American Caesar

by William Manchester

  His most important farewell was to Wainwright. Sutherland had summoned the leathery old cavalryman from Bataan. In the tunnel the chief of staff told him that during MacArthur’s absence he would command all troops on Luzon and that “if it’s agreeable to you, Jones will get another star and take over I Corps.” Then they walked to the gray cottage, where the General awaited them, wearing a khaki bush jacket, now shabby, which the Chinese tailor had made for him during their first days on the island. Wainwright, always rawboned, had been almost reduced to a skeleton by the three-eighths rations. He stood mutely, his eyes full, as MacArthur, trying to be cheerful, presented him with a box of Quezon’s cigars and two jars of shaving cream. Then they sat in facing lounge chairs on the porch. The General said, “Jonathan, I want you to understand my position very plainly. I’m leaving for Australia pursuant to repeated orders of the President. Things have reached such a point that I must comply with these orders or get out of the Army. I want you to make it known throughout all elements of your command that I’m leaving over my repeated protests. ”125

  Wainwright replied that of course he would. MacArthur said, “If I get through to Australia you know I’ll come back as soon as I can with as much as I can. In the meantime you’ve got to hold.” Wainwright said that holding Bataan was “our aim in life.” Then he said, “You’ll get through. ” The General snapped, “—and back.” Standing and shaking hands he said, “Good-bye, Jonathan. When I get back, if you’re still on Bataan, I’ll make you a lieutenant general.” Wainwright said, “I’ll be on Bataan if I’m alive.” He tactfully ignored the promise of a promotion, though it is a key to another tragic misunderstanding. MacArthur hadn’t told George Marshall, but he planned to coordinate the defense of the Philippines from Australia. Under that command structure, a capitulation on Bataan would permit troops on the other islands in the archipelago to fight on. Marshall, however, had decided to give Wainwright a third star and command of all Philippine forces. That meant that Wainwright had the power to surrender all fighting men in the islands and that the Japanese, aware of it, could threaten to execute everyone on Bataan and Corregidor unless he exercised it—which is exactly what happened.126

  Bulkeley had warned the General that he could provide no food, so Jean and Huff had quietly gathered what they could, mostly tinned salmon and canned orangeade, and packed the results into four duffel bags, one for each boat. Bulkeley had also said he would have to limit each passenger to one suitcase weighing not more than thirty-five pounds. He carried the MacArthurs’ luggage aboard PT-41 himself. Ah Cheu’s belongings were folded in a handkerchief. Jean’s were packed in her valise. She was taking one dress, her coat, a pantsuit, and the pantsuit, in Bulkeley’s later words, would be “beyond repair by the time the trip was over.” Arthur was wearing a blue zipper jacket, khaki trousers, and his prized overseas cap. He was holding his stuffed Old Friend and the six-inch-long toy motorcycle; his tricycle had to be left behind. His father, as so often on important occasions in his life, was out of uniform. He was wearing civilian socks with loud checks and brown civilian shoes—wing tips with decorative little holes in them—and he carried not an ounce of baggage, not even a razor; he planned to borrow Bulkeley’s.127

  Evening was approaching on Corregidor when PT-41 crept up and idled by the shore as quietly as its three-shaft, 4,050-horsepower Packard motors would permit. The island rises steeply from the water’s edge at this point. High above, on Topside, the great American guns leered across Manila Bay at the Japanese. Below, where Bulkeley waited, the scene was one of almost total devastation. The bomb-ravaged South Dock had long since been abandoned. The vivid green foliage had vanished. Virtually every building, shed, and tree had been blasted and burned. Enormous crevasses had been torn in the earth, and the great fires had left black streaks on the twisted rocks. Huff helped Jean and Ah Cheu aboard, stumbling a little on the charred timbers. Arthur, clutching Old Friend, hopped on. The light was fading fast. There was no moon. The waves were ominously high. Huff felt that “the fate of Bataan was sealed, but we had little confidence that anything better awaited us at sea.”128

  The General, exercising a commander’s right to board last, stood for a long moment on the devastated pier, facing the Rock. In his worn khaki he looked spindly and forlorn. His face was dead white, and there was a twitch, a kind of tic, at the corner of his mouth. He raised his gold-braided cap. Overhead the U.S. artillery—commanded by Paul Bunker, who had been an Army all-American halfback when MacArthur managed the West Point team—opened diversionary fire. The muzzles flashed red, deep rumbling followed, and the air was filled with the haze and stench of gunpowder. The General replaced his cap and stepped on the 41’s deck. He said, “You may cast off, Buck, when you are ready.” Bulkeley glided off toward the bay’s turning buoy. At 8:00 P.M. exactly they joined the other three PTs, which had picked up their passengers at obscure inlets elsewhere on the island and on Bataan. The helmsmen were nervous. A last-minute air reconnaissance by the P-40s had sighted a Japanese destroyer and a Japanese cruiser racing toward these waters. Led by a navy minelayer, and with Bulkeley setting the pace in front, the tiny convoy crept through the minefield in single file. Then, at 9:15 P.M., the four young skippers opened their throttles. Great waves rolled out on either side of each bow, and their wakes formed rooster tails of white froth. The black hulk of Corregidor receded. Assuming their diamond pattern, they headed into the deepening night.129

  World War II PT boats were low, squat, narrow, mahogany-hulled speedboats, seventy-seven feet long and twenty feet wide. Called “Green Dragons” by the Japanese, they usually attacked at night, armed with their four torpedo tubes and four .50-caliber machine guns, which were fired in pairs from each side. They were designed, in Bulkeley’s words, “to roar in, let fly a Sunday punch, and then get the hell out, zigging to dodge the shells.” According to Jane’s Fighting Ships, when in top condition their triple screws could hurtle them forward at a velocity of over forty-five knots (fifty-two miles per hour). But the engines were meant to be changed every few hundred hours. After three months of combat operations, without spare parts or adequate maintenance, Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three had already quadrupled the motors’ normal life span. Clogged with carbon and rust, they were now limited to twenty-three knots (twenty-six miles per hour). Enemy four-pipers, which could attain a flank speed of thirty-five knots (thirty-eight miles per hour), could easily overtake them. One daylight sighting by a Zero, Betty, or Zeke would mean the end of them; the aviator could alert Nipponese destroyers in the area, against which the PTs would be helpless; as Lieutenant (j.g.) John F. Kennedy would discover the year after MacArthur’s long dash to safety, they were as defenseless as cockleshells. The first time the General inspected one, Bulkeley told him it didn’t carry an ounce of armor. “What about those?” MacArthur asked, pointing at what looked like steel shields rising just under the noses of the guns. Bulkeley explained that they were merely three-eighths-inch plywood, useful only to keep spray out of the steersman’s eyes.130

  There was always a lot of spray, lashing the bluejackets’ faces like wet confetti. Pounding through swells, the Packards’ twelve thousand horses made the whole boat tremble. In rough water the convulsions were indescribable. Approaching top speed, the bows lifted clear of the water, and the planing hulls slammed against the whitecaps. It was “murderous,” one passenger remembers, “a combination of bucking bronco and wallowing tub.” The ocean was especially turbulent that Wednesday night. All afternoon the weather had been making up in Mindoro Strait. Squalls and a strong easterly wind, recalls Lieutenant R. G. Kelly, the skipper of PT-34, resulted in “big foaming waves fifteen or twenty feet high thundering over the cockpit, drenching everybody topside. Also, because of the speed, water, and wind, it got damned cold. Our binoculars were full of water and our eyes so continuously drenched with stinging salt that we couldn’t see, in addition to which it was pitch-black.” From time to time they had to veer sharply to avoid reefs or stop a
ltogether to dry off engine magnetos. The stops were the worst. With the motors shut off, they bobbed around violently and seemed certain to capsize at any moment.131

  MacArthur, his son, and Ah Cheu were in agony. Ironically it was Jean, about whom the General had been most concerned, who was the least distressed passenger on the 41 boat. Arthur and his nanny lay below on the two officers’ bunks, Arthur running a fever. On the floor beside them MacArthur sprawled on a mattress, his face waxen and his eyes dark-circled. He kept retching, though his stomach had been emptied in the first spasms of nausea. The anguish of his defeat, and the mortification at being sent away from his men, were now joined by unspeakable physical suffering. For a sixty-two-year-old man it could have been fatal. His limbs were so rigid that he was unable to move them. Jean, kneeling alongside, chafed his hands hour after hour. It was, the General later wrote, like “a trip in a concrete mixer.”132

  Anticipating a stormy passage, Bulkeley had expected to skirt the islands on his port bow, where the waters would be less choppy. The folly of this became clear when huge bonfires sprang up on the shores of Cabra and the Apo Islands—the time-honored signal that a nighttime escape through a blockade is being attempted. Obviously Japanese coast watchers had spotted them and were trying to alert Japanese sentries on the larger islands of Luzon and Mindoro. If the message was passed along, it would mean searching aircraft at dawn and, later in the day, gunboats. Ruefully Bulkeley turned westward until they were hull down over the horizon.133

  By 11:00 P.M., when they passed the dim outline of the Apos, the four naval officers were struggling to keep their formation. At 3:30 A.M. they failed. For over three hours Bulkeley tried to round up the other three. He couldn’t find them, gave up at daybreak Thursday, and headed for the nearest alternate hideout. They were all supposed to be anchored on a lee shore and camouflaged when dawn broke at 7:30 A.M. None of them made it. The first boat to approach the Cuyo Islands, Lieutenant (j.g.) V. S. Schumacher’s PT-32, was two hours behind schedule. At first light Schumacher believed he saw an enemy destroyer closing in on him. Jettisoning his deck-load of gasoline—essential if the 32 boat was to reach Mindanao—he tied his throttles down and picked up a few knots. The other ship continued to narrow the distance. Ordering general quarters, he swung around for a torpedo attack. At the last second, with the fish almost in the water, an army officer recognized Bulkeley’s PT-41, oddly magnified in the mist. The officer shouted: “Hold fire!” In Willoughby’s words, “It was close—a real ‘squeaker.’ ”134

  As they compared bruises in an inlet, they were, Huff thought, “a sorry-looking crew.” Obviously Schumacher’s 32 boat had to be abandoned. In addition to the loss of its gas drums, two engines were finished and the hull was leaking from loose struts. Later they learned that Ensign A. B. Akers’s PT-35 had broken down with fouled gasoline strainers; its passengers had to make their own way to Melbourne afterward. Kelly’s PT-34 slid into the inlet two hours after the 32 and the 41, gasping but intact. “I will never forget how you looked,” Kelly later told Bulkeley. “There was General MacArthur sitting on a wicker chair, soaking wet; beside him Mrs. MacArthur, also soaking wet, but smiling bravely; and then the Chinese amah holding little Arthur MacArthur, both soaking wet and very seasick. You could see [Arthur] was most unhappy but wouldn’t admit it, and his jaw was set—just the exact angle of his father’s.”135

  The cove’s beach was beautiful, and the boy wanted to play on it, but Bulkeley regretfully told him no one could go ashore; the peril was too great. Instead he introduced him to the 41’s cook’s monkey, “General Tojo,” and Arthur happily chased the pet into the galley. By then MacArthur was on his feet, pacing the little deck and pausing from time to time for a word with Bulkeley and Admiral Rockwell, one of Kelly’s passengers. The General faced a difficult decision. Under the original plan they would have anchored all day Thursday at Tagauayan and departed at 5:00 P.M. The Permit had been instructed to meet the party there, giving them the option of continuing underwater. MacArthur was tempted by this. Bulkeley had warned them that the rest of the journey might be even rougher than last night. But because they had become separated, Tagauayan was three sailing hours away. And the submarine, Rockwell pointed out, might never arrive. The admiral said, “We better get the hell out of here fast.” The General was weighing the advantages of such a daylight movement. On the one hand there was the very real danger of a surface encounter with a Japanese warship, in which the PTs, with their faulty engines, would be doomed. On the other hand, they might be spotted here by an enemy plane. Their schedule was another consideration. Brigadier William F. Sharp, the American commander on Mindanao, was expecting them to reach the port of Cagayan at sunrise tomorrow—Friday. If they were late, Brett’s Flying Fortresses might return to Australia without them. They might even be given up for lost. Bulkeley said he was willing to take a chance and leave now. That decided MacArthur. At 2:30 P.M. he said, “Well, let’s go.”136

  Dividing the 32 boat’s passengers and crew between them, the 34 and the 41 weighed anchor early that Thursday afternoon, Bulkeley’s boat in the rear this time, to give the MacArthur’ a smoother ride in the other PTs wake. A quarter-hour after their departure the 41’s port lookout called: “Sail-ho! Looks like an enemy cruiser!” The skipper grabbed his binoculars and there she was, the unmistakable many-storied superstructure and the pagodalike mast rising three points on the port bow. On their present course they would cross the Japanese warship’s bow. Bulkeley knew that class of cruiser could make thirty-five knots, and he was now moving at a little better than eighteen. He swiftly took evasive action. “I think it was the whitecaps that saved us,” he said. “The Japs didn’t notice our wake, even though we were foaming away at full throttle.” Later in the afternoon they narrowly escaped discovery by an enemy destroyer, and still later, after sundown, as they approached Negros Island, a battery of Japanese coastal artillery heard them. Luckily the spotters mistook the roaring engines for American warplanes, and as their spotlights fingered the sky, the two PTs lumbered by.137

  During these brushes with the foe the General, for once, was keeping his head down. He lay on the mattress in the 41 boat’s lower cockpit, deathly ill again, gritting his teeth as his wife again rubbed his hands. Whether he understood the meaning of the activity topside is unknown, but Jean, though she was vomiting herself, heard everything and, a crewman said, “she didn’t turn a hair.” After the excitement had died down and night had fallen, Huff, suddenly exhausted, managed to curl into the fetal position on the stairs above the cockpit and drift off into slumber. He was sleeping soundly when he heard a deep voice saying, “Sid? Sid?” It was the General, completely recovered and very alert. The aide sat up and said, “Yes, sir?” MacArthur said he couldn’t sleep and wanted to talk. “Yes, sir,” said his aide. “What about?” The General said, “Oh, anything. I just want to talk.” Huff later recalled: “That began a couple of the strangest hours of my life. Up on deck, Bulkeley was sending the torpedo boat along at a good clip in the darkness, the lookouts were alert for enemy craft, we were all soaked with salt spray . . . and the General was sitting on the mattress talking about what he had gone through in the last four years or so. “ MacArthur, here as always, had a highly selective memory. He remembered the strong points in his plans for Philippine defense and forgot his tragic decision to fight on the beaches; remembered the parsimony of Quezon’s military budgets and forgot the negligence at Clark and Iba fields; remembered his differences with Washington and omitted his failure to store adequate rice on Bataan. His voice was “slow and deliberate and barely distinguishable above the high wail of the engines,” Huff said. “I was soon wide awake, especially when his voice choked up as he expressed his chagrin at being ordered to leave Corregidor.” He told Huff that sooner or later, one way or another, he would recapture the Philippines. Huff realized that “he meant it, and he was already planning how he would do it.”138

  Sputtering eastward across the Mindanao Sea in the
early hours of Friday, they made a landfall near the Del Monte pineapple plantation at 6:30 A.M., and shortly afterward PT-34’s starboard lookout sighted the light on Cagayan Point. After thirty-five consecutive hours with the conn, having passed through 560 miles of Japanese waters, the exhausted Bulkeley was coming in precisely on time. At 7:00 A.M. Kelly peeled off to let the flagship, which had the channel charts, enter the port first. Ashore, Colonel William Morse, one of Brigadier Sharp’s officers, was waiting with a guard of American infantrymen. Glimpsing MacArthur standing on the prow, the colonel thought he resembled “Washington crossing the Delaware. “ Jean was just behind him; she had lost her handbag somewhere along the way and was carrying her lipstick, comb, and compact in a red bandanna “like a gypsy.” The General shook the salt water from his braided cap, flipped it back on at a jaunty angle, and helped her ashore. Turning back toward the boat, he said, “Bulkeley, I’m giving every officer and man here the Silver Star for gallantry. You’ve taken me out of the jaws of death, and I won’t forget it.” Then he concisely asked Morse where he could relieve himself.139

  Sharp commanded twenty-five thousand men on Mindanao.* Hurrying up to MacArthur, the brigadier saluted and reported that the clubhouse and guest lodges of the Del Monte plantation had been prepared for the General and his party. He had, he added, lined the five-mile road leading there with soldiers. That was unwise. Inevitably, the word that MacArthur was coming, which was supposed to have been undivulged, had spread to distant villages. No sooner had Bulkeley’s passengers reached the clubhouse and sat down to a breakfast of pineapples—their first fresh fruit since they had left Manila—than a Filipino woman appeared and asked to see Mrs. MacArthur. She had walked twenty-five miles for news of her son, who was fighting on Luzon. Neither Jean nor the others could provide any, and to the woman’s indignation, she was placed under temporary arrest. It was too late. Presently reports reached them that Japanese troops, having heard that the General was here, were pushing north from Davao to seize Del Monte airfield. Sharp doubled the guard. Everyone became jittery. That evening the peripatetic, ubiquitous Captain Ind, who had flown down while the torpedo boats were still at sea, went for a stroll and spied two shadows on a hillock above him. He aimed his weapon at the taller shadow and then realized it was MacArthur. Lowering the muzzle he cried, “I almost shot your ears off!” Jean, the shorter shadow, gasped. The General chuckled. He said, “Well, you’d better get up here and we’ll decide who’s going to escort whom back to the compound.”140