The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (21 page)

In the midst of Wainwright’s fight for the pockets and in an attempt to counteract Homma’s propaganda, MacArthur issued a reassuring circular, instructing his officers to read it aloud to their men. Everyone was to get the message:

    
Help is on the way from the United States. Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched. The exact time of arrival
of reinforcements is unknown as they will have to fight their way through Japanese attempts against them. It is imperative that our troops hold until reinforcements arrive. No further retreat is possible. . . . It is a question now of courage and determination. Men who run will merely be destroyed but men who fight will save themselves and their country. I call upon every soldier in Bataan to fight in his assigned position resisting every attack. This is the only road to salvation. If we fight we win; if we retreat we will be destroyed.

The message gave MacArthur’s soldiers faint hope and was widely, and vocally, dismissed and labeled “MacArthur’s ghost story.”

By early February, disillusion with the American war effort had set in on Corregidor, capped by yet another Roosevelt fireside chat. America was waging a world war on many battlefields, the president said. And while it seemed that the future was shrouded in uncertainty, there was no doubt that America would be victorious. MacArthur’s men listened to Roosevelt and believed him. Victory was assured and help was on the way, but, they sensed, it would not arrive soon or in time to stave off
their
defeat. So although Roosevelt’s talk was intended to cheer up the troops, as one of MacArthur’s soldiers noted, it “[tended] to weaken morale.” In truth, as Roosevelt and Marshall knew, not only was no help on the way, but “the battling bastards of Bataan” (as MacArthur’s men now described themselves) were about to lose their commander.

T
he idea that Douglas MacArthur should be “rescued” from Corregidor and brought to Australia originated not with Marshall or Roosevelt, but with Australian Prime Minister John Curtin. A calloused trade union activist, the tough-talking Curtin came to office with a reputation as his country’s most celebrated antimilitarist and its most outspoken critic of Great Britain. In fact, his opinion of the mother country bordered on contempt. He viewed Winston Churchill as a leader who cloaked British imperialism in fine phrases about liberty and self-determination, but who was not only an unrepentant colonialist but also, as Curtin described him, “a blowhard.” The Australians had willingly joined the fight against Germany, providing England with three badly needed and well-trained combat divisions. But when the Japanese struck
Pearl Harbor and then conquered much of Southeast Asia, Curtin pressed Churchill to bring the “Diggers” (the Australians) home. Curtin made these views public in a high-profile commentary in the
Melbourne Herald
three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. “We refuse to accept the dictum that the Pacific struggle must be treated as a subordinate segment of the general conflict,” he wrote. “By that it is not meant that any one of the other theatres of war is of less importance than the Pacific, but that Australia asks for a concerted plan evoking the greatest strength at the Democracies’ disposal, determined upon hurling Japan back.”

Curtin’s argument mirrored MacArthur’s thinking. Both acquiesced in the Germany-first strategy, but neither of them liked it. For Curtin, the strategy not only was ill-conceived, but also exposed Australia to military conquest. Quezón-like, Curtin seethed at this, for while Churchill talked of plucky little England, the British leader seemed to blithely ignore the Japanese onslaught rolling south toward Darwin. When Churchill pointed out that the British fleet was still in the Pacific and doing battle with the Japanese, Curtin harrumphed his disgust. The British prime minister, Curtin thought, was either out of touch or suffering from delusions. The British fleet was no match for the Japanese and was hardly a bulwark against the hundreds of thousands of soldiers Tokyo could put in the field. In his
Melbourne Herald
commentary, Curtin made these views, and his disdain for the British, clear in a statement that stands as the first declaration of Australian independence from British dominance: “The Australian Government therefore regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in direction of the Democracies’ fighting plan. Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links with the United Kingdom.” Put simply, while Curtin confirmed Australia’s place in the empire, he placed its future in the hands of the Americans—not the British. “We must try to save ourselves,” Manuel Quezón told Carlos Romulo, “and to hell with the Americans.” John Curtin agreed: Australia must save itself, he said, and to hell with the British Empire.

Churchill huffily responded to Curtin’s defiant commentary with a series of detailed missives stretching over two months. He cajoled the
Australian leader with expansive pledges of support—what amounted to the equivalent of Marshall’s “buck up” cables to MacArthur. Still, this was Churchill at his Churchillian best, reassuring, feisty, steely-eyed, and self-confident. “Night and day,” he wrote in early January, “I am laboring here to make the best arrangements possible in your interests and for your safety, having regard to the other theatres and the other dangers which have to be met from our limited resources.”

Curtin greeted this claim acerbically, telling his Canberra political allies that no one, and certainly not Churchill, was as concerned with the “interests and safety” of Australia as he was. In mid-January, sensing that Curtin remained unmoved, Churchill praised the work of the “Australian Imperial Force” in North Africa, then pointed out that he could not have possibly known of the Japanese attack beforehand—implying that, if he had, things would be different: “I am sure it would have been wrong to send forces needed to beat Rommel to reinforce the Malay peninsula while Japan was still at peace. To try to be safe everywhere is to be strong nowhere.”

This argument, too, fell on deaf ears: Curtin might have pointed out that although the Japanese had not attacked Britain directly, their actions over the last ten years could hardly be described as “at peace.” Churchill, it was clear, had simply not been paying attention. Nevertheless, Curtin believed that Churchill was not making an argument so much as issuing a plea: If the Australian prime minister insisted on a withdrawal of Australian forces under British command, the fight against the Germans in North Africa would collapse. “We must not be dismayed or get into recrimination,” Churchill said, metaphorically baring his breast, “but remain united in true comradeship. Do not doubt my loyalty to Australia and New Zealand. I cannot offer any guarantees for the future, and I am sure great ordeals lie before us, but I feel hopeful as never before that we shall emerge safely, and also gloriously, from the dark valley.”

Thus Churchill, complete with the impressive capital-letter Churchill tropes: Comradeship. Loyalty. Ordeals. Glory. The Dark Valley. Churchill meant it, of course, and hoped it would be convincing. But privately, he was dismissive: He thought Curtin was weak and vacillating and, despite Churchill’s well-aimed praise, the British prime minister
looked upon Australian soldiers as barely competent—as auxiliaries to the British army. Curtin, who had friends in London spying on the prime minister (and reporting on Churchill’s private views), wasn’t fooled and wouldn’t cede his point. Like Quezón, he wanted a pledge, or as near to one as he could get, that the Americans and British would focus as much of their resources on Japan as they did on Germany. He threw a roundhouse right, but covered it with a velvet glove. “The long distance programming you outline is encouraging,” he responded, “but the great need is in the immediate future. The Japanese are going to take a lot of repelling, and in the meantime may do very vital damage to our capacity to eject them from the areas they are capturing.”

In this realistic assessment, at least, Curtin held the edge on his British counterpart. When Singapore was assaulted, Churchill considered but then rejected a plan to withdraw all the imperial forces. He then watched in dismay as the Japanese crept south and overwhelmed the empire’s “impregnable bastion.” Churchill’s refusal to withdraw was, as Curtin described it, “an inexcusable betrayal.” Of the 60,000-plus non-Indian forces taken captive, 15,000 of them were Australian, many of whom were diverted to Singapore in midstride, just as they were being shipped to Australia. Curtin’s view was reinforced by eyewitness reports from Australian officers describing British incompetence. One of them wrote that “the whole operation seems incredible: 550 miles in 55 days—forced back by a small Japanese army of only two divisions, riding stolen bicycles and without artillery support.” More adept at political maneuvering than either Churchill or Roosevelt would then (or later) concede, Curtin told Churchill that England could keep the Diggers in North Africa, but only if Churchill agreed to the appointment of an American commander for the Southwest Pacific. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt needed to read between the lines: Curtin wanted MacArthur.

Marshall and Roosevelt were thinking the same thing and had hinted as much to their Far East commander. Marshall first broached the subject in a February 2 cable that asked
for MacArthur’s views on sending MacArthur’s wife and son south. Two days later, Marshall sent another message, saying that consideration was being given to evacuating Philippine officials from Corregidor. Finally, on February 20, Marshall asked for MacArthur’s views on transferring his command to Mindanao, the southernmost island in the Philippine archipelago. From there, Marshall suggested, MacArthur could lead a guerrilla campaign against the Japanese or transfer his command to Australia. The next day, one of MacArthur’s oldest friends and longtime supporters, Patrick Hurley, who had served as secretary of war during the Bonus March incident, contacted MacArthur from his billet in Melbourne, where he was serving as a newly minted brigadier general. Hurley told MacArthur that he thought it was “logical and essential that the supreme command in the Southwest Pacific be given to an American.”

All these efforts had the look and feel of a well-designed campaign to pry MacArthur out of his Corregidor bastion and send him south, where he could not only do battle with the Japanese but also, as importantly, serve as a calming influence on the increasingly angry John Curtin. After seeding the idea for a rescue with the Philippine commander, Marshall communicated his thinking to Henry Stimson in a memo detailing the political reasons why he believed MacArthur should be transferred south. At the end of the memo (as if it were a mere afterthought), Marshall added that “a dominating character is needed down there [in Australia] to make the Navy keep up their job in spite of rows which we shall have between them.” We do not know Stimson’s reaction to Marshall’s reasoning, but he must have smiled: MacArthur would go to Australia to calm Curtin, to fight the Japanese, and—oh yes, to counter the influence of Ernie King.

By the end of February, Marshall had successfully shaped a consensus on MacArthur’s removal. Marshall’s reasoning was sound and had as much to do with the talent on hand as with Curtin, the Japanese—or the navy. As he scanned the list of senior officers capable of higher command, MacArthur’s name stood out. While MacArthur was “shrewd, proud, remote, highly strung and vastly vain,” as a British senior officer later described him, he was also experienced, courageous, imaginative, a brilliant organizer, and the sole senior American officer who had actually commanded large formations in wartime.

As Marshall scanned his list of potential army, corps, and division commanders—Dwight Eisenhower, Mark Clark, George Patton, Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodges, Robert “Nelly” Richardson, and a half
dozen others (all of them listed in the little black book he kept in the drawer of his office at the War Department) he noted that none of them had the Philippine commander’s experience. Eisenhower was untested, Clark a sniveler, and Patton a marplot; Bradley had never heard a shot fired in anger; Hodges lacked ambition; and Richardson was unwilling. MacArthur was the only one who wouldn’t have to learn on the job and who had the experience necessary to reassure the frightened Australians. Even Churchill himself, back in December, had hinted that MacArthur might be more useful in Australia than in Corregidor. During Churchill’s talks in Washington, he had shown Roosevelt and Stimson a telegram he had written ordering the evacuation of Lord Gort from Dunkirk in 1940 and thus depriving the Germans of a military trophy. The same could be done for MacArthur, he said. “I was struck by the impression it seemed to make on them,” Churchill recalled. “A little later in the day, Mr. Stimson came back and asked for a copy of it, which I promptly gave him.”

The argument for MacArthur’s removal to Australia was convincing to Roosevelt, not the least because pulling MacArthur off Corregidor would serve the president’s own political agenda. Roosevelt was facing public pressure to exact revenge on Japan (polls showed that Americans viewed Japan, and not Germany, as the nation’s primary enemy). Moreover, sending MacArthur to Australia would relieve pressure from Republicans who were pressing for MacArthur’s appointment as supreme commander. Wendell Willkie, who had lost the 1940 election to Roosevelt, publicly proposed that MacArthur be recalled from the Philippines and appointed supreme commander of all U.S. forces, and Congress had introduced a bill calling for the establishment of a Supreme War Command, which MacArthur would head. Roosevelt was not in the least bit intimidated by these political initiatives, but he agreed with Marshall that MacArthur’s rescue from Corregidor could serve multiple purposes. The most important of these would be to calm the clamor that the president do something to fight the Japanese. Then too, as Roosevelt conceded, the defense of Bataan and Corregidor had made MacArthur a national hero.

What was not clear, however, was whether MacArthur would agree to a “rescue.” Many of his colleagues in the War Department doubted
that he would, arguing that he would instead insist on the evacuation of his wife and son while staying to fight to the last soldier on Corregidor. Patrick Hurley, in Australia, agreed. He wrote to Marshall, saying that the proposed transfer would have to be handled carefully because MacArthur would view his rescue as a stain on “his honor and record as a soldier” and would be sensitive to claims that he was abandoning his men. Hurley suggested that it be made clear to MacArthur that he was only being evacuated to organize a new command—to fight the Japanese. On February 23, Stimson met with Roosevelt to talk about MacArthur’s status and to find the words that would convince the Philippine commander that journeying south was the noble thing to do. This mission was more delicate than either man would later admit: A mere suggestion would likely result in a MacArthur rejection (with the political fallout that would entail), while a cajoling directive would force the Philippine commander to guard his honor. After a short discussion, Stimson threw up his hands. “Make it an order,” he said. Roosevelt agreed: MacArthur would never refuse a direct order, no matter how distasteful, and the president instructed Stimson to have Marshall draft it. At the War Department, Marshall gave the assignment to Eisenhower, who knew how to appeal to his former boss.