American Caesar

by William Manchester

  The locomotive was extraordinarily slow, the insects relentless, the heat oppressive. The stops at sidings, to let freight trains pass on the single track, seemed interminable. At one point the engineer, squinting ahead, passed back word that they were being flagged down by a gathering of sheep ranchers. MacArthur assumed that they were there to greet him, that his presence had been announced, and he instantly went into rehearsal, striking a pose and coming phrases. The ranchers knew he was on the train, but they weren’t there to see him. One of the ranch hands had a steel splinter in his eye, and they had heard that the General’s party included a doctor. Morhouse swiftly removed the sliver. MacArthur was visibly disappointed, but as they left the station and rumbled on, his spirits rose again.152

  They were about to be tested severely. On the afternoon of the third day Dick Marshall came aboard at the little town of Kooringa, eighty miles northeast of Adelaide. The deputy chief of staff’s face was long, his mouth set. He had just come from Melbourne, where he had discovered that the army that MacArthur thought awaited him did not exist. Counting Australians, there were fewer than thirty-two thousand Allied troops in the country, most of them noncombatants. MacArthur had left a larger army on Bataan. The Battle of the Java Sea had destroyed Leary’s navy. There were fewer than a hundred serviceable planes, including the obsolete Australian Gypsy Moths, with their fabric-covered wings and propellers which could only be started by spinning them by hand, and there were no tanks at all. Not only were these forces pitifully inadequate for MacArthur’s hope of swiftly reconquering the Philippines; there were grave doubts that Allied strength was sufficient to hold Australia. Certainly the Australians couldn’t. Except for a brigade of the 6th Division, all their troops were elsewhere. In Melbourne there was talk of withdrawing to the “Brisbane Line,” the settled southern and eastern coasts, and abandoning the northern ports to the Japanese. In a word, the situation was desperate, and it would continue to be so for some time. Supply lines to the rest of the Allied world were long. Furthermore, the commitment to defeat Germany first meant that the General could expect few convoys from the United States during the months ahead. “God have mercy on us,” MacArthur whispered. Turning away, he clenched his teeth until his jaw was white. His tic returned. “It was,” he later wrote, his “greatest shock and surprise of the whole war.”153

  At Adelaide he would leave the dinky train for a luxurious private car provided by Australia’s commissioner of railways. A crowd was waiting at the station, and this time it was for him; hour by hour news of his approach had been telegraphed ahead. At 4:15 P.M. three days earlier—7:15 A.M. in Australia—President Roosevelt had told a press conference that the General had escaped from Corregidor and was now down under. Roosevelt said he felt that “every American admires, with me, General MacArthur’s determination to fight to the finish with his men in the Philippines.” At the same time, FDR was equally sure that “if faced individually with the question as to where General MacArthur could best serve his country,” all “could come to only one conclusion,” which was that “he will be more useful in Supreme Command of the whole Southwest Pacific than if he had stayed on Bataan.” The next day, Wednesday, March 18, the New York Times banner headline had read: MACARTHUR IN AUSTRALIA AS ALLIED COMMANDER / MOVE HAILED AS FORESHADOWING TURN OF THE TIDE.154

  Now it was Friday, and he was in the Adelaide station. Knowing that reporters would be there, asking for a statement, he had scrawled a few words on the back of an envelope: “The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines . . . for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary object of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.” He had worked and reworked the first sentence, which he hoped would lead the American people to demand, and the White House and the War Department to grant, a higher priority to this theater of operations. It was the last three words, however, which captured the public’s attention and became the most famous spoken during the war in the Pacific. Perhaps they were also the most controversial. The Office of War Information, realizing their appeal, asked him to change the sentence to “We shall return.” MacArthur refused, and his critics cited it as an example of his megalomania. In The General and the President Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote that his “Caesaresque words” left “rather an ashen taste in the mouths of the men who knew they would be called on to return somewhat in advance of him.” It was pointed out that Oliver Perry said, “We have met the enemy and he is ours,” that a colonel in the 16th Infantry (not Pershing, as is popularly thought) said in 1917, “Lafayette, we are here,” and that Joseph Stilwell, who had been at West Point with MacArthur, came out of Burma saying, “We took a hell of a beating.” By “Western standards,” Frank Kelley and Cornelius Ryan wrote, the phrase “I shall return” seemed “silly, pompous, and indeed stupid.”155

  The General’s defenders replied that he was speaking, not to Americans, but to Filipinos, who had more faith in his pledge than his own countrymen did. The originator of the phrase, in fact, was Carlos Romulo. Back on the Rock, Sutherland had told the Filipino journalist that the Allied slogan in the islands should be, as OWI later suggested, “We shall return.” Romulo objected; “America has let us down and won’t be trusted,” he said. “But the people still have confidence in MacArthur. If he says he is coming back, he will be believed.” Sutherland passed this suggestion along to the General, who adopted it. MacArthur, always his own most inept advocate, later wrote: “ ‘I shall return’ seemed a promise of magic to the Filipinos. It lit a flame that became a symbol which focused the nation’s indomitable will and at whose shrine it finally attained victory and, once again, found freedom. It was scraped in the sands of the beaches, it was daubed on the walls of the barrios, it was stamped on the mail, it was whispered in the cloisters of the church. It became the battle cry of a great underground swell that no Japanese bayonet could still.” That it had this great an impact is doubtful, and why it should be written in sand is unclear, but unquestionably it appealed to an unsophisticated Oriental people. Throughout the war American submarines provided Filipino guerrillas with cartons of buttons, gum, playing cards, and matchboxes bearing the message, and they were widely circulated. Scraps of paper with “I shall return” written on them were found in Japanese files. There was even a story—which made effective propaganda even if it was apocryphal—that a Japanese artillery battery, opening a case of artillery shells in the middle of a battle, found the sentence neatly stenciled on each of them. To this day Romulo believes that the phrase “served as a promise and command to the Philippine peoples. They knew his word was his bond.”156

  That he could keep it was dubious on that stygian night when he thundered toward Melbourne on the wide-gauge Adelaide Express. The Allied world rejoiced in his deliverance from Corregidor, but as he paced the aisle of the darkened commissioner’s car hour after hour he told Jean that he intended to return to his trapped garrison as soon as transportation could be arranged. It is unlikely that he was serious about this, but he certainly felt that he had been betrayed by Washington, and that he, in turn, had unknowingly deceived his soldiers in the Philippines. At the same time, he was aghast at Australia’s vulnerability. The Japanese, whose talons were already reaching for what was left of New Guinea and for key islands northeast of Australia—Samoa, New Caledonia, and the Fijis—appeared to be intent on further conquests; it seemed clear that they wouldn’t rest until Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane were part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. MacArthur talked of that, too, as he trod back and forth, wondering aloud whether he was forever doomed to serve star-crossed causes. He sounded like a broken man, and his wife shared his torment. She walked with him until, exhausted, she collapsed on a seat, and even then she remained alert, listening and sympathizing. It was during that long night, she later told a friend, that she resolved to renounce her own private life and live entirely for her husband
and son; the General was “a lonely, angry man “ who needed her “as never before. ”157

  By morning he had recovered his self-control, and at 9:50 A.M., when the train pulled into Melbourne’s Spencer Street Station, he was once more MacArthur the showman, lounging carelessly in a chair on the train’s observation platform. A boisterous crowd of nearly six thousand was there to greet him, held in check by fifty Victoria state constables. Brett had assembled an honor guard of 360 U.S. soldiers—there weren’t enough infantrymen, so he had raided detachments of signalmen and engineers—and the General carefully inspected their white-helmeted, pipe-clayed ranks. It was a beautiful, sunny Saturday. The lighthearted, rather disorderly spectators surged around the group of government officials and high-ranking officers who formed a welcoming delegation. According to John Hersey, who was there, “among the braid-horses and stovepipes” MacArthur, in his ribbonless bush jacket, worn khaki, and casual checked socks, “looked like business.”158

  There was no band; he had sent word that he didn’t want one. There was a Wolseley limousine flying a pennant with four stars on it. There were sixty newspapermen. And there was an Australian Broadcasting Company microphone, to which MacArthur was irresistibly drawn. Producing a carefully crumpled piece of paper, he said he had felt honored to serve with Australian soldiers in World War I and was proud to be their comrade once more. Then, with his eye again on Washington, he added that success in modern war “means the furnishing of sufficient troops and sufficient materiel to meet the known strength of the potential enemy. No general can make something out of nothing. My success or failure will depend primarily upon the resources which the respective governments place at my disposal. In any event, I shall do my best. I shall keep the soldier’s faith.”159

  The most apprehensive member of his audience was George H. Brett. Upon his return from Alice Springs, Hurley had told Brett that the General was “antagonistic” toward him. The airman had asked why, and Hurley had said, “I don’t know. I couldn’t put my finger on any particular reason, but the feeling is there, all right.” Agitated, Brett had said, “It couldn’t be just the trouble we had getting him out of the Philippines.” Hurley had replied, “You’ll probably find out soon enough after MacArthur gets here.” Now the Air Corps general waited for a sign. As MacArthur entered the limousine, Brett asked, “Would you care to have me accompany you, sir?” The General looked back stonily. He said flatly: “No.”160

  A motorcycle had been provided for his Wolseley, but through error it had already left, accompanying the car bearing his wife and son. An embarrassed Australian officer reported the blunder to MacArthur. The General said: “That is as it should be.” His hostility toward Brett remained, however. After he and the others had checked into the old-fashioned Menzies Hotel—politely declining several mansions offered by wealthy Melbourneans—he radioed the War Department that it was “most essential as a fundamental and primary step” that the airman “be relieved/” Meanwhile Brett, unaware that his role here was about to end, called at the hotel to pay his respects. Accompanying him was another rear-echelon officer, Brigadier Ralph Royce. MacArthur would not receive them. As they left gloomily, Royce growled, “What’s the idea? You’d think we were orderlies. Or don’t we belong to the same fraternity?”161

  Unwittingly he had put his finger on half of it. They didn’t belong to the same fraternity. Neither did George Marshall; neither did Eisenhower. The issue had nothing to do with personality, ability, or even performance. To MacArthur they were all officers who fought wars at desks far from the firing line and had little idea of what combat was like—who were, to use the derisive GI word, “chairborne.” The other half of the problem was more complicated. It was pathological. The General’s paranoia never lay more than a fraction of a millimeter below the surface of his thoughts. “They” had conspired against his father, “they” had refused to decorate him after his Vera Cruz adventure, “they” had undercut him in France in 1918, “they” had forced him into retirement in 1937, “they” had refused to reinforce his defense of Corregidor and Bataan, “they” had sent an inferior B-17 to Cagayan, and “they” were waiting even now for a chance to thwart him again.162

  MacArthur arriving in Melbourne, Australia, after his escape from Corregidor, March 1942

  Jean and Arthur IV in Melbourne

  To be sure, he knew that he had allies, too. The men who had made the eleven-day, three-thousand-mile trip from the Rock with him would receive his undivided loyalty—which, in some cases, was more than they deserved. Called the “Bataan Gang” (though most of them had remained on Corregidor and hadn’t set foot on the peninsula during the siege), these officers would form an insurmountable barrier between him and newcomers to the Pacific until late in the war. His closest confidante, of course, would always be his wife, who had now completely eclipsed his beloved mother. A few days after their arrival in Melbourne he gave Jean a platinum-and-diamond wristwatch on which was engraved: “To my bravest / Bataan-Corregidor 1942 / MacArthur.” There was considerable resentment in Washington over the fact that he, unlike other officers, was allowed to have his wife near him, but a member of George Marshall’s staff, who understood MacArthur better than MacArthur understood himself, said: “If feminine companionship serves in any way to help MacArthur, let her stay there. He is not a young man. Maybe he needs his wife.”163

  In Melbourne Jean and the General were drawn even closer together by the realization that few Australians had any idea of what they had been through. Her first task, as they settled in at the hotel, was to buy clothes for him, Arthur, Ah Cheu, and herself, and it led to a revealing experience. Shops were closed on Saturday afternoon, so a dressmaker came to their suite, fitted her, and had a frock ready for her to wear on a shopping tour Monday morning. In the Myer Emporium she saw several fabrics she liked, but the salesgirl looked her over, shook her head sadly, and said, “S.S.W. Well, I don’t know whether we’ve got anything.” What, she inquired, did “S.S.W.” mean? The girl explained, “Why, that means Small-Sized Woman, of course, and they’re hard to fit.” Another shopper, recognizing Jean, sympathized. Then the woman asked, “Won’t your clothes soon be arriving from Manila?”164

  In Berlin Goebbels described MacArthur as a “fleeing general,” in Rome Mussolini called him a “coward,” and in Tokyo the Japan Times and Advertiser labeled him a “deserter” who had “fled his post,” thereby admitting “the futility of further resisting Japanese pressure in the southern extremity of the Bataan peninsula.” Marshall decided that the best propaganda counterblow would be to award the General the Medal of Honor. Eisenhower, who was now rising rapidly to the top at the War Department, disagreed, but Marshall forwarded the recommendation to the President anyway, pointing out that in the past winners of the decoration hadn’t been confined to men responsible for front-line achievements; Lindbergh, for example, had won one with his transatlantic flight in 1927. Roosevelt approved, and MacArthur received the honor on March 26 at a dinner given for him by the Australian prime minister. The citation, read by the American minister to Canberra, praised his “gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action,” his “heroic conduct,” his “calm judgment in each crisis,” and his “utter disregard of personal danger under heavy fire and aerial bombardment.”165

  Accepting it, the General told the Australian leaders, “I have come as a soldier in a great crusade of personal liberty as opposed to perpetual slavery. My faith in our ultimate victory is invincible, and I bring you tonight the unbreakable spirit of the free man’s military code in support of our joint cause.” An Australian reporter wrote that he was “terrific” as he concluded slowly and emotionally: “There can be no compromise. We shall win or we shall die, and to this end I pledge the full resources of all the mighty power of my country and all the blood of my countrymen.” Of the medal he said that he felt it was “intended not so much for me personally as it is a recognition of the indomitable courage of the gallant army which it was my
honor to command.” Rescuing them, and driving the Japanese from the Philippines, had become the great obsession of his life. His determination to redeem the islands would not flag in the years ahead, though the same cannot be said of the men in Arlington’s new Pentagon building.166

  SIX

  The Green War

  1942–1944

  One reason Americans at home had trouble following the war in the Pacific was that they were ignorant of its geography. Their educational system was to blame. In school they had been taught that civilization began at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia and moved steadily westward until it culminated in the United States. Everyone had a rough map of Europe in his mind. When radio announcers reported that Nazi columns were lunging into Poland, Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, and France, their listeners had a fairly good idea of what was happening. Few maps of Asia and Oceania had hung on classroom walls, however. As a result, battles there were hopelessly confusing. At the time of the Spanish-American War Mr. Dooley had said that the average American didn’t know whether the Philippines were “islands or canned goods,” and to his grandsons, studying globes in the early 1940s, they still freckled the map like so many bewildering, unidentifiable Rorschach blots.