The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (16 page)

Roosevelt acceded to King’s wishes because the president knew that King would fight the Japanese—and the army. In any tussle with the army over resources, it would be inappropriate for Roosevelt to weigh in as the navy’s advocate, but not so for “blowtorch” King, whose view of the navy’s prerogatives was as parochial as MacArthur’s was of the army’s. Indeed, the dual moves that Roosevelt made after the Pearl Harbor attack strengthened the navy’s military position not only against the Japanese, but also in Washington. Harold Stark was a fine officer, but he was no match for Douglas MacArthur. Not so Ernie King, who thought that if MacArthur had any role at all, it would be in garrisoning the islands that Nimitz’s flattops left in their wake in their triumphant offensive against the Japanese in the Central Pacific.

But King was also a tireless commander. The Pearl Harbor debacle had made the navy’s most senior fleet officers gun-shy. The Japanese had ten aircraft carriers operating in the Pacific, King’s subordinates pointed out, while the Americans had only three. King thought these views were defeatist and set out the priorities for Nimitz: to keep open the shipping lanes from Pearl Harbor to Australia and to send America’s remaining aircraft carriers into enemy waters to find the Japanese. When the commander of the carrier
Lexington
requested a return to port to provision, King turned him down: “Carry on as long as you have hardtack, beans, and corn willy. What the hell are you worrying about?” For King, fighting the Japanese was a matter of national survival—and service pride. During the three weeks that separated Pearl Harbor from his appointment as the navy’s ranking officer, the navy had probed and probed, but hadn’t fought. The only Americans
who were killing the enemy were those fighting under MacArthur. For Ernie King, that was intolerable.

I
n the wake of the Japanese attack, Douglas MacArthur had ordered Brigadier General Richard Marshall, his head of logistics, to run supplies into northern Luzon instead of south into the artillery-studded Bataan-Corregidor bastion. It was a mistake. Marshall’s supply teams requisitioned one thousand trucks for the operation and sent them north, where the vehicles simply disappeared or were set ablaze in central Luzon. On December 24, realizing his mistake, MacArthur reversed the order, telling Marshall to begin supplying Bataan and Corregidor. Marshall was matter-of-fact about MacArthur’s change of heart, but his subordinates were stunned; they had calculated that it would take two weeks to stock the American defenses sufficiently for forty thousand troops to hold out for six months in Bataan and Corregidor—now, with the Japanese pummeling Wainwright, they might only have a few days. Marshall’s staff struggled to meet MacArthur’s directive, but the chaos of battle made the task impossible. A depot north of Manila, stocked with fifty million bushels of rice (enough to feed the soldiers of Bataan and Corregidor for five years), was left untouched, a bow to Quezón’s insistence that Manila be fed. But Marshall and his crew did what they could, packing school buses bound for Bataan with canned goods, clothing, ammunition, and water. MacArthur’s orders were strict: After the warehouses, granaries, and depots were emptied, they were to be destroyed to deny the Japanese their use.

Later, when the fate of America’s soldiers in the Philippines was a part of history, MacArthur’s subordinates would compare the U.S. logistics effort with the debacle of December 8. “Perhaps it was fortunate,” Colonel Ernest Miller of the 194th Tank Battalion wrote, “that, as we bivouacked amid the smoking ruins of Clark Field on that first day of the war, we could not see these things that were yet to come—food and matériel of war sabotaged by that same mismanagement and indecision which had destroyed our air power.” The judgment is harsh, but accurate. During these first months of war, the U.S. effort in the Philippines, and in all of the Pacific, was shot through with incompetence, the result of the U.S. military’s inability to master its own bureaucracy. The
requisition of food from warehouses north of Manila at Stotsenberg provided a grim example of this: A local regimental commander would not allow the removal of his foodstuffs, because he viewed it as his job to “guard” the material, not use it. The Japanese had no such compunction; they took what they wanted, leaving people to starve.

On Christmas Eve, MacArthur, Jean, Arthur (clutching his favorite stuffed rabbit), Arthur’s nurse Ah Cheu, and MacArthur’s staff boarded a launch in Manila Harbor for the evacuation to Corregidor, which lay in the misty darkness on the western horizon. The island, a tadpole-shaped rocky eminence the size of Manhattan and topped by hunchback Malinta Hill, was viewed as an impregnable fortress, the last bastion of MacArthur’s battered and undersupplied army. The island’s terraces were laced with tunnels cored out of the rock in three levels: Topside, Middleside, and Bottomside. The island’s narrow landing beaches led right up to the island’s steep slopes, providing scant cover for a seaborne invader. Washington’s war planners had chosen the fortress (dubbing it Fort Mills) well. Considering its 400-foot prominence facing out toward the southern end of Bataan (which lay a little over two miles north across Manila Bay), any landing party would be required to sprint across a narrow beach before fighting its way up through the island’s choking jungle.

MacArthur’s wife would remember the trip to Corregidor years later—the low profile of the island in the far distance, the motors of the launch churning through Manila Bay, the heat-soaked shirts of the launch’s crew, the gently rocking waves lapping up against Luzon’s tropical shore. She was depressed, for neither she nor her husband would return to Manila anytime soon, if ever. As a parting gift for General Homma, she had left two vases in their penthouse entrance hall, a gift to her husband from the Emperor Hirohito. She hoped their presence might keep the Japanese from an orgy of looting. She took only what she needed—two suitcases for herself and her husband, an extra for Arthur, and one for Ah Cheu.

The departure was difficult for MacArthur. Just hours before, he had bid farewell to a subdued Lewis Brereton. MacArthur had lost confidence in his airman, who was heading south to Australia, but their leave-taking was both personal and emotional. “I hope you
will tell the people outside what we have done and protect my reputation as a fighter,” MacArthur said. This was an odd admission for MacArthur, who rarely admitted failure. Brereton was reassuring: “General, your reputation will never need any protection.” Those were Brereton’s last words to MacArthur; the air commander finished his career out of MacArthur’s sight.

So too it was for Thomas Hart, who organized U.S. naval assets in Australia before returning to the United States. Harold Stark engineered Hart’s transfer to a combat command, but Ernie King had little use for Hart. The observation by Roger Miller, a historian of air power, nearly sixty years later—that if you disliked MacArthur, then you defended Brereton, and vice versa—also applies to Hart, who would become a footnote in U.S. naval history. In the heat of battle, MacArthur made mistakes, but he rarely made excuses. That wasn’t true for either Brereton or Hart, who, at key moments, worried about their careers or waited for MacArthur to tell them what to do. In the weeks and months ahead, MacArthur would search for their replacements, ably identify them, and shape a command team that was the best of any in the war.

But that was in the future. For now, with Corregidor’s shadow barely visible on the horizon, MacArthur and his party watched Manila recede. Finally, Corregidor loomed just ahead, lying low above the waterline. The MacArthur party landed at the North Dock, then walked to the Malinta Tunnel, which receded for nearly fifteen hundred feet, straight back. The reinforced tunnel, laced with supporting iron beams, was the main feature of the American defenses and was designed as both a headquarters and an arsenal. The primary tunnel was one of several, a maze of interlocking caverns hollowed out of the rock of the hill. It was, for its time, an engineering marvel, with a main east-west tunnel over eight hundred feet long and a series of branches leading from it. A separate set of tunnels north of the main tunnel housed a hospital with one thousand beds. Below it was another tunnel system for quartermaster stores. “Where are your quarters?” MacArthur had asked Major General George Moore, who greeted him at the North Dock. Moore put his index finger in the air. “Topside,” he said. MacArthur nodded and announced that he was also setting up his headquarters on Topside, the island’s most prominent feature. Moore objected. Japanese
fighters and bombers were targeting Topside, strafing it daily. “That’s fine,” MacArthur said. “Just the thing.”

In fact, MacArthur decided the tunnel was too confining, so he moved Jean, Arthur, and Arthur’s nurse outside the tunnel complex, where they lived in a small cottage with access to a natural rock overhang a short distance away. The ramshackle cottage was an inviting target for the Japanese, whose aircraft regularly attacked it, creating a smoldering landscape. The morning after his arrival, MacArthur directed his naval aide Sidney “Sid” Huff to return to Manila to retrieve MacArthur’s Colt .45 from his bedroom, along with the general’s old campaign helmet and the bottle of scotch he kept in the dining room. “It may be a long, hard winter over here,” MacArthur said.

In the days ahead, as MacArthur strode across the broad reach of Topside, Colt .45 sagging at his waist, he would count (as was his habit) the Japanese planes that targeted his headquarters. “Seventy-seven,” he said one day, then “seventy-two” the next. His voice was emotionless, as if simply confirming the overwhelming odds he faced. “These will fall close,” he noted of one bombing raid, then followed the bomb’s descent with his eyes to a point a hundred yards from his position as his aides, and his family, scrambled for cover. Quezón worried for MacArthur, fearing that a Japanese shell would kill him. MacArthur waved him away: “Oh, you know, the Japs haven’t yet fabricated the bomb with my name on it.” It was a clichéd response, perhaps, but one purposely designed to strengthen everyone’s resolve. Inevitably, the cottage on Topside was demolished, so MacArthur and his family moved to a similarly constructed shack on Bottomside, where Jean, Arthur, and Ah Cheu could scramble more quickly into Malinta.

MacArthur’s single-room command center was the only means of communicating with Jonathan Wainwright, who was feinting his way south toward Bataan, and the hard-driving and pugilistic Albert Jones, who was snapping ferociously at the Japanese as he weaved his way toward Manila. The North Luzon and South Luzon Forces (and Corregidor) were now under constant attack. MacArthur spoke often with Wainwright and Jones, and with George Parker, who was busily constructing a defensive line across the Bataan Peninsula, placing American units, identifying fields of fire, and digging in howitzers. MacArthur followed
Parker’s progress, talked with Wainwright and Jones on a secure line in his headquarters, and plotted their retreats carefully in his operations room. He furiously bombarded Washington with cables, the only way he had of telling the War Department that there were still Americans fighting in the Pacific. In the lateral tunnel below MacArthur’s, Philippine journalist Carlos Romulo, who would become one of the great diplomats of the Philippines, set up a broadcast center that beamed a
Voice of Freedom
program into Manila.

Inevitably, the American stand in the Philippines became the stuff of legend, with MacArthur endlessly pacing back and forth in the entrance to Lateral 3. In addition to the constant communications with Wainwright, Jones, and Parker, MacArthur sonorously described his defense of the Philippines to Washington in words that would make a modern reader cringe (“smoke begrimed men covered with the murk of battle”), while issuing optimistic reports about his forces’ “unbreakable morale” even as they skittered away from Homma. Much of this correspondence was overdone: MacArthur was not on the front lines, and the residents of Malinta (military officers, government officials, doctors, nurses, soldiers, radiomen, as well as aides, assistants, and hangers-on) were effectively trapped in the last bastion of American power in the Pacific and eating tinned salmon and platefuls of rice. But there were few complaints—Wainwright’s and Jones’s soldiers were eating far worse, or not at all.

None of this mattered in the United States, where MacArthur’s stand was making daily headlines and leading the newscasts. Mothers named their newborns for him, picnics were held in his honor, prayers were said for him during Sunday services, and patriotic parades featured his hardened features. In a time of seemingly endless defeat, MacArthur was everywhere, living proof of America’s tenacity and courage: Brochures of his life were passed hand to hand, national magazines ran pictures of him, and newspapers headlined his heroic stand. Those who knew him well were interviewed again and again. The glowing reports reflected America’s need for a hero, no matter how controversial, and were fed by daily War Department communiqués on America’s stand in the Philippines. The MacArthur legend even reached England, where Winston Churchill celebrated him in the House of Commons: “I should like
to express, in the name of the House, my admiration of the splendid courage, and quality with which the small American army, under General MacArthur, has resisted brilliantly for so long, at desperate odds, the hordes of Japanese who have been hurled against it by superior air power and superior sea power.”

While MacArthur was aware of his growing stature, he was more concerned with how he was being viewed in the Philippines. Near the end of December, he interrupted a discussion about transport requirements to call Jorge Vargas, who served as his lawyer, to ask about his investments. The resulting conversation, conducted in the open, brought a stunned silence to his aides: Why in the world was MacArthur concerned about his investments
now
? “Can you buy me $35,000 worth of Lepanto mining stocks?” MacArthur asked. “We will try, General, we will try,” Vargas answered. MacArthur rang off and continued his work. But for those who witnessed the conversation, the message could not have been clearer: While key senior Filipino officials were scrambling to get their assets out of the country, MacArthur was very publicly moving to keep his in. The next day, December 29, he made a similar symbolic gesture while rereading a proclamation issued by Roosevelt on American commitment to the Philippines: “I give to the people of the Philippines my solemn pledge that their freedom will be redeemed,” Roosevelt wrote. For MacArthur, it sounded as if Roosevelt believed the commonwealth’s surrender was inevitable. So he reached for a pencil and, without saying a word, scratched out the word
redeemed
and replaced it with the word
protected
. Only then did he approve the proclamation’s release.