We picture him on his favorite balcony as sundown approaches in the late afternoon of Sunday, December 7. Here it is the blue hour, but nine thousand miles away at Fort Sam Houston Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower’s watch reads 3:00 A.M. He is asleep, and still unknown to the American public; a recent newspaper caption has identified him as “D. D. Ersenbeing.”
MacArthur reaches one end of the balcony, wheels, and steps out briskly in the opposite direction.
Below him, in the spacious, palm-lined hotel lobby, newspapermen have finished polling one another on the chances of peace; all but one are convinced that hostilities are very close. In the bar Sid Huff, having just finished a round of golf, is in good spirits. He has three torpedo boats afloat and two almost ready for christening; presently John “Buck” Bulkeley will join him and they will discuss combining PT forces. In the nearby hotel pavilion Terso’s popular band is tuning up. The hotel ballroom is preparing to receive the Twenty-seventh Bombardment Group, twelve hundred airmen, who are throwing a party for Brereton. The committee of officers making the arrangements has promised “the best entertainment this side of Minsky’s,” and among those in the audience will be the crews of the seventeen B-17s still at Clark Field. Twice they have been ordered to Mindanao, where they would be out of the range of enemy aircraft, but they have stalled and temporized with this evening’s festivities in mind. The guest of honor will be leaving early—he is scheduled to fly to Java in the morning—but the rest of the fliers, including the Flying Fortress crews, won’t start breaking up until 2:00 A.M. Manila time. That will be 8:00 A.M., December 7, in Hawaii.103
At the far end of the balcony the General finishes another leg in his endless journey. He turns and steps off again.
Some 4,887 miles to the east of him, north of the Phoenix Islands, eight U. S. ships packed with planes, tanks, and American infantrymen are plunging through heavy seas toward Manila, shepherded by the heavy cruiser Pensacola.
MacArthur halts, pivots.
Over thirteen hundred miles to the southwest of him, three large Japanese troop convoys carrying General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s Twenty-fifth Army are converging on Malaya.
The General is pacing.
Two hundred miles north of Pearl Harbor the carrier Kido Butai is racing at flank speed—twenty-four knots—toward its launching point. Japanese pilots wearing mawashi (loincloths) and lucky “thousand-stitch” bellybands are stirring on their bunks. Elsewhere Japanese forces are bearing down on Guam, Wake, and Hong Kong.
Still pacing.
On Formosa and in the Pescadores, the 43,110 men of General Homma’s Fourteenth Army are about to board eighty-five transports and sail for Luzon.
Pacing, pacing.
It is a hot, sultry gloaming in Manila. The purplish masses of Bataan and Corregidor are just visible in the fading light. There is a fluttering sound over the penthouse as servants lower and furl the two flags.
Pacing, pacing, pacing.
In the penthouse’s Gold Room Jean hears the clock chime at 5:30 P.M. The blue hour is over. With the dramatic swiftness of tropical twilights the sun plunges behind the mountains of Cavite, and as it leaves, darkness falls on city and bay like a shadow of primitive terror.104
FIVE
Retreat
1941-1942
In Manila the telephones started ringing a few minutes after 3:00 A.M., just as the last formations of Japanese planes were winging away from the ruins of the U.S. Asiatic fleet in Hawaii. The first American commander in the Philippines to learn of the disaster was Admiral Hart; Admiral Husband E. Kimmel in Honolulu radioed him the same message he was sending to Washington and to all warships at sea: AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR, THIS is NO DRILL. It was characteristic of relations between the services that Hart neglected to share this vital information with MacArthur or any other army officer.* A half hour later an enlisted army signalman, listening to a California radio station while on watch, heard the first wire-service flash. He rushed to the duty officer, who phoned Brigadier Spencer B. Akin, MacArthur’s Signal Corps chief. Akin went directly to No. 1 Calle Victoria, where Sutherland, Brigadier Richard J. Marshall, Sutherland’s deputy, and Colonel Hugh “Pat” Casey, chief of engineers, were sleeping on cots. “Pat, Pat—wake up,” Akin whispered to Casey. “The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor.” That brought all three of them to their feet. Akin told them what he knew, which was very little; Sutherland then phoned MacArthur’s penthouse.1
The General lifted the telephone on his night table. “Pearl Harbor!” he said in astonishment. “It should be our strongest point!” At 3:40 A.M., while he was hurriedly dressing, the bedside phone rang again. This time the call was from Washington. Brigadier Leonard T. Gerow, chief of the army’s War Plans Division, confirmed the news bulletin. MacArthur later said he received “the impression that the Japanese had suffered a setback at Pearl Harbor,” but the War Department’s record of the conversation shows that Gerow told the General that the aircraft and installations in Hawaii had suffered “considerable damage” and that he “wouldn’t be surprised if you get an attack there in the near future.” Perhaps the connection was bad, though it is likelier that the General, like millions of other Americans, was in shock. He asked Jean to bring him his Bible, read it for a while, and then set out for the House on the Wall, where the situation was chaotic.2
Hart was there, visibly distressed. So was Sayre, whose executive assistant, Claude Buss, had burst into his bedroom after a call from Sutherland. Brereton was on his way from Nielson Field to his Military Plaza headquarters in an ancient building at the corner of Victoria and Santa Lucia, a few well-worn-stone steps from MacArthur’s office. Awakened shortly before 4.00 A.M. by a Sutherland call, Brereton had alerted his fliers, many of whom had just returned from the party at the hotel. An hour after the Americans had begun assembling, Quezon, who was in Baguio, was awakened by his Manila secretary, Jorge B. Vargas. Told of the broadcasts, Quezon said, “Where did you get that nonsense?” Vargas told him both the Associated Press and the United Press were receiving details from Pearl Harbor. Quezon prepared to leave Baguio for Manila. Thus the principals were congregating for one of the strangest episodes in American military history: the destruction of MacArthur’s air force, on the ground, nine hours after word had reached him of the disaster in Hawaii.3
The key to the riddle is the General himself, and we shall never solve it, because, although those who were around him would recall afterward that he looked gray, ill, and exhausted, we know little about his actions and nothing of his thoughts that terrible morning. He was the commanding officer, and therefore he was answerable for what happened. Assigning responsibility does not clarify the events, however. He was a gifted leader, and his failure in this emergency is bewildering. His critics have cited the catastrophe as evidence that he was flawed. They are right; he was. But he was in excellent company. Napoleon lost at Waterloo because he was catatonic that morning. Douglas S. Freeman notes that Washington was “in a daze” at the Battle of Brandywine. During the crucial engagement at White Oak Swamp, Burke Davis writes, Stonewall Jackson “sat stolidly on his log, his cap far down on his nose, eyes shut. . . . The day was to be known as the low point in Jackson’s military career, though no one was to be able to present a thorough and authentic explanation of the general’s behavior during these hours.” Like Bonaparte and Washington, Old Jack was unable to issue orders or even to understand the reports brought to him. That, or something like it, seems to have happened to MacArthur on December 8, 1941. The puzzle may be explained by a bit of computer jargon: input overload. If too much data is fed into an electronic calculator, the machine stops functioning. The Hawaiian disaster and the need for momentous decisions in Manila may have been too much for MacArthur. Hart agonizing over his vessels, Brereton over the threat to his planes, and above all Quezon begging him to keep the Philippines neutral—these were but a few of the urgent demands being made upon him in the turmoil of those predawn hours. And Sutherland, who as chief
of staff should have been his strong right arm, was no help at all.4
Of all the officers who were milling around in the darkness, clamoring for swift action, the one who should have received the highest priority was Brereton. MacArthur’s strategy in the event of war called for destruction of the enemy’s invasion barges before they could reach Philippine beaches. At 5:00 A.M., with daybreak an hour away, Brereton mounted the stone steps of the House on the Wall and told Sutherland that he wanted to see MacArthur. The chief of staff said the General was too busy; he was conferring with Hart. Brereton said: “I am going to attack Formosa.” What followed is a matter of dispute. According to Sutherland, he replied: “All right. What are you going to attack? What’s up there?” In the chief of staff’s account, Brereton said he didn’t know, that he would send a reconnaissance mission to find out. Sutherland says he approved this in MacArthur’s name. Brereton’s version is very different. As he recalls it, he asked for permission to launch an immediate B-17 attack on the enemy troop transports thought to be in Takao Harbor. This strike, by the Flying Fortresses at Clark, would be followed by a second raid, using the Fortresses on Mindanao. Brereton remembers the chief of staff telling him that nothing could be done until MacArthur had given them a green light, the reason being that Washington had proscribed any “offensive action.”5
Walter D. Edmonds believes that the explanation for what later happened “lies in Brereton’s first conference with Sutherland, of which there are two fundamentally opposed accounts.” That is true if one accepts the premise that Brereton could approach MacArthur only through Sutherland. Four months later the General read in an Australian newspaper that his Philippine air chief had wanted to launch preemptive B-17 attacks against southern Formosa. This, he said, was the first he had heard of it; he hadn’t even seen Brereton that fateful December 8. But he should have insisted on seeing him, brushing aside Sutherland’s zeal to act as his surrogate when major decisions loomed. Moreover, the need for reconnaissance is inexcusable. Sutherland should never have had to ask, “What’s up there?” The enemy knew precisely where Philippine airstrips were. MacArthur later conceded that “the Japanese knew where to strike. . . . More than a year before their invasion, they had made extensive aerial surveys of Northern Luzon.” The Americans should have possessed equally reliable intelligence about nearby Japanese bases, and if MacArthur hadn’t vetoed Brereton’s earlier requests for photo missions they would have had it. “Chance,” said Louis Pasteur, “favors the prepared man.” It disfavors the unprepared, who in this instance were the defenders of the Philippines. Afterward Claire Chennault wrote of the Luzon debacle: “If I had been caught with my planes on the ground . . . I could never have looked my fellow officers squarely in the eye. ” Certainly the men in Manila, especially MacArthur, were culpable. But the guilt was not confined to them. It was Washington, after all, which had sent America’s strongest force of B-17s to islands lacking adequate fighter protection, radar, and antiaircraft batteries.6
At 5:30, when MacArthur was studying dismaying intelligence reports under his gooseneck desk lamp, a War Department radiogram arrived officially informing him that the United States and the Empire of Japan were at war. He was directed to execute Rainbow Five immediately. Yet he continued to hesitate. To Louis Morton he later insisted: “My orders were explicit not to initiate hostilities against the Japanese.” Unfortunately, no record exists of his telephone conversations with Quezon that morning. The president of the commonwealth may have influenced him, though neither of them ever acknowledged it. According to Eisenhower, Quezon told him in 1942 that “when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor MacArthur was convinced for some strange reason that the Philippines would remain neutral and would not be attacked by the Japanese. For that reason, MacArthur refused permission to General Brereton to bomb Japanese bases on Formosa immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor.” Publicly the Filipino leader supported the General from the outset. John Bulkeley, however, believes that Quezon “was not convinced that the Japanese were actually making war. He was the one who insisted on the three-mile limit until the Japs actually dropped their bombs. It was Quezon who put the clamp on things.”7
“All that Monday,” Sayre wrote, “we worked feverishly.” The fever was certainly there; how much was being accomplished is another question. When day broke at 6:12 A.M. the defenders of the Philippines were in disarray. U.S. warships swung at anchor; troops lacked instructions; the sod fields at Clark, where fliers were nursing hangovers, lacked a single antiaircraft shelter. Brereton had ordered his B-17s readied for action, but there wasn’t a single bomb in their bomb bays. In the first olive moments of dawn Manila learned that Malag, in Davao Gulf, was being hit by enemy aircraft. Still there was no response from the House on the Wall.8
Actually this raid was of little importance. It had probably been launched by carriers, because Formosa, five hundred miles to the north, was fogged in. This was a time of great anxiety among the Japanese pilots. By now, they knew, the Americans on Luzon would have been alerted by Hawaii. The fog was destroying their last chance to take the defenders of the Philippines by surprise; U.S. bombers could now sink their troopships. After the war the senior Nipponese staff officer on Formosa told the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey: “We were very worried because we were sure after learning of Pearl Harbor you would disperse your planes or make an attack on our base at Formosa. We put on our gas masks and prepared for an attack by American aircraft.”9
At 7:15 Brereton again entered Sutherland’s office and was again told to return to his office and await orders. This rebuff was followed by two significant events: Hap Arnold phoned Brereton from Washington, ordering him to avoid a repetition of Pearl Harbor by dispersing his planes, and Iba’s radar screen showed unidentified aircraft headed for Manila and Clark Field. Thirty-six P-40s scrambled to intercept the enemy planes, and Brereton ordered sixteen of Clark’s seventeen Flying Fortresses—one had generator trouble—to take off and cruise aimlessly over Mount Arayat, out of harm’s way. Then a second radiogram arrived from Gerow at the War Department, asking MacArthur whether there were any “indications of an attack.” The General replied that “in the last half hour our radio detector service picked up planes about thirty miles off the coast,” that U.S. fighters would “meet them,” and that “our tails are up in the air.”10
The blips at Iba vanished. The Japanese naval fliers had veered off, and the American pilots, discovering that this had been a false alarm, lost their combat edge. Some of them even thought that Pearl Harbor had been a hoax intended to test their readiness. The P-40s came down, the B-17s stayed up. At 8:50 Sutherland contributed to the confusion by phoning Brereton that there would be no U.S. strikes against Formosa “for the present.” The air general called back ten minutes later, asking permission to arm his bomb bays. Sutherland later denied receiving this request, but a 9:00 A. M. entry in the airman’s log notes that “in response to query from General Brereton” he had received “a message from General Sutherland advising planes not authorized to carry bombs at this time. ”11
It was now six hours after Pearl Harbor. MacArthur’s luck was holding, though his inactivity was more and more baffling. At 9:25 Brereton learned that carrier-based Japanese planes had bombed Tarlac, Tuguegarao, and Camp John Hay in northern Luzon. Surely, he thought, the General now had his “overt act.” Phoning Sutherland, he pointed out: “If Clark Field is attacked, we won’t be able to operate on it.” It was, he said, absolutely essential that his pilots parry the coming blow. The chief of staff rejected this request, too. Then, at 10:10, Sutherland called back to approve a photo reconnaissance of Formosa. As hurried preparations for this were being made, Brereton says, he received a call from MacArthur himself, approving an attack on Japanese bases late in the afternoon, after the aerial photographs had been developed and evaluated. The General has denied that any such conversation ever took place. Sutherland said this twilight strike was Brereton’s own idea. Sorting out the truth is impossible now,
but considering the seniority and experience of these general officers, it all sounds incredibly vague, and suggests an almost criminal indifference toward the ominous clock. Not until 11:00 A.M., after another call from Sutherland, was Brereton able to tell his staff that “bombing missions” had definitely been authorized.12
Coded recall signals were radioed to the Fortresses over Mount Arayat, instructing them to land at Clark. After they had trickled in, three of them were equipped with cameras while hundred-pound and three-hundred-pound bombs were hoisted into the others. Now came the crisis. Up to this point Brereton had handled himself well. As noon approached, however, he stumbled badly. When Sutherland asked him for a progress report at 11:55, he replied that the air force would “send out a mission in the afternoon”—as though he had all the time in the world. Then he compounded his error by recalling all his P-40s for refueling. This left Clark Field without fighter cover when it most needed it. The only American plane overhead was the B-17 whose defective generator had been repaired. Its crew members were the safest airmen in the Philippines, for the fog over Formosa had lifted thirty minutes earlier. An awesome fleet of Japanese warplanes—108 new Mitsubishi bombers and 84 Zeros—was now roaring over Bashi Channel, which separates Formosa from the northernmost Philippine islands.13
American Caesar Page 27