Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  For MacArthur the lifetime soldier, someone who understood the full value of promotions, awards, and the other glittering measures of success, it was a powerful moment. His was a rank that only three men in American history—Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan—had ever held, and one even that General Pershing had never attained. It was certainly one his father could never have imagined reaching.

  He sent a telegram to Jean. It made no mention of his promotion, however; it was instead a greeting to be delivered on December 27, her birthday. “Many happy returns of the day,” it read. “The entire command joins me in saluting our staunchest soldier.”20

  The fact was that “the old thrill of promotions and decoration was gone,” he confessed many years later. “Perhaps I had heard too often the death wail of mangled men—or perhaps the years were beginning to take their toll.” Perhaps, also, there was the apprehension of what was to come.

  Because if MacArthur knew the Leyte campaign was over, so did his opponent, General Yamashita. He sternly sent a message to his commander on Leyte on the 17th, warning that there would be no more reinforcements. Yamashita had already spent nearly 100,000 men defending the island—he would have said “wasted”—including his elite First Division and the Sixteenth Division—the same one that had taken the Philippines from MacArthur in 1942.

  But he still had 275,000 left for the defense of Luzon. They were undersupplied and underfed, and deeply hated by the local population, who would greet the Americans as liberators. They also had no more naval protection and, thanks to Halsey’s incessant pounding, barely 150 planes still operational on the entire island.21

  But Yamashita also had a plan, one that he had devised and would personally supervise, unlike the one on Leyte. The Japanese cause in the Philippines might be doomed, but General Yamashita was sure he could make the American retaking of Luzon a living hell.

  —

  During the last two weeks of December 1944, meanwhile, MacArthur had other things on his mind besides the Philippines.

  MacArthur revealed this to a group of reporters who gathered on the porch at Price House a few days before his promotion to general of the army. He began talking about his vision of what would happen after Japan was finally defeated, of his fears about the deteriorating situation in the China theater (the Japanese had launched a fresh offensive in eastern China, threatening both the Chinese Nationalist capital at Chungking and Kunming, the terminus of China’s Ledo Road), and the failure of leadership in Washington to recognize the importance of the Pacific theater.

  “The history of the world for the next thousand years will be written in the Pacific,” he intoned.

  Japan had understood that, he explained, when she launched her Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere before the war, and saw that if she could control China, she could control the entire future of Asia. Stalin also understood it, and MacArthur predicted that the Communist dictator would soon try to reverse the losses that Russia had suffered during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Russia still wanted a warm-water port facing onto the Pacific, as well as the mineral-rich lands bordering Manchuria. If Chiang Kai-shek collapsed, MacArthur warned, then China’s future as a free nation would be at risk—and the real winner would be not Japan but Stalin’s Soviet Union.22

  The only power that could prevent that outcome, MacArthur believed, was the United States. The attack on Pearl Harbor had roused his country from its lethargy and was forcing her realize her destiny in Asia—the destiny (although he did not say so) that his father had foreseen more than sixty years before. The first part of that destiny was protecting the Pacific world from the tyranny of Japan; the second would be protecting it from the tyranny of Russia—again, much as his father had predicted.

  The future shape of the balance of power was clear in MacArthur’s mind at least. The struggle against Japan was now reaching its climax. When it was over, the struggle against Russia would begin.

  Five years later MacArthur’s words to those reporters would seem prescient almost beyond imagining.

  —

  On Christmas Eve, soon after his explosion with Sutherland, MacArthur was keeping his lonely vigil on his veranda when a small cluster of GIs appeared outside the hedge that bordered the porch. They began to sing, softly at first, then gathering volume as they sang a series of traditional Christmas carols.

  “We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!”

  Suddenly there was the sound of an airplane engine. Searchlights went up and the singing stopped. The light caught a Japanese plane swooping in on an attack before one short burst of antiaircraft fire sent it crashing into the jungle in flames.

  The soldiers cheered. MacArthur stared out in the darkness, very pleased.

  “Thank you, gentlemen, for your singing,” he said, and resumed his pacing.23

  What was he thinking about? Possibly his birthday greeting to Jean.

  This was the longest they had been separated since their marriage, almost three months. They had left Corregidor together two years and eight months ago; now he would be returning with an army of more than 200,000 men and a fleet of 850 ships—the biggest ever assembled.

  But in his mind, he was returning alone. He would always be alone until Jean was again with him in Manila, and until the nightmare of the past three years was finally past and the Philippines was finally free—and he was finally free of the shame that went with it.

  —

  Sergeant Vincent Powers was attached to the chief regulating officer’s section at GHQ, and had become used to the sight of MacArthur at Price House.

  “The General could be seen at all hours walking up and down the veranda, smoking his elongated corncob pipe, strolling alone, or with an aide or conferring with high-ranking military leaders. When he walked alone, every few steps, he would look out into the clear air, his sun glasses hiding his deep thoughts. Then there were times we would see him racing back and forth, an aide at his side, talking rapidly, gesticulating with quick nods, sucking his pipe with deep, long draughts. Suddenly he would take the pipe in hand, ask a rapid, short question, jam the stem back between his teeth as he listened to the answer.”

  Powers remembered, “[W]e grew to know his mood from the way he walked, how he smoked and whom [sic] his pacing companions were. Watching him, some claimed they could surmise the turn of history.”24

  On the evening of January 3, 1945, Powers and his fellow clerks were indeed watching history.

  “We went to the office to gather final odds and ends,” Powers remembered. It was the night before the armada for the Luzon invasion was to sail; GHQ personnel at Tacloban were going too, since Mac was intent on establishing SWPA’s presence as soon as the beachhead was secured.

  That night they noticed, to their surprise, that the veranda was deserted. It wasn’t until after 10:00 P.M. that they saw that “there on the porch was the same familiar figure pacing silently.”

  Tonight his demeanor was different, Powers remembered. “He wasn’t smoking. His famous Bataan hat was missing. With head bared, he walked, hands clasped behind. The pace was measured, reverently slow. He was alone.”

  They suddenly felt self-conscious, and hurried on. They ran into the general’s guard coming off duty, who offered to join them on the way home.

  They had walked half a block when the guard turned and said, “You know what he was doing as we left? He was conferring with God. On the eve of all major operations, the moment he is notified that the assault troops have sailed, he…” His voice trailed off.25

  The clerks and guards went home to catch a few hours’ sleep, but the solitary figure continued to pace.

  The landing on Luzon was about to happen.

  The plan, he knew, was a good one. He and Krueger and their staffs had spent weeks hammering it out. It involved putting four infantry divisions on two stretches of beach on Lingayen Gulf on Luzon’s west coast—the same Lingayen Gulf where General Homma’s
Japanese troops had landed almost exactly three years earlier. This was almost inevitable. That stretch of water gave the best access to the Sixth Army’s real objective, the central plains leading southward to Manila and Manila Bay, and access to the island’s best railroad and road network.26 Manila remained MacArthur’s ultimate objective, and not just because it was the Philippines’ capital or because it had been his home for ten years. Manila would also have to be the principal port for unloading American supplies and reinforcements, as the campaign shifted northward and eastward, into the Sierra Madre and the steep ridges of the Cagayan River valley. Mac’s newest staff officer, Courtney Whitney, in charge of gathering intelligence from Filipino guerrillas since 1943, had given him a grim picture of Japanese strength in the forbidding terrain of northern Luzon.27 MacArthur knew it would be a hard and bitter fight clearing the island, but it would be much harder until Manila was back in his hands.

  He also knew that the thrust south from Lingayen Gulf ran its own risks. Krueger had told him he fully expected a sharp Japanese counterattack on his left, and planned for a strong armored group to anchor that left flank as the push for Manila got under way. The beach at Lingayen was also too narrow to allow for a major buildup. Once all of Krueger’s army was landed—more than 200,000 men in six divisions, including the First Cavalry, with another division, the Twenty-fifth, in reserve—it would have no more than a week or two before it started to run short on supplies and ammunition. They had to get to Manila first, MacArthur was thinking, as he paced in the darkness.

  Everything he had done, everything he had planned, in the past two and a half years had come down to this. He had thought about every option and about everything that could go wrong. They had launched diversionary bombing runs on targets in southern Luzon; photo recon missions over the Batangas-Tayabas region south of Manila; and even sent transport planes to fake an airborne assault: everything to convince Yamashita and the Japanese that the landing would be anywhere but Lingayen Gulf.28 And once they did land, MacArthur had to wonder, what would Yamashita do then?

  His usually reliable ULTRA intelligence did tell him the Japanese were expecting a landing at Lingayen Gulf, but left him in the dark as to Yamashita’s own plans.29 If the Japanese commander decided to counterattack at once, he could tie up the Americans in the rice paddies and swamps that led off from the Lingayen beaches, costing them lives and time. Or he could withdraw his forces up into the mountains, or try to meet the Americans head-on in the central plains.

  One terrible thought came to him: What if the Japanese decided to make their final stand in the city of Manila itself, and tried to turn the capital into a Stalingrad-style graveyard for the Americans?

  No one on his staff had any good answers if that happened, although MacArthur himself believed Yamashita would abandon the city and take to the mountains for a final defense. Other staffers were still thinking the Luzon invasion should wait until they had more troops or more armor or until they had complete air supremacy, but MacArthur had pointed out that they could wait until they were stronger, but the Japanese would get stronger too.

  “The time to attack is now,” he had told them. “The largest pot I ever lost in a poker game was when I held four kings in my hands.”30

  Now in the early-morning darkness, a glance at his watch told him that he would be embarking in a couple of hours. There remained one other imponderable: Could the kamikazes on their own bring the entire invasion to a halt? In fact, even as he was preparing himself for battle, Japanese suicide pilots were making life for the Seventh Fleet a fiery nightmare.

  —

  The combat formations of the invasion fleet had set off for Lingayen starting on January 2, and they became a kamikaze magnet almost from the first day.

  It was a fleet of 160 battleships, cruisers, escort carriers, destroyer transports, and minesweepers under the command of one of Kinkaid’s most redoubtable lieutenants, Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, and it was that same afternoon that a pair of Japanese bombers picked out the minesweepers for attack but missed. The first kamikazes turned up at first light on the 3rd, when one hit an oil tanker but fortunately did little damage. Another tried to hit one of Oldendorf’s baby flattops but was shot down and crashed a couple of hundred yards short.31

  Their aim got better the next day. One crashed into the carrier Ommaney Bay and sank her, and on the 5th they managed to smash into two cruisers, another carrier, a destroyer escort, and a landing craft.32 On the 6th as the force entered Lingayen Gulf no fewer than sixteen of Oldendorf’s ships took kamikaze hits. One was the battleship New Mexico, where Winston Churchill’s British liaison, Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden, was killed as he descended a ladder from the navigation bridge. MacArthur and Lumsden had become good friends, and he wrote a brief personal note to Churchill, “His general service and usefulness to the Allied cause was beyond praise….My own personal sorrow is inexplicable.”

  By the 6th, MacArthur himself was under way in the cruiser Boise (the Nashville was still under repairs from an earlier kamikaze strike) along with the amphibious portion of the invasion fleet. That was, as always, under the command of the redoubtable Daniel Barbey, on board his own flagship, the Blue Ridge. The kamikazes and other Japanese planes swarmed in, but in fewer numbers. One crashed into a destroyer, and another dropped two bombs on the Boise, but both missed.

  “Again and again,” MacArthur remembered later as he stood and watched beside an antiaircraft battery near the Boise’s quarterdeck, “with vicious plunge and whirling propellers, enemy planes would dive, only to be cut down in the blazing barrage of antiaircraft fire as every ship opened in a deafening blast of flak.”33

  Then came a new threat. “Midget submarines, looking for all the world like dripping black whales,” suddenly appeared in the water, carrying out their suicide missions with torpedoes instead of bombs. One fired two torpedoes at the Boise, but MacArthur “calmly watched the action” as the cruiser turned sharply away from the white wakes in the water. Then a destroyer came along on the port side and rammed the submarine, sending it and its crew to the bottom.

  The next day, even as the kamikaze attacks were reaching their climax, wrecking two escort carriers, a transport, and an LST, no one could convince MacArthur to leave his post on deck. Besides, the first sight of land appeared off the starboard bow. Suddenly “there they were, gleaming in the sun far off on the horizon—Manila, Corregidor, Marivales, Bataan.”

  All at once the kamikazes were forgotten. “I could not leave the rail,” he wrote later. “One by one the staff drifted away, and I was alone with my memories. At the sight of those never to be forgotten scenes of my family’s past, I felt an indescribable sense of loss, of sorrow, of loneliness, and of solemn consecration.”34

  As night fell, the suicide attacks came to an end. A lone Japanese destroyer tried to slip out of Manila Bay under the cover of darkness and immediately met a hail of gunfire. On the Boise MacArthur could see the stabs of light and the tremendous explosion when one of the destroyer’s magazines was hit and the ship went down in a fierce fireworks display.35

  First light on January 9 revealed a vast panorama unfolding in Lingayen Bay. Almost a thousand ships lined the gulf from every horizon, the biggest armada in the history of the Pacific. As if on cue, the first kamikazes appeared, but far fewer than on the days before. They still managed to wreak destruction on another battleship and a pair of cruisers (for one, the Australia, it was the fifth kamikaze hit since leaving Leyte).36 But otherwise the rows of LSTs and landing craft—2,500 in all—collected their GIs and their equipment, as a ferocious naval bombardment was unleashed on the landing beaches, including thousands of rockets fired from LCMs.

  At 9:00 the assault craft were off. One of them contained Lieutenant Stanley Frankel of the Thirty-seventh Division, a nearsighted native of Dayton, Ohio, who had wound up being drafted and then, at a colonel’s recommendation, signed as a Jungle Warfare Officer Candidate at a training base on Fiji Island. He had served o
n Bougainville and risen to staff officer before joining the Thirty-seventh in time for its landing on Dagupan beach as part of the Luzon invasion.

  Congratulations, his colonel told Frankel before they boarded their landing craft. “You will have the honor of commanding that part of our regiment which will have the hardest time.”

  Frankel thought that was the one honor he could do without. “I also made certain I carried a GI shovel with me so that the moment I hit the beach, I could start digging a foxhole to protect myself from enemy fire.”37

  Leaving thousands of white wakes through the bright blue water, the landing craft made their way toward shore as the bombardment, including the Boise, reached its climax and then shifted farther inland to cut off and isolate any Japanese on the beachfront.

  The first amphtracs growled up onto the beach at about 9:30. “I was apprehensive as were most all the way,” remembered the gunner on one of them, “but I think after so many months of training and waiting they were glad to start fighting.”

  The firing was still intense when Stanley hit the beach, and the moment he did he began shoveling furiously. “I was almost underground,” he recalled, “frantically throwing the wet sand all around the hole.” Then he noticed the shelling had almost stopped, and he was hearing voices coming from higher up the beach, jubilant voices saying, “Veectorie! Veectorie!”

  He looked up. “I recognized the friendly faces of a dozen Filipinos, who were then swarming all around us. ‘Where are the Japanese?’ I asked. ‘All gone…two days ago…running to Manila.’ ” Frankel’s astonishment was shared by everyone else in the Thirty-seventh as, except for the firing of a few mortar shells, there was no sign of the enemy.38

  It was the same all along the rest of the beaches. The landings went far better than anyone had expected; in the end the GIs suffered fewer than 120 killed. The navy offshore was still catching hell, but the kamikazes too had largely fired their bolt in the days before the invasion. By the 9th, the same day as the landing, there were fewer than 50 Japanese planes left on the entire island, instead of the 250 that MacArthur’s intelligence people had anticipated.