by Perry, Mark
But things had changed since Wainwright succeeded MacArthur. Wainwright was convinced that while a surrender would be shameful, a last effusion of lives would be unconscionable. No useful purpose could thereby be gained, and much would be lost, including thousands of American soldiers who might one day be able to fight on. Thankfully, Wainwright and his soldiers won a desperately needed reprieve. During the early afternoon hours of April 8, in Washington, General Joseph McNarney—acting for Marshall in his absence—recommended that Roosevelt allow Wainwright to determine when further resistance would be useless. “It is possible,” McNarney wrote, “that in the literal execution of these orders General Wainwright may be tempted to carry them through to an illogical extreme. I think there should be no doubt that his resolution and sense of duty will preclude any untoward or precipitous action, but on the other hand, it is possible that greater latitude in the final decision should be allowed him.” Roosevelt got the message and cabled Wainwright that he was free to make any decision he deemed necessary. “I . . . have every confidence that whatever decision you may sooner or later be forced to make will be dictated only by the best interests of your country and your magnificent troops.” The message was not sent directly to Wainwright, however, but to MacArthur, who angrily failed to forward it. In the end, that didn’t matter: By the time the message reached Melbourne, Wainwright’s forces on Bataan had surrendered. After the surrender, Roosevelt reiterated his views directly to Wainwright on Corregidor, bypassing MacArthur in Australia. He reemphasized that he was giving Wainwright “complete freedom of action.”
At 7:00 on the morning of April 9, on Corregidor, Wainwright directed his staff to broadcast on Radio Freedom the news of Bataan’s surrender. “Bataan has fallen,” the announcer said. “The Philippine-American troops on this war-ravaged and bloodstained peninsula have laid down their arms. With heads bloody but unbowed, they have yielded to the superior force and numbers of the enemy.” Corregidor continued to hold out, but it would only do so for another thirty days, as Homma launched an all-out attack, with thousands of his soldiers storming Corregidor’s beaches.
With the end near, Roosevelt wrote to Wainwright: “In every camp and on every naval vessel, soldiers, sailors and marines are inspired by the gallant struggle of their comrades in the Philippines. The workmen in our shipyards and munitions plants redouble their efforts because of your example. You and your devoted followers have become the living symbols of our war aims and guarantee of victory.” Wainwright responded graciously, then had Roosevelt’s message broadcast throughout the Philippines and passed from soldier to soldier. The message lifted morale, but it didn’t change the outcome of the battle. After a courageous defense, waged for another three weeks, Wainwright surrendered the Corregidor garrison on May 6. He met directly with Homma, seated opposite him on the porch of a home in southern Bataan, where a Japanese escort had deposited him. Gaunt (he was over six feet tall but weighed only 160 pounds) and wearing simple khaki, Wainwright refused to surrender all American forces on the other islands of the Philippines, despite Homma’s insistence. But two days later, his own command now surrounded, Wainwright relented. In addition to agreeing to an “unconditional surrender,” Wainwright was forced to announce its terms by radio from Manila. While humiliated, Wainwright believed that had he not followed the Japanese instructions, the 11,000-plus men who were still on Corregidor would have been executed.
The Japanese celebrated, but the fight for the Philippines had been a near disaster for the Imperial Japanese Army. At one point, Homma, in Manila, hearing of the final battle for Corregidor, was convinced that his force was wiped out and that he would be sent home in disgrace. “I have failed miserably on the assault,” he wrote in his diary. Indeed, Homma’s breakthrough was more the result of overwhelming force than fighting prowess. The sheer tenacity of the American defense was certainly a part of the reason why, within twenty-four hours of Bataan’s surrender the month before, a brutal retribution was carried out against the surviving Americans and their Filipino allies.
The Bataan Death March, one of the most shameful episodes in Japanese history, began on the afternoon of April 12, as 75,000 American and Filipino soldiers (the exact numbers are uncertain) were forcibly walked from Bataan northward to Balanga (a distance of twenty-five miles) and then north again to San Fernando, another thirty-one miles. The march started with the summary execution of between 350 and 400 Filipinos, some dispatched by sword-wielding Japanese officers. In the days ahead, those who collapsed during the march were executed and those who were overcome by exhaustion were driven over by Japanese trucks. Bayoneting of weak soldiers was common; executions by a single bullet to the back of the skull were an hourly occurrence. The Americans and Filipinos were forced to drink stagnant water from puddles or roadside buffalo wallows. Of the 78,000 who made the march, between 7,000 and 10,000 Filipinos died or were murdered, as were between 500 and 700 Americans.
One of those who marched was Harold K. Johnson, who would later become army chief of staff. “I saw my first Jap atrocity that [first] morning,” he later remembered. “Not far off, in a field, a Filipino was on his knees pleading with a Jap officer. You could see the man’s arms in the air, imploring the soldiers to spare his life. The Jap laughed and shot him through the chest.” The Americans were forbidden to get out of line to find water, so some tried to sneak away. If caught, they were killed. Those who couldn’t walk were put on trucks in a journey to an assembly point where they were thrown by the side of the road. A young American, Major Henry Lee, survived the march, but not the war. He was interred at Babanatyuan Prison Camp, where, for two years, he speared fish for food, adding frogs from nearby swamps to his meals. He was eventually transferred to Cabanatuan Camp, and then, in October 1944, he was moved to Bilibad Prison in Manila, a fetid, dank, and overcrowded dungeon. In December, Lee and more than 1,500 other Americans were packed into the Oryoku Maru, a “hell ship” bound for Formosa. Lee was killed when the ship was sunk by American bombers in Formosa Harbor on January 9, 1945.
When Cabanatuan Camp was liberated that same January, Lieutenant John W. Lueddeke was told by inmates about a diary kept by one of its prisoners and hidden under a barracks in Ward 11 in the camp. Lueddeke didn’t find the diary, but he unearthed a book of poems, buried under the barracks and written by Henry Lee. Bound by canvas, the poems had been secretly composed by Lee during the Battle of Bataan and then during his imprisonment. Lee had buried the book in the soft earth under his barracks before he left for Formosa. Inmates remembered Lee reading his poems to them during their stay in the camp. The title of Lee’s book of verse, Nothing but Praise, came from a statement made by Henry Stimson: “We have nothing but praise for the men of Bataan.” Lee even added an author’s preface, and his corrections to his poems were meticulously marked out in a red pencil. The poems were passed on to Lee’s parents and later published. Very few soldiers leave poems of such quality, but Lee’s are celebrated for their restrained and remarkable beauty. One, “Abucay Withdrawal,” talks of the dust of Bataan and the unmet promises made to America’s soldiers by Roosevelt, Marshall, and MacArthur. “Abucay Withdrawal” sprawls for over two hundred lines. It concludes:
Rifles splatter, machine guns spray
As the weary doughboys take up the fray
Bataan is saved for another day
Saved for hunger and wounds and heat
For slow exhaustion and grim retreat
For a wasted hope and a sure defeat
“MacArthur’s Forces,” home papers whine,
“Strategic withdrawal”—a better line,
“The rear displacement proceeds as planned
And the situation is well in hand.”
Nearly eleven thousand Americans entered Japanese captivity in the Philippines, the largest number of U.S. soldiers to be taken prisoner since the American Civil War. Following the capitulation, Marshall went out of his way to ease the troubles of the families of those surrendered, ordering his
staff to send them regular reassurances on their men’s plight. At first, the details of the Bataan Death March were kept from the public to save the families the pain of such knowledge. Wainwright’s surrender inaugurated a season of finger-pointing in Washington, akin to what had followed the debacle at Pearl Harbor, as policy makers assessed blame for the defeat. MacArthur himself felt the sting of criticism, though not publicly. A small but influential number of administration officials, including MacArthur’s constant critic, Harold Ickes, were outspoken in their criticism of him. Ickes opposed awarding the Medal of Honor to MacArthur, because he had “stayed under cover” in Corregidor. Now, in the wake of Wainwright’s surrender, Ickes weighed in again, telling Roosevelt that MacArthur should be dismissed—and calling him a coward.
Ickes might have been surprised to learn that the criticisms he leveled at MacArthur were being leveled by military officers against Roosevelt. While the criticism of the president never led to open denunciations, senior officers on Marshall’s staff regularly drew comparisons between the funding they now enjoyed and the paucity of funds in the days before Pearl Harbor. Senior army officers remarked that before the war, when isolationist sentiment was at its height, they had been criticized by officials as “warmongers” for asking for more money. Now they were being criticized by the same officials for not having been prepared. While Marshall dismissed those who spent time rethinking the past, he was not immune to such resentments. “In 1940, they were saying I was leading the country into war,” he told an interviewer at the end of the conflict. “A year later, the same people were saying I wasn’t building up defenses fast enough. The criticism went on all the time. It has never stopped.”
Not surprisingly, the most disenchanted officers were those who bore the brunt of the fighting. In Tarlac, in Luzon, where Wainwright and his staff were imprisoned in a bare, wooden, two-story building, there was bitter contempt for the navy, for the air force, and for MacArthur and Roosevelt. The American defenders of the Philippines, it was said, had been sold down the river. Who was it, the prisoners asked, who decided that the Philippine Army should not be funded? That the navy should abandon the islands? That MacArthur’s troops lacked bombers and fighters? That MacArthur should be ordered south? Much of this could have been predicted, for in the wake of a major defeat, nearly every military turns in on itself, just as, in the aftermath of a victory, the old feuds are quickly forgotten. Within weeks of their detention, Wainwright’s officers were involved in a series of ugly disputes, with fistfights breaking out over food distribution and sleeping accommodations. Wainwright intervened, finally, by calling together his senior officers. “You gentlemen have had an easy life for some years,” he said. “Now you taste some hardship and it is apparent that some of you cannot take it well. I want no more behavior of the sort that has occurred recently.”
What happened in Washington and Tarlac was repeated in Melbourne, where an already sullen MacArthur lashed out at Roosevelt and Marshall—and at Wainwright—telling his staff that if he had been in command in the Philippines, he would have fought to the last man. MacArthur also angrily criticized Wainwright for arranging the surrender of troops in the rest of the archipelago, dismissing claims that Wainwright feared for the lives of American prisoners. If Washington had listened to him, MacArthur told his staff, Wainwright could have told Homma that only MacArthur, in Australia, could surrender his command. MacArthur’s Melbourne staff rallied behind him, sparking an animus that marked their headquarters as distinctly anti-Roosevelt. “Roosevelt had wanted only the appearance of the Alamo,” staff aide Paul Rogers later commented. “MacArthur had been willing to give him the reality.” Finally, when George Marshall cabled his intention of awarding Wainwright the Medal of Honor, MacArthur stridently disagreed. Wainwright did not deserve the award, he said, and those who recommended him for it were not in a position to know what he had done in the Philippines. Marshall was stunned by MacArthur’s response and took his concerns to his deputy, Joseph McNarney, and to Henry Stimson. Both men told Marshall to let the matter drop—at least for the time being. Marshall reluctantly agreed, though he was convinced that given enough victories, the poisonous recriminations that seeped their way into MacArthur’s Melbourne command would pass.
MacArthur’s treatment of Wainwright reflected poorly on him, but it was not unpredictable. The Bataan collapse and Corregidor surrender remained a raw subject for MacArthur’s staff in Australia, particularly after a number of anti-MacArthur screeds coming from Tarlac and other prison camps (and transmitted by escaping Allied prisoners who made their way south) became known at his headquarters. A particularly ugly criticism came from General William Brougher, one of Wainwright’s commanders: “A foul trick of deception has been played on a large group of Americans by a Commander in Chief and a small staff who are now eating steak and eggs in Australia. God Damn them!” MacArthur could ignore the statement, but he couldn’t ignore the sentiment, so he built a command in which the plight of Wainwright and his men became a consuming goal. He made certain that Bataan was in everyone’s mind. “The switchboard in GHQ was the ‘Bataan’ switchboard,” MacArthur chronicler Paul Rogers later wrote. “‘Bataan’ was given as a name to MacArthur’s staff planes, one after the other. Always Bataan, never to be forgotten. Those who had never been in the Philippines were constantly reminded that others had been, and that we all shared the same calling—we must return!”
In the months that followed Wainwright’s surrender and as the tide of Japanese victories was stemmed, the pain of America’s defeat in the Philippines faded, as did the recriminations that had followed in its wake. In this, George Marshall was prescient: The suffering of the Bataan Death March and Wainwright’s humiliation at the hands of Homma became a rallying point and steeled the nation for the sacrifices that lay ahead. Slowly, America began to view MacArthur’s defense of the Philippines as a kind of victory, a fight against overwhelming odds that had so bloodied the enemy that it had nearly succeeded. Among the first to understand this was George Kenney, soon to become MacArthur’s air commander. Kenney reflected that “the extra effort expended by Japanese in the Philippines” not only set the stage for America’s later triumphs, but also kept the Japanese from carrying out “the next phase of their plan, which was an invasion of Australia itself.”
None of this was a mystery in Tokyo, where Hideki Tojo, Japan’s army chief and prime minister, pointedly refused to join the saki-fueled celebrations of his staff when Wainwright’s surrender was announced. Instead, he recalled Homma and cashiered him. Bataan and Corregidor might be tallied as a Japanese victory, but MacArthur and Wainwright’s defense was a stunning repudiation of his nation’s belief that America was soft. Just the opposite was the case, for even as the Japanese celebrated, MacArthur was plotting his return, telling his staff that his first step would be to reinforce and secure Port Moresby, in southern New Guinea.
CHAPTER 9
Melbourne
I think we’re going to get along all right.
—Douglas MacArthur
Douglas MacArthur was not worried that Japan would invade Australia. The Japanese, he calculated, were too busy digesting what they had already conquered to take on the challenge of subduing a continent. But MacArthur’s confidence was not shared by the Australian people, who, after December 7, realized that their country was virtually undefended. So it was with a distinct sigh of relief that Australia welcomed home its 7th Infantry Division, which arrived in Adelaide from Syria at the end of March 1942. One week later, the 41st U.S. Infantry Division disembarked at Melbourne. On April 9, back in the United States, the 32nd Infantry Division was told that it would join the 41st. The U.S. Army Air Force in Australia was reinforced in April, and as the navy’s official history relates, the navy’s strength there was increased to include “three heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, fifteen destroyers, twenty modern submarines, eleven old submarines, six or seven sloops, and some smaller craft.” The numbers of naval vessels sounded impres
sive, but MacArthur knew they weren’t enough. The ships were old, the sailors needed training, and MacArthur remained short of men and transports. All of this would be essential if Port Moresby, on Papua New Guinea’s southern coast, was to be defended. Then too, Port Moresby’s harbor, a natural anchorage, was inadequate, and its two airfields were small. MacArthur’s chief engineer, Hugh Casey, reported that three more airfields would have to be built to support Port Moresby’s defenses, and the harbor would have to be improved. In spite of the port’s limitations, American B-17s and B-25s were ordered north from Australia to Port Moresby at the end of April. From Port Moresby, their bombing raids took them over the imposing Owen Stanley Mountains, to Lae and Salamaua, on Papua New Guinea’s northern coast. The operations lifted morale in Australia, but were easily slapped aside by the Japanese.