The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (19 page)

On January 22, Roosevelt confirmed Quezón’s fears. During one of his fireside chats, Roosevelt spoke eloquently of America’s determination to free Europe from the domination of Rome and Berlin. The Philippines were never mentioned. “Come, listen to this scoundrel,” Quezón yelled from inside Malinta. “For thirty years I have worked and hoped for my people,” he railed. “Now they burn and die for a flag that could not protect them. I cannot stand this constant reference to Europe. I am here and my people are here under the heels of a conqueror. Where are the planes that they boast of? America writhes in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin, Europe, while a daughter, the Philippines, is being raped in the back room.”

Quezón was not alone in his views. American officers on Bataan, their rations cut and their units now decimated by malaria, listened to Roosevelt’s talk and came to a similar conclusion: “Plain for all to see,” one of them wrote, “was the handwriting on the wall, at the end of which the President had placed a large and emphatic period. The President had—with regret—wiped us off the page and closed the book.”

The abandonment seemed real. Although Roosevelt, Secretary Stimson, and Marshall fought the navy to open a supply line to the Philippines, they recoiled from telling MacArthur that his relief wasn’t possible. Instead, they settled for telling the Philippine commander that somewhere over the horizon, American forces were gathering for a counteroffensive to relieve his starving garrison.

MacArthur was now beginning to understand that relief truly wasn’t around the corner and that all Marshall was trying to do was give him confidence. It is easy to understand why Marshall did this: The stand of Wainwright and his men on Bataan was viewed as an essential delaying action that would provide Washington with a breathing space to gather itself. Back at the War Department, Eisenhower calculated the shipment of aircraft and men to the Southwest Pacific, and despaired. “Ships! Ships! All we need is ships!” he wrote in his diary. But there were no ships, and no illusions about the outcome of MacArthur’s fight. “I stood in Washington,” Henry Stimson later reflected, “helpless to reinforce
and defend the Philippines and had to simply watch their glorious but hopeless defense.” In the years that followed, Marshall’s confident messages would be cited by MacArthur as a purposeful effort to delude him. They poisoned his views of Roosevelt and the nation’s senior military leadership. MacArthur blamed everyone: George Marshall (the living symbol of “the Chaumont crowd”), Dwight Eisenhower (who had “betrayed” him), and Roosevelt—that “liar.”

Stimson, who was talented at shearing away the political undergrowth, watched these events with alarm. His blunt assessment, had it been communicated to MacArthur, might have dampened the recriminations that followed: The sacrifice of the American army in Bataan might seem cold-blooded, he said, but it was necessary. Soldiers would be “required to die” so that an ultimate victory would be won. Marshall’s cables, Eisenhower’s assurances, and the president’s words might be misleading, but they were necessary in order to win the war. They kept MacArthur in the fight. “He wanted to send some news,” Stimson said of Marshall’s messages, “that would buck General MacArthur up.”

Although MacArthur would later acknowledge the truth of Stimson’s view (despite believing at the time that help was truly on the way), Quezón was growing increasingly disenchanted with the Americans. Anguished over his country’s fate and faced with inevitable defeat (the Japanese slammed into Wainwright’s lines with desperate assaults through all of January), Quezón weighed his political options. Finally, on February 8, and following a meeting with his cabinet, Quezón drafted a cable to Washington suggesting that the Philippines be granted independence so that he could begin negotiations with Japan to ensure Philippine neutrality. He hoped that the talks would lead to the withdrawal of U.S. and Japanese troops. The cable was tinged by Quezón’s bitterness: “While perfectly safe itself, the United States has practically doomed the Philippines to almost total extinction to secure a breathing space.” Quezón’s aides tried to dissuade him from sending the cable, but he remained adamant. He sent it, then sat back and waited for the inevitable explosion. Predictably, the cable dropped like a “bombshell” (Eisenhower’s term) in Washington. High Commissioner Francis Sayre’s sobering endorsement followed. “If the premise of President Quezón is correct that American help cannot or will not arrive here in time to be
availing,” he wrote, “I believe his proposal for immediate independence and neutralization of the Philippines is the sound course to follow.”

MacArthur had a different view. While sympathetic to Quezón’s initiative, he withheld his endorsement. He knew Roosevelt well and told Quezón that there “was not the slightest chance” that the president would accept Quezón’s proposal. But MacArthur’s follow-up cable to the War Department candidly expressed his sympathy for the Philippine president. Just across the bay from Corregidor, in Manila, large numbers of Philippine political leaders were accommodating themselves to their occupiers. Jorge Vargas, the official left behind by Quezón to represent the Philippine president, formed a Philippine Executive Commission, then issued a statement pledging its cooperation with Japan. That his own countrymen would collaborate with their occupiers was painful for Quezón—no less so than for the Americans. One of them, John D. Bulkeley, a young PT boat commander who would loom large in the MacArthur story, estimated that 80 percent of Filipinos were anti-American, the result of over forty years of colonial rule. MacArthur dutifully reported this reality. “The temper of the Filipinos is one of almost violent resentment against the United States,” he told Roosevelt. “Every one of them expected help, and when it has not been forthcoming, they believe they have been betrayed in favor of others.” He issued a blunt assessment of his military situation: “Since I have no air or sea protection, you must be prepared at any time to figure on the complete destruction of this command. You must determine whether the mission of delay would be better furthered by the temporizing plan of Quezón, or by my continued battle effort.”

“W
e can’t do this at all,” Roosevelt stormed. With Henry Stimson and George Marshall seated before him in the Oval Office, and the Quezón cable on his desk in front of him, Roosevelt leaned forward, eyes flashing. There would be no political accommodation with Japan, he said, no withdrawal of American troops, and no declaration of neutrality. Roosevelt barked out his orders, slamming the palm of his hand on his desk for emphasis, then dispatched Stimson to draft a response to Quezón while Marshall wrote a message to MacArthur. Both missives carried Roosevelt’s signature. Stimson was impressed by the president’s unfeigned rage, as was Marshall, who viewed Roosevelt’s
actions in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor as indecisive. But now, Marshall admitted, the president had finally shown his toughness. “I immediately discarded everything in my mind I had held to his discredit,” Marshall later said. “Roosevelt said we won’t neutralize. I decided he was a great man.” Stimson’s response to Quezón left little room for interpretation: Not only was a statement of neutrality out of the question, he wrote, but “so long as the flag of the United States flies on Filipino soil as a pledge of our duty to your people, it will be defended by our own men to the death. Whatever happens to [the] present American garrison, we shall not relax our efforts until the forces which are now marshaling outside the Philippines return to the Philippines and drive out the last remnant of the invaders from your soil.”

The pronouncement should have satisfied Quezón, who had finally got what he wanted—a unilateral pledge from Roosevelt that the Philippines would be defended and liberated. But Quezón responded angrily to the president’s missive, shouting at his aides that Roosevelt’s position was unacceptable. “Who is in a better position, Roosevelt or myself, to judge what is best for my people?” Quezón asked. Seated in a wheelchair in a small room off the main tunnel of Malinta and rasping for breath, the hotheaded Quezón peremptorily summoned his secretary and began dictating his resignation as the Philippine president. But within twenty-four hours and after a discussion with his aides, he withdrew the resignation, apparently convinced by the argument that such an action would leave him vulnerable to charges of abandoning his people during their greatest trial. MacArthur didn’t intervene, knowing that it was only a matter of time before the fiery Quezón changed his mind. Then too, the U.S. commander had his own problems, which included drafting a reply to an obviously angry Roosevelt, whose instructions to his commander were as unambiguous as any he would ever dictate. MacArthur, he directed, was to fight the Japanese on Bataan and Corregidor “so long as there remains any possibility of resistance.”

If MacArthur had any doubts about what was expected of him, Roosevelt put them to rest in a message to the commander:

    
I have made these decisions in complete understanding of your military estimate that accompanied President Quezón’s message to me.
The duty and the necessity of resisting Japanese aggression to the last transcends in importance any other obligation now facing us in the Philippines. I therefore give you this most difficult mission in full understanding of the desperate nature to which you may shortly be reduced. The service that you and the American members of your command can render to your country in this titanic struggle now developing is beyond all possibility of appraisement.

There it was—and MacArthur was right: Somewhere over the horizon, his fellow citizens were gathering their forces for the fight against Japan. His task now was to provide the blood that would buy the time for their preparation. There was one caveat given him. If required, Roosevelt said, MacArthur was free to surrender the Filipino part of his command, but the Americans must
never
surrender. MacArthur protested that, in fact, it had never been his intention to surrender either Filipinos
or
Americans. “My plans have already been outlined in previous radios,” he said, defensively. “[T]hey consist of fighting [on in] my present battle position in Bataan to destruction and then holding Corregidor in similar manner. I have not the slightest intention in the world of surrendering or capitulating the Filipino elements of my command.”

None of this melodrama was known to American and Filipino soldiers who were fighting for their lives on Bataan. Although George Parker’s defensive preparations along the Abucay-Mauban line were impressive (with positions dug using picks, axes, and shovels and scooped out by mess kits), the Japanese commanded the skies. They opened their attack on Bataan on January 9 with an artillery barrage against II Corps, holding the right of MacArthur’s position, and, for the next three days, slammed into Parker’s forces. On the thirteenth, attempting to pinch off a bulge in the line formed by the Japanese assault, the Philippine 21st Division counterattacked, and by the fifteenth, the Japanese offensive was stalled. The problem for Parker was that his “interior flank” (the units anchoring his left near Mount Natib, in the geographic center of Bataan) was vulnerable. But Parker’s decision to mount an attack on January 15 to strengthen this interior flank was a mistake: After twenty-four hours, the Philippine 51st Division disintegrated, its ranks thinned to nonexistence by a Japanese counterstroke. The Japanese immediately
saw their opening, plunged through the gap in the American lines, and drove a wedge between Parker and Wainwright’s forces. Parker faced a disaster. “Unless the 51st Division sector could be regained,” he later wrote, “it was evident that my left flank would be enveloped and the position would be lost.”

Wainwright could do nothing to help, as he was also under pressure. In the days ahead, Wainwright was able to fight the Japanese to a standstill, but the price was heavy. By the second week of January, his position was “desperate and rapidly growing worse.” The major clash took place near the town of Moron, which fell on January 17. Homma’s orders to his commanders were preemptory: They were to storm Moron and gain the ridgelines overlooking Wainwright’s forces. The Japanese plunged forward, taking enormous losses, but they stormed Moron and then held the ridges overlooking the town. Seeing that Homma had gained the higher ground, Wainwright withdrew further south, though not quickly enough. His 92nd Infantry was cut off by the Japanese, and the highway south—the only road suitable for transporting supplies and equipment—was severed. Intent now on cutting his way out, Wainwright mounted a series of attacks against a Japanese roadblock that held up his troops’ retreat. The battle for the roadblock raged for three days, with the Americans and Filipinos mounting successive attacks with “understrength, tired, poorly fed” units. Finally, on the morning of January 25, Wainwright ordered the abandonment of the Abucay-Mauban position, sending his units streaming south to a secondary defensive position laid out across the peninsula. “The difficult task of disengaging the enemy and moving a large number of men to the rear along a dangerously exposed and inadequate route of withdrawal was accomplished with a minimum of loss and confusion,” the official army history notes. “The maneuver was well planned and executed.”

Perhaps. But that was of little solace to Parker, whose eastern units were now in danger of being enveloped. On January 22, MacArthur sent Richard Sutherland into Bataan to assess the situation. The visit convinced Sutherland that a retreat was necessary. MacArthur agreed and warned the War Department of the impending move. “Heavy fighting has been raging all day,” he wrote on January 23. “My losses during the campaign have been very heavy and are mounting. They are now
approximately thirty-five percent. My diminishing strength will soon force me to a shortened line on which I shall make my final stand.” He added: “The enemy seems to have finally adopted a policy of attrition that his unopposed command of the sea enables him to replace at will.” The cable was the most pessimistic Marshall had yet received from MacArthur, and it was duly passed to the president. Marshall did not need to emphasize for Roosevelt what MacArthur’s cable meant, for while MacArthur went out of his way to praise his troops, it was clear that he held out little hope for a prolonged fight. MacArthur was losing heart: His January 23 cable designated Sutherland as his successor in the event of his own death.