Because very suddenly time ran out.
—
“Boom Boom Boom!”
At 7:30 every morning, the door to the office of the commander of USAFFE would burst open and a tiny dark-haired figure in an army sergeant’s uniform would toddle in.
Douglas MacArthur immediately jumped up from his desk and snapped to attention. It was his three-year-old son, Arthur, in a uniform specifically tailored to be an exact replica of a United States Army sergeant’s.
The pair would then exchange a series of snappy salutes, before Arthur would begin marching around the room with the general following, counting off the beats. “Sound off,” he would exclaim, and then they would repeat “Boom! Boom! Bittity-boom!”
The ritual always ended the same way. The general presented his diminutive sergeant-son with a present like a crayon, a copy of the funny papers, a piece of candy, or a tiny toy.48 It wasn’t the first time they had met during the day. Usually Arthur watched his daddy shave every morning, as the general would burst into song and his son would join him. “The fact of the matter is,” MacArthur told friends, “the only person who appreciates my singing in the bathroom is Arthur.”
Jean’s view on that subject is not recorded. But the two of them grew even closer over the years after MacArthur went from being military advisor to commander of USAFFE. For two and a half years she cooked all his meals, including lunch when a crowd of dignitaries, like Quezon and his wife or the Sayres, would descend on 1 Calle Victoria, and she would supervise the clearing of dishes and seeing the guests out the door while Douglas prepared for the nap that he took every afternoon—an hour or so of rest before heading back to GHQ to shoulder the burdens of the day.
Theirs was an intimate and domestic, rather than public, relationship. In private she called him “Sir Boss,” the nickname of the main character of Mark Twain’s romantic farce A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—not a bad description of MacArthur’s position as Quezon’s closest resource on military matters. In public with other friends like Sid Huff, she called him “the General,” with her soft Tennessee accent—a nickname that implied a certain irony mixed with respect. MacArthur’s devotion to Jean was unconditional; at last he had found the person who filled the vacuum left by the death of first one and then the other of his parents.
It was a relationship not to be swayed by other feminine temptations that came along, including the petite and brilliant blonde Clare Boothe Luce, who came out to the Philippines in September to do a feature article on MacArthur for her husband’s Life magazine. Clare Boothe Luce was not above using her charm and femininity to win an interview or, if a sexual encounter was needed, to ensnare the trust of her subjects. MacArthur did not succumb, but his intel officer Willoughby did, and arranged for an extended interview with the man that her husband, Henry, publisher of both Time and Life, wasn’t convinced was for real.
Henry Luce had slammed MacArthur for arming the peaceful, innocent Filipinos so they could defend themselves in a war. MacArthur responded angrily to attempts by Luce and others to paint him as a warmonger trying to turn the Philippines into a protomilitary dictatorship. Early in 1941 Luce had paid his own visit to Manila and spoken to MacArthur, but remained unconvinced. “He’s either a great fraud or a great genius,” Henry told Clare, and decided to send her to find out more.49
During the interview Clare quickly fell under the general’s spell. She spoke with him at 1 Calle Victoria, where she noted that despite his impressive physical presence, Douglas MacArthur was actually a small man with narrow, sloping shoulders and tiny, delicate hands. She also noted his smooth white skin, amounting almost to a pallor, the result of spending his time behind a desk instead of out in the Manila sun, and she commented on how the commander of USAFFE was careful to comb his hair over to hide his growing baldness. She interviewed fellow officers from the Philippine Department, one of whom remembered a conversation with MacArthur in late 1939, when his fortunes were near their nadir.
The officer reminded MacArthur that he had done his best, and shouldn’t feel bad if his mission was a failure. MacArthur indignantly burst out, “I must not fail. Too much of the world’s future depends upon success here. These Islands may not be the door to the control of the Pacific, they may not even be the lock to the door. But they are the key to the lock that opens the door—for America. I dare not allow that key to be lost!”50
An inspiring story. It might even be true. But even if MacArthur’s words were apocryphal, the conviction that they expressed was genuine, and during their interview the commander in chief of USAFFE did his best to convince Luce that he was right. “We stand on the eve of a great battle,” he declaimed. “We must spill our precious blood on foreign soil in vain, in vain!” By the time war came the next spring, he would have “125,000 well-trained and fairly well-equipped Filipino soldiers” ready for battle.
When and if the Japanese came, he told her, his strategy would be to “hit ’em where they ain’t”—in other words, to advance and keep the invader off balance.
She asked him what he thought about a purely defensive strategy for the Philippines.
“Defeat,” MacArthur said.51
Clare Luce went home with her interviews and pictures of the general posing on the ramparts of the Intramuros, gazing across Manila Bay. Her answer for her husband, and the readers of Life, was that MacArthur was indeed a genius, and not a fraud. MacArthur, despite his assurances to her about the strength of his position, knew that the facts didn’t bear them out. He knew the training program run by the Philippine Department was not going well. “In my inspections to date,” he wrote to General Grunert at about the time she visited, “I have found large groups of trainees and their officers standing around and doing nothing….[A] pall of inactivity was evident.”52
He also had a report by a USAFFE aide named Harold George, a former World War One fighter pilot, which told the sobering truth about his situation in the air even before General Brereton arrived. The Japanese would use 1,000 land-based bombers and 1,000 fighters in an air war over the Philippines, George concluded. Given a standard reserve of 25 percent for planes being refitted or maintenanced, defending the Philippines would require no fewer than 1,500 combat aircraft operating from fifty-six airfields.53
In fact, as November drew to a close MacArthur had less than a quarter of that number, even with his 33 B-17s and 100 or so P-40Es, the most advanced fighter in the U.S. Army Air Force, which was no possible match for the Japanese Zero.54 Instead of fifty-six airfields, he had five, with Del Monte slated to be finished by early December.
Then on November 27 came the message from the War Department that MacArthur had been dreading.
“Negotiations with Japan appear to be terminated…hostile action at any moment. If hostilities cannot, repeat cannot, be avoided, The United States desires that Japan commit the first act.”
That was cold comfort for MacArthur and his commanders. Still, he sent the alert on to Wainwright, who was now commander of all American forces in USAFFE after Grunert’s departure earlier in the month, and to his other field commanders. “Under existing circumstances, it is not possible to predict the future actions of the Japanese. Take necessary action to insure immediate readiness for any eventuality.”55
That Sunday the Army-Navy football game was scheduled to be broadcast. Although it was taking place 12,000 miles away, the game was a Manila ritual for the American garrison. Army and navy officers would gather on the lawn in front of the Philippine Division’s barracks in the Intramuros, drinks in hand, and listen to the game, broadcast in the early-morning hours. Whenever Army scored a touchdown, a mule would be ceremoniously escorted around the lawn. When Navy scored, a goat was led around the same circuit.56
That Sunday, MacArthur, a keen footballer, ordered the broadcast canceled. It was a sure sign to everyone, military and civilian, American and Filipino, that something serious was about to happen.
On December 1, the Fourth Marine Regime
nt arrived from Shanghai, and on December 2, another seven hundred marines docked with the President Harrison at Olangapo. They were MacArthur’s final reinforcements, and very welcome ones. But they knew no more about fighting a modern war than his army troops did. In some ways, they were no better prepared for battle against the Japanese than his Filipino trainees. In fact, the only time the marines arriving on the President Harrison had fired a weapon had been during basic training in the States.57
That same day crews working at dawn on Clark Field spotted a lone plane passing high in the sky. It was a Japanese reconnaissance plane, but no one bothered to scramble to try to intercept it. A few days before, there had been some reports of long-range patrol planes spotting Japanese troop transports in the South China Sea, bound for somewhere. Most assumed it was Indochina.58
To any sensible observer, the possibility of war seemed to be growing to a certainty. As tensions mounted, MacArthur grimly went ahead with his preparations. He told Washington that a full alert was in effect for all American installations in the Philippines. All stations were manned on a twenty-four-hour basis; aircraft on airfields were dispersed as much as possible to foil any surprise air attack; and the guard was doubled at all installations. With more than 18,000 Japanese living on Mindanao and elsewhere, MacArthur was taking no chances.
He had also ordered General Brereton to increase daily and nightly reconnaissance flights. On December 4 a fighter patrol encountered Japanese planes fifty miles out at sea, but the Japanese pilots turned back as the Americans approached. MacArthur was also conducting regular radar sweeps for unidentified aircraft. But he had only one radar set, at Iba Field, eighty-five miles northwest of Manila, and the only communication with headquarters was by landline telephone.
Then, on December 5, MacArthur had an unscheduled visitor. It was British admiral Sir Tom Phillips, on his way to assume command of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, which would now headline the British naval squadron based in Singapore. Great Britain was as unprepared for a war in the Far East as America was; with London’s attention firmly focused on the war with Germany, even less so. The hope was that the arrival of Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse, would make the Japanese think twice about starting a conflict with the British Empire, scattered and undermanned though its forces were.
Phillips found MacArthur in a grim but cautiously optimistic mood. On the basis of Washington’s warnings, he had now drastically telescoped his timetable for a Japanese attack. “General MacArthur thought the attack would come sometime after January 1,” Phillips told reporters after the meeting. Phillips’s meeting with Hart also went well. He explained that his ships were increasing their activity at sea, to be on lookout for any approaching Japanese vessels, and that “he was optimistic about the striking power of his subs”—all seventeen of them. They all made preliminary plans to coordinate British and American naval operations in defending the Malay Barrier, once war came.
They never got the chance. One week later Phillips would be dead, while his great battleship and the Repulse lay at the bottom of the ocean—even as the mighty British Empire in Asia teetered on the brink of collapse.
—
As for the Philippines, everything now depended on how fast the Americans could detect the first Japanese move. The radar set at Iba kept picking up unidentified craft off the coast of Luzon appearing as dots on the screen, but they kept disappearing. Back at Clark, Colonel Harold George solved the mystery.
“It’s my guess they’re getting their range data established,” he said, “possibly a rendezvous point from Formosa.” When the dots didn’t appear the next day, “they’ve got all they need now,” George remarked sourly. “The next time they won’t play. They’ll come in without knocking.”59
Fortunately, MacArthur had on hand a better resource for detecting a Japanese attack than blips on a radar screen.
—
The War Department had been cracking Japanese naval and diplomatic ciphers as far back as the 1920s. The crucial breakthrough came in 1940 when, eighteen months after Tokyo introduced the machine code-named PURPLE for enciphering diplomatic codes, the army’s Signals Intelligence Service managed to reproduce the same results with a machine of its own.60 The U.S. Army proceeded to build eight duplicate PURPLE machines. Four were kept in Washington, where they carefully monitored the mounting tensions in the Far East by reading the diplomatic cables running back and forth between Tokyo and Washington. Three found their way to London. The navy had a similar machine ensconced in its annex on Corregidor, but MacArthur did not—and he had no direct access to the navy’s.
Still, in the summer of 1941 MacArthur personally requested that Spencer Akin, one of the masterminds of reading encrypted Japanese radio traffic, be sent out as his chief signal officer. Although MacArthur was no cipher expert, then or later, and although Akin himself had not been personally involved in reading PURPLE decrypts, MacArthur soon had his army working round the clock on intercepted radio traffic at a small hut outside the gate at Fort McKinley, which became known as Station 6.61
The presiding genius at Station 6 was Major Joe Sherr. From his arrival in July 1940, he began deciphering Japanese diplomatic codes by hand, which he could do faster than the navy’s PURPLE machine was doing from Corregidor’s Monkey Point. The work became so intense that it began affecting Sherr’s eyesight.62
But it was vital to know what, if anything, might give away a Japanese move in advance. The drawback was that Station 6 had to send the copies made of decrypted messages to the navy signals intelligence people on Corregidor for translation, loading them into a mailbag that went on a PT boat plying the waters between Manila and Corregidor, otherwise known as the Rock, every day. Then followed a three-day delay until the translated version came back across the water, back to Station 6, and then was ready for the officer in charge of G-2, Colonel Willoughby, who edited the information before it landed on MacArthur’s desk.
In retrospect, it was an absurdly, dangerously slow process. But no one in late 1941 had figured out how to coordinate army and navy intelligence gathering, or considered it very important. Then on December 3 or 4—years later, Sherr’s assistant, Second Lieutenant Howard Brown, couldn’t remember which—there was a sharp increase in the Japanese diplomatic traffic that Station 6 was intercepting. Something was clearly up. A message of extraordinary size, to more than three hundred groups, turned up, directed to every Japanese diplomat and consular representative around the world.
The next day, a message came in from the MAGIC office in Washington, the office in charge of the entire PURPLE decryption effort. Watch out for a very short message going to every embassy and consulate, it read, that ends in STOP. If Station 6 personnel met such a message, they were to send the news, marked “urgent,” directly to Washington.
Brown and his fellow decrypters must have looked at one another. They had seen an extraordinarily long message already; now they were to look for an extraordinarily short message—clearly one that would set off the diplomatic time bomb contained in the 300-group cable.
They didn’t have to wait long. On the evening of December 7 around 10:00 P.M. Manila time, Tokyo sent its embassy in Manila just such a message. Then came fifteen copies of the same message to be forwarded along from the embassy’s cable desk to other Japanese embassies and consulates. Then twenty-five, then thirty more copies, arrived, all to be forwarded on from Manila, and all in the same secret code.
What in the world was going on? Sherr rubbed his eyes and set to work decrypting the message. It seemed innocuous enough, something about some officials being moved to new jobs. Certainly nothing worth awakening anyone in MacArthur’s office about—except perhaps for the last coded group. The message ended with the magic word “STOP.”
Sherr dropped his pencil and turned to Lieutenant Brown. They agreed that this had to be some sort of secret code, but for what? Sherr shook his head in frustration. But since this was clearly the message Washington was waiting for,
they sent the news on to MAGIC as ordered. Meanwhile, the decrypted message went out as usual to the navy boys for full translation on Corregidor.63
That night the Station 6 team went to bed exhausted, but feeling uneasy. They didn’t know, but maybe sensed, that by following orders the most important news in the world had just slipped through their fingers—and doomed MacArthur’s command.
CHAPTER 14
RAT IN THE HOUSE
The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: Too late.
—DOUGLAS MACARTHUR TO THEODORE H. WHITE, 1940
It was 3:40 in the morning when the phone rang in MacArthur’s penthouse apartment.
Sutherland was on the other end. “Pearl Harbor’s been attacked,” he said curtly. Sutherland had learned the news from Major Diller, who learned it from a correspondent who learned it from a commercial news broadcast.1 Sutherland added that the U.S. fleet had been caught unawares.
“Pearl Harbor!” MacArthur exploded. “It should have been our strongest point.”
He recovered from the shock long enough to throw on some clothes and tell Jean the news. Then he picked up his mother’s Bible, read a chapter or two, and prayed.2
Minutes later he was ensconced at No. 1 Calle Victoria, surrounded by his staff. Sutherland was still on the phone, demanding more news on what was happening in Hawaii. Admiral Hart was wringing his hands nearby, warning MacArthur that he needed to get his ships out of the way in case there was a similar attack on the Philippines.
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