That was the plan and that was what happened, though at different tempos. Seven hundred Japanese landed on the beaches of Agaña, in Guam, on December 10 and forced the tiny garrison’s surrender after a half-hour fire fight. Wake took longer. A “fixed aircraft carrier” moored over a thousand miles from Midway, the little atoll was manned by about five hundred Marines, who had a few small artillery pieces and a dozen Grumman Wildcats lacking both armor and self-sealing fuel tanks. The first air attack knocked out most of the Wildcats on the ground. Bombing continued for three days, after which the Japanese tried a landing—only to be miraculously driven off by Wake’s gun crews, with the loss of two destroyers. A relief expedition of carriers and support vessels was dispatched from Pearl Harbor but retired faintheartedly after a series of mishaps. After more air strikes had worn the defenders down, Japanese warships and transports returned on December 23 and overwhelmed the garrison in bloody fighting.
In the Philippines the Japanese planned to destroy America’s Far East Air Force and then capture Luzon with a five-pronged ground assault, and that is what they did. Faulty communications and bad luck marked MacArthur’s air defense. When the Zeroes roared down on Clark Field ten hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, they saw with surprise and relief B-17’s and fighters nicely lined up, evidently preparing to take off.
In hardly more than an hour the Japanese knocked out thirty-five of the exposed planes and crippled American air power in the Philippines. MacArthur, who a day or two before had told military colleagues that he was absolutely secure against air attack, reported that the Japanese planes had been brilliantly handled and thought that some of them were perhaps handled by white pilots. Three hundred miles north, the Japanese, under Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, were beginning their first landings on Luzon; in the next two weeks, in the face of harassment from the United States Navy, foul weather, and occasional communications failures of their own, they put thousands of troops on the northwestern, northern, and southeastern coasts of the long sprawl of Luzon, with the main concentration in Lingayen Gulf. In a final thrust—from the sea just before Christmas—twenty-four transports landed an infantry division in Lamon Bay, at the “rear entrance” to Manila.
For China, Tokyo planned a quick seizure of the foreign concessions in Shanghai and Tientsin as well as Hong Kong. The former had no chance to hold out; the crew of the river gunboat Wake had to surrender after failing to scuttle her—the only American ship to surrender in the whole war. The British and Canadian forces in Hong Kong put up unexpectedly strong resistance, but the increasingly familiar Japanese pattern—heavy bombing followed by overwhelming ground power—brought the surrender of the garrison on Christmas Day.
It was in Malaya, however, that Japanese Imperial Headquarters concentrated its main power. A naval force with nineteen transports headed up the Gulf of Siam, made a feint toward Bangkok, and then thrust its main force into the undefended port of Singora before dawn on December 8. The Japanese quickly won air command over the combat area and over the adjacent seas. In sinking the Prince of Wales and the Repulse they destroyed the only Allied battleship and battle cruiser west of Hawaii. Soon the ground forces were pushing down the length of Malaya and displaying the skill and versatility that would become a legend in the Pacific: turning strong points by quick amphibious hops, infiltrating the jungle, deftly employing light tanks and mobile forces, and always pressing the attack. By New Year’s Day several columns were converging north of Singapore.
So quickly did the Japanese fan out across the South Pacific and knock their adversaries off balance that the Allies not only were unable to establish counterstrategy, but they were unable to set up effective command machinery to make such strategy. The new ABDA command under Wavell, embracing American, British, Dutch, and Australian forces spread out over vast areas of Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines, was disintegrating even as Wavell was trying to take control. Instructed to hold the Malay Barrier, Burma, and Australia, and even “to take the offensive at the earliest opportunity” against Japan, the British General found that even on paper he had no power to relieve subordinate commanders, who retained the right to appeal to their governments. It was a jerry-built structure that could not survive defeat, and perhaps not even victory.
Already Roosevelt’s high goal of the militarily united nations was facing the splintering impact of defeat. As the Japanese drove south, Australia became more alarmed about its cities lying along the exposed seacoasts. Prime Minister John Curtin feared that the British would not be able to reinforce the defense of Malaya, which included Australian infantry units and air squadrons. Under heavy pressure, he communicated directly with Roosevelt, bypassing Churchill. “The army in Malaya must be provided with air support,” he cabled to Washington the day after Christmas, “otherwise there will be a repetition of Greece and Crete, and Singapore will be grievously threatened.” The fall of Singapore would leave Australia isolated from the mother country. Reinforcements marked by London for Malaya, he complained to Roosevelt, seemed utterly inadequate.
The next day Curtin made a declaration of military independence from Great Britain—and did so publicly. “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.”
Curtin’s declaration put Roosevelt in a political vise between London and Canberra, but militarily he was able to reassure the apprehensive Australians. A week after Pearl Harbor, Marshall had called a fifty-one-year-old staff officer, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to Washington and asked him to work out a general plan of action for the Pacific. After a quick assessment Eisenhower concluded that while every effort should be made to help MacArthur on Luzon, the United States must keep open the Pacific line of communication with Australia and establish a base there. Stimson welcomed the plan, partly because he feared that the Navy was all too ready to abandon the Far East entirely while the admirals built up their battle power. If the Allies were driven out of the Philippines and Singapore, he calculated, they could fall back on the East Indies and Australia, “and with the cooperation of China—if we can keep that going—we can strike good counterblows at Japan.” Roosevelt approved this plan, and soon was able to promise Curtin sizable reinforcements.
If we can keep China going—this was the cardinal problem in the Allied plan. Chungking emerged as both a demanding and a divisive factor in the United Nations within days of Pearl Harbor. Churchill found in Washington what he felt to be an exaggerated view of China’s importance. Roosevelt, he sensed, believed that Chinese fighting power rivaled that of Britain and even of Russia. He warned Roosevelt that American opinion overestimated the contributions that China could make to the global war. The President strongly disagreed, Churchill remembered later. What would happen, Roosevelt asked him, if China’s five hundred million population developed in the same way as Japan had and got hold of modern weapons? Churchill responded that he was more concerned with the present war. He assured Roosevelt that he would “of course always be helpful and polite to the Chinese, whom I admired and liked as a race”—but he still disagreed. If he could sum up in one word the lesson he had learned in the United States, he said later, it was “China.”
Relations in the field between the Chinese and the British were already deteriorating. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Chiang had grandly offered to hand over all Chinese resources unreservedly to the common cause, and he was disturbed that the British, even in their direst moment, seemed standoffish. Wavell would accept only two Chinese divisions for the defense of Burma—which was the defense also of the Burma Road, the only remaining supply route to Chungking. Chiang also suspected that in their extremity the British were filching supplies promised to China. But Wavell preferred to defend Burma with imperial troops, partly because the Burmese themselves, he felt, feared too many Chinese troops in their country. He asked Churchill to correct Roosevelt’s erroneous impression of his attitude.
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p; “I am aware of American sentiment about the Chinese,” he added tartly, “but democracies are apt to think with their hearts rather than with their heads, and a general’s business is, or should be, to use his head for planning.”
By late January, American eyes riveted on Luzon. The ordeal of the jungle fighting was rivaled only by the bleakness of the choices facing the high command in Washington, and by the drama of the men caught in a huge trap from which they could not free themselves.
A more fitting hero for the drama could hardly have been contrived. By 1942 Douglas MacArthur’s years stretched back over the great military events of the first half-century and a career of rare military virtuosity: observer with the Japanese Army in the Russo-Japanese War, aide-de-camp to President Theodore Roosevelt, assistant to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, engineer officer in the Vera Cruz expedition, Chief of Staff of the 42nd (Rainbow) Division by the end of World War I, superintendent of West Point at the age of thirty-nine, Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1929 to 1935, the third year of Roosevelt’s first term, Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, recalled to active duty in 1941.
MacArthur and Roosevelt had long had the amicable, wary, and defensive relationship of two seasoned leaders who saw in each other something of the prima donna, the rival, and the expert in his own trade. Their relationship was now dominated by the dynamics of war. In wartime each military echelon tends to be generous and forgiving of the next echelon below, which is nearer the field of danger and heroism, and demanding and critical of the next echelon above. This was the case in the Philippines, but it was exacerbated by special conditions. MacArthur loved the Philippines like a second homeland. He had long been a personal friend as well as subordinate of Manuel Quezon, first President of the Philippine Commonwealth and a leader in its long fight for independence. Both men believed that Washington starved the Far East and Pacific commands in general and had neglected Philippine defenses in particular. Both saw the archipelago as the bastion of the Southwest Pacific.
MacArthur had worked out a plan for the best use of his limited strength. As the giant Japanese pincers converged on Manila from north and south, he declared the capital an open city and deftly sidestepped his forces, in a risky double retrograde movement, to the Bataan Peninsula. Homma now closed in for the siege of Bataan. With limited troops of his own, since Imperial Headquarters considered the Philippines a secondary objective, for six days he drove again and again at the improvised line of Americans and Filipinos across the northern part of the peninsula. Finding an opening, he forced MacArthur’s troops down to the waist of Bataan. By now the main foe of both armies was not each other, but malaria, beriberi, dysentery, and deepening fatigue. Reluctantly Homma realized that he would have to call on Tokyo for more troops.
MacArthur by now was deep in another campaign—enlisting help from Washington. From the start he had rallied his forces with the promise that help was coming. The President’s message of December 28 cheered the defenders, and the New York Times report of it even more: ALL AID PROMISED / PRESIDENT PLEDGES PROTECTION. Even in January MacArthur was assuring his forces that “thousands of troops and hundreds of planes” were on the way. But the hoped-for flood of supplies was actually a driblet. The embattled General had to deal not only with Washington but also with the United States Asiatic fleet, which was under the separate command of Admiral Thomas C. Hart. MacArthur wanted him to use his small fleet to protect the line of supply up the long string of islands, and even to ferry planes and supplies. Hart, with inadequate air cover, with a handful of ships all “old enough to vote,” and with a new-found respect for Japanese striking power, would not risk his main strength; he agreed to commit only his large submarine fleet, but this was to prove inadequate. Commercial ships were hired to run the ever-tightening blockade, but only three small ships finally got through.
Unceasingly MacArthur called for a more aggressive strategy in the Southwest Pacific. “The Japanese are sweeping southward in a great offensive,” he radioed to Marshall on February 4, “and the Allies are attempting merely to stop them by building up forces in their front.” This method always failed in war and would be “a fatal mistake on the part of the Democratic Allies.” The enemy could be defeated only by closing with him—and this meant striking with naval power at his 2,000 miles of weakly protected communications. A sea threat would at once relieve the pressure in the south. “I unhesitatingly predict that if this is not done the plan upon which we are now working, based upon the building up of air supremacy in the Southwest Pacific, will fail, the war will be indefinitely prolonged and its final outcome will be jeopardized. Counsels of timidity based upon theories of safety first will not win against such an aggressive and audacious adversary as Japan….” United States High Commissioner Francis Sayre sent a similar plea.
Part of MacArthur’s frustration was caused by the fear that his pleas and proposals were not getting through to the “highest authority.” Marshall had to assure him that they were.
The Commander in Chief was indeed closely following MacArthur’s plight and was eager to help him. But a difference of perspective and interest had separated the War Department and MacArthur from the start. MacArthur took—or professed to take—Stimson’s and Marshall’s decision to give him emergency support and to show loyalty to the Filipinos, and, above all, to slow down the enemy, as a willingness to make a major commitment in the Philippines. In fact, Marshall and Eisenhower did not propose to make this a strategic commitment; on the contrary, once they saw the weight of the Japanese assault in Luzon, assessed the full damage to the fleet after Pearl Harbor, and felt the sting of Japanese air power against warships and merchantmen, they prepared to write the archipelago off.
Well before Christmas, Stimson and the military leaders were expecting the loss of Luzon and the retreat into Bataan and even to Corregidor. By January 3 the army planners concluded that an offensive northward from Australia to Mindanao would require a fleet so huge that Navy units would have to be transferred from the Atlantic, and that this would constitute “an entirely unjustifiable diversion of forces from the principal theatre—the Atlantic.” MacArthur kept up his pleas. As late as mid-February he was urging that time was growing short and that a “determined effort in force made now would probably attract the assistance of Russia.” In vain. Deep in the jungles of Luzon, he was running into the citadel of Atlantic First.
Roosevelt’s position was more ambiguous. His warm message to the Philippine people of December 28 had been reassuring about long-run protection of the Commonwealth but studiedly ambiguous as to immediate, all-out support. Fearing that both friend and foe might interpret his message as predicting a temporary loss of the archipelago, he had Hassett and Early deny that this was any kind of valedictory. But the more he stressed that he was not writing off MacArthur’s forces, the more he aroused false expectations.
Now Quezon tried a desperate maneuver. Agonized by the Japanese advance, crippled by tuberculosis, enfuriated by Washington’s refusal to act decisively, he proposed to Roosevelt that if the Philippines could not be saved, Washington should grant the country immediate independence and agree with Tokyo on a joint withdrawal of both forces; then the Philippines would be neutralized and spared the scourge of war and defeat. MacArthur had demurred at the step until Quezon told him that this was not a serious proposal; he hoped it might shock Washington into seeing the importance of the Far East.
Shock Washington it did. To Eisenhower it was a “bombshell.” Stimson and Marshall were disturbed that MacArthur, in his accompanying message, did not disown the neutralization proposal; rather, he treated it seriously as an alternative. They took the message to Roosevelt. Standing before the President as if in a court, Stimson denounced the idea as a moral abdication. Roosevelt, far more than the War Department, had to think of all the political implications of allowing to die the commonwealth that his nation had promised independence.
But he did not hesitate to veto the plan. Watching him, Marsh
all decided that all his doubts about the President were negated—that here was a great man. Soon on the way from Roosevelt to MacArthur was a message free of reproach but clear in its summons:
“American forces will continue to keep our flag flying in the Philippines so long as there remains any possibility of resistance. I have made these decisions in complete understanding of your military estimate that accompanied President Quezon’s message to me. The duty and necessity of resisting Japanese aggression to the last transcends in importance any other obligation now facing us in the Philippines.
“There has gradually been welded into a common front a globe encircling opposition to the predatory powers that are seeking the destruction of individual liberty and freedom of government. We cannot afford to have this line broken in any particular theatre. As the most powerful member of this coalition we cannot display weakness in fact or in spirit anywhere….
“I therefore give you this most difficult mission in full understanding of the desperate situation to which you may shortly be reduced….”
An accompanying message to Quezon struck the same note—and pledged ultimate liberation of the islands and independence for the Commonwealth.
Roosevelt could not save the Philippines, but he would save its President and its commander. On February 20, Quezon, his family, and his War Cabinet slipped away from Corregidor in a submarine. Three days later the President directed MacArthur to proceed to Mindanao, arrange for the prolonged defense of the southern Philippines, and then proceed to Australia, “where you will assume command of all United States troops.” MacArthur stayed with his command at Corregidor for another two weeks; then he, his wife, his son, and a small staff left on a dark evening in four torpedo boats. Through hazards they made their way to Mindanao and then by plane and train to Melbourne, arriving to a hero’s welcome and to the award by the Commander in Chief of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
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