The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (17 page)

Roosevelt’s sentiment that the Philippines could be redeemed—and MacArthur’s belief that it could be protected—was deeply felt. But so far, neither man had any idea of how to do that. It was not simply that MacArthur lacked the men and supplies to defend the Philippines or that reinforcements would not arrive in time to save his garrison. Rather, both men were faced with a grim reality: Even if the soldiers and supplies that the United States had available could be transported to the Philippines, Japan’s officers were leading a highly trained army that was supported by more artillery and aircraft than the United States could then deploy in any battlefield, anywhere. MacArthur knew this and so did Roosevelt. The Japanese knew it too.

On December 27, as his army was poised to storm D-4, General Masaharu Homma’s intelligence staff briefed him on his successes thus far. His army, they told him, had destroyed three Philippine divisions—the 11th, 71st, and 91st—in just five days. The Americans and their Filipino allies had suffered a catastrophic defeat. Their air force was gone, their navy destroyed, their soldiers unequal to the Japanese. Homma, a somber figure not given to premature celebrations, heard this without comment. He then announced that while he believed that MacArthur would make his stand on Bataan, the Japanese army’s goal
was the capture of Manila. The effort would start with a breaching of Wainwright’s last defenses—a swarming and overwhelming attack. If the Japanese broke through against Wainwright in the north and Jones in the south, the Americans would have no choice but to retreat into the Philippine capital, which would then be besieged. The victory, he believed, would come soon thereafter, with thousands of Americans and Filipinos, hands raised in abject surrender, filing out of the capital and into Japanese prison camps.

That was the plan, and it began with the fight against Wainwright. The advance on D-4 on Homma’s left was led by his 48th Division, which moved south on December 29. On the morning of December 30, the attack of the 48th bent back the American line. In the center, Homma’s assault was made by the Kanno Detachment, the force that had landed at Vigan. Homma held out the greatest hope for the center, believing a successful attack would unhinge the Americans and cut off their withdrawal. At worst, Wainwright would be forced further south; at best, his command would be destroyed. Wainwright’s defense in the center depended on the 11th Division, which defended a key roadblock along the Cabanatuan-Tarlac highway. On Homma’s right, the assault was led by the 9th Infantry along Route 3. The Japanese assault ran into tough resistance in the center, but by the early afternoon of December 30, Wainwright, his right wing near collapse, ordered a retreat.

So far, MacArthur’s defense had been valiant, but the lines and arrows on the U.S. maps bore little resemblance to reality. Despite “numerous instances of heroism under fire and determined stands,” MacArthur’s intelligence team issued a sobering judgment: “Not a single position was really occupied and organized for defense. Troops were barely stopped and assigned defensive sectors before they stampeded into farther withdrawal, in many instances without firing a shot.” The retreat of Wainwright’s army (and south of him, Jones’s force, its back to Manila), would be forever viewed as heroic, but for MacArthur, Wainwright, and Jones, the retreats that followed Homma’s landings at Lingayen were fated to fail. While MacArthur had never managed a fighting retreat, he knew the fundamental tactics involved and had studied how others had done it. The models were Lee’s retreat before Grant in 1864, the bloody road south from the Wilderness to Richmond, and Confederate General Joe Johnston’s brilliant
fighting defense from Chattanooga to Atlanta. Both Lee and Johnston had exacted a bloody toll on the invader for each yard gained until, the odds evened, they turned and pounced on the bled-white attacker. The object was not to win, but to survive, and to provide a hope for victory. The problem, as MacArthur knew, was that as brilliant as Lee and Johnston had been, both had been defeated.

Similar bleak prospects are what faced MacArthur now. The Japanese were simply too strong, too well equipped, and too well trained for an opponent to execute a fighting retreat to gain a final victory. But MacArthur did not want a victory. He wanted time. He hoped to delay Homma’s advance long enough and to exact a price steep enough so that Parker could construct a strong defensive line across Bataan’s base and the army’s quartermaster corps could restock the Bataan Peninsula. Eying both Wainwright’s retreat to D-4 and the converging Japanese lines, MacArthur plotted a response

But even before Homma’s assault on D-4, MacArthur had decided the line couldn’t hold. So he ordered Jones’s forces, which were south of Manila, to quickly begin their withdrawal into Bataan. This was a matter of precise timing: Jones was to move north around Manila, passing to the rear of Wainwright’s retreating North Luzon Force at San Fernando before swinging west into the Bataan perimeter. Wainwright would follow, moving south and then west, falling in behind Jones. If all went well, the converging Japanese forces would launch a final, all-out effort to destroy Wainwright at San Fernando and, lunging forward, would find . . . nothing. This “slip slide” would save both armies, leaving them intact in Bataan. The maneuver would give Homma Manila, but this wouldn’t matter—without MacArthur’s army, the city was useless. Jones received MacArthur’s orders and followed them, but at Santiago (just south of the capital), he discovered that the Japanese had left themselves vulnerable, and he turned to face them. Having done his best to bleed the Japanese through nearly 140 miles of rugged terrain, Jones was anxious to bloody his foe, which had unaccountably slowed to resupply. When the Japanese turned north again, Jones calculated, he would fall on them and send them reeling south.

It was not to be. In Corregidor, MacArthur directed Richard Marshall to contact Jones and hurry him north. Jones was ordered not to
launch his counterattack. It was too risky. Wainwright’s forces, Marshall said, had been turned out of their D-4 defensive line, and if Jones delayed, the Japanese would drive a wedge between him and Wainwright, and Jones’s army would be surrounded and destroyed. Marshall made the call, talked with Jones’s chief of staff, and received assurances that the South Luzon Force would move west of Manila, then clear the bridges over the Calumpit River north of the city by the end of New Year’s Day.

MacArthur worriedly consulted his battle map at Corregidor, then urged Wainwright to retreat to a new D-5 line before moving further south. But even at D-5, Wainwright’s divisions were strung out along a fifteen-mile arc—much too broad a front, MacArthur thought, to be adequately defended. Getting Wainwright into Bataan would be touch and go. The key for Wainwright was to effectively sidle his troops along the D-5 line from east to west, scooping them up in turn, then funnel them onto a narrow track down Route 3. From there (MacArthur hoped), they could link up with Jones before sprinting into Bataan’s defenses along Route 7. That’s what the map said, at least, though Wainwright knew that for complete success, he would have to count on Homma. If Homma ignored Wainwright’s “slip slide” and lunged south, hoping to capture Manila, he would find the roads into the capital undefended. By then, Wainwright’s force would be safe in Bataan.

MacArthur’s calculations now became even more exact. After Jones moved west of Manila, MacArthur ordered Wainwright’s 51st Infantry and 194th Tank Battalion to block Homma’s forces along Route 5 at Plaridel, nine miles from the double-span Calumpit Bridge over the swift-moving Pampanga River. Wainwright’s forces would have to hold, for behind them, the South Luzon Force and Wainwright’s right wing would pass over the bridges and then west for the run into Bataan. Wainwright met Jones at the Plaridel schoolhouse on December 31, just as the Japanese were massing for an attack six miles to the north, near the village of Baliuag. After conferring about their next steps, Jones ordered Company C, 192nd Tank Battalion, to attack Baliuag. The action that followed was an armored melee as “American and Japanese tanks chased each other up and down the narrow streets, while enemy foot soldiers, in a futile gesture, fired small arms at the tankers,” the U.S. Army’s official history notes.

Jones’s attack paid off, buying the time needed to allow Wainwright’s 71st Division to pass over the Pampanga River. At dawn the next morning, 0400 on New Year’s Day, Homma attacked just as the 51st Division pulled out of Plaridel. Rushing forward, the Japanese found Baliuag deserted and the rear units of Wainwright’s force headed west over the bridges. Oddly, the one thing that the Japanese might have done—bomb the crossing—they failed to do, despite pleas from the commander of Homma’s 48th Division. One hour after the Japanese attack at Baliuag, Wainwright, Jones, and their senior subordinate commanders met again, this time on the road leading onto the double-span crossing. Having asked the officers whether all of their units had crossed the bridges, Wainwright was told that a single unit of Philippine engineers remained in the south. Wainwright decided to wait. But forty-five minutes later, he gave Colonel Harry Skerry the order to destroy the crossing. “Skerry, we cannot wait any longer,” he said. “Blow the bridges.” The men trapped on the other side would have to find their own way into Bataan.

Only one obstacle remained. Wainwright and Jones now had to maneuver the units coming out of Calumpit west into San Fernando and then south to Bataan along Route 7. The single column would be an inviting target for the Japanese, so the retreat would have to be handled carefully. Standing on the north side of the now-destroyed Calumpit Bridge, Jones and Wainwright surveyed the damaged spans, eyed the desperate Filipinos around them, then headed off to organize the retreat. Already, San Fernando was in chaos while Route 7, the artery leading out of the city, was clogged with retreating units. A survivor of Wainwright’s Luzon fight remembered the scene: “Vehicles of all types—cars, buses, trucks, artillery, and tanks—filled the center of the road. In some places, there were stretches of several miles where the vehicles were lined up almost bumper to bumper. On each side was an endless line of pedestrians, most civilians fleeing from the invading army.” The problem for Wainwright and Jones was that the Japanese “could hardly be expected to overlook so obvious and inviting a target.” Wainwright and Jones’s retreat might end in tragedy, with smoking hulks of vehicles and the bodies of thousands of their soldiers marking the byways of Route 7.

Unaccountably—for neither Wainwright nor Jones could thereafter explain their good fortune—the Japanese not only ignored the retreating units along Route 7, but were also stymied by the blown bridges at Calumpit. Consequently, Jones was able to withdraw to the new Guagua-Porac line (fifteen miles from the base of the Bataan Peninsula), followed by Wainwright’s 71st and 91st Philippine Divisions. The new Guagua-Porac defensive line (eight miles long) was only attacked in force on January 3, giving Wainwright time to organize his defense. For the forty-eight hours that followed the attack, from January 3 to 5, the Japanese mounted a desperate offensive; it was as if Homma suddenly realized that Wainwright and Jones were getting away. Homma’s forces battered away at the line, but it held for two days. Finally, late on the evening of January 6, Wainwright’s men filed into Parker’s entrenchments on Bataan, ending one of the greatest fighting retreats in American military history. “The men who filed into Bataan in the dark of January 6 were a pathetic lot,” Wainwright later remembered. “Some came in silent, blacked-out buses. But most of them came stumbling down the main highway from San Fernando, heavy with weariness and steeped in the knowledge that they were walking into little more than a trap. It was, in short, a sickening experience to withdraw into the peninsula. I issued the order with the greatest of sorrow.”

The final act in this drama took place at Layac Junction, a crossroads bottleneck that marked the final point of the funnel that led south into Bataan. The responsibility for the defense of the junction was given to Brigadier General Clyde “Papa” Selleck, a West Point graduate who had been assigned by MacArthur to lead the 71st Philippine Division. On the morning of January 6, Selleck took command at Layac Junction, assigned two Philippine divisions to hold his flanks, and deployed the American 31st Regiment in the center. This was the first time that a regular, main-force unit composed only of Americans faced the Japanese in combat. The 31st, with sixteen hundred officers and men, was a celebrated outfit. Nicknamed “the American foreign legion” (it had never been based in the United States), it was formed in the Philippines in 1916. It received its polar bear crest from its service in Siberia as a part of an American expeditionary force from 1918 to 1920.

At 0600 on the morning of the sixth, Wainwright stopped to confer with Selleck on his defenses, just as Selleck heard from MacArthur that he could expect a massed artillery attack to his front—“a prepared attack in some strength,” as MacArthur had said. Four hours later, and just as MacArthur had predicted, the artillery attack began, its fire driving Selleck’s men into their trenches and leaving the surrounding landscape stripped of vegetation. There was little Selleck could do to respond, as Japanese spotter planes radioed their artillery to shift their fire every time Selleck moved.

Two hours later, during the hottest part of the day, the Japanese began their ground assault. The attack involved tactics the Japanese would come to be known for, with waves of bayonet-wielding Japanese soldiers charging across open ground toward the American trenches. “I looked out over the front,” Private Harold J. Garrett of the 31st later recalled, “and it seemed that the whole field got up and moved.” Garrett and his trench mates returned fire, slashing bloody holes into the advancing lines. Nearby, Corporal Milton Alexander and members of his squad cut through the attackers, raking the enemy’s front with two air-cooled .30-caliber machine guns. The Japanese kept coming. “It seemed like a bunch of bees hit our position,” a soldier of the 31st remembered.