Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  That was the question all of them were asking in the inky blackness of the early morning, besides how badly the fleet at Pearl had been hit. Would they be next? MacArthur had spoken by phone to Brigadier General Leonard Gerow in Washington, who told him to expect an air attack soon.3 But when and where? One way to find out would be to send out some air patrols, which meant talking to Lewis Brereton.

  Brereton had had a rough night, and an even rougher morning. He had been attending a birthday party with his fliers until the early hours. In between rounds of drinks Sutherland had informed him that war might be days, even hours, away. He later remembered how Brereton’s face fell at the news, but Brereton had stayed on to party. When he showed up at 1 Calle Victoria, he may have been drunk; accounts differ. He probably still had liquor on his breath. That could be one reason that Sutherland insisted he stay in the outer office while MacArthur talked to Admiral Hart.4

  Alcohol-befogged or not, Brereton was worried, as they all were, but also angry. He wanted to do something. His pilots had been alerted about the same time as Sutherland got the news. They were already in their P-40s with engines running and standing by on their radios.5 Their chief now told Sutherland he wanted to conduct a raid on Japan-occupied Formosa—which was also the location of the airfields that any long-range attack on the Philippines would come from. Here again accounts differ, but Sutherland seems to have given Brereton tentative permission but wanted to confirm the order with MacArthur before anything happened.6 Brereton headed back to Clark to alert his B-17 crews there and at Del Carmen that they would be leading the strike on Formosa.

  Years later Brereton would insist that he kept pressing Sutherland and MacArthur to give him permission to launch an attack. MacArthur would insist with the same vehemence that Brereton never pressed him to do any such thing. When he read a later newspaper account stating that his air chief had approached him with the idea of a preemptive raid on Formosa using his B-29s, MacArthur announced that it was news to him and that he didn’t even see Brereton that day.7

  There is, however, one indisputable fact. Neither MacArthur nor Brereton spoke directly to each other for almost five hours. Instead it was left to Richard Sutherland, who had plenty else to do on that chaotic morning, to communicate the one’s intentions to the other.

  For example, according to Sutherland, Brereton had no clear idea what, if anything, he would be bombing on Formosa. Brereton’s plan was far too vague to present to his chief. “What targets? What airfields?” Sutherland kept asking him. That made him reluctant to press the plan to MacArthur, even after Brereton drove back to 1 Calle Victoria to renew his plea. On the other hand, MacArthur still believed he was under orders from Washington not to take any offensive action until he had been attacked himself.

  “My orders were explicit,” he later told army historian Louis Morton, “not to initiate hostilities against the Japanese,” although it’s difficult to know what the attack on Pearl was except an initiation of hostilities demanding some kind of response from MacArthur. At the same time, orders modifying war plan Rainbow Five had been issued on November 19, 1941, explicitly requiring MacArthur to fly air raids on Japanese targets within range of his Philippine airfields in such an event. Yet if MacArthur had been left free to disregard Rainbow Five, he might have decided to disregard this order, as well.8

  Or did MacArthur believe not inititating hostilities referred to the Philippine area? Did he believe he was supposed to wait until the Japanese struck at forces under his direct command before taking action? In retrospect, this seems to have been how MacArthur interpreted his orders from Washington. Either way, Sutherland seems to have conveyed to General Brereton a message of caution in a phone call at 8:30 A.M. And it was a furious Brereton who turned to his staff, who were working out the details of the Formosa raid, to say, “No, we can’t attack until fired upon”—words that tend to reinforce MacArthur’s account of the constraints he felt he was under at the time.9

  It was a confusing moment, in the midst of greater confusion. While MacArthur claimed years later in his memoirs that “we were as ready as we possibly could be” on December 7, when “every disposition had been made, every man, gun, and plane was on alert”—there can be no doubt that the proverbial fog of war was settling thickly over 1 Calle Victoria. Eyewitnesses later stated that MacArthur “looked grey, drawn and exhausted.”10 He had no reliable information of what the enemy was doing and no reliable communications with his forces in the field, including at Clark Field, and they had none with one another—the phone system kept breaking down, due to either sabotage or poor maintenance or both. Radio communication was intermittent at best.

  Perhaps for the first and only time in his life, MacArthur was uncertain what to do next. Above all, he had no adequate plan for what to do until Japanese intentions were made plain. That uncertainty may have sprung from the belief, already mentioned, that Washington wanted him to wait until the Japanese struck the first blow before retaliating. That in turn fed absurd rumors later that MacArthur may have secretly hoped that the Philippines could remain neutral in a U.S.-Japanese conflict, and that the Japanese would pass them all by if he did nothing.

  The only thing that is plain is that he and Sutherland decided it was better to sit tight until they had more accurate information on which to act. MacArthur tells us in his memoirs that he was still unclear how badly the United States had been damaged at Pearl Harbor, or indeed even whether it was the Japanese, not the navy, who had come out the worse for the attack.11

  Brereton, at least, was under no such illusions. He had received a phone call from Hap Arnold in Washington. The head of the Army Air Forces told him in no uncertain terms that the air force on the ground in Hawaii was all but wiped out. Make sure your fighters and bombers are in the air, he warned the head of the Fifth Air Force, or dispersed on the ground.

  At 8:50 (Brereton later claimed) he called Sutherland back, still asking for permission to attack. Sutherland still told him, “Hold off for present.”12

  Only minutes later, something happened that got everyone’s attention. A radio bulletin came in saying that Japanese bombers had been spotted over Lingayen Gulf, headed for the Philippines. It was that report that spurred Brereton into taking unilateral action. He sent a radio message to Clark Field ordering the planes and bombers there into the air, so that they would not be caught in any air raid. At ten Brereton put in another call to HQ, in which, he said later, he warned Sutherland that “if Clark Field were attacked successfully we would be unable to operate offensively with the bombers.”13

  Sutherland, meanwhile, had passed the Lingayen Gulf report on to Washington, and on to MacArthur. Then he got back to Brereton with the first suggestion from 1 Calle Victoria that the Formosa plan might be in the works. Get some planes aloft to take aerial reconnaissance photos of Formosa, Sutherland said, so we can find worthwhile targets.

  But it was already too late.

  —

  The men at Clark Field weren’t the only ones listening in on Brereton’s radio message to his pilots ordering them to take to the air. So were the Japanese on Formosa.

  Five hundred Japanese bombers and fighters had been poised to attack the Philippines since before dawn. A dense fog kept most of them on the ground for nearly six hours, while they heard reports that the strike on Pearl Harbor had been a success (shrill shouts of “Banzai!” echoed across the airfields) and that planes assigned to hit northern Luzon had taken off from bases farther east that were clear of fog.

  Then came the intercepted message, which the Japanese could interpret only one way: B-17s were headed to attack them. Hitting Clark was now an urgent priority for the Japanese air force. Finally after another hour of tense waiting, the fog slowly lifted. Still, it wasn’t until 10:45 that morning that the fifty-three bombers and forty-five Zero fighters, led by future fighter superstar Saburo Sakai, finally took off and set their course for Clark Field.14

  At 11:00 MacArthur finally telephoned Brereton, and t
he two men spoke for the first time. Brereton told the commander of USAFFE that he had three planes headed for Formosa to reconnoiter, and that the rest of his bombers were already in the air. MacArthur approved, but added that he should wait for those reports on Formosa before launching his attack.15

  They were going to need it. Information and charts were poor, certainly without the bomb target maps and bomb release lines for speed and altitudes that European air forces like the Luftwaffe, or even the RAF, had.

  But Brereton’s report that his planes were in the air was mistaken. In fact, after circling Clark for almost two hours, and with no hostiles in sight, the B-17s began to land back at the field, along with the P-40s.16

  By now the men at Clark had learned that the first wave of Japanese bombers spotted by Americans had struck at Tuguegarao and Baguio, but then turned north and headed for home. As the news spread, so did relief that Clark had been spared. At 10:30 the all-clear had sounded. Sometime between 11:00 and 11:30 most of Clark’s P-40s and B-17s were back on the ground.

  Their relief and lack of caution were unjustified. At almost the same time when planes were landing back at Clark, the American commander of the Eleventh Infantry Regiment, on patrol near Iba, heard aircraft engines. Looking up, he and his men counted no fewer than eighty-four Japanese bombers passing overhead. Minutes later the radar installation at Iba sent out a frantic alert to all Air Corps bases that a large formation of planes was coming in from the China Sea. They were vectored in the direction of Clark Field.

  It was the last communication Iba ever made. Bombers at 28,000 feet unloaded a wave of destruction that knocked out the only radar installation in the Philippines and destroyed every building.

  The loss of Iba left Clark Field—and MacArthur—sitting blind. The only other source of information was the Philippine phone system, which wasn’t very reliable in the best of times. At noon, it went stone dead, either from sabotage or from technical problems—to this day, no one knows which.17

  At 11:30 the air raid Klaxons at Nichols Field south of Manila began to sound. The Twentieth Air Group stationed there had picked up word of an incoming second Japanese strike and guessed (correctly) that it might be headed for Clark. Nichols scrambled its three flights of P-40s, in hopes of intercepting the attack.

  One of those scrambling was the newly arrived Lieutenant Samuel Grashio. “After the initial alert [that morning], we cut our engines, got out of the cockpits and sat under the wings and waited as seemingly endless hours dragged by,” he remembered later. Then at 11:30 came an alert to go into action, “though just what action was unspecified.”18

  It wasn’t until 11:50—twenty minutes after the initial warning—that the P-40s were actually in the air, and two had to turn back due to oil leaks that covered their windshields so thickly they couldn’t see. Grashio and his three remaining planes lost track of the other fighters. They finally radioed down to Nichols to say they were going to pass over Clark Field.

  At the same time Nichols sent a final warning to Clark by teletype and by radio about an impending attack. Neither message ever made it.19

  Back in Manila, MacArthur rang up Sutherland at almost that same time, 11:50. Check with Brereton, he ordered, concerning reports about Japanese air operations during the past two hours. On the phone General Brereton confirmed that there had been two groups of Japanese bombers seen over Luzon, but he had no other information. The vital point was, however, that Japan had attacked the Philippines. Brereton could now go ahead with the attack on Formosa, which, he told Sutherland, would go out “this afternoon.”20

  The clock in MacArthur’s office struck twelve noon. He may have glanced at his watch as well. This was the hour designated for Brereton’s photo recon mission to take off. But something happened to delay the flight: the assigned B-17 crews realized they had the wrong cameras. So there had been a long wait for the right cameras to be flown over from Del Monte field.

  Despite the tension, no one seemed to be in much of a hurry. After all, the last reports they had received indicated that the most recent Japanese air operations were passing them by. Soon everyone at Clark stopped work to grab a quick lunch, while Brereton’s staff went over their final plans for the raid on Formosa.

  At 12:20, Lieutenant Gashio and his three companions were directly over Clark Field. They saw nothing amiss, so they decided to set off to the west for a further look.

  Finally at 12:30, the right cameras arrived and the photo recon planes were revving their engines as they waited for the signal to start. In preparation for providing escort, the Twentieth Pursuit Squadron’s P-40s were already taxiing to the runway, their propellers whirring and pilots making their last-minute check before takeoff. Bombs, meanwhile, were being loaded on the sixteen other B-17s.

  At 12:31, one of the B-17 pilots, Lieutenant Fred Crimmins, had just pulled loose a .50-caliber machine gun that needed replacing and was carrying it over to the hangar when one of his mechanics said wide-eyed that a radio report said Japanese bombers were right overhead. Crimmins barely had time to hand the machine gun over before the Klaxon sounded.

  By then the first bombs were falling.

  At 12:32, Grashio’s radio suddenly crackled: “All P-40s return to Clark Field. Enemy bombers overhead!” It was Clark’s tower operator, and he sounded as if he were in pain. Grashio could hear the sound of bombs exploding back where Clark was.21

  Two tight vee formations of Japanese bombers led by Saburo Sakai’s fighters dropped their bombs on Clark in a wide pattern, setting up destruction all across the field. The B-17s on the runways were soon smashed and burning. Parked P-40s exploded, sending propellers and parts of wings high into the air, and every building was hit. Clark’s antiaircraft batteries belatedly blazed away, hoping to hit some of the bombers, but their ammunition was old and defective. Only one in every six 3-inch shells actually fired.22 Four of Clark’s nine P-40s managed to get into the air in the confusion. The others, and their pilots, were blown to bits.

  Lieutenant Grashio, meanwhile, who had banked back and was now passing overhead, was astounded at the inferno raging below him. “The whole area was boiling with smoke, dust, and flames,” he would remember, “in the middle a huge column of greasy black smoke from the top of which red flames billowed intermittently.” Grashio tried to attack some Japanese dive bombers strafing the field, but he was jumped by two Zeros and had to dive and veer away without firing a shot.

  In just forty-five minutes it was all over. Not a single plane that had been on the field when the attack started could fly. Craters pocked every runway, and fires consumed hangars and buildings. Fifty-five men were dead; more than one hundred were wounded. Half of the B-17s, the ones MacArthur had ordered sent to Del Monte, were still intact. The P-40s of Twentieth Pursuit that had managed to take off shot down three or four Japanese fighters, and even the obsolete P-35s of Thirty-fourth Pursuit based at Del Carmen caught up with the fleeing Japanese and downed three without a single loss.23

  But otherwise, literally in one fell swoop, MacArthur’s air force had been cut in half.

  The recriminations began almost at once, and they continue to this day. Many still blame MacArthur for the debacle at Clark. Many then and later blamed Brereton, who, evidence suggests, may have surreptitiously altered the Clark daily log in order to suggest that he was more ready to take off at MacArthur’s orders than he actually was.24 And certainly almost everyone blames Sutherland for not making MacArthur’s orders clearer to Brereton and not making Brereton’s actions clearer to MacArthur.

  All the same, once the historian takes into account Brereton’s woeful lack of preparation for a sudden Japanese attack, and his going against MacArthur’s express orders, and Sutherland’s failures in coordinating command and control, and MacArthur’s failure to keep better track of what was happening to his air force in those confusing but crucial hours on December 8—even after that exercise in retrospective judgment, it’s hard not to conclude that the real problem was a comb
ination of bad luck and a broken communication system, including communication among the various Far East Air Force bases that might have gotten the news to Clark in time that the Japanese were coming.

  For those eager to point the finger of blame at MacArthur, however—and for those just as eager to deflect the blame in another direction—the events of December 8 remain a matter of bitter controversy. Yet it was MacArthur who said the history of failure in war could be summed up in two words, “Too late.” It may be the only suitable epitaph for the men who died in those forty-five minutes of shock and awe on Clark Field and during the rest of MacArthur’s campaign in the Philippines.

  MacArthur, meanwhile, received the devastating news by phone, even as Jean and little Arthur were watching the smoke rising up from Clark from their balcony at the Manila Hotel. For five minutes MacArthur berated his air chief for not moving out the B-17s as he had ordered (allowing them to land that morning all at once was also a blunder, one that MacArthur didn’t mention).

  He slammed down the phone, still in a rage. When he looked up, a grim-faced Sutherland was standing before him.

  He told the general that a Lieutenant Howard Brown of the Signal Corps was here with a top-secret message. MacArthur agreed to see him.

  Brown saluted and handed him an envelope, which he immediately tore open. It was a secret decrypt from Washington sent the day before, informing MacArthur that Japan was now at war with the United States and Great Britain.

  As MacArthur glared in disbelief, an abashed Lieutenant Brown explained it had taken hours to get this message from the Navy decrypt office to USAFFE GHQ because of the long, slow bureaucratic trail involved. MacArthur took the cruel trick that fate had played without much comment.