The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur

by Perry, Mark

  Wainwright was reassuring. “Of course I will, Douglas,” he said.

  MacArthur told Wainwright that he would be in command. Wainwright responded that his goal was to hold Bataan until relieved.

  “Yes, yes, I know,” MacArthur said. “But I want to be sure that you’re defending in as great depth as you can. You’re an old cavalryman, Jonathan, and your training has been long, thin, light, quick-hitting lines. The defense of Bataan must be deep. For any prolonged defense, you must have depth.”

  The two were silent for a moment. “You’ll get through,” Wainwright said.

  MacArthur nodded. “And back,” he responded. MacArthur gave Wainwright a box of cigars and two cans of shaving cream as a farewell gift. “Goodbye, Jonathan,” MacArthur said. “When I get back, if you’re still on Bataan, I’ll make you a lieutenant general.” This was typical of MacArthur, for whom promotions were the ultimate symbol of achievement.

  “I’ll be on Bataan if I’m still alive,” Wainwright responded.

  The next night, as the sun set, MacArthur and his entourage boarded PT-41 at the South Dock.

  MacArthur was the last aboard, turning for one last look at Corregidor. Finally, he nodded: “You may cast off, Buck, when you are ready.” PT-41 met up with the other PT boats, which had picked up their passengers at various locations around the island, and then, with PT-41 in the lead, the group gingerly navigated the mine-filled waters of Manila Bay before Bulkeley turned south. He pushed the engines hard then, leaving Corregidor in his wake. After several hours, a minor compass error brought them close to Cabra Island, and for a moment, Bulkeley was convinced they had been spotted. South of the island, the sea was pitch dark. “Towering waves buffeted our tiny war-weary, blacked-out vessels,” MacArthur remembered. “The flying spray drove against our skin like stinging pellets of birdshot. We would fall off into a trough, then climb up the near slope of the steep water peak, only to slide down the other side. The boat would toss crazily back and forth seeming to hang free in space as though about to breach, and then would break away and go forward with a rush.” Nearly everyone on the boat was sick, with one passenger describing the journey as “murderous.”

  The four PT boats were separated in the night, with one of them dumping its fuel to gain speed when it mistook the distant PT-41 for a Japanese vessel. Bulkeley spun his boat in circles, searching for the other PT boats in the darkness, but it was hopeless. At 3:00 a.m., he turned south again, this time alone, into Mindoro Strait, hoping that the others would somehow make their way to his preplanned rendezvous point. Near dawn, Bulkeley made landfall at an uninhabited island of the Cuyo group, some 250 miles from Corregidor. Two hours later, two other PT boats arrived and the three hid in a cove, their commanders debating whether MacArthur should wait for a submarine to take him to Mindanao, or whether all three boats should wait for the missing PT-32. It wouldn’t be until weeks later that Bulkeley learned that PT-32 had been abandoned by its commander because of a faulty engine. Luckily, the commander and his crew were taken aboard an American submarine, which then sunk the boat.

  The run from Corregidor had been rough, and few wanted to endure another night of sickness and danger. Early that afternoon, Bulkeley and MacArthur decided to go on to Mindanao while leaving PT-34 behind to wait for the missing boat. They left during the midafternoon. That night, Bulkeley spotted a Japanese destroyer but eluded it. “I think it was the whitecaps that saved us,” he later speculated. “The Japs didn’t notice our wake, even though we were foaming away at full throttle.” Darkness found them hugging the coastline at Negros Island. “I had no charts,” Bulkeley later remembered. “I’d never been there before.” At daylight, PT-41 was in the Mindanao Sea. As the sun rose, Bulkeley spotted Cagayan—his destination—and he stood at the wheel, squinting to see if the Japanese were tied up in its harbor, waiting for him. MacArthur came up from below, unshaven and weakened from seasickness. The coast of Mindanao, and safety, beckoned. He smiled at Bulkeley. “You’ve taken me out of the jaws of death,” he told him, “and I won’t forget it.”

  Bulkeley and his passengers tied up at Cagayan in Mindanao, with the trailing boat that had vainly waited for PT-32 showing up soon thereafter. Three days later, after what seemed like an interminable delay, a single B-17 bomber arrived at Del Monte Airfield, but it was so patched together that MacArthur refused to use it. Exasperated, he fired off a cable to Marshall, requesting that a better-equipped aircraft be sent for him. MacArthur used his time in Mindanao to confer with Brigadier General William F. Sharp, who commanded twenty-five thousand U.S. and Filipino forces on the island. Their situation was better than Wainwright’s: While isolated and short of ammunition, they had plenty of food. Finally, at midnight on March 16, two B-17s landed at Del Monte and MacArthur and his party boarded them the next morning. The B-17s were nearly as rickety as the first one sent from Australia, but MacArthur, Jean, Arthur, Ah Cheu, and MacArthur’s staff packed themselves into the aircraft, leaving their baggage behind. Huff, seated near the general, shook his head. He couldn’t decide which he preferred: a watery death or a fiery crash. “At this moment our lives are worth something less than a nickel,” he told MacArthur’s logistics chief, Richard Marshall.

  MacArthur, his family, and his staff made the ten-hour journey to Australia without incident. Even a last-minute diversion (caused by a nearby Japanese air attack) could not keep him from celebrating. After he landed at a sun-drenched airfield near Darwin on March 18, he made a quick statement for the waiting press before accosting the nearest American in uniform. “Where are all the troops?” he asked. The American, shocked that he was face-to-face with his new commander, shrugged. “So far as I know, sir,” he said, “there are very few troops here.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Alice Springs

  I came through and I shall return.

  —Douglas MacArthur

  On the day that Douglas MacArthur arrived at Australia’s Batchelor Field, fifty miles south of Darwin, Lieutenant General George Brett, the new head of the U.S. Army Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific, telephoned John Curtin with the news. “The President of the United States has directed that I present his compliments to you and inform you that General Douglas MacArthur, United States Army, has today arrived in Australia from the Philippine Islands,” he said. Brett told Curtin that Roosevelt would find it “highly acceptable to him and pleasing to the American people for the Australian government to nominate General MacArthur as the Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific.” Curtin was surprised and pleased, but before he could say anything, Brett apologized for telling him of MacArthur’s arrival after the fact, adding that Roosevelt hoped Curtin would understand that MacArthur’s “safety during the voyage from the Philippine Islands required the highest order of secrecy.” Curtin said that he understood. Where exactly was MacArthur now? he asked. Brett hesitated. “I don’t really know,” he said.

  MacArthur was in Alice Springs, a dusty, fly-infested town in the middle of Australia, his next stopping point after being told that Japanese fighters were on their way to bomb Darwin. Alice Springs was not what MacArthur had expected; there was a hotel of sorts where he, Jean, Arthur, and his staff stretched out on hastily arranged cots while awaiting the Australian government’s dispatch of a special train for their use. Jean wouldn’t have it any other way—when told that another aircraft would take them to Melbourne, she had refused. “We are going by train,” she insisted, even though their destination, Melbourne, was 1,403 miles to the southeast, a seventy-hour train journey across half a continent. MacArthur was sympathetic. The flight from Mindanao had taken them over Japanese-held territory, the pilot dodging and plunging to evade detection as Jean and Arthur held air-sickness bags to their mouths. They had flown through downdrafts and thunderstorms and, in the end, had been forced to dodge an attack of swarming Japanese Zeros along Australia’s northern coast.

  Jean had had enough of such aerial perils. MacArthur and his entourage took i
n a movie at Alice Spring’s theater, sipped coffee in the hotel, then went up to bed—a somewhat ridiculous start for the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific.

  The train arrived the next day, but it was as rickety as the town itself. Nonetheless, MacArthur and his immediate family boarded it for the journey south while some of his staff, eyeing the locomotive suspiciously, decided to fly. The trip might have gone down as romantic, but the ride was agonizingly slow, the passenger accommodations uncomfortable (the only way to get to the dining car was to stop the train and walk back to it), and the lay of the tracks uncertain. The antiquated nineteenth-century train rocked and swayed as much as the B-17 that had flown the MacArthurs south from Mindanao. With the shock of the risky journey and the worry about his son now subsiding a bit, MacArthur was finally able to sleep. This was good therapy, as it was now apparent that there was no army in Australia, no special troops designated for his arrival, no munitions or planes or navy, and no way back to Luzon. He had had his first intimation of this at twenty thousand feet over the Celebes Sea, when the B-17 carrying him rocked its way through a thunderstorm that, for the white-knuckled pilot, was preferable to dodging Japanese fighters. The Empire of Japan was triumphant: Its carriers ruled the seas, its planes owned the air, and its soldiers had rolled south all the way to Australia’s doorstep. Staff aide Richard Marshall, who had preceded MacArthur and joined the party north of Adelaide, briefed his commander on the bad news: There were just over thirty thousand Allied troops in Australia, he said, perhaps five score planes, and no navy to speak of. MacArthur listened in silence before nodding. “God have mercy on us,” he said.

  MacArthur arrived in Adelaide on Friday, March 20. He was 953 miles from Alice Springs, 1,840 miles from New Guinea, 3,614 miles from Manila, and 4,786 miles from Tokyo Bay (about the distance from New York to Los Angeles—and back again). When the train chugged into Adelaide Station, MacArthur steeled himself to face the gaggle of reporters who were expecting a statement. Anticipating this, he pulled a crumpled envelope with some scribbled words from his pocket. He had brought a speech all the way from Corregidor. He wanted to send a message, though not simply to the Australians; he also wanted to address the people of the Philippines and his besieged soldiers on Bataan. For while he had escaped Bataan and Corregidor, they had not. He was safe and sound, while they continued fighting for their lives. He was filled with guilt and had shared his anguish with Sid Huff during their time on PT-41. It was one of the few times in his life that he had confided to anyone. Huff wrote about that long night with MacArthur years later, in a series of articles for the Saturday Evening Post:

  What had happened, I soon realized, was that he had had time to think back over our defeat in the Philippines and he was now trying to analyze it and get it all straight in his mind. And to do that, he wanted to think out loud. . . . Occasionally, I remembered something that had slipped his mind, but most of the time MacArthur just talked, his voice slow and deliberate and barely distinguishable above the high whine of the engines. I was soon wide-awake, especially when his voice choked up as he expressed his chagrin at being ordered to leave Corregidor.

  It was a little uncanny. But it was bitterly dramatic, too, and gravely sad. I thought then that on this bouncing voyage to Mindanao, on this rough passage that brought us not only mental but physical wretchedness, he had been thrust downward from the crest as far as a man could go.

  I was wrong, of course. I was wrong because we could not realize the greater trouble that lay ahead. But I was wrong, if I thought that MacArthur was merely looking back at what might have been. He was in the trough of the wave at the moment, but he had no intentions of staying there. His jaw was set. His face was grim. When he said he would return to the Philippines, he meant it, and he was already planning how he could do it.

  Now, at Adelaide Station, MacArthur scribbled some additional words on the back of the envelope, then opened the door to the train’s rear platform and greeted the crowd. The face that Huff saw on PT-41 was then evident. MacArthur’s jaw was set, his face was grim, and although he was “in the trough of the wave at the moment,” he was already plotting his return. He neither waved nor smiled, but had prepared himself for this moment, so his voice was strong and authoritative: “The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary object of which is the relief of the Philippines.” He paused and looked up from his notes: “I came through and I shall return.”

  MacArthur’s pledge brought an ovation from the throngs in Adelaide, reassured Curtin, and cheered the people of the Philippines. But it caused consternation at the War Department and bitter mutterings among MacArthur’s colleagues. It seemed inappropriately personal, even self-centered. MacArthur wasn’t going to whip the Japanese alone, his critics pointed out; tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen would have to do it. Shouldn’t he have said “ we shall return”? Other voices joined this chorus, with American columnists dismissing MacArthur’s speech as “silly,” “pompous,” and even “stupid.” George Marshall ignored the grumbling. MacArthur couldn’t be expected to change his statement now, he said, and the American public loved it. The news of his rescue had electrified the nation and reinforced the view that he remained the nation’s greatest soldier. Then too, MacArthur’s “I shall return” pledge was not simply a spur-of-the-moment reflection of his outsized ego, but was the purposeful outcome of discussions he had had with Philippine journalist Carlos Romulo and the MacArthur staff back on Corregidor. Even then, there were strong objections: Richard Sutherland argued that MacArthur shouldn’t personalize the war or draw attention from the sacrifices made by his soldiers on Bataan. Romulo disagreed. The statement would be believed by Filipinos, he said, precisely because it was personal. “America has let us down and won’t be trusted,” he told Sutherland. “But the people still have confidence in MacArthur. If he says he is coming back, he will be believed.”

  As Romulo foresaw, MacArthur’s statement not only became a political asset, but also fit well with Franklin Roosevelt’s war strategy: As soldiers and airmen were being shipped to Great Britain, the president had to show the people of the Philippines something—and MacArthur was it. Roosevelt himself had said as much during a White House press conference just days before MacArthur arrived in Adelaide. The president told reporters that MacArthur’s escape from the Philippines was the result of a calculation that the general could more capably defeat the Japanese from Australia than from the Philippines. “Every American admires, with me, General MacArthur’s determination to fight to the finish with his men in the Philippines,” Roosevelt said, but then pointedly added that there was little doubt that MacArthur could be “more useful in Supreme Command of the whole Southwest Pacific than if he had stayed on Bataan.” This was good politics: MacArthur might not be worth an army, but he could serve as a useful stand-in until one was created.

  This sobering fact was now apparent to the new Southwest Pacific commander, whose welcome in Melbourne (three days and four hundred miles southeast of Adelaide) was accompanied by a patched-together American color guard, many of whom had last held a rifle during basic training. “No band!” MacArthur insisted to his aides, which was a good thing, because there wasn’t one. This esteemed soldier and celebrated war hero deployed words instead of soldiers, his artillery salvos consisting of soaring pledges. He now understood the truth of Marshall’s brazen buck-’em-up cables: There was no army awaiting him in Australia—it was still being trained, in the United States. Of course, the one man who didn’t need reminding of this was George Marshall himself, who, back in Washington, was ensnaring MacArthur for his own purposes. The army chief of staff needed to keep MacArthur happy, if only to stave off increasingly public complaints that while America was fighting to save England, its colonial wards in the Philippines were left to fight for themselves.

  For this reason, and be
cause Marshall admired him (though MacArthur himself could never bring himself to admit this), the army chief forwarded a paper to Roosevelt recommending that MacArthur be given the Medal of Honor. Awarding the medal would transform MacArthur’s flight from Corregidor into an act of courage and silence wary Republicans. Then too, as Marshall knew, it was long overdue: MacArthur had deserved it in World War One, but hadn’t received it, in part because of his poor relations with Pershing’s “Chaumont crowd.” And while the award would confirm MacArthur’s place as the army’s man in the Pacific, it would also (as Marshall believed) counter Japanese claims that MacArthur’s Pacific hegira symbolized U.S. cowardice. Soon enough, the Japanese did exactly what Marshall had anticipated, broadcasting that MacArthur was a “deserter”—a word they knew would erode the morale of Bataan’s defenders. The Medal of Honor citation, written by Marshall and reviewed by Roosevelt, was a single paragraph that focused on his personal courage. “His utter disregard of personal danger under heavy fire and aerial bombardment, his calm judgment in each crisis, inspired his troops, galvanized the spirit of resistance of the Filipino people, and confirmed the faith of the American people in their armed forces.”

  Aside from the obvious domestic political benefits that Roosevelt accrued by agreeing to MacArthur’s award, the honor reinforced the president’s commitment to Churchill to help resolve England’s Australia problems. Despite agreeing to transfer three Australian divisions to Curtin, Churchill had hesitated (again) when Japanese troops overran northern Burma—an offensive that threatened India, the jewel in England’s colonial crown. The promised troops were not on the way to Australia after all, Churchill wrote to Curtin, then added that he was certain the Australian prime minister could understand why.