The Allies

by Winston Groom

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  FOR NOW, ROOSEVELT HAD his hands full in the Pacific. Immediately after the assault on Hawaii, the Japanese had attacked Guam and Wake Islands. Guam, which had been considered “indefensible” by the War Department, surrendered its garrison of three hundred marines and naval personnel after a brief battle with some five thousand Japanese invaders. But Wake was a buzz saw for the Japanese. Situated twenty-three hundred miles from Pearl Harbor, it was an important intelligence collecting center, warning outpost, and stopover atoll for the big China Clipper ships of Pan Am’s flying boat operation. It was defended by a 450-man Marine Defense Battalion, equipped with half a dozen 5-inch guns from a World War I–era battleship and a small squadron of obsolete fighter planes.

  After two days of intense bombing, the Japanese planned on landing a force that would easily overwhelm the few marines who survived. The marine commanding the island, Major James P. S. Devereux, had other ideas. After learning about Pearl Harbor, he had expected to be bombed and moved his guns, substituting “dummy” versions in their place. No guns were hit, and when the Japanese invasion fleet appeared the next dawn, Devereux held his fire until the enemy was within a mile of shore. Then he opened up, sinking three destroyers, a troop transport, and knocking out a cruiser. More than three hundred Japanese had been killed, and the enemy commander decided to steam away and fight another day.

  When Devereux radioed the results of the action to Pearl Harbor, it was regarded as a grand victory, even though everyone expected it was temporary. It also was reported that when asked if he needed anything, Devereux had replied, “Send us more Japs.” This received widespread coverage in the press and airwaves, electrifying the American people, who badly needed a lift.*1

  A relief task force was sent to the island, built around the carrier Saratoga, with a cruiser division and marine reinforcements, but it would take nearly a week to get there. Over the next several days the Japanese contented themselves with bombing Wake from their bases in the nearby Marshall Islands. Slowly, almost every sign of civilization on the island was obliterated. On December 21, two Japanese carriers on their way home from the Pearl Harbor operation peeled off to add to the carnage.

  Shortly after midnight, December 23, the Japanese began landing troops on beaches all over Wake, outnumbering the marines three or four to one. Devereux’s scouts were watching intensely for any signs of the relief force while his shore guns accounted for two other troop transports and eight hundred Japanese soldiers.

  When Admiral William Pye (who was now in charge of the U.S. Pacific Fleet) received word that Japanese infantry were on the island, he decided it was too late to defend Wake or even to evacuate it and recalled the relief force back to Pearl Harbor. When word of this reached the marine pilots on Saratoga there was bitter consternation; in the cruiser division, there were even suggestions they should ignore the order and proceed with the mission. In the end, the task force came about and headed for Pearl, with the distressed marine pilots knowing full well what would become of their fellow marines on Wake Island if it were abandoned to the Japanese. Most cursed; some wept or bashed their fists against the bulkheads.

  Devereux began organizing his remaining men for a last stand. They fought it out during the morning and most of the afternoon but were slowly overcome. Lest everyone, including civilian workers, be killed, Devereux surrendered and was taken to the Japanese commander, who immediately demanded, “Where are the women’s quarters!” When Devereux replied there weren’t any women on Wake, the Japanese refused to believe it and threw Devereux and other officers into a cramped and filthy prison building. From there, they were shipped to atrocious POW camps in China or Japan and, as with other prisoners of the Japanese, only about two-thirds of them returned after the war.*22

  The president and many at the White House had been looking for a miracle at Wake. When word came that the Japanese had taken the island a disappointed Roosevelt declared, “It’s worse than Pearl Harbor.”

  * * *

  SINCE THE DAY OF THE Pearl Harbor attack, intelligence officers had voiced concern over the large number of Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the U.S. West Coast, who immediately became the object of suspicion and contempt by their neighbors.

  For the past several years the FBI and military counterintelligence services had been intercepting secret Japanese radio communiqués regarding the use of Japanese civilians in espionage work. West Coast ports were the jump-off points for the entire Pacific war, and it was disturbing to know they could be (and probably were being) watched. Right after Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded up several thousand persons of Japanese ancestry who were suspected of enemy activity and put them in internment camps for the remainder of the war. The agency at the same time also corralled several thousand persons of German and Italian ancestry and placed them in similar accommodations.

  There remained what to do about the large number of Japanese against whom the FBI had no information of disloyalty, but who, it was generally assumed, remained loyal to their emperor and their homeland. The possibility of a Japanese invasion remained high in speculation and on February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced off Santa Barbara and commenced shelling an oil field, killing a number of cattle. A clamor had begun to remove the Japanese, who were also becoming a target for mobs of angry Americans and Filipinos. Secretary of War Henry Stimson recorded that “anti-Japanese feeling had reached a level which endangered the lives of all such individuals; incidents of extra-legal violence were increasingly frequent.”

  In the face of mounting pressure Roosevelt signed an order of evacuation for the West Coast Japanese—two-thirds of them American citizens. The order called for a voluntary evacuation and relocation away from the coast; some ten thousand Japanese did this on their own, moving east into they knew not what. But for the remaining hundred thousand who chose not to avail themselves of this option, the Justice Department issued further instructions: that they were to be physically relocated to internment camps. The orders further stated that no military guards would be used, except for the protection of the evacuees, and that “all assistance” would be provided in helping the Japanese to move. Once assembled in the War Relocation Centers, the Japanese remained free to voluntarily relocate to points of their choosing in the interior of the country (a third, about thirty thousand, chose this option). The man Roosevelt placed in charge of this program was Milton Eisenhower, brother of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  An impression has been formed, through the mists of time and temperament, that every person of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast was summarily rounded up by the U.S. government and thrown into “concentration camps,” which subsequently developed a horrible reputation in the European war. In truth, the relocation camps of America were never places of torture or death, as were those in Europe. Additionally any Japanese (other than the ones already arrested by the FBI) could relocate voluntarily to any place inland.*3

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  THE PLIGHT OF THE U.S. PHILIPPINES, which like Wake Island was also undergoing its ordeal, was particularly agonizing for Roosevelt. Five years earlier, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, a hero of World War I, had retired to become chief military adviser to the Philippines, then a U.S. commonwealth. In prewar days, President Roosevelt had a cordial but wary relationship with the Army’s chief of staff. Roosevelt actually once remarked to Rex Tugwell, one of his brain trusters, that MacArthur was “the most dangerous man in America.”*4 MacArthur, for his part, regarded Roosevelt as a lightweight but in practice showed him great deference as president. In fact, they both showed each other respect, though neither fully trusted the other.

  The American battle design for defense of the Philippines, War Plan Orange, was to assume that U.S. and Filipino forces would be able to hold out against a Japanese invasion for up to six months until a powerful U.S. naval force could fight its way across the Pacific with reinforcements. Asked by the Philip
pines commonwealth president Manuel Quezon how long it would take to build an army that could withstand a Japanese invasion for that long, MacArthur replied it would take ten years. That was in 1935. The Americans and the Filipinos had simply run out of time.

  At this time, the United States Army had some thirty-one thousand men in the Philippines, along with a sizable air force of B-17 bombers and modern P-40 fighters. The Philippine army numbered seventy thousand, but most were reservists and not highly trained. MacArthur, representing both the United States and the Philippines, commanded them all.

  When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, an alert soldier listening to music on a San Francisco station through his shortwave radio heard the broadcast interrupted to announce the attack and ran hollering into the night to break the news. MacArthur, asleep in his luxurious penthouse in the Manila Hotel with his wife and four-year-old son, put on his uniform and asked his wife to bring him a Bible, which he read for about an hour before going to his headquarters.

  The Army Air Corps commander wanted to immediately send thirty-one B-17s to bomb Japanese air bases on Formosa Island (now Taiwan). But MacArthur refused permission on grounds that Roosevelt had ordered him to let the Japanese strike first. It is unclear what the sixty-year-old MacArthur thought the Japanese attack on Hawaii had represented. But the Philippine air corps was relegated to sending its bombers away at first light to keep from being destroyed on the ground in an enemy air raid they all assumed must be coming.

  The fighters were sent out to patrol against enemy attack, which they did from first light till about noon, when they were brought down to be refueled at Clark Field, about forty miles northwest of Manila. By then MacArthur had changed his mind about bombing Formosa and the bombers, too, were recalled for fueling. So far, there were no signs of the enemy and the American pilots had gone into the mess hall for lunch when suddenly in the sky there appeared great formations of Japanese bombers. The pilots, rushing out to the airstrip to man their planes, could see high above them countless sticks of enemy bombs glinting in the noonday sun, headed their way.

  Most of the American bombers and many fighters were destroyed or badly damaged by the explosions, and thirty men were killed. When this was reported back to Washington an irate Hap Arnold, chief of the Air Corps, telephoned the U.S. air commander in the Philippines and berated him: “How could you, an experienced airman, let this happen? This is what we sent you out there to prevent in the first place!” When Roosevelt got the news he could not seem to get over it, for several days repeating, over and over, “On the ground! On the ground! They were destroyed on the ground!”

  Though MacArthur didn’t know it, there was no U.S. naval fleet coming to relieve and reinforce the Philippines. Roosevelt was aware of this, and so was General George Marshall, the current Army chief of staff. The Japanese navy was running wild all over the Far East with a dozen aircraft carriers and division after division of battleships and cruisers, while the United States had but three carriers and no battleships or trained Army to send to the rescue. There were twenty-one thousand partly trained U.S. Army troops waiting on the West Coast to board ships for the Philippines, but they were diverted to Australia for fear of the Japanese navy. Like Wake’s Major Devereux before him, General MacArthur was on his own.

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  ON THE TWENTY-FOURTH of December, Christmas Eve, the Japanese invasion fleet appeared and began landing an army at Lingayen Gulf, about 125 miles north of Manila. The enemy got their men ashore before MacArthur could react. War Plan Orange called for the Allied forces to move to the Bataan Peninsula across Manila Bay from the city. It was a dense, jungle-type terrain with mountains and unfordable rivers, ideal for defense. It was assumed that food stockpiled for six months would be sufficient for a forty-thousand-man army.

  MacArthur, however, decided to meet the Japanese army head-on. After all, he had an army of more than a hundred thousand against an enemy nearly half that size.

  It was not a wise decision. The Japanese were well-trained veterans; they had tanks and air support, as well as the cover of big naval guns. The fighting was bitter and bloody. It also featured the last large-scale cavalry charge in modern warfare, led by General Jonathan “Skinny” Wainwright, a hard-drinking former West Point first captain and cavalryman. “We lost more than a few of our first-class fighting men,” Wainwright lamented later, “and a number of fine horses—including my Little Boy, who took a bullet through the head.”

  The Japanese pushed the Americans and Filipinos back until retreat into the Bataan Peninsula was the only option. On the evening of December 28, President Roosevelt delivered over the radio a “proclamation”: “I give to the people of the Philippines my solemn pledge that their freedom will be redeemed and their independence established and protected,” he said. “The entire resources, in men and material of the United States, stands behind that pledge.”3

  The Filipinos, already reeling from the bombings of their cities, received this promise as a godsend. So did MacArthur and his army, who believed that the Navy was coming to their rescue with reinforcements and supplies. Neither appreciated that this promise was just political palaver.

  MacArthur was so confident that he cabled General George Marshall in Washington: “If the western Pacific is to be saved it has to be saved here and now.” But by then Marshall had concluded that the western Pacific could not be saved—at least not here and not now. Yet he was averse to imparting that information to MacArthur, lest he lose confidence. A week earlier, a conference between Roosevelt and Churchill had secretly confirmed the “Europe First” policy for the United States and Great Britain, meaning that all major resources from both countries would go to the war against Germany. Japan could be dealt with later.

  Yet the president and General Marshall had decided it was better for MacArthur to fight on rather than surrender. Who knew? Maybe he would somehow pull off a victory. The Philippines was getting big headlines back home, and MacArthur was portrayed as a great hero. It was good for morale because, at the time, it was the only place Americans were actively fighting any of the Axis powers. War Secretary Stimson was even more cynical about it. “Sometimes men have to die,” he said.

  Thus MacArthur charged hopefully backward, as it were—into the steaming mists of Bataan’s mountainous jungles, believing salvation was at hand. He cabled Washington that he needed several dozen P-40 fighter planes, asking, rather pathetically, “Can I expect anything along that line?”4

  * * *

  MACARTHUR HAD SET UP HIS headquarters on the Rock, Corregidor, the thousand-acre granite island two miles off the tip of the Bataan Peninsula, across the bay from Manila. The American and Filipino resistance stiffened. MacArthur knew the terrain well ever since he had surveyed the entire peninsula as a young first lieutenant. He drew his defensive lines carefully across the hundred-mile-long, thirty-mile-wide finger of land. In all there were five defensive lines, each about ten miles distant from the other, most drawn up where rivers impeded the Japanese way and bridges could be blown.

  For nearly three months, MacArthur’s army put up a magnificent fight. The Japanese hurled entire regiments against the Americans in reckless, suicidal banzai charges and were shot down by the thousands. But still they came, and by late February MacArthur’s defensive lines began to give way. It turned out there had been only a month’s supply of food; although MacArthur had put the men on half rations, hunger began to be rampant. As the days passed, the men killed off all the carabao (a kind of water buffalo) on Bataan; when the cavalry horses had eaten up all the grain and were themselves starving, they were killed and consumed. Men shot monkeys from the trees and made soup. Most of the soldiers had lost twenty or thirty pounds and their uniforms, now in tatters, hung on them as if on scarecrows. Experimentation with consuming local flora and fauna sometimes came with a high price: a lot of it was poisonous, from snakes, toads, and nettles to luscious-looking jungle plants.

&
nbsp; Finally, MacArthur learned the truth about his situation, that there would be no powerful relief fleet from the Navy. He was informed by an intelligence officer from Washington, who had arrived by submarine to take the Philippines’ gold reserves out of the country.

  In disgust, MacArthur wired General Marshall in Washington: “I intend to fight it out to complete destruction.” Marshall tried to soothe him by pointing out that as long as MacArthur was fighting the Japanese army in the Philippines, he was at least keeping them from fighting elsewhere. This offered MacArthur some new sense of purpose but it had a hollow ring.

  For Roosevelt and Marshall, the possibility of MacArthur as a prisoner of the Japanese was awful to contemplate. Tokyo Rose, the Japanese radio propagandist, had gleefully told of marching him in chains through the streets of Tokyo to the Imperial Plaza, his eventual hanging place across from the emperor’s palace. To preserve his safety, Marshall and Roosevelt decided to send MacArthur to Australia to command U.S. and Allied forces there. At that point the Japanese were occupying the northern half of New Guinea, from where they intended to launch an invasion of the Australian mainland.

  MacArthur furiously declined to leave his troops at the hour of their great peril. After a series of terse back-and-forths between him and Marshall, MacArthur refused to go unless ordered by President Roosevelt personally. Roosevelt gave the order and promised MacArthur he would be in command of a great army with which to fight the Japanese.

  Getting the general, his family, and their faithful Cantonese amah (nurse) “Ah Chew,” plus his immediate staff, out of the Philippines was no sure thing, however. The enemy had thrown up a tight naval blockade, and no large plane could land safely anywhere near Corregidor. Escape by submarine might take too long to arrange, and MacArthur didn’t like the idea anyway. Finally it was decided that they go by PT boat to the island of Mindanao, five hundred miles south, where they would be picked up at the Del Monte pineapple plantation by a B-17 bomber from Australia.