The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  As the inevitable surrender of the Bataan and Corregidor garrisons approached, however, cruel words were spoken in the press and in Washington about Secretary Stimson’s performance—indeed, Stimson would be urged to retire by a member of Congress speaking on the floor of the House.76 It was small wonder that, as the concluding part of General MacArthur’s cable was received and successfully decoded early on the morning of February 9, 1942, the secretary of war blanched.

  “When I reached the War Department,” he recorded that night, “the telegram which had begun coming in yesterday had been finished.” First, however, Stimson reread President Quezon’s “somber” evaluation of the situation in the Philippines—“arraigning the United States for delinquency in helping the Philippines in many matters which were entirely false,” and therefore proposing “that we should declare the independence of the Philippines and retire and that the Japanese should be appealed to on the basis of a recent speech by the Prime Minister of Japan”—a speech to the Japanese Diet in which Prime Minister Tojo had promised eventual independence to the Filipinos if they would stop fighting side-by-side with the Americans.

  If Quezon’s recommendation—namely a pact with the Japanese to withdraw all forces, Japanese and American, from the Philippine Islands in the midst of a critical battle—was not bad enough, MacArthur’s accompanying telegram was even worse. “This telegram was most disappointing,” Stimson dictated in his diary, for MacArthur “went more than half way towards supporting Quezon’s position.”77

  Having talked over the telegram with Marshall and Eisenhower, “I then called up the President, told him of the [second part of the] message, and said I was on the point of sending it to him by messenger. I gave him an outline of it to break the news and he at once suggested that Marshall and I come over at half past ten.”78

  Stimson and Marshall were duly driven to the White House. In the President’s study on the second floor they found not only the Commander in Chief but Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles—“Cordell Hull being sick.”79 Quezon’s message might be disappointing, but it was MacArthur’s telegram recommending “neutralization” of the Philippines in the middle of a battle that most amazed the President.

  Japanese forces had already invaded Borneo and Celebes, prior to the seizure of Java and Timor; meanwhile, they had other forces preparing for the conquest of Sumatra. What earthly reason would the Japanese have to accept “neutralization” of the Philippines—the closest major islands to Japan—and the evacuation of American forces, when they already had the islands within their grasp, indeed had withdrawn one fighting division, with the intention of dealing with the Bataan business later, once they had reached Borneo?

  It made no sense—yet MacArthur, in his cable, had supported President Quezon’s appeal, and had quoted the high commissioner, Francis Sayre, as supporting it too. “I took the liberty of presenting this message to High Commissioner Sayre for a general expression of his views,” MacArthur reported in the second part of his cable. “States as follows: ‘If the premise of President Quezon is correct that American help cannot or will not arrive here in time to be availing I believe his proposal for immediate independence and neutralization of Philippines is sound course to follow.’”80 To which MacArthur had appended his own estimate of the military situation.

  MacArthur’s report was as “gloomy,” in Stimson’s view, as that of Quezon—claiming “we are near done. . . . Since I have no air or sea protection you must be prepared at any time to figure on the complete destruction of this command. You must determine,” MacArthur had addressed himself to General Marshall, “whether the mission of delay would be better furthered by the temporizing plan of Quezon or by my continued battle effort. The temper of the Filipinos is one of almost violent resentment against the United States. Every one of them expected help and when it has not been forthcoming they believe they have been betrayed in favor of others. It must be remembered they are hostile to Great Britain on account of the latter’s colonial policy. In spite of my great prestige with them, I have had the utmost difficulty in keeping them in line. If help does not arrive shortly nothing, in my opinion, can prevent their utter collapse and their complete absorption by the enemy. The Japanese,” he admitted, “made a powerful impression upon Philippine public imagination in promising independence.” In the general’s view, then, “the problem presents itself as to whether the plan of President Quezon might offer the best possible solution of what is about to be a disastrous debacle. . . . Please instruct me.”81

  If MacArthur’s recommendation was anathema to the war secretary, it was even more so to Roosevelt.

  It was, after all, a betrayal of MacArthur’s aggressive spirit. On January 31, the President had asked Stimson to look into whether MacArthur could be awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest medal for bravery in the field, in recognition of the general’s fighting ardor. Now the general was proposing to parley with the enemy!

  The President asked Marshall for his opinion, but it was Secretary Stimson who first responded, allowing that General Marshall “said that I could state our views better than he could.” Stimson thus now “gave my views in full and as carefully as I could,” as he subsequently explained his action—aware that this was perhaps the most critical moment of the war since Pearl Harbor.

  “I arose from my seat and gave my views standing as if before the court”82—for Stimson was not only a highly successful prosecuting attorney, but had himself been governor-general of the Philippines, and felt that the notion of asking the Japanese to stop fighting in midconquest and vacate the Philippine Islands, halfway through their campaign to seize the entire Malay Barrier, was ridiculous.

  However eloquent the secretary of war, and however much General Marshall agreed with him, the plain fact of the matter was that they were both afraid of MacArthur. In the circumstances, only the President had the moral as well as constitutional authority to respond to what was effectively “surrender.”

  All now looked at the President—who shook his head, negating any such idea.

  “Roosevelt said we won’t neutralize,” Marshall later recalled the President’s emphatic words—and his own relief. At that moment of world crisis, “I decided,” he added, “he was a great man.”83

  The President having made his decision, Marshall and Stimson were instructed to go draft replies on the lines they then agreed—a cable over which both Stimson and Brigadier General Eisenhower labored “the entire day,” as Eisenhower duly noted in his diary.84

  The President was dissatisfied when the drafters returned around three o’clock that afternoon, however—Stimson’s prose being mealy-mouthed and apologetic.85 Recognizing the importance of the decision, the President had meantime called in Admiral King and Admiral Stark, as well as Sumner Welles, to assist in the business. The time had come, the President recognized, when he must not only take action as commander in chief, but be seen by his military staff to do so.

  “My reply must emphatically deny,” Roosevelt warned MacArthur straight off the bat, “the possibility of this Government’s agreement to the political aspects of President Quezon’s proposal.” A full presidential response, to be handed to Quezon, would be contained in the “second section of this message.”86 First, however, the Commander in Chief had personal and confidential instructions for General MacArthur.

  “I authorize you to arrange for the capitulation of the Filipino elements of the defending forces,” the President’s cable began, “when and if in your opinion that course appears necessary and always having in mind that the Filipino troops are in the service of the United States. For this purpose the Filipino troops could be placed by you under the command of a Filipino officer who would conduct actual negotiations with the enemy. Such negotiations must involve military matters exclusively. Details of all necessary arrangements will be left in your hands, including plans for segregation of forces and the withdrawal, if your judgment so dictates, of American elements to Fort Mills [Corregi
dor]. The timing also will be left to you,” the President laid down.87 With regard to American troops, however, the Commander in Chief minced no words.

  “American forces will continue to keep our flag flying in the Philippines so long as there remains any possibility of resistance. I have made these decisions in complete understanding of your military estimate that accompanied President Quezon’s message to me. The duty and necessity of resisting Japanese aggression to the last transcends in importance any other obligation now facing us in the Philippines.” 88

  For almost thirteen weeks the Commander in Chief had tolerated MacArthur’s increasingly melodramatic appeals for an American imaginative counteroffensive strategy in the Pacific—naval, air, and army operations that would have been hard for a nation at the very apex of its military power, let alone one whose forces were depleted in the first, halting weeks of a war it had not sought. Now it was Roosevelt’s turn to educate his commander in the field—and he proceeded to do so, uncompromisingly.

  “There has been gradually welded into a common front,” he reminded MacArthur, a global coalition confronting “the predatory powers that are seeking the destruction of individual liberty and freedom of government. We cannot afford to have this line broken in any particular theater. As the most powerful member of this coalition we cannot display weakness in fact or in spirit anywhere. It is mandatory that there be established once and for all in the minds of all peoples complete evidence that the American determination and indomitable will to win carries on down to the last unit.

  “I therefore give you this most difficult mission in full understanding of the desperate situation to which you may shortly be reduced. The service that you and the American members of your command can render to your country in the titanic struggle now developing is beyond all possibility of appraisement.”89

  It was, in short, time for General MacArthur to cease sending home schemes of grand strategy from his tunnel below Fort Mills, and to concentrate on his troops in Bataan and Corregidor. “I particularly request that you proceed rapidly to the organization of your forces and your defenses so as to make your resistance as effective as circumstances will permit,” the Commander in Chief ordered, “and as prolonged as humanly possible.”90

  Perhaps no signal in history from a United States president, in his role as commander in chief, to his commanding general in the field had ever been as candid or coldly imperative. It was a directive calculated to pierce MacArthur’s amour propre: to rouse him out of his temporary mental collapse, and to sting.

  It did—transforming MacArthur from a near-wreck into his old self: a great commander.

  The President’s signal to President Quezon would, too, go down in history—though for another, perhaps even more significant, reason: articulating, at a critical juncture in the unfolding drama of World War II, the goals of an undaunted United States emerging from its long isolationist slumber and beginning its new role as the unchallenged leader of the democracies—not only in the Western world, but the East.

  “I have just received your message sent through General MacArthur,” Roosevelt began his reply to President Quezon. “From my message to you of January thirty, you must realize that I am not lacking in understanding of or sympathy with the situation of yourself and the Commonwealth Government today. The immediate crisis certainly seems desperate,” he allowed, “but such cris[e]s and their treatment must be judged by a more accurate measure than the anxieties and sufferings of the present, however acute. For over forty years,” he pointed out—his language carrying shades of Sumner Welles’s contributions, reminiscent of the assistant secretary’s work on the Atlantic Charter—“the American Government has been carrying out to the people of the Philippines a pledge to help them successfully, however long it might take, in their aspirations to become a self governing and independent people with the individual freedom and economic strength which that lofty aim makes requisite. You yourself have participated in and are familiar with the carefully planned steps by which that pledge of self-government has been carried out and also the steps by which the economic dependence of your islands is to be made effective.

  “May I remind you now that in the loftiness of its aim and the fidelity with which it has been executed, this program of the United States towards another people has been unique in the history of the family of nations,” the President pointed out. “In the Tydings McDuffy [sic] Act of 1934, to which you refer, the Congress of the United States finally fixed the year 1946 as the date in which the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands established by that Act should finally reach the goal of its hopes for political and economic independence.

  “By a malign conspiracy of a few depraved but powerful governments this hope is now being frustrated and delayed,” the President went on—but only delayed. Moreover, the Commonwealth of the Philippines was not alone among the United Nations in its suffering. “An organized attack upon individual freedom and governmental independence throughout the entire world, beginning in Europe,91 has now spread and been carried to the Southwestern Pacific by Japan. The basic principles which have guided the United States in its conduct towards the Philippines have been violated in the rape of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia, Manchukuo, China, Thailand, and finally the Philippines. Could the people of any of these nations honestly look forward to a true restoration of their independent sovereignty under the dominance of Germany, Italy or Japan? You refer in your telegram to the announcement by the Japanese Prime Minister of Japan’s willingness to grant to the Philippines her independence. I only have to refer you to the present condition of Korea, Manchukuo, North China, Indo-China, and all other countries which have fallen under the brutal sway of the Japanese government, to point out the hollow duplicity of such an announcement. The present sufferings of the Filipino people, cruel as they may be, are infinitely less than the sufferings and permanent enslavement which will inevitably follow acceptance of Japanese promises. In any event is it longer possible for any reasonable person to rely upon Japanese offer or promise?”

  With this the President came to the crux of the matter. “The United States is engaged with all its resources and in company with the governments of 26 other nations in an effort to defeat the aggression of Japan and its Axis partners. This effort will never be abandoned until the complete and thorough overthrow of the entire Axis system and the governments which maintain it. We are engaged now in laying the foundations in the Southwest Pacific of a development in air, naval, and military power which shall become sufficient to meet and overthrow the widely extended and arrogant attempts of the Japanese. . . . By the terms of our pledge to the Philippines implicit in our forty years of conduct towards your people and expressly recognized in the terms of the Tydings McDuffie Act, we have undertaken to protect you to the uttermost of our power until the time of your ultimate independence had arrived. Our soldiers in the Philippines are now engaged in fulfilling that purpose. The honor of the United States is pledged to its fulfillment. We propose that it be carried out regardless of its cost. Those Americans who are fighting now will continue to fight until the bitter end,” the Commander in Chief of the United States made clear. In the meantime the Philippine president could be proud in the knowledge that “Filipino soldiers” were not mercenaries, but “have been rendering voluntary and gallant service in defense of their own homeland.”

  In sum, the President concluded, the war in the Southwest Pacific was only beginning; Japan had no idea what it had taken on. “So long as the flag of the United States flies on Filipino soil as a pledge of our duty to your people, it will be defended by our own men to the death,” the President promised. “Whatever happens to the present American garrison we shall not relax our efforts until the forces which we are now marshaling outside the Philippine Islands return to the Philippines and drive the last remnant of the invaders from your soil. Signed Franklin D. Roosevelt.”92

  At 6:45 P.M. Brigadier Gener
al Eisenhower brought the final texts to the President for signature, prior to transmission. It had been a “Long, difficult, and irritating” day. “But now,” Eisenhower noted in his diary, “we’ll see what happens.”93

  Washington waited—the business of encryption and decryption seeming to take an eternity. At 9:51 A.M. on February 10, however, General MacArthur—who had still not received the President’s cable—transmitted yet another message from Quezon to President Roosevelt, enclosing the text of the “letter I propose to address to you,” Quezon stated, “and to the Emperor of Japan if my recent proposal meets with your approval.”94

  It didn’t—indeed the President’s response was tarter than the day before.

  “1037. From the President to General MacArthur. Transmit the following message from me to President Quezon: ‘Your message of February 10 evidently crossed mine to you of February 9. Under our constitutional authority the President of the United States is not empowered to cede or alienate any territory to another nation. Furthermore, the United States ha[s] just bound itself in agreement with 25 other nations to united action in dealing with the Axis powers and has specifically engaged itself not to enter into any negotiations for a separate peace. You have no authority to communicate with the Japanese Government without the express permission of the United States Government. I will make no further comments regarding your last message dated February 10 pending your acknowledgement of mine to you of February 9 through General MacArthur. Franklin D. Roosevelt.”95