American Caesar

by William Manchester

  Arthur’s stool; the table napkin which Osmeña kept to shine his shoes; the candle Dona Aurora burned in a primitive oratory in her lateral; even MacArthur with the automobile license plate bearing the four stars of his rank—everyone on the Rock cherished some tangible reminder that their world had once been, and one day would again be, sane. For Jean it was embroidery. In a cotton print dress and crocheted turban she sat hour after hour by a picnic table, under the speckled shade of a camouflage net outside Malinta’s entrance, making her fingers fly and listening, from what had become a habit, for the faint drone of approaching bombers. As the weeks passed and the number of stretchers carrying the wounded inside increased, both she and the large-eyed amah worried about the effect of so much gore on a little boy. When the two women saw a litter approaching, they tried to direct his attention elsewhere. They were not always successful, because on Corregidor very little could be kept secret long. In the tunnel it was, for example, impossible not to overhear the Japanese propaganda broadcasts in English, including the ones in which Tokyo Rose predicted that MacArthur would be publicly hanged in Tokyo’s Imperial Plaza. She went into great detail. And she pronounced Arthur’s father’s name correctly.63

  Corregidor brought out the attractive and the unattractive in the General. As usual, those closest to him saw only his inspiring side, but there are aspects of his behavior on the island which are embarrassing to his biographer. On the one hand we have his moving remarks at Quezon’s second inaugural. On the other hand we find him inveigling the sick old man into agreeing to rehire him as Philippine field marshal after the war, with the same pay and allowances. We know he cared deeply about the men on Bataan—in his memoirs he would say: “They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stank. And I loved them”—yet he ordered the food reserves of his starving infantry companies transferred to the Rock, where they were promptly consumed, and he allowed Sutherland to exclude Sam Howard’s 4th Marines from a general recommendation that the defenders receive presidential unit citations on the ground that “the marines had enough glory in World War I.” After Roosevelt radioed him on January 27, “Congratulations on the magnificent stand that you and your men are making. We are watching with pride and understanding, and are thinking of you on your birthday,”* MacArthur eloquently replied: “Today, January 30, your birth anniversary, smoke-begrimed men covered with the murk of battle rise from the foxholes of Bataan and the batteries of Corregidor, to pray reverently that God may bless immeasurably the President of the United States. “ At the same time, of the 142 communiques dispatched by the General during the first three months of the war, 109 mentioned only one soldier, Douglas MacArthur.64

  These messages were self-advertising, and hard-sell advertising at that. Americans at home, hungry for heroes, accepted them then at their face value, but in retrospect they sound stilted and turgid. They weren’t even accurate. They reported that Captain Colin P. Kelly’s Flying Fortress had sunk the battleship Haruna, which it hadn’t, and that “MacArthur’s army” was “greatly outnumbered,” which it wasn’t. They further announced that: “From various sources hitherto regarded as reliable General MacArthur has received persistent reports that Lieut. Gen. Masaharu Homma, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese forces in the Philippines, committed Hara-kiri. . . . The funeral rites of the late Japanese commander, the reports state, were held on Feb. 26 in Manila. . . . An interesting and ironic detail of the story is that the suicide and funeral rites occurred in the suite at the Manila hotel occupied by General MacArthur prior to the evacuation of Manila.” In fact, Homma survived the war and was tried on war-crimes charges afterward.65

  Arthur IV outside the Corregidor tunnel

  On one topic all observers agree: MacArthur’s personal bravery was extraordinary. When his son cried, “Air raid!” or antiaircraft gunners yelled, “Meatball!” or “Scrambled eggs!”—describing the Rising Sun on the wings of enemy aircraft—men racing for the shelter of the tunnel would encounter MacArthur coming out. Huff recalls: “Everybody on the staff tried to persuade the General to keep away from the entrance or at least to wear a helmet during raids. He paid no attention to us. We put up big telephone poles, strung with cables, along the approach to the tunnel to prevent suicide bombers from crashing the entrance, and we erected flash walls at an angle to prevent them from ‘skipping’ a bomb inside where it would set off our ammunition and blow up the whole place. MacArthur, however, kept right on walking outside to look—sometimes angrily and sometimes scornfully— at the enemy craft wheeling overhead.” Captain Godfrey R. Ames saw the General at a Topside battery “standing tall and never taking the field glasses from his eyes” as a formation of strafing Zeros came in low. Ames urged him to take cover. Ignoring him, the General calmly predicted that “the bombs will fall close.” Moments later they exploded less than a hundred yards away. Sayre remembers that he was “fearless of shellfire; he remained standing. Anyone who saw us must have had a good laugh—at the General standing erect while the High Commissioner lay prone in the dust. I have often wondered whether he was as amused as I. In any event, his expression never changed.” Quezon wrote: “Those of us who have seen him in the most anxious days, when Japanese bombs were shattering to pieces everything around him, have learned that this man’s courage was greater than his caution. He never sought shelter or covered his head with a helmet in the midst of the worst air raids. On the Rock of Corregidor, Douglas MacArthur was a rock of strength and a source of inspiration for all who fought by his side.” 66

  We see the General, at the start of a typical Corregidor day, rising before Jean awakens and dressing quietly. Though Adversario has shined his shoes and pressed his khaki uniform, his shaggy hair is badly in need of cutting, his face is rough from saltwater shaving, and he has lost so much weight that his suntans hang on him. Nevertheless the stars on his shirt glitter, and Carlos Romulo, peering out of a window next door, sees him circle the cottage several times with long, purposeful strides before swinging off jauntily, walnut cane in hand, for his office in the tunnel. There he breakfasts with Sutherland, confers with Quezon, and studies the night’s cables. Some of these are heartening: in London Winston Churchill has told the Commons that “I should like to express, in the name of the House, my admiration of the splendid courage and quality with which the small American army, under General MacArthur, has resisted brilliantly for so long, at desperate odds, the hordes of Japanese who have been hurled against it by superior air power and superior sea power.” Other cables are diverting; a Nipponese submarine has shelled Santa Barbara, and MacArthur says: “I think I’ll send a wire to the California commander and tell him if he can hold out for thirty more days I’ll be able to send him help.” After handing his daily, handwritten communique to Lieutenant Colonel LeGrande A. Diller, the General visits the cots of the wounded and returns to Lateral No. 3 to pace.67

  This is something of a feat, because there is very little room. Snarls of communications wire lie everywhere. A corporal is moving pins on a map. Telephones, bolted to the limestone walls, jangle constantly. There is just space, beneath the single naked light bulb overhead, for five steps. Shoulders braced, MacArthur moves back and forth, back and forth over the rough concrete, and a Filipino officer notes how his hands are “clasped behind him, his head bowed a little, his hawklike face cast in bitter lines.” Except during a bombardment, when he heads for the entrance, ignoring offers of a steel helmet, he will remain here until late evening. The high point of the day is usually San Francisco’s 6:00 P.M. shortwave news, heard here at 10:00 A.M. Philippine time. Lighting up a Lucky Strike or one of Quezon’s cigars, he listens with Sutherland to the daily shortwave summary of KGEI’s announcer, William Winter. Like the bombings and shellings outside Malinta, each day’s broadcast seems worse than the day before.68

  The gist of the news, quite simply, was that Douglas MacArthur and his ragged, famished garrison were caught in a gigantic trap—the largest trap in the history of warfare. The blitzkrieg, invented in Be
rlin, had been perfected in Tokyo. The world had never seen anything comparable to the concert of victorious Japanese offensives which followed that first bold strike at Pearl Harbor. It was totally unexpected; Allied commanders had speculated over whether the Nipponese would attack the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, or Hawaii. No one dreamed that they would lunge simultaneously toward all of them, and overwhelm all in twenty-one weeks, at negligible cost to themselves. London had assured Washington that Singapore—the “City of the Lion”—could hold out indefinitely. The Dutch were sure that the Malay Barrier, that chain of islands which runs from the Isthmus of Kra in southern Siam to Timor, north of Australia, was impenetrable. The Australians and New Zealanders, confident that their homelands were safe, had sent virtually all their own troops to fight Rommel in the western desert.69

  Then the rising sun appeared and blinded everyone. Yamashitas crack troops came down the Malay Peninsula so swiftly that wild rumors credited them with swinging from tree to tree, like apes. (Actually they were riding bicycles.) When ninety thousand Allied troops surrendered at Singapore—which the Nipponese promptly rechristened “Shonan,” or “Bright South”—Fleet Street at first suspected that it was a hoax. In The Hinge of Fate Churchill compares the city’s loss to the fall of France; it was, he writes, “the worst disaster and largest capitulation of British history.” Less than two weeks later, seventy-four Japanese warships wiped out a combined American-British-Dutch-Australian fleet in the seven-hour Battle of the Java Sea, the largest surface engagement since Jutland. The only gain for the Allies was a twenty-four-hour delay in the enemy’s timetable. U.S. eyes were riveted on the Philippines, but Java was more important to Hirohito’s warlords; it gave them all the oil, tin, and tungsten they needed, and it smashed the strongest link in the Malay Barrier.70

  Like a metastasizing cancer, the Japanese conquests spread and spread. The Allies could hardly grasp the staggering fact that an Asian nation surpassed them on every level. Nipponese strategy was superior, their tactics were more skillful, their navy and air force larger and more efficient, their infantry better trained and more experienced. In amphibious operations, as Gavin M. Long has pointed out, “their landings of whole armies on surf beaches were of a magnitude only dreamt of in the West.” By the spring of 1942 they had conquered, among other strongholds, Siam, Burma, Sumatra, Borneo, the Celebes, Timor, the Bismarcks, the Gilberts, Wake, Guam, and most of the Solomons. Half of New Guinea was gone, and the other half was apparently going. In a daring daylight raid, eighty-one carrier-borne Japanese bombers leveled the key Australian port of Darwin. The invasion of Australia now seemed inevitable. The capture of Java had left it virtually defenseless. One by one, its lines of transportation and communication with the rest of the world were being broken. In Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and New Zealand, terrifying posters showed a snarling, bestial Japanese soldier hurtling across the sea, the rising sun at his back and, in one hand, a map of Australia. Across the poster was written: “The word now is MUST.”71

  With German columns approaching Suez and Stalingrad, the Axis powers appeared to have the war all but won. If the forces facing Hitler in Egypt and on the Volga looked weak, those barring Tojo’s path were almost nonexistent. Strategists in Washington and London estimated that at least ten years would be required to reconquer the Pacific. The Japanese empire now stretched five thousand miles in every direction, from Wake Island in the east to the gates of India in the west; from the frigid Kuril Islands, off the coast of Siberia, in the north, to the tropical Coral Sea in the south. Hirohito reigned over almost a seventh of the globe, an area three times as large as the United States and Europe combined, and the fact that much of it was water merely meant that it would be harder to retake. The closest forces friendly to MacArthur lay a thousand miles to the northwest. They were Chiang Kai-shek’s troops, who were precariously supplied via the Burma Road, which, when cut in April at Lashio, its southern terminus, would leave them dependent upon the even more fragile trans-Himalayan airlift—“the Hump.”72

  On February 8 the deadline Tokyo had given Homma for the conquest of the Philippines passed, and he asked for more troops. MacArthur’s Americans and Filipinos were still holding on. His was the only flicker of organized resistance behind Japanese lines. Clare Boothe Luce believes that the General’s “defense of the Philippines was his finest hour. “ George Kenney observes: “When it came to fighting . . . MacArthur’s defense . . . was the one creditable episode of the whole five first months of the war in the Pacific. The battle of Luzon stands out like a beacon of hope in comparison with the incredible debacle at Singapore, the easy fall of the Dutch East Indies, and the confusion in Washington. No wonder MacArthur proudly named his airplane Bataan.” 73

  He named his plane for it, and to the end of his life he could never speak of it without choking up, yet the singular fact remains that during his seventy-seven days on Corregidor he visited the peninsula just once. Pat Casey sent him word that there was a need for his presence on Bataan “to stimulate sagging morale,” and at 6:45 A.M. on January 10, 1942, the General, Sutherland, Huff, and an antiaircraft officer crossed to Mariveles in one of Bulkeley’s PT boats. A dusty Ford sedan took them on a tour of foxholes and field hospitals. Buoyant and genial, MacArthur assured everyone that “help is definitely on the way. We must hold out until it comes.” One young captain inquired about his savings account in Manila’s Philippine Trust Company, and MacArthur replied that he would be seeing both the bank and his money soon. He asked Wainwright about his artillery and was told that two 155-millimeter fieldpieces were nearby, awaiting inspection. The General said jovially, “Jonathan, I don’t want to see them. I want to hear them!” Back on Corregidor he told Quezon that there was “no reason for immediate worry,” that morale was actually “high,” and that he was confident he could keep Homma at bay “for several months without outside help.”74

  Bataan was only three miles away—five minutes in a torpedo boat—yet he didn’t repeat his visit. Naturally there was speculation there about the reason why, and it is still puzzling. Captain Ind heard rumors among frontline defenders on the peninsula that MacArthur was “really sick with a heart condition.” He wasn’t. He was healthier than they were. Quezon, stoutly supporting his compadre after his own escape from the Philippines, said he had urged the General not to go to Bataan again: “With great diffidence and as much diplomacy as I was capable of, I voiced the general feeling among Americans and Filipinos on Corregidor that General MacArthur should not take chances and risk his life, for if he were lost the consequences to the morale of the fighting men would be incalculable.” But MacArthur was always taking needless risks; he was taking them every day on the Rock. To be sure, he had to command from the tunnel because only there could he keep in touch with Washington and the garrisons elsewhere in the archipelago, and the terrain and fluid battle positions in Bataan’s pathless jungle made on-the-spot generalship impossible. Yet MacArthur, with his World War I experiences in France, should have been the first to realize that men on the line need to see their commander from time to time, if only to be reminded that they are not forgotten.75

  The likeliest explanation is that, having promised them reinforcements and discovering that there would be none, he could not bear to face them again. At all events, he paid a terrible price for his absence. It was summed up in the unjust epithet—coined on the peninsula during their desperate battle and repeated again and again by the troops who followed them to the Pacific—of “Dugout Doug.” He never acknowledged having heard it, but after the war, in a conversation about undeserved rumors that hurt generals, he told Major Faubion Bowers in Tokyo, “Once they start talking, everybody believes them, and you’ve got to change your tack. Take that story in the Philippines . . .” Bowers asked, “Which one?” MacArthur said, “You know the one,” and the major later wrote, “He wouldn’t repeat the phrase ‘Dugout Doug,’ and it was only later in context that I remembered it.”76

  I
f scapegoating tempered their bitterness, they were entitled to it. With the possible exception of Stalingrad, no battle that year was fought under worse conditions. At least the weapons at Stalingrad worked. On Bataan four out of every five hand grenades failed to explode. Of seventeen Stokes mortar shells fired by one platoon of MacArthur’s men, only four burst. Enemy soldiers, to show their contempt, left a captured mortar in no-man’s-land and decorated it with blossoms. In some respects the terrain was more forbidding than the Japanese. Bataan, shaped like a miniature Florida, with the southern end pointing toward Corregidor, is twenty-five miles long and twenty miles wide at the neck—roughly the size of greater Los Angeles. Along its spine extinct jungle-clad volcanoes rise to nearly five thousand feet. There are just two roads, one cobblestoned and the other dirt. Rivers are treacherous. Cliffs are unscalable. Between huge mahogany trees, ipils, eucalyptus trees, and tortured banyans, almost impenetrable screens are formed by tropical vines, creepers, and bamboo. Beneath these lie sharp coral out-croppings, fibrous undergrowth, and alang-alang grass inhabited by serpents, including pythons. In the early months of the year rain pours down almost steadily. Lacking mosquito nets or shelter halves, the troops suffered from malaria, dengue fever, beriberi, hookworm, and pellagra. The water was contaminated. Men ate roots, leaves, papaya, breadfruit, monkey meat, wild chickens, and wild pigs. Always slender, the Filipino troops, wearing helmets fashioned from coconuts, grew gaunter and gaunter. At night the Japanese murdered sleep with firecrackers, shellfire, and obscene taunts shouted through megaphones.77