As for Roosevelt, few could remember him being so furious. “We can’t do this at all,” he raged, slamming his hand on his desk with emphasis as Stimson and Marshall sat stone-faced in his office. There would be no declaration of neutrality, no accommodation with Japan, and no pullout of American troops. He ordered Marshall and Stimson to prepare a draft statement to that effect, for both MacArthur and Quezon.
“American forces will continue to keep our flag flying in the Philippines,” it read, “as long as there remains any possibility of resistance. I have made these decisions in complete understanding of your military estimate that accompanied President Quezon’s message to me. The duty and necessity of resisting Japanese aggression to the last transcends in importance any other obligation now facing us in the Philippines.”
Stimson was deeply impressed by FDR’s resolution, as was Marshall, who said later that day “I decided he was a great man.”31 Quezon’s immediate reaction, however, when Roosevelt’s reply arrived on February 10, was blind fury.
“Who is in a better position, Roosevelt or myself, to judge what is best for my people?” He kept saying, and threatened to resign. MacArthur let him rant. He knew Quezon would calm down and change his mind (in twenty-four hours, he did).
But that still left the fact that Washington had no strategy for the Philippines, except to let the mission die. There were no plans for relief, no plans for a countermove, no plans for anything beyond trying to send an occasional ship or sub through the ever-tightening Japanese blockade. And at last, in the final part of his message to MacArthur, Roosevelt made that clear.
—
The last paragraph from Roosevelt read, “I therefore give you this most difficult mission in full understanding of the desperate nature to which you may shortly be reduced. It is mandatory…that the American determination and indomitable will to win carries down to the last unit….The service that you and the American members of your command can render to your country in the titanic struggle now developing is beyond all possibility of appraisement.”32
As MacArthur read the cable standing in front of his desk, the full import hit home. So that was it. He and his command were to die fighting. His reply was immediate:
“I have not the slightest intention in the world of surrendering or capitulating the Filipino forces under my command. I intend to fight to destruction on Bataan and then do the same on Corregidor.”
He certainly was personally prepared for a last stand. “They will never take me alive,” he told Huff matter-of-factly. Jean felt the same. Her refusal to leave when George Marshall on February 2 suggested she could be taken away by submarine, signaled that. “We drink of the same cup,” she reportedly told MacArthur. “We three are one.”33 34
For MacArthur himself, there would be no surrender and no retreat. He told two reporters who were about to leave Corregidor, the AP’s Clark Lee and Life photographer Melville Jacoby, “if we don’t get reinforcements, the end here will be brutal and bloody”—which also included himself.35 He had sent a message to General Marshall on January 23 that was a kind of last will and testament. It paid tribute to his troops on Bataan—“no troops have ever done so much with so little”—and went on to say that “in case of my death” he was naming Richard Sutherland as his successor in command of USAFFE. “Of all my general officers,” he wrote, “Dick has the most comprehensive view of the situation,” and would be the one most likely to prevent an overall collapse.36
MacArthur had once told Francis Sayre, who had complimented him on his incredible bravery during the air raids, “death will take me only at the ordained time.” Now as the second week of February began, he was ready to meet that moment on Corregidor.
But those back in Washington had other plans.
—
The reason had nothing to do with the Philippines, nor the overall American strategy in Asia. It had a lot to do with what MacArthur, and a handful of reporters on Corregidor, were saying about what was happening out there.
After three months of uninterrupted bad news, Americans were looking for a hero. In the cold late winter of 1942, they found him in Douglas MacArthur. Official dispatches from Corregidor, many of them written by MacArthur himself, had created a military and political drama in which he was single-handedly defying the entire might of the Japanese empire—and he alone of the opponents the Japanese had faced was getting the better of them.
“When the hordes of the north swept down on the south like wolves the legend of Japanese military superiority had preceded them,” read one dispatch. “The initial successes of the enemy seemed to bear this out but the legend is now shattered. The superiority of the Japanese military machine has been reduced in the crucible of war. Filipinos and Americans shoulder to shoulder and greatly outnumbered have stopped and thrown back the Japanese infantry. The Japanese soldier emerges from the shattered legend as a man with feet of clay.”37
Another went out on Roosevelt’s birthday:
“Today January 30, your birth anniversary, smoke begrimed men covered with the murk of battle, rise from the foxholes of Bataan and the batteries of Corregidor, to pray fervently that God may bless immeasurably the President of the United States.”38
They were masterpieces of verbal pyrotechnics, combining a strong dose of poetic license—or, one might say, heroic license—with artistic ego. Of the 142 official communiqués sent from the Philippines from the start of the war until early April, 109 mentioned only one name, that of General Douglas MacArthur.39
Americans soon got the message. There was one American standing foursquare against the Japanese hordes despite the odds, and the embattled men on Bataan were both his instrument of resistance and the nation’s trust.
Already by the end of January 1942 the press was regularly comparing the defense of Bataan to that of Valley Forge and Yorktown, and MacArthur to America’s finest soldiers. On his birthday, January 26, the stream of praise swelled to a flood.
The front page of the Washington Post paid tribute “to an American soldier who spent his sixty-second birthday shaming the prophets of disaster…there was no way yet for millions of hungry Americans to tell Gen. MacArthur fighting his last ditch fight in the bamboo jungles of Bataan of the hope and pride he has fanned to flame in their hearts…[and] strengthened the will of every man and woman and child back home.”40
The Baltimore Sun enthused, “General MacArthur is not only a professional soldier. He is something in the nature of a military genius.”41 The Associated Press dubbed his fortress at Corregidor “MacArthur’s Gibraltar.” The New York Herald Tribune devoted half a page to photos emblazoning his military career. The Philadelphia Record started serializing MacArthur’s life, and proclaimed that he had celebrated his sixty-second birthday “by proving anew that he is one of the greatest fighting generals of this war or any other war.”
On Capitol Hill, Representative Lee O’Daniel found time to suggest that Luzon be renamed MacArthur Island, while another congressman wanted the TVA’s Douglas Dam to be renamed MacArthur Dam. Still another pushed for him to be given the Congressional Medal of Honor, while Senator Scott Thomas of Utah declared, “Seldom in all history has a military leader faced such insuperable odds. Never has a commander of his troops met such a situation with greater and cooler courage, never with more resourcefulness of brilliant action.”42
Seventy years on, it’s easy to scoff at this histrionic, even hysterical praise—and to frown at the bulletins MacArthur saw fit to fire off across the Pacific to his fellow Americans. It’s true that like Napoleon’s in an earlier age, they were often inaccurate, like the one describing the sinking of the battleship Haruna by Medal of Honor winner Clark, when the Haruna wasn’t even in the theater. Sometimes they were deliberately incorrect, like the claim about being “greatly outnumbered,” when it was Homma and the Japanese who had the smaller, although better-equipped and more experienced force. One bulletin in particular that has come under harsh condemnation from later biographers reported
that General Homma, despairing of victory, had actually committed hara-kiri in Mac’s old suite at the Manila Hotel, and described the general’s funeral rites the next day.
Yet the fact was that MacArthur did get a report of Homma’s suicide, and although it was untrue, it was not deliberate misrepresentation. “I hope he didn’t mess up my carpet,” was MacArthur’s comment when he first heard the story.43
Then, when the USAFFE’s last remaining quartet of P-40s managed to launch an attack with some 500-pound bombs on Japanese craft in Subic Bay and hit some ships, MacArthur managed to turn the incident into a magnificent air-to-sea battle in which seven Japanese transports were sunk, while “innumerable motor launches and other small craft, and thousands of Japanese soldiers had gone down in [Subic’s] waters.” He also reported that “we lost no planes by enemy action,” even though official reports showed one P-40 shot down and no record of any enemy vessels sunk.44 No wonder the Los Angeles Times, among other papers, kept reporting that “MacArthur’s stand in Philippines, judged by every military standard, has inflicted grievous defeat on attackers who have failed to reach objectives, suffered heavy losses, and are now dangerously behind schedule.”45
What was MacArthur thinking? There was purpose behind his license with the truth, and his self-dramatization of the ordeal, that went beyond pure ego. It was to convince the American people, and Washington, that their stand in the Philippines was worth supporting, and worthy of whatever help the United States could send. He also knew that the Japanese were listening—and that the more convinced they were that American and Filipino morale was high and their spirit indomitable, the less likely they were to launch the all-out attack that would undoubtedly spell the end of the command.
“The distillate of forty years—Filamerican,” began a MacArthur communiqué on March 6. “The word was coined in the thick of battle. Filamerican troops, Filamerican spirit. Filamerican grit! This perfect union of two races began early in this century….But the fire of war brought forth the perfect and pure understanding.”46
By then, however, it was all too late.
—
The soldiers on Bataan were not feeling the Filamerican spirit in the first week of March.
Dugout Doug MacArthur lies ashaking on the Rock
Safe from all the bombers and from any sudden shock
Dugout Doug is eating the best food on Bataan
And his troops go starving on.
Dugout Doug’s not timid, he’s just cautious, not afraid
He’s protecting carefully the stars that Franklin made
Four-star generals are as rare as good food on Bataan
And his troops go starving on.
Colonel Ernest B. Miller, one of Wainwright’s tank commanders, found a copy of this anonymous ditty circulating around his men, and saw them “laughing quite heartily over the verses.”
Chorus: Dugout Doug, come out from hiding
Dugout Doug, come out from hiding
Send to Franklin the glad tidings
That his troops go starving on.
The song stated “with clarity,” Miller remembered, “just what went on in the minds of the men on Bataan” in the grim days of that spring of 1942.47
The attack was scurrilous and unfair, of course; far from hiding, MacArthur was displaying a reckless courage when the Japanese air raids came daily over Corregidor. Far from eating like a king, he ate the same diet as his men. The official army historian of the Bataan campaign, Louis Morton, who was no MacArthur devotee, had to conclude that most defenders who were close to him on Corregidor held him in high esteem, especially the Filipinos. Quezon’s description of him as a “rock of strength” was not far wrong in the minds of everyone who was caught in close proximity with him on that embattled island.
But the men on Bataan felt otherwise. An occasional visit might have made a marginal difference to morale. The sole one, on January 10, was not repeated. MacArthur later claimed that Quezon urged him not to risk his life unnecessarily by going across to Bataan—a strange request, given MacArthur’s reckless performance during air raids on Corregidor. All the same, it was true that slipping across Manila Bay ran the risk of a Japanese destroyer snaring the launch containing the USAFFE commander—or a dive bomber blowing it out of the water. There was also the issue of MacArthur wanting to stay on the Rock in order to keep track of the latest developments in Washington—although again, that was a task his right arm, Richard Sutherland, was more than able to handle.
There may, in fact, have been another reason why MacArthur never went to Bataan after his initial visit: he could not look them in the eye. Having led them to this place and situation, with the certainty that they were doomed and that he was responsible—and that he still had to encourage them to hope for help while knowing in his heart that Washington had written them off—may have been too much for him.
He would never admit to that implicit sense that he, not Washington, had betrayed their trust. But it certainly drove his desire later to liberate the Philippines, and rescue the survivors of Bataan, as the fulfillment of an inner vow. As he admitted to Jean, the memory of their stares that January 10 when he did visit haunted him almost every day for the rest of the war. And it may have been what kept him gazing toward the peninsula during his morning and evening walks, knowing: They are waiting for me there but I cannot bring myself to go.
As for the garrison on Bataan, if they felt bitterness at their desperate situation, they were justified—but it was not in fact Douglas MacArthur who had let them down. He made a convenient target, and the legend of Dugout Doug would linger on, long after his death.
Dugout Doug is ready with his Kris Craft for the final flee
Over bounding billows and the wildly raging sea…
And we’ll continue fighting after Dugout Doug is gone
And still go starving on.
On February 11 MacArthur told Roosevelt he was arranging for Quezon’s evacuation. He let Marshall know that Quezon had refused several times to leave by submarine because he felt too frail and feared the voyage would kill him.48 Sutherland figured it would take six days to make the necessary arrangements.
But before he left, MacArthur had some business to do—and Quezon had a special gift for his old friend.
Two days later, on February 13, MacArthur came down to Lateral Tunnel No. 3 and motioned to Sutherland to join him for a talk “about highly secret matters of policy.” Sutherland listened, then returned to his desk and his yellow pad. He began writing; three and a half hours later he was still at it. When it was done, he handed Paul Rogers a memorandum to type up, which read at the top “Special Executive Order from President Quezon.”
The order was an award of $500,000 to MacArthur for his service to the Philippine Military Mission; as well as $75,000 to Richard Sutherland and $45,000 to Richard Marshall, while Sid Huff found himself richer by $20,000. To Rogers’s surprise, the memo was dated January 1, which implied that the agreement for the payment had been reached beforehand, with implementation to begin when it was time to evacuate.49
No single document from the MacArthur files has caused more controversy than Executive Order #1, since scholar Carol Petillo discovered it in 1978. Many, if not most, have treated it as nothing less than a bribe. As Geoffrey Perret points out, “Most scholars have treated it as a corrupt transaction.”50 MacArthur critic Michael Schaller has taken it to mean that MacArthur was planning to cut and run, and was lining his pockets before he left. One writer has even suggested that MacArthur had blackmailed Quezon into paying up before letting him leave Corregidor.51
MacArthur did nothing to help his case, since he never mentions the incident in his memoirs or in Charles Willoughby’s laudatory biography which MacArthur largely coauthored. That silence isn’t surprising, since accepting the money would have been a technical, albeit clear, violation of the American military code that he had sworn to uphold.
In fact there was nothing secret about the deal at all. Paul Rog
ers even mentioned it in his diary, although he revised the numbers downward, since he had been told not to record MacArthur’s financial affairs.52 And certainly Marshall and Stimson and FDR all knew about it, since no transfer of funds from Philippine treasury certificates to Chase National Bank could take place unless it was authorized by the Treasury Department, which means Roosevelt.
Why did Marshall and the army let it happen? Geoffrey Perret points to a September 1935 letter from the adjutant general to MacArthur giving him complete discretion in how much money he received from the Philippines government, and in what form—all with the permission of the secretary of war.53
It was suggested to Roosevelt in 1937 that he should revoke the authorization, but Roosevelt chose to let it stand. Marshall and Stimson may not have liked the transaction and its conspiratorial overtones, but there was nothing they could do to stop it.
More importantly, why did Quezon do it? Carol Petillo herself supplies the most compelling answer. The gift of money, Quezon believed, would draw MacArthur more closely to him as his advocate, and would serve as a symbol of, rather than a reward for, the bond of loyalty existing between them—and the bond between the Philippines and the United States. A Renaissance monarch like Henry VIII of England or Charles V of Spain would have understood the transaction; Douglas MacArthur, who was something of a Renaissance prince himself, no doubt understood it that way. The notion that somehow he knew he was accepting something dishonorable—even contradictory to his character as an American officer—simply flies in the face of who MacArthur was or, even more important, who he thought himself to be.
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