Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  Meanwhile, the men of the Thirty-seventh could only depend on their tanks to take out Japanese strongholds, while rifle and heavy machine-gun fire poured down from every building as they moved on toward the Pasig. Teams sprinted forward, spraying BAR and .30-caliber fire, while they waited for the tanks of 754th Battalion to catch up. Gunner Tom Howard was with the 754th’s Company A. He remembered how they got a short briefing on “city streets and names of principal intersections and landmarks…so that when we enter the city proper we can get around without getting lost.”16

  Moving in, Howard and his crew found a phantasmagoria of macabre scenes. On one side of the street Filipinos danced and sang and handed out drinks (one man gave Howard an entire bottle of Three Feathers Whiskey that he had been saving since the Japanese occupation began). On the other, people were going through garbage cans looking for food, and running away with their children from the intense crossfire a few blocks ahead.

  Then great clouds of smoke rose up as they neared the river. Fires set by Japanese defenders were sweeping through the city. They spread across the far side of the Pasig, then quickly jumped across the river and begin setting alight anything flammable, including blocks of thatched-roof houses. The thick smoke made it hard for attacker and defender alike to see each other until they were in close proximity. Then it was brutal hand-to-hand combat with grenades tossed through windows and bursts of Thompson and BAR fire to clear one room before moving on to the next.

  By evening, the tanks of the 745th had reached the Commonwealth Life Insurance Building overlooking the Jones Bridge, the main crossing over the Pasig from north to south Manila. Their orders were to hold the span no matter what the cost. Howard stood guard all night with a grenade in his hand with the pin pulled out and his thumb on the release, so he could respond fast to any threat—and to keep himself awake.17

  That same evening, GIs of the Thirty-seventh fought their way through the raging inferno around them, which included enemy pillboxes, sniper fire, and collapsing buildings, to the banks of the Pasig River. As darkness fell, they and the First Cavalry had cleared the Japanese from the entire city north of the river. Troops of the 148th had even crossed the river in assault boats after an intense artillery barrage of the Japanese-held opposite bank. They took more than 150 casualties, but managed to set up a bridgehead to start clearing neighborhoods east of the Intramuros the next day. That still left nearly half the city in the enemy’s hands, with the most formidable obstacle of all, the citadel of the Intramuros, looming ahead.18

  MacArthur had watched the landing of the 148th through binoculars, even as clouds of smoke rose up from the growing inferno that was his beloved city. He returned to Hacienda Luisita that night, exhausted by the emotional scenes with the freed prisoners and in a somber and chastened mood. It might be some time, he informed his staff, before they would be moving their headquarters into Manila. That victory parade would have to wait.

  —

  Fierce fighting continued on the 8th and 9th, with the Americans still trying to figure out where the Japanese strongpoints were, and their heaviest concentrations of troops. Gunner Howard and the tanks of the 745th repulsed several attacks as the carnage grew. “Bodies of civilians and Japanese were strewn over the streets, in gutters, on lawns and in the middle of the pavement,” he remembered. Japanese snipers were everywhere; when he and his men entered any building they found mounds of dead Japanese, some of whom were actually snipers pretending to be dead. The tankers soon learned to shoot every Japanese soldier in the head, whether he was clearly dead or not, to make sure no one sprang to life the second their backs were turned.

  From their observation post overlooking the Pasig, they also had to endure the sight of Japanese soldiers across the river dragging Filipino women out, raping them, and shooting them dead. They were under strict orders not to fire, in order to avoid revealing the American positions. “There was no way to describe the emotion of hatred for the Japanese,” Howard later said, “and the anguish of not being able to help…but orders were orders.”19

  On the 9th MacArthur reluctantly lifted the order on the use of heavy artillery and the full weight of XIV Corps Artillery poured forth, leveling entire buildings as the Thirty-seventh Division continued its block-by-block advance westward, and both Japanese soldiers and Filipino civilians were buried under the rubble. It was the civilians who suffered worst throughout the battle. Starved and driven from their homes by flames and gunfire, thousands were murdered by desperate and demented Japanese soldiers.

  Their bodies soon filled the streets in parts of the city east of the Intramuros. It was impossible to bury them because of Japanese sniper fire; American combat teams learned the only thing they could do was to dump quicklime over the bodies to make them decompose faster and reduce the stench of decaying flesh.

  For MacArthur, February 10 was crucial. For the first time First Cavalry had moved across the Pasig and was now pounding steadily southwest toward the suburb of Pasay on Manila Bay. That day, too, control over the Eleventh Airborne passed from Eichelberger’s Eighth Army to the Sixth Army. Since the 4th the paratroopers had been battering fruitlessly away on the line of powerful defenses the Japanese had set up to keep the Americans away from Nichols Field. The XIV Corps commander General Griswold now brought his corps artillery to bear in support of Swing’s troopers. Howitzers, tanks, and tank destroyers turned their fire loose on Iwabuchi’s naval troops and their entrenched positions. MacArthur’s mood began to brighten.

  But not for long. Four days of intense, rugged fighting were needed before Nichols Field was finally cleared of all but the last two hundred or so Japanese defenders. It turned out that Iwabuchi’s heaviest artillery, including six-inch naval guns, and steel-reinforced emplacements outside the Intramuros had been installed in the Parañaque–Nichols Field sector.20

  “General MacArthur came down in a jeep yesterday to see what we had been doing,” Swing wrote to Peyton March. “Think he was a little surprised at the opposition we encountered….Said I had done a fine and grand job.” Now the Eleventh and the First Cavalry had made contact, closing the noose on the Japanese that were still left in Manila. Iwabuchi’s warriors were now completely surrounded, trapped in the area around the Intramuros and the waterfront to its south.21

  For Iwabuchi, who had withdrawn to the Intramuros on the 11th, the final hope was a sudden attack by the Japanese Shimbu group, in the hopes he might break out while they tied up the Americans. Instead, they were utterly destroyed by the combined power of MacArthur’s air and artillery.

  For every Japanese soldier, the only options left were surrender or death.

  —

  MacArthur and his staff drove in every day to supervise the fighting. But theirs was an intense frustration at being only spectators to the growing slaughter and having no control over its course.

  Starting on the 14th, the First Cavalry began scouring out resistance from Pasay. For two days they fought yard by yard through Rizal Stadium and the baseball diamond at Harrison Park. Flamethrowers and Sherman tanks had to fire directly into the dugouts, and sandbagged positions under the grandstand, to get the last Japanese out.22 As troopers crept through the outfield, posted signs reminded them not to pick the flowers.

  Farther west, outside the city, things were going well. The retaking of Bataan Peninsula proceeded better than anyone had expected. After an initial series of bloody repulses at Zig Zag Pass, XI Corps managed to clear the pass by the 14th and was moving steadily south. Thanks to MacArthur’s earlier decision to put the cork in the Bataan bottle, there were never enough Japanese troops to make the fighting for the peninsula a major headache, let alone the turning point of the battle.

  Instead, that was going to be the taking of the Intramuros, and already by the 16th plans were complete and the artillery and troops were ready.23 But before the storming of Manila’s last fortress, there was one more operation to go.

  That was retaking Corregidor.

  —
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br />   The Rock was crucial for MacArthur’s strategy.

  Quite apart from the symbolic value of the fortress that had been his HQ and the Americans’ final stronghold until the last ragged American and Filipino defenders had surrendered on May 6, 1942, there was also the fact that the Japanese garrisoning the island, few in number though they were (Willoughby’s estimate was that there could not be more than 850), were still enough to harass any American ships entering or leaving Manila Bay. They could throw the whole objective of securing the bay for the next phase of the campaign into doubt. The mighty fortress had to be taken by force, and the question was how to do it.

  Kenney’s airplanes had kept Corregidor under steady bombardment since January 22, and stepped up their efforts at the start of February so that by the 16th they had dropped more than 3,000 tons of bombs.24 At the same time, MacArthur and his staff had come up with a dual plan for taking the Rock, either amphibious or airborne assault or both. Everything depended, he told Krueger, on the results of the aerial bombardment.

  An airdrop on the Rock looked wildly risky. Only three and a half miles long and one and a half miles wide, the Rock has only one feasible drop zone, barely 250 yards wide and 325 yards long. Yet Krueger proposed putting 2,000 men in by parachute, and at an unprecedented low level at that. In fact, one reason MacArthur and his staffers figured they would gain the advantage of surprise was that the Japanese would think the Americans were out of their minds to try such a plan.25

  Yet an amphibious assault on the island, with its narrow beaches and forbidding cliffs, was even more risky. So the airborne plan moved forward, even though it would take five hours to get all 2,000 men onto the landing area known as Topside, the same place where MacArthur had set up his headquarters more than three years before.

  At dawn on February 16, the C-47s rumbled off the runways on Mindoro loaded with paratroopers from the 503rd Regimental Combat Team. One of them, Rod Rodriguez of G Company, had made both of the previous combat jumps at Noemfoor and the Markham Valley. He felt even more nervous about this one, and began walking the length of the plane. Then he looked out the window.

  All around them were C-47s with flights of P-38s above providing escort. Below on the azure sea, there were LCIs carrying 1,000 of the Thirty-fourth Infantry toward the beaches, where they would initiate an amphibious assault to distract and divert the Japanese from the parachute drop. Even farther out was a formation of cruisers and destroyers, their guns glistening in the sun. “It was an inspiring sight,” Rodriguez later admitted.26

  They would need some inspiration. Rodriguez and his fellow troopers didn’t know that MacArthur’s intel was seriously flawed. Instead of the 800 or 900 Japanese guarding the fortress, there were actually 5,000.27 They were flying into a death trap.

  At 8:40 A.M. they were over the Rock. The buzzers rang and the troopers stood and clipped up. Then at the green light, one by one they headed out the door into the void.

  “We jumped at four hundred feet,” Rod remembered. “Since it takes about 175 feet for the parachute to open, it meant the average trooper had about 225 feet for the parachute to open, not very long.” At that height, opening too early might mean drifting seriously off course, tumbling into the cliffs or even into the sea. Opening too late might mean death.

  Meanwhile, the Japanese were waiting for them.

  —

  Back on the mainland, MacArthur rose early and was on the road at 6:00 A.M. to visit the recaptured areas on Bataan. His jeep sped past Abucay, where Wainwright and General George Parker had held their first defensive line in 1942, and Balanga, where they held the last.28

  A little farther along they came upon a company of soldiers who had just beaten off a desperate banzai attack. Fresh Japanese bodies were strewn across the road and along the ditches; so were American bodies. As the GIs gingerly pulled the wounded out for the trip to the first-aid station, MacArthur stopped, got out, and talked to the officers and men, wounded and unwounded. “We soon passed our forward point, a man on either side of the road stealthily proceeding down the ditch,” Egeberg recalled. “What had earlier been a rather large cavalcade of jeeps had dwindled down to six,” of them the SWPA commander’s. They had entered enemy territory, which “certainly took the edge off my enthusiasm.”

  But MacArthur was of another mind. “Go on,” he ordered the driver. “This is my personal patrol.” Half a mile ahead they found two scouts and spoke briefly. The men admitted that they had heard some Japanese up ahead but weren’t sure how many.

  “You are the forward point?” MacArthur wanted to know. “None of our men ahead of you?”

  They said, “None of our men ahead of here, sir. No, sir!”

  “Larry, Doc, get your carbines unlimbered,” MacArthur said, as the jeep edged forward at fifteen miles an hour, its engine growling in low gear, as the other five vehicles, carrying soldiers with rifles and BARs, other officers, and correspondents and photographers, followed.

  Then they came to an acre of clearing. It was an abandoned Japanese camp, with pots of rice still sitting on fires and a machine gun pointing menacingly down the road at them—but with no gunner. He and his fellow soldiers had clearly fled in a hurry.

  As they came to another campsite, again abandoned, the walkie-talkie squawked. There was a report that some one hundred Japanese soldiers had just landed from the Manila Bay side of Bataan and were crossing the road behind them.

  That caused something of a sensation among the group, but MacArthur waved it off.

  “Just a group of frightened and demoralized soldiers,” he said, “retreating from Manila and coming across to head for the hills to join their comrades.” It turned out MacArthur was right. That was the last they saw, or heard, about the hundred soldiers.29

  MacArthur’s hope was that he could meet up with American troops coming north from Mariveles, but it was not to be. At a turn in the road they came upon a large stream where the bridge had been blown apart by an air strike. MacArthur got out and inspected the blasted bridge ruefully. At that moment, another P-38 turned up and dove for a strafing pass, then at the last minute pulled up and peeled away. MacArthur had ignored him, then simply signaled that they should head back. He wasn’t getting to Mariveles this day.

  When they were back behind American lines, MacArthur said, “Doc, it’s been a long time since I led a patrol into no-man’s-land. Makes you tingle a bit, doesn’t it?”

  Egeberg wisely said nothing. MacArthur had stopped, and was thinking of the fact that he had finally won the battle for Bataan—three years too late to save his old command, but a matter of deep satisfaction nonetheless.

  “You don’t know what a leaden load this lifts from my heart,” he finally said. “This day has done me good.”30

  Still, he was disappointed. He had hoped to make it to the bay so he could watch the airdrop over Corregidor.

  —

  “I was just little over the treetops that lined the golf course” on Corregidor’s Topside, Rod Rodriguez remembered, “when my parachute blossomed. I came crashing down on the edge of the course. The other guys of the platoon landed around me.” They were the lucky ones. He could see troopers being hit in midair by machine-gun fire and antiaircraft batteries as they descended. Others fell far off course. In the end, there would be almost 300 casualties from bad falls and accidents. In the first wave, in fact, almost one out of every four troopers of the 503rd was disabled or out of action before he could unsling his rifle.

  But then they got lucky. A cluster of troopers who were blown off course completely missed Topside but fell by sheer chance into the Japanese observation post overlooking the beaches. There Captain Akira Itagaki was busy staring out at the approaching landing craft when suddenly the view from his binoculars was filled with white parachutes and olive drab–clad Americans.

  The Japanese had no time to react, as the paratroopers poured on the fire with their M-1s and Thompsons. Captain Itagaki was dead almost before he realized he was under atta
ck, and his entire outpost was wiped out.31

  The Japanese defenders still outnumbered their attackers by more than two to one, but they were now leaderless. Doors on the first LCIs dropped at 10:30, and the soldiers of the Thirty-fourth Infantry Regiment swarmed ashore almost unopposed. They ran into heavy machine-gun fire as they came inland, but within half an hour they were on the top of Malinta Hill—while Rodriguez and other paratroopers set up their firing posts and counted their dead and wounded.32

  The fighting went on the rest of the day, with the Americans steadily gaining the advantage over the disorganized Japanese. Some defenders tried a breakneck counterattack that night to clear the Americans off the beach, only to run into the murderous fire of the paratroopers’ machine guns overhead.33

  Most, however, retreated deep into the island’s caves and tunnels, including the Malinta Tunnel. There would be another two weeks of ugly fighting before the last of them was dead.

  But as dawn broke on February 17, the Americans had effective control of the island at a cost far lower than anyone could have expected. The cork in the bottle of Manila Bay was back in MacArthur’s hands, after almost three years.

  But there were still Manila and the Intramuros to deal with.

  —

  The same day the 503rd was securing Topside, MacArthur watched with his heart in his mouth as the bombardment of the old walled city was set to begin. He still forbade the use of any bombers—“I can’t do it, George, and that’s final” was what he told General Kenney—but he had finally relented on allowing the heaviest artillery that the XIV Corps could bring to bear. Only overwhelming firepower was going to penetrate a sixteenth-century stone wall that was as much as fifteen feet thick in some places and forty feet at its base. The decision to go forward broke MacArthur’s heart. It also doomed the Intramuros, every civilian, and the 16,000 Japanese still inside its walls.

  Sergeant Rogers was there the morning of the bombardment. “The huge guns were jacked up on their supports,” he remembered, “to permit point blank fire.”34 At 7:30 A.M., 130 artillery pieces, ranging from 75 mm tank guns to 240 mm howitzers, opened up. The old city vanished in a rising cloud of smoke as more and more guns rained death on Japanese and Filipinos—the Japanese had refused to let the pitiful remaining residents leave. The bombardment went on and on, not ending until 8:30 A.M., six days later, on February 23, when the Thirty-seventh Division began to creep in through the handful of holes blasted through the walls.