Moving their air force and one of their two divisions to prepare the invasion of the Dutch East Indies in preparation for their next major campaign, the Japanese had done exactly that. However hard they tried thereafter, neither the U.S. Army nor the Navy was able to break the blockade. And without enough food, thanks to MacArthur’s error, the garrison was doomed.
None of this was known by the public in America, thanks largely to MacArthur’s publicity machine on Corregidor. At his underground headquarters in the Malinta Tunnel beneath the Corregidor “Rock,” two miles across the water from the Bataan Peninsula, MacArthur had reserved to himself the sole right to issue press communiqués and press releases, telling each day more stories of heroic combat against the Japanese under his sterling generalship—even though MacArthur only once ever crossed the water to visit his army in the field.26 He was writing pure propaganda. “General MacArthur personally checks all publicity reports, and writes many of them himself,” his chief of staff afterward explained, “always with an eye on their effect on the MacArthur legend.”27
MacArthur’s subsequent air force commander, Brigadier General George Kenney, mockingly described the communiqués as having “painted the General with a halo and seated him on the highest pedestal in the universe.”28 Of almost 150 communiqués put out by the headquarters of the USAFFE in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, 109 mentioned only one individual: MacArthur.29
As a battlefield commander MacArthur was, Roosevelt reflected, a fraud—his January 15, 1942, message, “to be read out to all units,” declaring that “help is on the way,” being “criminal” in its mendacity and the raising “of false hopes,” the President told his personal secretary, “—hopes that MacArthur knew could not be fulfilled.”30
But what of the general’s credentials to replace the President as U.S. commander in chief—a replacement that had never taken place in American history, given the Constitution’s express condition that only the President of the United States should hold that title, rank, and responsibility?
Here the President was even more disappointed by MacArthur’s histrionics—the only term that could describe the “flood of communications” (as Eisenhower called it in his diary)31 the general had transmitted to Washington by wireless since Pearl Harbor. For in their miscalculations, wild exaggerations, grandiose recommendations, and doomsday warnings, MacArthur’s cables had given cause for the President to question MacArthur’s mental health.
Among many others, Admiral Tommy Hart had long despaired of MacArthur’s contact with reality. “The truth of the matter is that Douglas is, I think, no longer altogether sane,” Hart had confided to his wife even before the Japanese assault; in fact, Hart added thoughtfully, “he may not have been for a long time.”32
In terms of army-navy cooperation, MacArthur had evinced a fatal lack of interest—adamantly refusing Hart’s request to let the navy call upon the army’s long-range B-17s for reconnaissance or protection purposes over the sea. Instead, the “field marshal” had simply gloried in his refusal to take orders from Washington, telling Hart it was his aim to create a “200,000-man army” and fight “a glorious land war” in defending the Philippines without naval support. The “Navy had its plans, the Army had its plans,” MacArthur had declared with finality, “and we each had our own fields”—waving away Hart’s proposals for combined defense.33
The loss of his air force on December 7, 1941 (Washington time), had rendered the U.S. fleet in the Far East sitting ducks. Such a disaster might have chastened a lesser man than MacArthur. Given his monumental ego it had not, at least to judge by his signals to Washington, which Marshall arranged to be messengered to the Commander in Chief in the White House immediately on receipt, given the crisis in the Pacific. “I do not know the present grand strategy,” MacArthur had shamelessly cabled, for example, on December 13, 1941, a week after his air force had been destroyed—“but I do know what will follow here unless an immediate effort, conceived on a grand scale, is made to break the Jap blockade. If Japan ever seizes these islands the difficulty of recapture is impossible of conception. If the Western Pacific is to be saved, it will have to be saved here and now. If the Philippines and the Netherlands East Indies go, so will Singapore and the entire Asiatic continent,” he warned. “The Philippines theatre of operations is the locus of victory or defeat,” he claimed, “and I urge a strategic review of the entire situation lest a fatal mistake be made. The immediate necessity is to delay the hostile advance. This can be effectively accomplished by providing air support” for U.S. ground forces, as well as “bombardment to operate against [enemy] air bases, communications and installations”—the very things he had conspicuously failed to order on the day of Pearl Harbor. “The presence of air forces here would delay the enemy advance,” the general summarized, and would moreover serve to protect the “Netherlands East Indies and Singapore, thus insuring the rapid defeat of the enemy. It justifies the diversion here of the entire output of air and other resources. Please advise me on the broadest lines possible. End. MacArthur.”34
A week later, when the Japanese invasion of the Philippines began in earnest, MacArthur had sent his inexplicable estimate of his forces and those of the enemy he faced. He commanded only “about forty thousand men in units partially equipped,” he had signaled on December 22, 1941, confronting “eighty to one hundred thousand” Japanese35—when in truth he had no fewer than eighty-five thousand of his own armed troops, facing less than half that number of Japanese. On January 2, 1942, he had then revised his numbers, claiming to have “only seven thousand American combat troops here, the balance of force being Filipino”—and had begged not only for U.S. planes to be urgently delivered, but “the landing of an expeditionary force”—emphasizing his firm belief “that the loss of the Philippines will mark the end of white prestige,” and that U.S. forces must “move strongly and promptly,” as he put the choice, “or withdraw in shame from Orient. Stop.”36
Five days later, on January 7, 1942, the general had urged that, as in some pageant of miracles, “an Army corps should be landed in Mindanao”—the largest southern island of the Philippines—“at the earliest date possible.” He begged also for “more aggressive and resourceful handling of naval forces in this area”—while reportin
g that, despite the War Department’s long-laid plans for a staged withdrawal of U.S. forces to the Bataan Peninsula, he now had insufficient food to feed them, and had been compelled to place them on “half rations.” He therefore demanded “steps must be taken immediately to get in supply ships no matter at what loss.”37
How such steps could be taken ten thousand miles away was unclear, though the President had ordered everything possible to be done to get supplies through. Troop reinforcements—especially an entire “Army corps”—were not only impossible to prepare and transport to the battlefield, but strategically absurd. In his diary at his headquarters in Java, toward which Japanese forces were now steaming, Admiral Hart painted on January 11, 1942, a mocking image of the field marshal on Corregidor: “Douglas sitting in his tunnel dreaming up suggestions of how the Navy could help him win the war that he actually had lost in the first 24 hours.”38
Undeterred, a week later, on January 15, 1942, MacArthur had issued his message to be “read and explained to all troops” on Bataan and Corregidor: “Help is on the way from the United States. Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched,” the commanding general had assured them. “The exact time of arrival of reinforcements is unknown as they will have to fight through Japanese attempts against them. It is imperative that our troops hold until these reinforcements arrive. . . . If we fight we will win; if we retreat we will be destroyed.”39
Two days after that, on January 17, 1942, however, MacArthur had appeared at his wit’s end. The rations he needed, “measured in ships capacity,” were “small indeed,” he begged Washington. “Many medium sized or small ships should be loaded with rations and dispatched along various routes. Stop. The enemy bomber formations are no longer here but have moved south. Stop. Unquestionably ships can get through but no attempt yet seems to have been made along this line. Stop. This seems incredible to me and I am having increasing difficulty in appeasing Philippine thought along this line. Stop. They cannot understand the apparent lack of effort to bring something in. Stop. I cannot overemphasize the psychological reaction that will take place here,” he warned, “and unless something tangible is done in this direction a revulsion of feeling of tremendous proportions against America can be expected. Stop. They can understand failures but cannot understand why no attempt is being made at relief through the forwarding of supplies. Stop. The repeated statements from the United States that Hitler is to be destroyed before an effort is made here is causing dismay. Stop. The Japanese forces—air, land and ground—are much overextended. Stop. His success to date does not measure his own strength,” MacArthur claimed of the Japanese invasion, but rather “the weakness of his opposition”—despite even three-to-one superiority in troops on Bataan.40 “A blow or even a threatened blow against him will almost certainly be attended with some success. Stop. I am professionally certain that his so-called blockade can easily be pierced. Stop. The only thing that can make it really effective is our own passive acceptance of it as a fact. Stop. If something is not done to meet the general situation which is developing the disastrous results will be monumental. Stop. The problems involved cannot be measured or solved by mere army and navy strategic formulas they involve comprehensiveness of the entire oriental problem. End. MacArthur.”41
MacArthur’s doomsday language had been ridiculed at the War Department—which nevertheless tried again and again to get blockade runners through to Mindanao, on the President’s specific orders. Yet there was no one in the War Department willing to put the distinguished general in his place, let alone criticize him for losing his own air force on the first day of battle. Every message had therefore been replied to with courteous War Department assurances, signed by General Marshall himself, explaining that everything possible was being done to get supplies to him, as well as reinforcements to Australia and the Far East in order to assemble an eventual coordinated counterattack.42 But with Malaya being overrun, Singapore within Japanese sights, the Dutch East Indies vulnerable, and Australians themselves rattled over imminent invasion, there was, undoubtedly, a tendency to see MacArthur and his eight or more thousand beleaguered American troops as “expendable.” The view in the Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue—and even more so in the Navy Department next door—was that, having lost his air force and failed to provision his army on the Bataan Peninsula as he had been instructed to do in advance of Pearl Harbor—instructions he had labeled “defeatist”—MacArthur had made his own bed and must lie in it.
MacArthur’s cables to Washington had understandably only grown more desperate in the days that followed—indeed MacArthur’s wild pleas and warnings seemed to Eisenhower and others at the War Department to “indicate a refusal on his part to look facts in the face, an old trait of his.” Highly emotional in their language, envisaging a “fatal” scenario for the Allies if his wishes were not met, his cables showed the hero, by January 29, 1942, to be “jittery!” as Eisenhower jotted in his diary.43 “Looks like MacArthur is losing his nerve,” Eisenhower wrote on February 3, 1942.44
Eisenhower—who had come to despise MacArthur, for all his “brilliance,” after years working for him in Washington and the Philippines—had simply lost patience with the braggart, as had others in the War Department, despite all the sympathy they felt for their fellow servicemen, beleaguered on Bataan.
MacArthur’s pleas were filed in the new ground-floor Map Room at the White House, once the President had read them. “The President has seen all of your messages,” Marshall had assured MacArthur in late December 1941,45 and the President continued to read them over the following days and weeks. “I welcome and appreciate your strategical views,” Marshall signaled back to MacArthur in February, “and invariably submit them to the President.”46
Was the Far Eastern general a “strategical” genius, as the press and Republicans increasingly seemed to believe? Or was he a charlatan—a Mad Hatter, ensconced in a rabbit hole of a tunnel—driven literally to distraction by his unenviable situation in the Philippines?
The President had his own views, knowing MacArthur over so many years. Yet it was part of Roosevelt’s genius as a leader that he was able, for the most part, to take a more Olympian view than others, especially in times of stress and ill success. His long political battles and his struggle against polio had given him a stature among his colleagues and contemporaries unrivaled by any other figure in America. And at the heart of this robustness of character, tempered by so many reverses across the years, was his abiding optimism. MacArthur might well be mad—but as King George II had famously said when listening to his advisers’ objections to the appointment of young Brigadier General James Wolfe to command an amphibious operation to seize Quebec: “Mad, is he? Then I hope he will bite some of my other generals!” MacArthur was a potentially great leader, whose flaws were as large as his strengths. He was symbolically important, as an inspiration to so many.
As Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States and de facto leader of the United Nations, the President thus had a wider perspective than those in the War or Navy Departments who derided MacArthur’s histrionics, and who deplored MacArthur’s failure to mind his own business in his endless “strategical” outpourings, instead of actually commanding his troops in battle on Bataan. At least MacArthur was determined to strike back against the Japanese!
It was all very well, the President reflected, to point to MacArthur’s mistakes from day one of the war—indeed even before war began—but who in the Far East, or the West, was any better as a military commander? As the President noted in a cable to Manuel Quezon that he sent via MacArthur, “The deficiency which now exists in our offensive weapons are the natural results of the policies of peaceful nations such as the Philippines and the United States”—nations “who without warning are attacked by despotic nations which have spent years in preparing for such action. Early reverses, hardships and pain are the price that democracy must pay under such conditions.” Roosevelt had assured Quezon that
“every dollar and every material sinew of this nation” were being thrown into the fight, a fight whose objective was in part the restoration of “tranquility and peace to the Philippines and its return to such government as its people may themselves choose.”47 Yet patient realism of this kind, sincere as it was, would have no value, the President recognized, without military commanders able to convey confidence and a transcending belief in their own leadership.
“This war can’t be won with men who are thinking only about retiring to farms somewhere and who won’t take great and bold risks,” the President had told Harry Hopkins at dinner on January 24, 1942—Hopkins noting that Roosevelt “has got a whole hatful of them in the Army and Navy that will have to be liquidated before we really get on with our fighting.”48
What a contrast MacArthur was, for example, to Admiral Tommy Hart, the four-star commander of the U.S. Navy’s Far Eastern Fleet, as the President explained to Hopkins. The President had known Hart for many years. Like Admiral Stark, Hart was a highly professional officer—but one who exuded defeatism, however much he called it realism. From Admiral King and others in the Navy Department, the President was hearing how Hart was spreading little but weariness and resignation wherever he went—prompting the chief of naval operations to send messages from the Navy Department warning Hart of what was being said about him in Washington,49 and Harry Hopkins to write in his diary, before he himself went into hospital for another prolonged bout of treatment, that the President was “going to have many of the same problems that Lincoln had with generals and admirals whose records look awfully good but who may turn out to be the McClellans of this war.50 The only difference,” Hopkins wrote, “is that I think Roosevelt will act much faster in replacing these fellows.”51 Faute de mieux, Hart had recently been appointed commander in chief of all American, British, Dutch, and Australian naval forces in the Southwest Pacific (the so-called ABDA area), under General Archibald Wavell, the new supreme commander in area—but was letting down the American flag. As Hopkins noted, the President felt Admiral Hart “is too old adequately to carry out the responsibilities that were given him and I fancy before long there will be a change in our naval command in the Far East.”52
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