American Caesar

by William Manchester

  MacArthur scorned those who called the archipelago “indefensible.” He said, “No place is indefensible or impregnable in itself. Any place can be defended, any place taken, provided superior forces can be assembled. To say the Philippines are indefensible is merely to say they are inadequately defended. “And in the September 5, 1936, issue of Collier’s he was quoted as saying, “Were going to make it so very expensive for any nation to attack these islands that no nation will try it.” To be sure, recalling these assurances is a little like citing Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign promise to balance the budget. Much of the General’s bravado was meant to be read in Tokyo and in Manila, where Quezon had committed 22 percent of his first budget to defense of the commonwealth. But it does seem that MacArthur was trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, he argued that Japan didn’t need the Philippines; on the other, he maintained that the islands, because they were “on the flank of Japan’s vital sea lanes,” would, together with Singapore, form a barricade protecting the oil, rubber, quinine, teak, and tin in the Dutch East Indies to the south.20

  The second of these assumptions was correct—“Without the Philippines,” Homer Lea had written, “Japan’s dominion of Asian seas will be no more than tentative, and her eventual dominion of destruction will depend upon who holds these islands”—and among themselves the Japanese agreed with it. Washington seemed to be unable to make up its mind. The decision there was crucial, for the islands could not be held indefinitely by hit-and-run speedboats, illiterate guerrillas, and obsolete aircraft. What counted were the intentions of the American military establishment. Until MacArthur took over the defense of the commonwealth, the conclusions of the generals and admirals had been uniformly negative. Their reasons were largely geographical. By sea Manila lay 8,004 miles from San Francisco and, for freighters sailing via the Panama Canal, 13,088 miles from New York. But Nagasaki was only 1,006 miles away. And Japan’s air bases on the outlying islands off Formosa (Taiwan) were just 40 miles from the closest Philippine island—easily visible on a clear day. MacArthur was fond of reminding his staff that Napoleon never fought unless he had a 70 percent chance of victory; “no such percentage of prospective victory,” he would add, “would exist in such a struggle” between the Japanese and the Philippines. In fact the figure would be 100 percent unless the U.S. Navy intervened. Even the Orange plan, which MacArthur regarded as too conservative, assumed that warships could lift a siege of Luzon in six months. In the late 1930s the Navy Department, painfully aware that its Asiatic fleet was understrength and overage, estimated that reinforcing the Philippine garrison would take from two to three years. In effect the navy was willing to yield the islands by default.21

  The army had reached that conclusion as early as 1909, when it decided to build no major bases in the archipelago. In the late 1920s Major General Johnson Hagood, then the American commander in Manila, reported to President Hoover that it was “not within the wildest possibility to maintain or to raise in the Philippine Islands a sufficient force to defend it against any probable foe.” In 1933 Brigadier Stanley D. Embick, who was responsible for Corregidor’s defense, wrote: “To carry out the present Orange plan, with the provisions for the early dispatch of our fleet to the Philippine waters, would be literally an act of madness.” Embick recommended retiring to a defense line running from Alaska through Hawaii to Panama. That was rejected on higher levels, but Major General E. E. Booth, Hagood’s successor, strongly endorsed it, arguing that the forces available to him could put up only a token resistance in the event of an invasion.22

  Now MacArthur was insisting that enemy troops could be met at the waterline and driven back into the sea, and as we shall see, even his old adversary George Marshall would come to agree with him. Part of the reason was faith in America’s growing air power, another part of it was trust in MacArthur’s judgment, and a third part was a conviction that the Japanese were clowns. It is difficult today to recapture the prewar image of the juggernaut which was to overrun most of Asia in the early 1940s. There were a few Cassandras. In 1934 Major General Frank Parker, then the commander in the Philippines, reported to Washington that Japanese immigration continued to grow at an alarming rate, that they were mapping the coasts, and that most of them were men of military age—some, indeed, known to hold reserve commissions in the Nipponese army. The War Department shrugged, and so, once more, did Quezon. The newcomers were industrious; they were useful bicycle salesmen, sidewalk photographers, and servants; they seemed to contribute to the quality of Filipino life. “Only later,” Carlos Romulo recalls, “did I discover that my gardener was a Japanese major and my masseur a Japanese colonel.”23

  MacArthur to the contrary—and his public statements may have been mere diplomacy—as the 1930s drew to a close most American officers in the Philippines regarded conflict between the United States and Dai Nippon (literally Great Japan, as in Great Britain) as inevitable. But few of them doubted a swift U.S. victory. Even MacArthur was misled by racial chauvinism; when he saw the skill with which Japanese warplanes were flown in the first days of the war, he concluded that the pilots must be white men. The Japanese, Americans agreed, were a comical race. They wrote backward and read backward. They built their houses from the roof down and pulled, instead of pushing, their saws. Their baseball announcers gave the full count as “two and three.” Department-store bargain basements were on the top floor. Japanese women gave men gifts on Saint Valentine’s Day. Papers were stapled in the upper right-hand corner. To open their locks you had to turn the key to the left. If they fell in the mud, they laughed; telling you of grave personal misfortunes, they grinned. Japanese murderers apologized to the victims’ families for messing up the house, and the Japanese host who received you in his home with exquisite courtesy might, upon meeting you on the street, shove you roughly into the gutter. They were stocky, bandylegged, and buck-toothed. Their civilians wore crumpled hats, dark alpaca suits, and tinted glasses in public. Their soldiers suited up in uniforms resembling badly wrapped brown-paper parcels. The notion that they could shoot straight—not to mention lick red-blooded Americans—was regarded in Manila as preposterous.24

  Really it was the Americans who were comic, or, considering what lay ahead, tragicomic. To Filipino trainees they issued cheap pith helmets and rubber tennis sneakers so old that they fell apart in the first maneuvers. Ancient Enfield firearms were purchased from the U.S. Army (which charged the commonwealth an additional 10 percent for each) and nineteenth-century eight-inch guns were sited on straits leading to the Philippines’ inland sea, or mare nostrum, as MacArthur called it—that body of water which separates Luzon in the north, Mindanao in the south, Samar and Leyte in the east, and Mindoro and Panay in the west—as though air power did not exist. Finally, MacArthur, who was presiding over this Gilbert and Sullivan performance, was given a rank no other American officer, before or since, has ever held. In an elaborate ceremony at Malacañan Palace on August 24, 1936, Aurora Quezon, the commonwealth’s first lady, presented him with a gold baton. He was now a field marshal.25

  The new field marshal had designed a Ruritanian uniform for the occasion: black pants, a white tunic festooned with medals, stars, and gold cord, and a braided cap which would become as famous in World War II as George Pat-ton’s ivory-handled pistols. Nevertheless, when he saluted his sneakered, pith-helmeted troops from a palace balcony, MacArthur looked every centimeter a soldier and delivered a rousing speech. “The military code that has come down to us from even before the age of knighthood and chivalry,” he said, had found its highest expression in the soldier, who, “above all men, is required to perform the highest act of religious teaching—sacrifice. In battle and in the face of danger and death he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when He created man in His own image. However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country, is the noblest development of mankind.”26

  He was, as Lyndon Johnson would have said, s
howing a little garter, and he was probably right to do so. He was addressing an audience, not of Americans, but of Filipinos, and they liked what they heard and saw. Commenting on the spectacle, Vicente Albano Pacis, a Manila editor, wrote approvingly: “In actual life, every great enterprise begins with and takes its first forward step in faith.” Even MacArthur’s critics have since acknowledged that he struck the right note. “His dramatic flair captivated the imagination of the Filipinos,” David Joel Steinberg observed, and Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote: “MacArthur recognized that he faced a difficult morale problem in the Philippines. His defense program would never succeed unless the Filipinos developed an active and unquestioning confidence in his wisdom. He therefore had to impress them with a sense of his authority, if not of his infallibility. The rhetoric, the military swagger, the remorseless gold braid were, in part, the response of a naturally histrionic personality to a situation where histrionics became almost a part of policy.”27

  But that is not how Americans saw it at the time. Liberals were especially derisive. In those years they were pacifistic and isolationist—a few months later the Ludlow resolution, which would have required a national referendum before a declaration of war, was narrowly defeated in Congress—and MacArthur, now the highest-paid professional soldier in the world, was an irresistible target for them. They called him “the Napoleon of Luzon,” and “the dandy of the Philippines.” Some of them, in John Hersey’s words, were “afraid they saw a sinister imperialistic plot.” Harold E. Fey, writing in the Nation, was outraged by the conscription; Fey worried about the effect “upon our relations with Japan,” said that the program “effected by General MacArthur will make impossible the attainment of Filipino freedom,” and demanded that he be recalled immediately. Some conservatives were also piqued. Eisenhower, who had become a lieutenant colonel the month before, thought the situation “rather fantastic,” and had attempted, he said afterward, “to persuade MacArthur to refuse the title since it was pompous and rather ridiculous to be the Field Marshal of a virtually nonexisting army.”28

  At the time Ike thought the new title had been Quezon’s idea. Later, in conversation with the Philippine president, he learned that it had been MacArthur’s. It was about this time that relations between the showy General and his more modest chief of staff began to cool. The reason is obscure. According to Eisenhower, MacArthur wanted a big parade to show the people of Manila what they were getting for their money, Quezon said it would be too expensive, and the General blamed Ike and Ord for the idea. Captain Bonner Fellers, who was present at the showdown, left it with a very different impression. According to Fellers, the two aides had tried to bypass MacArthur by presenting Quezon with proposals which would enhance their own prestige. In this version, the General told Eisenhower and Ord: “I would relieve you both if it weren’t for the fact that it would ruin your careers. But although you’ll stay, I’ll never trust you two again.”29

  Probably MacArthur’s clemency was less generous than pragmatic. He needed both men. After Ord was killed in the crash of a plane piloted by an inexperienced Filipino flier, the General relied even more heavily upon Ike’s staff work. Quezon also wanted the new lieutenant colonel to stay on; because of the Field Marshal’s erratic office hours—he never arrived before 11:00 A.M. and took long lunches—the volatile president “seemed,” Eisenhower said, “to ask for my advice more and more.” Ike was flattered but uneasy. “Douglas MacArthur,” he later said, “was a forceful—some thought an overpowering—individual, blessed with a fast and facile mind, interested in both the military and political side . . . of government. “ Eisenhower didn’t want to offend the sensitive General. Besides, in those years Ike was bored by statecraft, and on some of the issues Quezon exasperated him. One of them, which provoked almost everyone except Quezon and MacArthur, concerned the ceremonial honors to which the Philippine president was entitled.30

  The point was raised early in 1937, when Paul V. McNutt was chosen to succeed Murphy as high commissioner. Quezon and MacArthur were invited to Washington for the swearing-in, and the Filipino president planned to make the trip part of an extensive world tour, including visits to China, Japan, Mexico, and Europe. At each port of call, he felt, he would be entitled to a chief-of-state’s twenty-one-gun salute. The General agreed: “To refuse a sovereign salute to the elective head of this people will create a sense of outrage and insult in the breasts of all Filipinos.” The State Department argued that nineteen guns, the number due to a state governor, was correct. This tedious question preoccupied the palace for two months, and was never solved to everyone’s satisfaction. Other countries gave Quezon full honors. The United States was less hospitable, especially after he told Los Angeles reporters that he wanted Philippine independence, not in 1946, but in 1938—the next year. Roosevelt, furious, first refused to receive him and relented only after MacArthur had spent two hours in the oval office begging him to change his mind.31

  While Quezon was buttonholing congressmen on Capitol Hill and soliciting support for early Philippine freedom, MacArthur was shopping for munitions. Both were unsuccessful; the congressmen advised the commonwealth president to be patient—which with his temperament was impossible—and the General sadly reported that “my request for supplies and equipment went unheeded by the War Department.” The army expressed fear that issuing arms would encourage a native uprising. Only the navy was sympathetic. The admirals liked his PT-boat ideas. Quezon, meanwhile, was finding New York disagreeable. At a Foreign Policy Association luncheon he was accused by liberal journalists of blurring distinctions between military and civil authority, of draining the archipelago’s economy to buy guns, and of provoking Japan. Oswald Garrison Villard of the Nation asked him why it wasn’t better to teach the islands’ children to live rather than to kill. Quezon replied emotionally: “If I believed that the Philippines could not defend itself, I would commit suicide this afternoon.”32

  He and MacArthur parted in Manhattan. The president was sailing for the Continent, and the General was returning to Luzon to supervise the first levy of conscripts. MacArthur had found New York cheerier than Quezon had. At 10:00 A.M. on Friday, April 30, 1937, he had appeared in the Municipal Building, where Deputy City Clerk Philip A. Hines had married him to Jean Marie Faircloth.33

  Precisely when they had become betrothed is unknown, but it was probably in Manila, perhaps on one of those blue-hour walks on the wide balcony looking toward Corregidor, for Jean had taken to joining him during his twilight constitutionals there. The issue was almost certainly decided by January 25, when Quezon and his party left Luzon on their elaborate tour aboard the Empress of Canada. A few days later Jean donned her tricorn hat and booked passage on the Pan American clipper flight to Honolulu, where she was scheduled to continue on to San Francisco aboard the S.S. Lurline. To inquiring friends who accompanied her to the Cavite air terminal she said that she had merely “decided to go home,” or “I’m just going to Tennessee,” or “I’m going to visit relatives.” Her flight to Oahu was ghastly—she was airsick all the way—but when she reached Hawaii she was amazed (she later professed) to be greeted by MacArthur. By some feat of legerdemain which has never been explained, the party of the Philippine president had transferred from the Empress of Canada to the Lurline. Jean enjoyed the voyage to California much more than the flight from Cavite.34

  She really did visit friends in Murfreesboro while MacArthur was in Washington. Although she revealed her plans to none of them, she made one interesting slip. One evening they were all playing jackstraws, a parlor game in which each player tries to pick up as many straws as possible from a pile without disturbing the others. Some straws are worth more points than the rest. The most valuable one is called the Major, and when Jean got it she cried impulsively, “Oh, I’ve got the General!” She first disclosed the fact that she had a real general awaiting her in New York to Mrs. Marie Glenn Beard, a favorite aunt in Louisville. Mrs. Beard remarked that the American people wo
uld certainly be surprised. Leaving for Manhattan, Jean said, “Well, the people of Manila won’t be.”35