by Peter Eisner
MacArthur, his wife, Jean, and their three-year-old son, Arthur, withdrew to Corregidor, where an estimated fourteen thousand soldiers set up operations and prepared shelter from attacks in the eight-hundred-foot-long tunnel built into the rock of Malinta Hill by the Army Corps of Engineers. The twenty-four-foot-wide tunnel had living space, work areas, a hospital, and headquarters offices for MacArthur, his family, and thousands of personnel.
The general spoke and acted in the heroic terms expected of him. He defied danger by establishing his headquarters boldly at the highest point on Corregidor, a symbol that although the United States was under attack, its command stood proud and defiant. He was the greatest of cheerleaders when he crossed the bay from Corregidor to Bataan on January 10, 1942, to spend a day walking among the troops. He later issued a letter to all commanders stating that while “the exact time of the arrival of reinforcements is unknown . . . help is on the way from the United States.”
American troops on the ground banked on such persistent promises: Relief was on the way. There was never a chance. Washington had no intention of sending reinforcements to break through the Japanese blockade of the besieged U.S. forces. With the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, all attention in the Pacific focused on how to regroup and protect Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States. The United States took no steps even to protect Guam or Wake Island, two U.S. outposts between Hawaii and the Philippines that could have served as relay points for rescue of the Philippines. Instead, both territories fell quickly to the Japanese. Officials in Washington kept to their strategy of dealing with “Europe first.” Any reinforcements and the majority of engagement turned eastward toward Europe and combating Hitler’s blitzkrieg. Manila was 7,400 miles from the U.S. mainland. It was just as distant from Washington’s immediate plans for war.
MacArthur found out long afterward that a “top-level decision had long before been reached that the Atlantic war came first, no matter what the cost in the Far East. . . . Unhappily, I was not informed . . . and believed that a brave effort at relief was in the making.”
The brave face was hard to maintain for long. After his January 10 visit to his troops, MacArthur received a threatening missive from General Homma: “You are well aware that you are doomed. The end is near. The question is how long you will be able to resist. You have already cut rations by half. I appreciate the fighting spirit of yourself and your troops who have been fighting with courage. However, in order to avoid needless bloodshed and to save the remnants of your divisions and your auxiliary troops, you are advised to surrender.”
MacArthur did not respond. Japanese planes next dropped leaflets over Bataan, repeating some of the same language used by Homma:
The outcome of the present combat has been already decided and you are cornered to the doom. But, however, being unable to realize the present situation, blinded General MacArthur has stupidly refused our proposal and continues futile struggle at the cost of your precious lives.
Dear Filipino Soldiers!
There are [sic] still one way left for you. That is to give up all your weapons at once and surrender to the Japanese force before it is too late, then we shall fully protect you.
We repeat for the last!
Surrender at once and build your new Philippines for and by Filipinos.
MacArthur said the response to the Japanese message was unanimous: “Every foxhole on Bataan rocked with ridicule that night.”
For weeks now, Homma had been applying pressure to dislodge MacArthur. In late December, he had sent in bombers to attack Corregidor and MacArthur narrowly escaped death. The planes “looked like silver pieces thrown against the sun. But their currency was death and their appearance a deceit.” One bomb crushed the roof of his headquarters building and others, accompanied by strafing rounds, left the grounds pockmarked with craters. “Blue sky turned to dirty gray. . . . Machine guns chattered everywhere and ceaselessly. Then they left as shaking earth yielded under the pulverizing attack, and there rose a slow choking cover of dust and smoke and flame.”
MacArthur withdrew to a new headquarters facility deep in the rock of the Malinta Tunnel. He held out for two more months until President Roosevelt ordered him to withdraw to safety in Australia and from there organize an American offensive in the Pacific. MacArthur wavered with the thought of resigning the army to take up a rifle himself and fight in the hills rather than obey the president. But the sixty-two-year-old general thought better and, though he delayed his departure, said he would follow orders. He would soon learn that some members of his fragmented forces did disobey orders to surrender and headed for the hills to fight.
Learning About War
Bataan, December 20, 1941
LIFE IN THE LITTLE mountain village of Pilar was Claire’s introduction to war and hard days to come. The villagers asked Claire to teach their children because the local school had closed and the teacher was gone. She made a deal: She would teach English, and they would teach her Tagalog. The first day ten children came to school; by the third day attendance had more than tripled. Soon she had one hundred students.
War fever was increasing, but fighting had not yet come close to the village. Most mornings Claire and the nanny, Lolita, went out in search of stores that still had food to sell. Every night they heard rumbling explosions in the distance. Villagers were jittery, and by the weekend of December 20, they were digging air-raid shelters.
John Phillips showed up on December 22. According to Claire, he had taken the car down to Manila for supplies and come back with Christmas presents as a surprise, but the roads were bad and his car got a flat on the way back. It was late by the time he had commandeered a truck and delivered the presents and a bottle of rum. Phillips told Claire where to find the car about twenty miles south and then raced back to camp. He sent a message the next day that he was being punished with KP for a week and could not get away. Claire took a horse-cart taxi and then hitched a ride on an army truck, found the car, and had someone fix the tire. It was a bad day to be on any road in the open. As Claire drove back to Pilar on the main highway, Japanese planes swooped in; she stopped and leaped out of the car into a ditch, injuring her foot in the process. “I was hit in the toe with shrapnel,” she said. By Christmas Day Claire’s toe was infected and she could hardly walk. A doctor at the first-aid station treated the toe, removed the nail, and told her to stay in bed. She tried to obey the doctor’s orders but she saw too many American soldiers coming along the road on their march north. “Every time they would stop by, I would give them some food.”
For the rest of her life, Claire claimed that she had married John Phillips on Christmas Eve 1941 under the trees before a Catholic priest named Father Gonzales. The real story was less than romantic. According to her diary, she was still laid up in bed, and Phillips still would have been serving his punishment for going AWOL on his last visit. She did not mention Phillips in her diary on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day. Instead, she wrote, they had no company for Christmas dinner. She received a message from Phillips on December 26 that he and his unit had moved on December 24 to the town of Hermosa, about twelve miles to the north.
Phillips was able to come down from Hermosa for a delayed Christmas dinner on December 28. “Cold chicken Xmas dinner,” Claire wrote. Perhaps they made plans for the future after the war, but “Cry and laugh” was all she wrote about that visit. Phillips headed back to his camp the next morning. On December 30 Claire, Dian, and Lolita moved to Hermosa. Phillips had arranged a room for them at the home of Judge Fernando Rivera, two blocks from Phillips and his Headquarters Company. The soldiers spent their days training and waiting for orders and an expected Japanese invasion from northern Luzon. Claire set up housekeeping for Phillips, washed his clothes, and cooked dinner before he returned to camp at night. That lasted for about a week, the most prolonged period of time that Claire had been able to spend with her young beau.
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Claire’s decision to flee with Phillips’s company to Bataan kept her closer to the center of battle than she could have imagined or wanted. The Japanese commander in the Philippines, General Homma, plowed across Luzon in pursuit of the retreating Americans, following his fifty-days-to-victory plan with no intention of slowing down. He directed his forces across the Pampanga River directly toward Hermosa, where Phillips was bivouacked and where he had taken Claire. Every time Claire, Dian, and the nursemaid moved northward and inland, the Japanese happened to be marching and bombing in the same direction. Softening up the American forces in retreat, General Homma ordered air strikes over the nearby town of Orani on New Year’s Day. Many people in town, including Claire, were outdoors at 3:00 p.m. when the air-raid sirens wailed. A Japanese fighter swept over the village and bullets popped and raised dust in the town square. Claire was recruited to nurse the wounded at the local first-aid clinic, which was so crowded that medics took over another house to treat more people.
Phillips came over a few hours later and moved Claire, Dian, and Lolita one last time to a house closer to his unit’s new camp near Dinalupihan. That was not good enough; Claire saw fires and bomb craters; they could hear explosions as they drove along the highway. The next morning Phillips managed another brief visit amid the bombing and chaos. Claire helped doctors and nurses for the next two days, treating the sick and wounded.
On January 4, two days after the fact, word came that the Japanese Army now occupied Manila. She received one final message from Phillips on January 6 as the army moved farther north from Hermosa. Claire now realized that the Americans were in grave danger as they marched to the northern mountains of Bataan; the Japanese occupied territory on all sides. Now on her own, Claire gathered up the belongings and money Phillips had left behind and buried it all.
She probably did not admit the obvious to herself right away: If Phillips survived, and if she made it out of the hills herself, they might not find each other again. Claire did copy a famous sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning into her little diary that night. She said that she and Phillips loved the sonnet and used it as a kind of code between them:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Unprepared for War
Manila, December 1941
THESE WERE the final days of the Manila that was. Forty years of American development had made Manila a powerhouse for banking and commerce. It was the Pearl of the Orient, a crossroads of cultures where American expatriates had come to settle at the outset of the twentieth century and mingled with the various ethnic groups of the islands. New Japanese immigrants had taken a prominent role in commerce and local politics, raising fears before the war of a fifth column of Japanese agents. The mix also included people of Chinese origin, Pacific islanders, and mestizos, the varied ethnic groups of the Philippines and descendants of Spanish settlers. In the late 1500s the Spanish colonial government had built a bastion around old Manila to protect the city from marauding pirates, with walls at some points forty feet thick and twenty-two feet high, and aptly called it Intramuros (Spanish for “within the walls”). The area just outside Intramuros had been a broad moat on three sides, now filled in for sports and recreation. The grounds just outside Intramuros had become a popular golf course; soldiers and children also played baseball there. Beyond Intramuros the port angled around the Pasig River, flowing into Manila Bay to the west. The Luneta—a sprawling downtown park—had been built just beyond the walled city, and to the south and all around was the central business district of Manila proper. For some reason, cars and trucks drove on the left side in the British fashion, sharing the roads with a jumble of transport: bright orange streetcars, horse-drawn buses, buggy taxis, and carts of commerce and industrial goods hauled by water buffaloes.
Manila was a divided society. Life was good for the small community of expatriate Americans. A 1940 government census listed 8,739 permanent American residents in Manila—a city of 623,000—not counting military families, temporary businesspeople, or diplomats and their families on assignment from the States. Americans and other foreigners did well in business and constituted an upper middle class. Americans benefited from the four decades of colonial rule since the United States had ousted Spain in 1898, one result of the Spanish-American War. Cuba and the Philippines, a Spanish colony for more than three hundred years, were the spoils of U.S. victory. The Philippines became a commonwealth of the United States in 1935 as part of its planned transition to full independence by 1946.
The wealthiest residents, mostly Americans, lived in sumptuous mansions on Dewey Boulevard (named for Admiral George Dewey, the victor in the 1898 Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War). Hidden, though, beyond the mansions of the Americans were the working-class neighborhoods and shantytowns or the thatched-roof barges where the poor and voiceless of Manila lived in underdevelopment and squalor along canals around the city.
Education drew a new class of Filipinos to the city’s universities, the University of the Philippines, founded in 1908, and the Pontifical and Royal University of Santo Tomas, founded in 1611 by the Spaniards, twenty-five years before Harvard, the oldest university in the United States. Expatriate Americans ran popular department stores and published dozens of newspapers. A new generation of young Americans had been drawn to the Philippines in the 1930s, attracted by romance, the wanderlust that Claire had felt, and an escape from the privations of the Great Depression.
A colonial existence was safe and comfortable for the Americans. Everyone knew but never spoke very much about the subservient relationship of Filipinos to Americans. Filipinos were second-class citizens in their own country. The relationship was demeaning and objectionable, recalls Joan Bennett Chapman, an American who was born in Manila. “Many people, it may sound very patronizing, but they had this disgusting phrase: The Americans were the big brothers and the Filipinos were the little brown brothers.” And that was just the way the American colony thought it was supposed to be. “We will share the values of democracy and education with our little brothers and we will help them grow.”
Joan Bennett Chapman’s father was one of the most prominent expatriates in the Philippines. Roy C. Bennett, fifty-two, was editor and general manager of the Manila Daily Bulletin, the city’s largest newspaper and one of the most influential English-language publications in the Pacific Rim. Almost daily Bennett blasted the Japanese military juggernaut and warned about what was to come. “There seems to be no road open to Japan except war,” he editorialized on October 18, 1941. He called Japan’s drive toward war a suicidal course, and he knew that any pretense by Japan of making peace with the United States was just that. “The Japanese government is a military organization, long has been under military domination, operating on a military program,” he wrote. Argue and harangue though he did, Bennett could not awaken Washington to the dimensions of the impending catastrophe.
Bennett had lived in the islands for most of his life. Educated on the U.S. mainland, he had come back after college for good, because this was his home. He was enough of a friend of Douglas MacArthur that the general occasionally came to the Bennett house for dinner. Manila was home base for MacArthur
as head of the colonial Philippine military in the 1930s, before President Roosevelt recalled him to active duty in 1941. Bennett’s daughter, Joan, would quake when the general sat at the dinner table yet sometimes hid nearby so she could hear him speak. “My parents and MacArthur were in the same social circles,” Joan recalled. “When I was maybe five or six, I was allowed to come down when there were parties. I was to carry a basket with candies around to people at the table and then disappear. But one night I saw this big man, MacArthur, who scared me. I heard him and watched him from behind the curtains and I wrapped myself up for protection.”
Bennett predicted nothing but war and managed to anger Tokyo early on with his predictions that Japan and its “supermilitarism” would ultimately fail. “Japan is heading full speed downhill; with the accelerator stuck, heading for more war. The near certainty [is] that this further war making will be suicidal.”
Bennett also said clearly that the Philippines was in the sights of the Japanese war machine. “Certainly we do not choose war—do not want it under any conditions,” he wrote. But “if Japan is dead set on making war, the showdown might as well come now.” He knew the consequences for the Philippines. “The natural wish of the Philippines is to see a way found to escape the necessity of war. But this should not mean the Philippine sentiment is in favor of peace at any price.”
MacArthur knew that Bennett was right about Japanese intentions in the Philippines and had been lobbying the Roosevelt administration and Congress for years with minimal results. The United States “had begun an eleventh-hour struggle to build up enough force to repel an enemy,” MacArthur wrote years later. “Too late, Washington had come to realize the danger. Men and munitions were finally being shipped to the Pacific, but the crucial question was, would they arrive in time and in sufficient strength?”
Bennett continued to publish and write pointed editorials throughout December 1941. General Homma stepped up the pace of invasion and bombed the unprotected capital on December 27. Japanese planes attacked at midday along the Manila waterfront, where several strikes destroyed piers and ships. Bombs also hit church buildings and schools in Intramuros, the walled city, on December 28. Cars burned and smoke billowed over the old city. About 40 civilians died and 150 were wounded. Bennett responded angrily with the power of his pen. He wrote that Japan was bound to lose and was “gambling with stakes that could mean their ultimate ruin.” The words were prescient: “It is not understandable that the Japanese strategists could believe for one second that the United States, Britain and China will stop until the whole strength of the Pacific defense forces are brought into full action—and that means until the attacking enemy is crushed.” From his new headquarters on Corregidor, MacArthur condemned the attacks on Manila as a violation of international law and said, “At the proper time I shall bespeak of due retaliatory measures.” For the moment he could do little.