American Caesar

by William Manchester

  His first Luzon communiqué since the escape on Bulkeley’s PT-41 announced: “The decisive battle for the liberation of the Philippines and the control of the Southwest Pacific is at hand. General MacArthur is in personal command at the front and landed with his assault troops.” That was misleading. He did tour the command posts of the four divisions, which by nightfall had pushed eight miles inland against negligible resistance, but he slept on the Boise until Friday, when he transferred his headquarters to a school-house in the town of Santa Barbara, twelve miles east of Lingayen. As usual, he wanted to create a picture of himself as a knight leading charges in glittering armor—or, perhaps closer to the truth, as eighteen-year-old Arthur MacArthur, Jr., scrambling up the slope of Missionary Ridge.

  War correspondents who knew he was back on the cruiser jeered, but soon afterward the General’s display of physical courage on Luzon would once again alarm those accompanying him, and the first sign of it came ten days later when he moved to Hacienda Luisita, thirty miles ahead of Krueger’s command post at Calasiao. One reason for the trip may have been the prospect, brilliantly realized, of Filipinos decking his jeep with flowers until it resembled a victorious Roman chariot, kissing his hand, pressing wreaths around his neck, and trying to touch his uniform.* But his chief motive was to goad the cautious Krueger into more daring action. Eichelberger wrote Miss Em that “the commander-in-chief is very impatient,” that “he has had to speed up your palsy-walsy,” and that “Krueger doesn’t even radiate courage.” The General had told Eichelberger that he wanted him to “undertake a daring expedition against Manila with a small mobile force,” using tactics which “would have delighted Jeb Stuart.” The implication was that such a maneuver was too difficult for Krueger, and while MacArthur was doubtless playing his two fighting generals against one another—as Napoleon did with his marshals, and as Stalin would soon do in encouraging Zhukov and Konev to race each other to Berlin—the General clearly regarded his senior field commander as unenterprising, and even timid.70

  The amphitheater in which they were maneuvering, the island’s central plain, is about 40 miles wide and 110 miles deep. Beginning at Lingayen Gulf, it runs south, confined on each side by jagged mountain ranges. Some fifteen miles above Manila it narrows between impassable marshes and then broadens once more upon reaching the capital’s outskirts. Though MacArthur had shown the defensive potential of Bataan and Corregidor, south of Manila, Yamashita preferred to withdraw the main body of his troops into the mountains to the east. And MacArthur somehow knew this. He was so sure of it that he saw no need to guard his left flank. “Get to Manila!” he told his field commanders. “Go around the Japs, bounce off the Japs, save your men, but get to Manila! Free the internees at Santo Tomas! Take Malacañan and the legislative buildings!” But Krueger was haunted by the nightmare of a quarter-million Japanese driving in his flank pickets, cutting him off from the gulf, and “slicing him up,” as Romulo put it, “like a pie.” He wanted to spend two or three weeks consolidating his gains before advancing behind heavy artillery barrages toward the capital, which he assumed would be strongly defended.71

  The General vehemently disagreed. Those, he said, were the tactics which had destroyed the flower of a generation in the trenches of World War I. Moreover, he pointed out, in his words, that “I was fighting on ground that had witnessed my father’s military triumph nearly fifty years earlier and my own campaigns at the beginning of the war. I knew every wrinkle of the terrain, every foot of the topography.” He saw no reason why flying columns shouldn’t move swiftly down the fine roads leading southward between the rice paddies and neat little towns to Manila, which he believed would once more be undefended because the booted and spurred general in Baguio, as a first-class commander, knew the capital was strategically worthless. MacArthur and Krueger had words over this, the four-star general arguing tenaciously in his native German accent and the five-star commander in chief in his winged Victorian rhetoric. Yet MacArthur never pulled rank on him. Sutherland had frequently urged that Krueger be “sent home”—Sutherland wanted to lead the Sixth Army himself— and others wondered why he wasn’t. The likeliest explanation is that the General knew his plodding subordinate was a useful counterweight to his own bravura. Had Krueger been with him in December 1941, there is little doubt that Bataan would have been stocked with enough rice for a long siege.72

  Although the General left Sixth Army tactics alone, however, he controlled the strategy, and if MacArthur had never fought another battle, his reconquest of Luzon would have vindicated his own high opinion of his generalship. George Marshall, more generous than the man who so mistrusted him, was rhapsodic over it. Because the Mindoro operation had forced the Japanese to reckon with the possibility of an invasion from the south, he wrote in an official report to the secretary of war, “the landing caught every major hostile combat unit in motion.” Then “Yamashita’s inability to cope with MacArthur’s swift moves” and “his desired reaction to the deception measures” combined “to place the Japanese in an impossible situation.” The enemy “was forced into a piecemeal commitment of his troops.” Deploying “a strong portion of his assault force” to protect the beachhead, MacArthur “immediately launched” an “advance toward Manila across the bend of the Agno, which presumably should have been a strongly held Japanese defense line,” so that GIs “met little resistance until they approached Clark Field.” MacArthur himself wrote that here and in his other Philippine campaigns, “enemy troops could never contract their lines to keep pace with the ever-narrowing area of conflict. They were unable to conduct an orderly retreat, in classic fashion, to fall back on inner perimeters with forces intact for a last defense . . . . It was a situation unique in modern war. Never had such large numbers of troops been so outmaneuvered, . . . and left tactically impotent to take an active part in the final battle for their homeland.”73

  While Krueger was investing Clark Field, his commander in chief was dazzling Yamashita with a series of lightning thrusts elsewhere. As the Sixth Army moved toward Manila, he landed a corps at Subic Bay, on the west coast, above Bataan. Without losing a man, this expedition captured the invaluable port of Olongapo. Then he put a regiment ashore at Mariveles, on the peninsula’s lower tip. Trapped in a double envelopment, Yamashita’s Bataan garrison was isolated and impotent; the peninsula was taken in just seven days. Meanwhile MacArthur had landed a division of paratroopers at Nasugbu, forty miles south of the capital, on the other side of Manila Bay. Not a shot was fired, and the city was virtually surrounded.74

  The only remaining stronghold in the bay itself was Corregidor. In 1942 the Japanese had lost twice their landing force—several thousand men—to the gallant marines on the Rock’s beaches. Now, with 5,200 enemy defenders in superb condition and provided with enormous stocks of ammunition, the fortress seemed far more formidable. MacArthur landed a regiment of airborne troops on Topside while an infantry battalion, with exquisite timing, leaped from Higgins boats to storm the Bottomside shore. After losing 1,500 men in a ten-day battle, the enemy commander holed up with the rest in Malinta Tunnel, where they committed suicide spectacularly by igniting a huge mass of explosives and blowing themselves up. The American losses had been 210 men, 50 of them killed in that final blowup. One wonders what would have happened had MacArthur, not Mark Clark, been the U.S. commander in Italy.

  Those were the achievements of a great strategist. What makes them all the more remarkable is that the General was not moving overlays on situation maps at his headquarters, now in Tarlac, sixty-five miles north of Manila, but leaving his staff every morning to race around in his five-star jeep like a man forty years younger. “The Chief wanted to be in personal command,” Eichelberger wrote, “and apparently he has done so.” Willoughby wrote afterward: “Constantly on the front line—at times well ahead of it—his sheer physical endurance and his reckless exposure of himself excited the native population and even his own forces to a pitch of effort that became the dismay of the enemy.” O
n Leyte he had left his command post just once, to confer with Krueger in Tanauan. Here he was everywhere, doing everything but digging the foxholes and loading the machine-gun belts. He watched the airborne drops from a B-17 overhead. On the central plain, he climbed on tanks to observe enemy patrols through field glasses. On Bataan he ventured five miles beyond American lines, hoping for a glimpse of Corregidor, and was almost strafed by a squadron of Kenney’s fighters. He stood erect at an enemy roadblock, and when a nearby Nambu opened up and an American lieutenant said, “We’re going after those fellows, but please get down sir; we’re under fire,” MacArthur replied crisply, without moving, “I’m not under fire. Those bullets are not intended for me.”75

  In late January he was inspecting the 161st Infantry when the regiment was struck by a tank-led counterattack. The American lines buckled, and MacArthur personally rallied the men. When Stimson heard about it, the General was awarded his third Distinguished Service Cross. On another occasion, when looking for Clark Field with Egeberg, he became lost. A GI crouched behind a stump told them there were Japanese ahead. MacArthur continued to stroll toward the front, with Egeberg reluctantly following. The General said they should look for a strand of communications wire and follow it; that would lead them to the nearest U.S. command post. They found a wire in a canebrake and were tracking it when Egeberg realized to his horror that it was thinner than American wire—it was Japanese wire, they were approaching an enemy headquarters. He breathlessly pointed it out. Either the General hadn’t noticed or didn’t care; he said disgustedly, “Doc!” Just then they came out of the brake and saw, off to the left, three Hotchkiss-type machine guns. The muzzles were not pointed in their direction, but as they were staring at the weapons an enemy soldier glimpsed them and shouted shrilly, “Hey, Meestah!” MacArthur muttered, “We better back up,” and they fell back into the canebrake. Among GIs once more, the General said warmly, “This day has done me good.”76

  On another occasion, just north of Manila, his jeep halted at a blown bridge. He wanted to proceed on foot, but an aide talked him out of it. Shortly thereafter, however, he made what he called a “personal reconnaissance” inside the enemy-held city itself, touring the Malacañan Palace grounds and returning to report, like a scout, that he believed GIs “could cross the river and clear all southern Manila with a platoon.” That was hyperbole, but few Americans expected more than token resistance from the Japanese still in the capital. As MacArthur had predicted, Yamashita had withdrawn his troops from the city, declaring that “the capital of the republic and its law-abiding inhabitants should not suffer from the ravages of war.” MacArthur’s headquarters informed senior U.S. officers that plans were being made “for a great victory parade à la Champs Élysées.”

  The General hoped he could make his triumphant entry into the Pearl of the Orient on January 26, his sixty-fifth birthday, and while this proved to be unrealistic, most men on his staff— and Yamashita’s, in the mountains—believed that with 100,000 GIs pouring down Luzon’s two main highways, the delay would be brief. Eichelberger wrote Miss Em on January 27: “If the Jap doesn’t put up any more fight than he has done to date, it will be a great triumph for our Chief, whose losses have been small.” At 6:00 P.M. on Saturday, February 3, patrols of the 1st Cavalry entered the city limits. Three days later, on Tuesday, MacArthur’s communiqué announced: “Our forces are rapidly clearing the enemy from Manila. Our converging columns . . . entered the city and surrounded the Jap defenders. Their complete destruction is imminent.” Congratulatory cables arrived in Tarlac from Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, Curtin, and Stimson. Leahy told the President on Wednesday that the General was on the outskirts of the capital, freeing American prisoners of war. On Thursday Eichelberger wrote, “It is possible that the Big Chief will be able to enter the city proper within the next three or four days,” and two days later he told his wife: “Late this afternoon we received quite a surprise when we were invited by General MacArthur to attend the formal entry into the city.” Time’s February 12 issue headlined its Philippine story “Victory! Mabuhay!”—mabuhay being the Tagalog word for “hurrah”—and Newsweek’s head that same day was: “Prize of the Pacific War, Manila Fell to MacArthur Like Ripened Plum.”77

  It didn’t. Although the American public was unaware of the fact—the General’s censors told correspondents they couldn’t expose his victory communique as a lie—the fall of the capital was a month away. And there would be no Champs Élysées march then. “I understand,” Eichelberger wrote on February 21, “the big parade has been called off.” That was a shattering understatement. A parade was in fact impossible. No streets would be clear of rubble, and the gutters would be running with blood. The devastation of Manila was one of the great tragedies of World War II. Of Allied cities in those war years, only Warsaw suffered more. Seventy percent of the utilities, 75 percent of the factories, 80 percent of the southern residential district, and 100 percent of the business district were razed. Nearly 100,000 Filipinos were murdered by the Japanese. Hospitals were set afire after their patients had been strapped to their beds. The corpses of males were mutilated, females of all ages were raped before they were slain, and babies’ eyeballs were gouged out and smeared on walls like jelly. The middle class, the professionals and white-collar workers, suffered most. Ironically, the chief survivors of the prewar oligarchy were the members of Laurel’s puppet government, who were safe in Baguio with Yamashita.78

  MacArthur blamed the holocaust on the Japanese general, but the guilt lay elsewhere. Yamashita’s orderly evacuation into the hills had left about thirty thousand Japanese sailors and marines under Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, whose superior, Vice Admiral Denshichi Okochi, directed him to destroy all port facilities and naval storehouses. Either Iwabuchi had not received the order from Yamashita declaring the capital an open city, or he chose to ignore it. Once he had decided to defend Manila, the atrocities began, and the longer the battle raged, the more the Japanese command structure deteriorated, until the uniforms of Nipponese sailors and marines were saturated with Filipino blood.

  GIs fought them hand to hand, room by room, closet by closet. Then enemy survivors retreated into the old walled city of Intramuros, whose stone walls, forty feet thick and twenty-five feet high, had withstood nearly four centuries of earthquakes. MacArthur denied Kenney’s vigorous request to attack Intramuros from the air; he said he couldn’t permit the use of dive bombers, and particularly napalm, when so many innocent civilians were trapped within. This led to absurd rumors. “A year later back in the United States,” Kenney wrote, “I was told that it was common knowledge that the reason MacArthur did not allow the Intramuros to be bombed, and instead let our troops be killed capturing the place without destroying it, was that he owned a lot of property there. . . . MacArthur never owned a square foot of property in the Philippines.” In any event, the General did approve heavy artillery shellings, the results of which were so destructive that one wonders why he hadn’t given Kenney the go-ahead; the results were the same. Eventually his cannonades breached the northeast corner of the great wall, but more heavy fighting lay ahead.79

  He had been unprepared for the fanatical defense of the blazing, crumbling capital, and he was in anguish. Taking Manila had become a fixation with him. When the embattled enemy disregarded his repeated appeals to them to surrender, he became further distraught. With tactics in the hands of his field commanders, he had little to do, and he told his staff he wanted to see prisoners of war, internees, and Filipinos. He went first to Bilibid and Santo Tomas prisons, which had just been liberated. At Santo Tomas he was surrounded by thousands of sobbing, emaciated men in rags. At Bilibid, many of the inmates made a pathetic effort to stand at attention. He wrote afterward: “They remained silent, as though at inspection. I looked down the lines of men bearded and soiled, . . . with ripped and soiled shirts and trousers, with toes sticking out of such shoes as remained, with suffering and torture written on their gaunt faces. Here was all tha
t was left of my men of Bataan and Corregidor. . . . As I passed slowly down the scrawny, suffering column, a murmur accompanied me as each man barely speaking above a whisper, said, ‘You’re back,’ or ‘You made it.’ . . . I could only reply, ‘I’m a little late, but we finally came.’ I passed on out of the barracks compound and looked around at the debris that was no longer important to those inside: the tin cans they had eaten from; the dirty old bottles they had drunk from. It made me ill just to look at them.”80

  To Egeberg he said: “Doc, this is getting to me. I want to go forward till we meet some fire, and I don’t just mean sniper fire.” (“He had,” the physician explains, “no respect for sniper fire.”) Accompanied by two other aides, Larry Lehrbas and Andres Soriano, the Filipino, they walked toward the sound of the big guns. Around the corner they encountered a silent truck of Japanese soldiers, all erect and all dead—victims of a flamethrower. Then they passed through a platoon of GIs who were crouched behind cover and who looked up at them as though they were insane. On the banks of the Pasig River they came upon the San Miguel Brewery, which happened to be owned by Soriano’s family. The workers, who were inside, peered out and, seeing their uniforms, yelled that this was Japanese territory, that they’d better get back; then, recognizing Soriano, they invited MacArthur and his party inside and—some moments in combat are like scenes from a Duerrenmatt play—offered them all glasses of beer. The General touched his tumbler to his lips, put it down, and said he wanted to get closer to the enemy. On the edge of Intramuros they were stopped by the wall. Overhead a Japanese officer was looking down at them through binoculars. MacArthur spread his legs, flipped his hands to his hips, and stared back until the Japanese glanced away. Moving farther down the wall they came under heavy sniper fire. The doctor started counting skirling bullets and stopped when he reached twenty-eight. Then a GI popped out of a cellar and said there was a machine gun just ahead. It started to chatter, and MacArthur turned and walked away slowly, each step deliberately taken, showing his contempt for peril. Back in defilade, Egeberg once more asked him why he needlessly exposed himself. “That wasn’t so dangerous,” the General said. “Those weren’t real sharpshooters. They were just a scared rear guard. They were shooting too soon, instead of holding their fire and drawing a bead. Hell, Doc,” he said, chuckling and clapping him on the back, “aiming at me, they were likelier to hit you!” Egeberg turned away, unsmiling.