The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  To MacArthur himself General Marshall sent his own, equally tart, message from the White House: “The President desires that no public statement of any kind bearing directly or indirectly on this subject be permitted to go out from any station or source under your control unless and until the President of the United States ha[s] had prior and specific notification and you have received his reply and further instructions.” General Marshall added that, as the President had already made clear, Quezon was to be evacuated, if willing, as soon as possible “by submarine” for “a safe and speedy trip” via Australia “to the United States”—in which country he would, “because of the gallant struggle the Filipino soldiers have made under your command,” receive “an extraordinary welcome and honors” in leading a Philippine government in exile.96

  By the evening of February 10, 1942, then, there could no longer be any debate about who was the commander in chief of the United States Armed Forces. MacArthur’s self-serving, self-lauding press communiqués were now to be submitted first to the President, if they related in any way to the subject of neutralization, surrender, independence, or relief. President Quezon was to be evacuated from the Philippines as soon as possible, lest he take any steps to parley with the enemy; MacArthur was to concentrate on defending Bataan and Corregidor—not grand strategy.

  MacArthur’s pride was more deeply dented than at any other time in his life—more so even than in his contretemps with the President in 1934, since his honor as a soldier had now been called into question in recommending parleying with the enemy.

  Even MacArthur’s secretary and stenographer, a young private first class who had damned “all politicians including roosevelt,”97 now recorded in his secret, shorthand diary the reality that MacArthur had been struggling to avoid for eight weeks. “All help that can be given at the present time has been given,” he summarized, having presented to the commanding general the decoded messages from the President. “If the present American force is destroyed,” he noted, “another will be sent” to liberate the Philippines “in the future”—not the present. As for the Filipino leader, “Quezon reminded of America’s faithfulness in the past and the deception of the Japanese promises of independence for the Philippines.”98

  So there it was. General MacArthur, in the cordoned-off portion of the Malinta Tunnel where he spent all day with his wife, Jean, and four-year-old son, Arthur, was understandably chastened. By “First Priority” on February 11, 1942, he wired back to assure the President he had “delivered your message to President Quezon,” as well as to High Commissioner Sayre, who was also to be evacuated with his family by submarine. MacArthur’s own plans, he claimed, “have been outlined in previous radios; they consist in fighting my present battle position in Bataan to destruction and then holding Corregidor in a similar manner.”99

  There was little doubt that the general had spoken with President Quezon, though, for he continued: “I have not the slightest intention in the world of surrendering or capitulating the Filipino elements of my command. Apparently my message gave a false impression or was garbled with reference to Filipinos. My statements regarding collapse applied only to the civilian population including Commonwealth officials the puppet government and the general populace. There has never been the slightest wavering of the troops. I count upon them equally with the Americans to hold steadfast to the end. End. MacArthur.”100

  To this response MacArthur then added a second telegram, assuring General Marshall that “President Quezon’s suggested proposal was entirely contingent upon prior approval by President Roosevelt. Replying your 1031 he has no intention whatsoever so far as I know to do anything which does not meet with President Roosevelt’s complete acquiescence. I will however take every precaution that nothing of this nature goes out.”101

  Swallowing his wounded self-esteem, MacArthur thus accepted Roosevelt’s orders without demur—in fact refused the President’s suggestion that his wife and his son should be evacuated by submarine with the Sayre and Quezon families. As he responded, somewhat bathetically, he was “deeply appreciative of the inclusion of my family in this list but they and I have decided that they will share the fate of the garrison.”102

  General MacArthur might be penitent—even resigned to die on Corregidor, as he told two war correspondents103—but for his part, President Quezon was not.

  Quezon was incensed—at once ashamed of his naiveté and furious with President Roosevelt for pointing it out. Pride, humiliation, ill health, and horrible conditions in the cramped 835-foot-long tunnel at Corregidor, with its twenty-four 160-foot-long “laterals” where the MacArthur, Sayre, and Quezon families lived and slept, made President Quezon see red. Would Americans ultimately triumph over the Japanese, he asked himself? Did the United States really have the determination and the power?

  According to James Eyre, a later adviser to Philippines vice president Sergio Osmeña, Quezon “flew into a violent rage” on receiving the copy of the President’s signal that MacArthur gave to him. “His anger giving him new-born strength, Quezon got up from his wheelchair and walked back and forth within the narrow confines of the tent in which he was resting near the mouth of the Malinta tunnel. As if addressing an invisible audience he bitterly attacked Roosevelt’s direction of policy with reference to the war.” Calling for his secretary, he thereupon “resigned as President of the Commonwealth,” saying he “would return to Manila. Repeating his verbal attacks upon Roosevelt and American policy, he stated that he wanted no further responsibility for the continued participation of the Filipinos in the war.”104

  Vice President Osmeña urged Quezon to reconsider. Even as a resigned president, Quezon might “bring permanent dishonor to himself and his country” by returning to Manila—the duty of Filipinos surely being to “defend their homeland against the invading armies” of Japan, the vice president argued.105 Manuel Roxas, the senior liaison officer between the Commonwealth and MacArthur’s headquarters, supported Osmeña106—as did Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Romulo, a Filipino newspaperman and broadcaster at MacArthur’s headquarters.107

  As Romulo later recalled, Roosevelt’s message had, in essence, allowed Quezon the right to surrender his Filipino forces, but had stated that the U.S. Army, for its part, would go on fighting. “Since then I have thought often of this struggle between Roosevelt and Quezon,” Romulo wrote—“of Quezon’s willingness to yield and Roosevelt’s telling him to go ahead, American soldiers would fight on. Would the Filipino soldiers,” Romulo wondered, “have stayed with the American fighters or would they have given up?”108

  According to Osmeña’s chronicler, Quezon “remained adamant” all day and night that he would return to the Philippine capital, now under Japanese military occupation. “Because of Roosevelt’s insulting message, it is no longer possible for me to serve as President of the Commonwealth,” he told his entourage. “I have been deceived and I intend to return to Manila.”109

  A further day passed, and a small boat was actually readied for the President’s journey across the bay to Manila.

  Early on the morning of February 12, 1942, however, Vice President Osmeña spoke quietly with the Filipino president, pointing out that, if Quezon returned to Manila, “history might record him as a gross coward and a traitor.”110

  Osmeña himself would have nothing to do with such a move; he would go to Washington as vice president, he made clear, and lead a government in exile on the part of proud Filipinos—not cowards.111

  MacArthur waited patiently for Quezon to make his decision. So did the White House.

  At last it came: MacArthur transmitting on February 12, 1942, the “following message from President Quezon.” It was addressed to “The President of the United States: I wish to thank you for your prompt answer to the proposal which I submitted to you with the unanimous approval of my cabinet. We fully appreciate the reasons upon which your decision is based and we are abiding by it.”112

  The U.S. secretary of war and all the senior officers of the
War Department, as well as the State Department, breathed a sigh of relief. President Roosevelt had certainly won a great moral battle—despite a pending military defeat. And he had gained the grudging obedience and respect of his theater commander, as well as the support of the elected president of the Philippines.

  Quezon, in retrospect at least, was proud of Roosevelt, too. “I first knew President Roosevelt when he was Under-Secretary of the Navy,” Quezon afterwards wrote, in exile, before his death in 1944. “From the first time that I had met him, his irresistibly winning smile had attracted me to him. I gave him from the beginning my personal affection. From my official dealings with him, I had come to the conclusion that he was a great statesman—with broad human sympathies and a world-wide knowledge of affairs; a leader of men, with physical and moral courage rarely seen in a human being.”113

  At the point of choice between throwing in his lot with the Japanese or with Washington, Quezon had chosen Washington—because of Roosevelt. “I had become convinced of his extreme regard for the welfare of the Filipino people and his abiding faith in liberty and freedom for the human race,” Quezon explained. “When I realized that he was big enough to assume and place the burden of the defense of my country upon the sacrifice and heroism of his own people alone, I swore to God and to the God of my ancestors that as long as I lived I would stand by America regardless of the consequences to my people and to myself. We could not in decency be less generous or less determined than President Roosevelt. Without further discussion with anybody I called my Cabinet and read them my answer to President Roosevelt . . .”114

  In truth, the process of digestion—or indigestion—had been fraught. There were other things that went missing from the record, too—one of them so egregious it would be covered up for forty years. For at the very moment when the President had shown his mettle as commander in chief, General MacArthur—who had been given a fourth star on December 20, 1941—did something that would stun and disappoint even his most ardent admirers.

  Forty years later, MacArthur’s former wartime office secretary at Corregidor could only scratch his head in retrospect as to why MacArthur would do something so stupid—for on February 13, 1942, the day after President Quezon had agreed to turn down the Japanese offer of independence for the Philippines and for the Philippine government to stand by the United States, General MacArthur persuaded Quezon to award him a backdated bonus or bribe of half a million dollars—the sum to be wired into MacArthur’s personal bank account in New York.115 Not only that, but until the general received a cable from Chase National Bank in New York confirming that the money had been credited to his account, Quezon was to give MacArthur half a million dollars in cash (or bonds) as a surety. “God, would I like to be a General!” Private Rogers noted in amazement in his shorthand diary that night—so embarrassed by the transaction and the negotiations for it, in the midst of a significant battle in a world war, that he did not dare set down the true sum—changing it to $50,000.116

  That MacArthur would take such a huge sum ($4.7 million in today’s currency) for supposed “past services” to the president of the Philippines was not only illegal for a serving U.S. officer, but a tremendous risk for General MacArthur in terms of his stature as an officer and a gentleman. Such an urgent, cabled request, from a commanding general in a combat zone in the Far East, would obviously be seen by others—indeed, it would require the authorization of senior U.S. Army and cabinet officers, as well as directors of Chase National Bank. It could not be (and was not) hidden from the President (who kept a copy of MacArthur’s secret wire in his files), the secretary of war, the secretary of the interior, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, the adjutant general, or Brigadier General Eisenhower—who became head of the Far East section of the War Department on February 16, 1942, just as the strange money-transfer cable request was going through.117

  The President could be forgiven for wondering why MacArthur and his closest staff (who also were offered and accepted lesser sums) should take such fortunes from the president of an American territory, at a critical juncture of the war, when tens of thousands of men were fighting for their lives—and would necessarily be abandoned—on Bataan. Was MacArthur, as Admiral Hart claimed, completely “mad”?

  Under Article 94 of the Articles of War of 1920, “Frauds Against the Government” as well as “conduct unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman” could be punished “by fine or imprisonment, or by such other punishment as a court-martial may adjudge.”

  Rogers was ashamed of the risk MacArthur was taking, but took some comfort in the fact that the bribe, though kept secret, was known to the highest authorities in America. “If Roosevelt had not approved the transfer,” as Rogers later wrote, “the entire affair would have been annulled.”118

  In the event, however, the question of corruption or insanity was set aside by the President, and by Secretary Stimson—both of whom had law degrees. For on February 15, 1942, the war in the Pacific turned a new and darker page. Singapore, the “Gibraltar of the East,” was surrendered by the British without more than a token fight. More than forty thousand of their Indian troops went over to the enemy, offering to fight with the Japanese, against the British.

  Like a house of cards, Britain’s empire in the Far East collapsed, overnight. And General Douglas MacArthur, the man who had helped President Quezon and the Filipinos to continue fighting with the democracies, instead of becoming a felon became the U.S. Commander in Chief’s “indispensable man” in the Pacific.

  PART FIVE

  END OF AN EMPIRE

  8

  Singapore

  “BRING DOUGLAS MACARTHUR HOME!” shouted Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s Republican rival for the presidency in the 1940 election, to a big audience in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 12, 1942. “Place him at the very top. Keep bureaucratic and political hands off him. Give him the responsibility and the power of coordinating all the armed forces of the nation to their most effective use. Put him in supreme command of our armed forces under the President.”1

  “Ordinarily it might be hard, it might be impossible to find such a man,” Willkie allowed. “But as the last two months have proved, we have the man,” he declared “—the one man in all our forces who has learned from first hand, contemporary experience the value and the proper use of Army, Navy and air forces fighting together towards one end; the man who on Bataan Peninsula has accomplished what was regarded as impossible by his brilliant tactical sense; the man who almost alone has given his fellow countrymen confidence and hope in the conduct of this war—General Douglas MacArthur.”2

  Henry Stimson was appalled—having found the same suggestion circulating in his War Department. Secretary Stimson had, in fact, “just come from a series of discussions” with a group of men charged with the “reorganization of the [War] Department,” in which the same question of a commander in chief of all, or at least all U.S. Army forces, had been raised. Stimson had been at pains to argue “just the opposite position—that in the United States there should be nobody between the President and the commanders of different task forces, and that the Chief of Staff should be a Chief of Staff,” he noted in his diary. In other words, General Marshall’s job was to run the War Department under the commander in chief, not take his place as commander in chief.3

  When, the next day, Stimson “picked up the newspapers and saw that Willkie had come out for making MacArthur General-in-Chief of all forces of the United States under the President,” he was appalled by such “Republican talk.”4

  The President, for his part, had heard much the same. In the aftermath of his contretemps with General MacArthur and Quezon, however, he was confident he could bat away such nonsense. “No,” Roosevelt responded to the White House correspondents gathered at the 806th press conference of his presidency, he would not “comment on the agitation to have MacArthur ordered out of the Philippines and given over-all command.” He had little time for such silly talk. “I think that is just one of ‘the
m’ things that people talk about without very much knowledge of the situation.”5

  And there the matter of Roosevelt’s commander-in-chief-ship of the Armed Forces of the United States was laid to rest for the rest of the war.

  Winston Churchill, in London, was also under fire as quasi commander-in-chief of British imperial armed forces. In his case this stemmed from the British Eighth Army’s lamentable showing against General Rommel’s forces in Libya, and even worse performance in the Far East. He was also being pilloried as a poor protector of Britain’s preferential prewar trading rights, in view of President Roosevelt’s latest Declaration of the United Nations, on January 1, 1942.

  A month later, on February 2, 1942, a fierce new argument had erupted over the looming Master Lend-Lease Agreement. Article 7 stipulated there was to be an eventual termination, after the war’s end, to trade tariffs, known as “imperial preference,” which unfairly benefited Britain.6 By February 7, 1942, Churchill had felt compelled to beg the President not to insist upon the article’s inclusion in Lend-Lease, lest the United States be accused, he said, of “breaking up the British Empire and reducing us to the level of [a] territory of the Union.”7

  Economic concerns, with the prospect of postwar bankruptcy, were only the tip of the looming iceberg for Great Britain. The once-majestic British Empire, with its king-emperor as lord of a quarter of the world’s population and landmass, was approaching a crisis of existence—something that now became vividly, tragically, symbolically, and militarily clear.

  With a population of only 50 million in 1939, the notion of the British Isles continuing to command the fortunes of such a vast Victorian imperial construct was inherently unlikely. Even as far back as 1883, the British historian Sir John Seeley had forecast a day when the game would be up. “Russia and the United States will surpass in power” Great Britain, he had written, just as the emerging nation-states in the sixteenth century had “surpassed Florence.”8 Compared with 140 million Americans and 180 million Russians, what chance did the little United Kingdom have in administering and defending an ill-assorted global empire of 490 million people, from the Faroe Isles to Hong Kong?