American Caesar

by William Manchester

  One Mindanao inhabitant who had heard nothing about the famous visitor was Father Edward Haggerty, rector of a small Cagayan college. The priest had come to the clubhouse to discuss the evacuation of American civilians with Sharp. The brigadier, he saw, was tense, preoccupied, and anxious to get rid of him. He also noticed that there were many high-ranking officers in the reception room. Intent on his mission, he drew no conclusions from this until an air-raid siren shrieked and a general wearing four stars emerged from an adjacent bedroom to inquire about the alert. He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot, and his suntans were threadbare and wrinkled, yet the startled priest’s first impression was of how handsome he was. Seeing the visitor, the General crossed the wide room and, without waiting for an introduction, shook his hand. By now the cleric had recognized MacArthur, and he expressed his admiration for the stubborn resistance on Bataan. Stepping away for a moment, the General beckoned Jean, Arthur, and Ah Cheu from the next room and led them to a trench which had been dug outside the clubhouse. Reappearing, he asked, “Would you like to go to a shelter, Father? There are only two planes. I never bother about so few.” The priest replied, “No, your calmness makes me brave.” Taking a chair and then striding about, MacArthur talked compulsively about the command he had left: “Bataan cannot be taken if the food holds out. . . . The men of Bataan are splendid. . . . They have proven their valor far beyond my expectations—beyond the expectation of friends and, especially, of the enemy . . . . I have been ordered by President Roosevelt to Australia to begin the offensive . . . . If the Jap does not take Mindanao by Easter, all he will receive is bullets.” In five minutes the all clear sounded and he left to check his family. He had said nothing to Father Haggerty about keeping all this to himself. Sharp, more discreet, whispered at the door, “Padre, I think you’ve scooped a few of us. Please consider everything secret—even his presence here.”141

  The fear that the airlift to Darwin might have come and gone proved groundless. Indeed, the General’s party was to remain in Cagayan for four perilous days, spending “a good deal of the time,” one of them recalls, “dodging Japanese planes during the daylight hours.” Their commander took advantage of the pause to send Quezon a long letter. The Philippine president was roaming the archipelago’s central islands, moving every two days to keep a jump ahead of the Japanese, but the General had a Filipino aide, Andres Soriano, who knew how to find him. MacArthur wrote his compadre that

  an entirely new situation has developed. The United States is moving its forces into the southern Pacific area in which is destined to be a great offensive against Japan. The troops are being concentrated in Australia which will be used as a base for the offensive drive to the Philippines. President Roosevelt has designated me to command this offensive and has directed me to proceed to Australia for that purpose. He believes this is the best way to insure the success of the movement. I was naturally loath to leave Corregidor but the Washington authorities insisted, implying that if I did not personally assume command the effort could not be made. As a matter of fact, I had no choice in the matter, being peremptorily ordered by President Roosevelt himself. I understand the forces are rapidly being accumulated and hope that the drive can be undertaken before the Bataan-Corregidor situation reaches a climax.142

  His premise, of course, was false. The journey back to Manila would be far longer and much harder than he then dreamed. The extent to which he misread the War Department’s mood, and the degree to which Washington had encouraged his hopes, are now no longer relevant. What this letter does establish is that MacArthur believed every word of it. Making false promises to the doomed garrison he had left behind was one thing; making them to Quezon was another. The Philippine leader was on his way to freedom, where he could and would tell his story to the American people. The General not only wanted him to go; at the end of this message he urged Quezon to follow his own escape route aboard a B-17 from Del Monte: “The trip would take only nine hours and be done at night, and it does not represent a serious hazard. You could do it with no jeopardy whatsoever to your health. Flying at night would be at no higher altitude than eight or nine thousand feet, and the flight surgeons assure me that you would have no physical difficulty.”

  Eventually Quezon would follow his advice, and the two men would be reunited in Australia. Meanwhile many members of MacArthur’s party were exasperated by the delay on Mindanao. Officers in Melbourne, it seemed, were squabbling about their travel arrangements. The men at Del Monte blamed Brett with the instinctive resentment of men in action for rear-echelon soldiers in comfortable billets. Their indignation was unfounded. Brett was doing his best. Lacking Flying Fortresses of his own, he had asked the navy’s Vice Admiral Herbert F. Leary to lend him four of them. The admiral, who had just learned that Java’s twenty thousand Dutch troops had surrendered, removing the last natural obstacle to an enemy invasion of Australia, told him, “I’d like to help you, Brett, but it’s quite impossible. We need those planes here and can’t spare them for a ferry job, no matter how important it is.” The best Brett could do was to send one of his old B-17s. Ground crews lugged away the movable trees which camouflaged Del Monte’s crude airstrip, and the Fortress coughed and wheezed down in a wobbly landing. The General took one look at it and lost his temper. Under no circumstances, he said cuttingly, would he board, or allow anyone with him to board, so “dangerously decrepit’ an aircraft. The poor pilot lurched away in an even wobblier takeoff, and MacArthur radioed blistering messages to Brett and George Marshall: “To attempt such a desperate and important trip with inadequate equipment would amount to consigning the whole party to death and I could not undertake such a responsibility.” He demanded “the three best planes in the United States or Hawaii,” crewed by “completely adequate, experienced” airmen. Brett reapproached Leary, expecting another refusal, but the cable to Washington had worked—the admiral agreed to provide him with three new B-17s—though Stimson complained to Roosevelt about the General’s “rather imperative command.”143

  In early 1942 even the best U.S. aircraft were unreliable. One of the three Fortresses which took off for Cagayan had to turn back over the Australian desert with engine trouble, and the two which made it came in unsteadily shortly before midnight Monday. The runway was illumined by just two flares, one at either end, as the bombers touched down after a seven-hour flight. The lead pilot, Lieutenant Frank P. Bostrom, drank eight cups of black coffee to fortify himself for the return trip while mechanics repaired his defective supercharger. Bostrom told MacArthur that although the two planes would be overloaded, they could carry everyone in the party if they all abandoned their luggage. Jean boarded carrying only a lavendar silk scarf and the coat with the fur collar. Huff brought the mattress, which he had carried off PT-41, for Arthur. Later a wild story circulated the Pacific about how the General had left Corregidor with a mattress stuffed with money. In fact, the tick contained only feathers, and at the end of the trip the General gave it to Bostrom.144

  Arthur and Ah Cheu stretched out on it under the waist gunner’s position as the bombers taxied out to Del Monte’s airstrip, lit by the two guttering flambeaux. Jean lay beside them on the cold metal, her head pillowed on her bunched-up coat. The General sat in the radio operator’s seat, and the rest of them were crammed into what space was left. Sutherland and another officer were wedged against each other over the bomb bay. In the nose of the aircraft, Huff sat in the bombardier’s seat; Dick Marshall sprawled in the aisle alongside him. Bostrom was pouring on the oil, using every trick he knew, including body English, to become airborne before they reached the far torch. One engine was spluttering and missing badly. In such crises men often think in cliches. Admiral Rockwell, in the follow-up plane, thought that the passengers in both bombers were packed in “like sardines in a can.” Huff had remarked that the heavy waves had tossed PT-41 around “like a cork,” and now he yelled at Marshall: “At this moment our lives are worth something less than a nickel.” Then the faltering engine caugh
t and they roared up for the five-hour flight—roughly the distance from Boston to New Orleans. Moments later they were followed by the second Fortress.145

  Neither MacArthur’s son nor the amah had ever been on a plane before, and both were excited. They found it wasn’t much different from PT-41. Violent turbulence over the Celebes Sea made them airsick, and when they soared over land the pilot repeatedly had to take sharp evasive action. Below them lay strongholds of Japan’s new empire—the conquered Indies, Timor, and northern New Guinea—where every sign pointed to an imminent enemy thrust against Australia. Already Zeros were based at captured airdromes, and Japanese coast watchers were scanning the tropical skies for Allied aircraft. At sunrise Japanese fighters rose to search for the B-17s; but somehow the twisting, diving American fliers eluded them. The worst of it came at the end. Bostrom picked up a radio warning: they couldn’t land at Darwin because an enemy raid was in progress. Instead they were diverted to an emergency strip, Batchelor Field, fifty miles away. As they deplaned there at 9:00 A.M., most of them were barely able to stand. Only the General seemed exhilarated. “It was close, “ he said to Sutherland, “but that’s the way it is in war. You win or lose, live or die—and the difference is just an eyelash.” Spotting an American officer, he called him over and asked about the buildup to reconquer the Philippines. The officer seemed bewildered. He said, “So far as I know, sir, there are very few troops here.” MacArthur looked startled; then he turned to Sutherland and said, “Surely he is wrong.”146

  As they breakfasted in a little shack on canned peaches and baked beans, Jean said vehemently to Huff, “Never, never again will anybody get me into an airplane! Not for any reason! Sid, please find some way that we can get to Melbourne without getting off the ground.” Brett had borrowed two DC-3s from a commercial airline and sent them north from Melbourne to fly the party down over the hot, sandy interior of the Australian bush, but MacArthur, responding to his wife’s pleas, said he didn’t even want to see the planes. He had resolved to proceed by automobile. Brigadier Ralph Royce, who had met him in Brett’s behalf, thought this was a bad idea. An argument developed. Word of it was passed among the others until it reached Major Charles H. Morhouse, who had accompanied the group from Corregidor as medical officer. Morhouse went straight to the base commander’s office, where he found the General, surrounded by anxious officers, wrathfully striding about in his underwear. “What’s the matter?” the doctor asked. “They’re just too damned lazy to do what I want,” MacArthur raged. He said he wanted a motorcade to the nearest train station, in Alice Springs, the northern terminus of the Central Australian Railway. He knew that Alice Springs was a thousand miles away—roughly the distance from Boston to Chicago—but, he said, “Mrs. MacArthur is tired of flying.” The physician said bluntly that both the General and his wife were wrong. Their son had been ill since leaving the Rock; Morhouse was now feeding him intravenously. He said he could not “guarantee little Arthur would make so long a drive over the desert without shelter and food.” The General stopped pacing. He asked, “Doc, do you mean that?” “Every word,” the doctor replied, and the General ordered embarkation on the DC-3S.147

  As they moved toward the runway, Jean’s face grim, Sutherland drew Huff aside. Mitsubishis were on their way here from Darwin, he said in a low voice; he wanted the women and the child aboard at once. Without disclosing this, Huff briskly led them up the ramp. As the door closed, Major Richard H. Carmichael, in the cockpit, heard the first scream of the air-raid sirens. He shoved the throttle in and released the brakes, throwing his passengers off their feet. The General roared, “Sid, get that pilot’s name!” Once they were up, Huff explained the reason for urgency, and MacArthur, mollified, nodded silently. Later, looking down at the bleak landscape, he put an arm around Morhouse’s shoulder and said, “We wouldn’t have made it. Thank you.”148

  Meanwhile Brett, on instructions from George Marshall, had phoned Prime Minister Curtin that Saint Patrick’s Day, formally telling him: “The President of the United States has directed that I present his compliments to you and inform you that General Douglas MacArthur, United States Army, has today arrived in Australia from the Philippine Islands.” Roosevelt, he continued, “suggests that it would be highly acceptable to him and pleasing to the American people for the Australian Government to nominate General MacArthur as the Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific.” He expressed the President’s “regrets that he has been unable to inform you of General MacArthur’s pending arrival, but feels certain that you will appreciate that his safety during the voyage from the Philippine Islands required the highest order of secrecy.” Exactly where, Curtin asked, was MacArthur now? Brett didn’t know then. He first learned of MacArthur’s precise whereabouts when Carmichael broke radio silence to report that they had landed at Alice Springs. And there, he said, MacArthur and his family intended to stay until surface transportation became available. The fact that there was only one passenger train a week—and that this week’s had left the day before—did not diminish the General’s determination. “Anything wrong with the DC-3S?” Brett asked. The pilot replied, “Not a thing. They’re perfect. He’s just sick and tired of airplanes, I guess.” Brett sighed and said he would make arrangements for a special train. An elated aide conveyed this news to MacArthur. The General looked surprised. He said: “Of course.”149

  As its own inhabitants put it, Alice Springs lay in the “dead heart of Australia, back of beyond.” Douglas MacArthur’s father would have recognized it, and Wyatt Earp would have felt at home there. Except for an open-air motion-picture theater, the town was straight out of the American frontier of the 1880s. There were two dusty streets lined with primitive boardwalks, ramshackle wooden storefronts, a saloon, and a rickety old hotel. There were also hordes of blackflies. The town was sweltering in the heat of the late Australian summer, and the insects, one officer recalls, “were crazy for water, including the perspiration that popped out on your face. . . . From the moment we got off the plane, they swarmed around us by the hundreds. If you weren’t careful they would crawl right into your nose or mouth. The sweat soaked through the backs of our shirts in a few minutes, and the flies, seeking moisture, would collect there in droves, covering a man’s back like a blanket.”

  At the hotel an aide said, “General, there’s a movie in town. Do you want to go tonight?” MacArthur replied, “I believe I will. I haven’t seen a movie since we left Manila.” It was a double feature, but the first film, a Western, was “unbelievably bad,” the aide recalls, “and when it ended, the General, followed by the rest of us, left and went back to the hotel.” There the party slept on cots erected wherever there was space for them, including the verandas. In the morning Hurley flew in. Every generation of Americans had its hero, he told the General, citing Dewey, Pershing, and Lindbergh, and at home, he said, this generation was taking MacArthur to its heart. He assumed that the MacArthur’ would fly back with him, but Jean shook her head vehemently. She said, “No thank you. We’re going by train.” Most of the staff accompanied Hurley on his flight back to Melbourne while the rest of the party walked to the depot after lunch. The special train, like Alice Springs, resembled a relic from the past, with its cowcatcher almost as large as the tiny locomotive, a picturesque funnel smokestack, two wooden third-class coaches, and a squat red caboose. MacArthur noted that the single track was three foot, narrow gauge. The tracks in most of Australia, he had been told, were five foot, standard gauge. Since supplies for a northward offensive would have to move on up this slender artery, he realized, the difference in widths meant a logistical nightmare. Peering inside the first coach, he saw two hard wooden seats running lengthwise; they would have to ride facing one another. The second car, the diner, had a long wooden table, washtubs filled with ice, and an Australian army stove. Two Australian sergeants were aboard to serve meals; an army nurse would help with housekeeping chores. To reach the diner—or the sleeping car, which would be added at the next
station—passengers would have to wait until the engineer stopped the locomotive, get off, and walk back. On this ancient conveyance they would have to ride 1,028 miles to Adelaide. MacArthur looked longingly at the sky. Jean swiftly directed his attention elsewhere.150

  Accompanied by Sutherland, Huff, Morhouse, the amah, and several thousand blackflies, the little family chugged away from Alice Springs on what would be a seventy-hour train journey. Once they were under way, the General began to relax. In the day coach he began to talk about the troops awaiting him, and the drive which would take them back to Manila, but after a few minutes he began to nod. Sliding down a little on the bench, he dropped asleep with his head on his wife’s shoulder. She signaled Huff to get a pillow and said softly, “I knew this train trip would be best. This is the first time he’s really slept since Pearl Harbor.” Despite the bugs, he slumbered for four hours. When he awoke, it was time for supper. In the diner, Jean popped a morsel of food in her mouth. A fly buzzed in with it. She clapped a hand over her mouth and looked across the table at him in dismay. The General grinned. “It’s all right, Jeannie,” he said. “Just swallow it. A fly won’t kill you.” That evening the nurse, Jean, and Ah Cheu made up bunks in the sleeper, and all that night, as the little train clickety-clacked across the white desert, the General snored deeply, regaining strength.151