by James Webb
I knew that the campaign for the Philippines would be long and bloody. After two years in the Pacific I was already mind-weary, ready to leave the army. And so as we proceeded toward Leyte I invented my own little escapes. As the Nashville sliced and turned through the gleaming royal blue waters I spent my free hours standing alone on its holy stoned wooden main deck, under the long tubes of the eight-inch guns so that I could not see them, and pretending I did not hear the boatswain’s pipings as I peered out into the incessant waves. In those moments I imagined I was a tourist, on a luxury liner headed not to the France where my little brother had just died but to the old and glorious Paris where he somehow might still be alive.
I could not deceive the sea, though. It was all Pacific Asia, surging and playing, rocking the giant warship like a toy, entertaining us with escorts of flying fish and swirling, multicolored giant eels. Behind us were the festering, swampy jungles of New Guinea, where MacArthur had feinted, prodded, bombed, enveloped, and eventually bypassed a frustrated multitude of Japanese soldiers whose greatest desire had been to die for the emperor but who now were useless to the war. He was at his military best in those battles, cutting off the enemy from their sea lanes, dwindling their supplies rather than crushing them with the brutal, costly frontal assaults that Nimitz and the Marines were using in the central Pacific. He had left the enemy, as he put it, “dying on the vine.”
The correspondents liked to write that a lot of soldiers hated MacArthur for his arrogance and showmanship, and in truth he was at times unbearable. But a multitude of them would not have been alive to feel these resentments had he not planned and directed their battles with such undeniable genius.
Ahead of us was fresh grist for all the passions MacArthur had conjured, and some new ones as well. The sprawling islands of the Philippines were indeed a military challenge, defended by four hundred thousand Japanese soldiers. But much more than that, they were MacArthur’s great obsession. No place in the world, not even in America, so claimed MacArthur’s emotions. He had begun his military career here, more than forty years before. His father had served here before him. He had spent another tour here as a general officer, between marriages and before he became army chief of staff. He had been rescued from the anonymity of early military retirement by becoming field marshal of the Philippines in 1936 when his regular army career was over. He had met his present wife on a ship as he headed to that assignment and had married her here. His son had been born here. His mother had died here. He had a singular place among the people of these islands, large and small, and he had promised them personally that he would return.
And there was something else. By now we knew the war had turned, that it would be won, if not in months, then soon, someday, inevitably. When that day came, we who had been reluctant but dutiful soldiers would go thankfully home. But what would our General do? Some, including Franklin D. Roosevelt in his darker moments, thought MacArthur might run for president, but we knew instinctively that he could never endure the indignities of true democracy. He had not even set foot in the United States since 1937. Some odd and unpredictable karma awaited him, a future that would be set in motion on the coming beaches. This was his true moment, the eve not of his retirement but of his enthronement, the day he had dreamed of during nearly three years of wandering through his own personal wilderness.
But he had to do much more than win a military campaign. He could not be truly great unless he was without enduring stain, and the Philippines had stained him deeply. He had suffered his most humiliating moment right here in the land that had always fed his greatest hungers.
Sometimes we were his stooges, at others we played the whore, but one could not rationalize, sympathize, or euphemize away the simple fact that he had been defeated by the Japanese in 1942. Not simply beaten but routed. Washington might be blamed, but MacArthur had not been ready either, despite four years of preparation. His air force had been bombed into uselessness on the ground twelve hours after the debacle at Pearl Harbor, the pilots and ground crews improperly forewarned, at first unable to believe that the attacking formations were Japanese and that they were in reality at war. His armies had been pushed back inches at a time down the Bataan Peninsula and then onto the rocks and caves of Corregidor. He himself had escaped the humiliation of capture, torture, and imprisonment that had been visited on his soldiers only by fleeing on a small PT boat to a faraway airstrip, where a plane carried him and his wife and child to Australia.
He had been defeated. And worse, he had abandoned his men under fire, in their most desperate moments.
But from Australia he had planned and implemented his personal and military revenge. He had taken it out a campaign at a time, his soldiers leapfrogging from one jungle battle to another, ever northward, always aiming at the Philippines. Because for a general who viewed himself as the greatest mind that had ever lived, the only retribution could be found not simply in victory but in an unholy excess of genius. And finally on these beaches and in the ensuing months the Japanese would taste and feel that kind of retribution in its full and flowery fury. With the move from Hollandia to Leyte, he was determined to leap from mere fame to a historic place no general had ever dreamed of.
For who was Napoleon but some poodle with hemorrhoids who wasted an army in the frozen tundra of the steppes? And who was Caesar, who in the end had pampered himself with such vanity that he could not control his own murderous staff? And who, particularly, was Yamashita, this bump in the road in front of MacArthur’s charge toward immortality, this so-called Tiger of Malaya who had humiliated Percival in Singapore and then sent British prisoners of war parading through all the streets of conquered Asia to show the weakness of the soldiers of the West?
Who, indeed. This was MacArthur, cold and brilliant and in control, knocking on the door of greatness.
Leyte was a centerpoint in the Philippines archipelago, one of several midsized islands with names like Samar and Panaon and Dinagat that were clumped between the Philippine and Sulu Seas. Since it was far smaller than the main islands of Mindanao to the south and Luzon to the north, many questioned its strategic value. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had argued that MacArthur should establish bases in Mindanao, then leave the rest of the Philippines to “die on the vine” as he moved north to beachheads in Formosa and eastern China before the final assault on Japan. Others had called for a more cautious approach, a Mindanao landing in November, then a series of leapfrog moves northward to Luzon, home of Manila, the final, most important prize.
But MacArthur wanted Leyte, and he wanted it in October. He had chosen to invade here, he told us, because strategically it would cut Japan’s shipping lanes in two, severing them from their petroleum and other resources that flowed from Borneo or through Singapore, while tactically it would divide the Japanese ground forces in the Philippines themselves. That may have been true. The president and Joint Chiefs finally bought this logic, and the navy had concurred. But I had been with him continuously for more than a year, and I knew there were other reasons.
Leyte was personal. It held the charms and ruins of his youth.
And so MacArthur had formed his strategy, badgered the government, tilted the ocean, and in the end swung whole fleets and armies into motion toward this small and little-known island, because it was from these beaches that he could best glorify the magnitude of his second coming. It seemed so obvious to me that I wondered why the rest of the government wasted its energy on weeks of complicated debate. Do not great men, the very few chosen by history to be remembered a thousand years hence, seem always to find in their crowning moments some mystifying event that appears to be a portentous coincidence of fate?
The evening before the invasion, he summoned nine of us who served on his personal staff to the Nashville’s wardroom. The ship now gently undulated with what the sailors called ground swells, echoes of some nearby surf that told us we were approaching shore. As I walked down the darkened tunnels of red-lit passageways toward the wardroom I cou
ld hear and feel the distant rumblings of the big guns from our fire support ships and escort carriers as they unendingly pounded Japanese coastal defenses. The day before, army ranger battalions had taken two small islands guarding the entrance to Leyte Gulf, thus securing the flanks of our coming invasion. At that very moment, minesweepers and underwater demolition teams were already inside the gulf, clearing obstructions from the beachheads. For the last several days Allied aircraft had struck repeatedly at Japanese air bases far to the north in Formosa and China, to the east in the Marshalls and Carolines, and to our south in Mindanao and the East Indies, isolating Leyte from air attack.
The Nashville was in Condition One. Its sailors had become tense, preoccupied and electric. In a few hours they would go to battle stations. And at first light we would steam into the gulf, beginning the assault.
In the wardroom, MacArthur sat at the head of the large, cloth-covered dining table. Navy stewards slipped quietly in and out, bringing us ship-made cookies and great pots of hot coffee. The stewards placed their trays soundlessly at the center of the table and disappeared back into the kitchen. We just as soundlessly took our seats. As the most junior officer on his staff, I took my customary chair at the far end of the table, furthest from the General.
MacArthur lit his favorite corncob pipe, surveying us. He was smiling like a young boy. He twitched nervously in his chair, unable to contain his excitement. He was a handsome, gallant man who had no need to so carefully manufacture his charisma. At sixty-four his hair was still dark, his face thinly lined and his energy palpable. And back in Australia he had a much younger wife and a son just out of infancy. He had never consented to live in the world of his peers, and because of that MacArthur would never grow old with them.
I had met with him every day for more than a year, but I still felt a thrill when I heard him speak. His bearing and his choice of words were the same with an audience of one as they were in front of thousands. The world in which he lived was right-angled, erect and classical, and it took no respite from privacy. For a young man of twenty-three, to be in his presence was to be swept behind a magic screen into a royal court where centuries did not matter. I admired him boundlessly. And unlike others I took no jealousy from his egotism, for I knew that I would never seek to equal him. I was Jay Marsh, happy to be this close to greatness, and anxious to be done with war. Only God and Pinky could create a MacArthur.
“Get me a cup of coffee, Jay.”
“Yes, sir.”
Thrilled as ever to be recognized by my first name in the presence of these battlefield luminaries, I rose quickly, leaning over the center of the table and pouring him a fresh cup of steaming hot coffee. Then I placed it carefully before him with both hands, as if delivering him a treasure.
He nodded, blessing me with a rewarding smile, and sipped his coffee as I hurried back to my seat.
“Excellent coffee,” he said, as if only his words would make it so.
He surveyed the array of senior officers who awaited his wisdom. “Well, gentlemen, the moment we’ve all dreamed of has finally arrived.”
He went through a small list of details, making them seem grand. He ordered us to wear our helmets once the invasion began. He told us to remember to take our malaria pills. He held up the pages of a speech he would deliver into a Signal Corps radio microphone once he arrived onshore and sought our reactions to his proposed words. We nodded our agreement to each dictate, quibbled with a few phrases in his speech, took a few careful notes, sipped our coffee, ate our cookies, lit a cigarette or two, and waited for the main event.
Suddenly he stood and began pacing, his chin against his chest, and I knew we had reached the MacArthur Moment. As he paced, he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small derringer. The derringer was old and scratched, small enough to disappear inside his hand when he closed it. MacArthur theatrically studied it and then produced two bullets, slowly loading them into its chambers. He displayed the pistol to us as he spoke.
“Most of you remember my father for having won the Medal of Honor as a very young man at Missionary Ridge in the Civil War, or perhaps for having been the senior general in the army before his retirement. But I consider his greatest days to have been here in the Philippines, both as a combat soldier and as military governor some forty-five years ago. He was the first senior American official to argue convincingly for the importance of these islands. He risked his life many times here and ended up with a price on his head. And he carried this derringer always, on the streets of the cities and into dozens of vicious battles against Filipino rebels, vowing that if he ever faced the prospect of being taken prisoner, he would kill himself first.”
MacArthur stopped pacing and faced us. “The Japanese know where and when we are landing. Tokyo Rose has even broadcast to the world that I am on this very ship and am going ashore with our forces tomorrow. The enemy knows I am back, and they know what that means to those loyal Filipinos who have waited patiently through years of suffering and defiance for my return. If General Yamashita is wise, he will send a suicide squad to the beaches to try to capture or kill me. Think of it! Could there be a greater victory for the Japanese cause than to capture MacArthur and parade him through the streets of Manila as the battle rages behind him? But it will never happen. Because tonight I make the same vow to you that my father made: I will die first!”
He held the pistol loosely for another second, then slipped it quietly back into his pocket and resumed his pacing.
I sat amazed and enthralled, watching him walking back and forth, his chin down to his chest again as if he were in a trance, his lungs sucking in new inspiration from the dank and smoke-filled wardroom air. My logic told me that with the pounding the Japanese were already taking and with the ferocity of the invading soldiers who would precede us onto the beaches, what he had posited was a near impossibility. And yet one could not disagree that if MacArthur were indeed killed or captured on the invasion beach tomorrow, the impact on the Philippines campaign would be irreversible.
And that was his real point. In two short minutes, the General had reminded us that the coming campaign would not have taken place without his dogged insistence and would never succeed without him. And he had performed this feat by pulling from his pocket a symbol of courage and defiance that tied him to his father’s heroic lore. This gesture itself was a subtle reminder that he and his father were the only father-son Medal of Honor winners in our nation’s history, and at the same time refreshed our memories of his family’s long historical ties to the Philippines. He had given us a near-perfect, metaphoric poem.
Now he stopped pacing and lifted up his head, facing us again. His voice became strong and urgent, like a football coach’s during a halftime locker-room talk.
“Tomorrow we strike. We will land just down the beach from Tacloban. This will be a very full moment for me. It was at Tacloban that I reported for my first duty assignment after leaving West Point. And as fate would have it, I reported to Tacloban forty-one years ago, on the very same day I will return! This is a symbolic omen that the Filipino people will understand. It is the kind of sign they look for in their own lives! When they learn I have returned they will rise up in the cities. They will unleash their guerrilla forces from the jungles. And we will deal the Japanese the swiftest, ugliest retaliation they have suffered in this long and costly war.”
He started pacing again, looking at every one of his staff in turn as if wishing to bond personally with each of us. “There is more than a battle at stake here, gentlemen. I must seal our future with the most important islands in the Pacific other than Japan itself. And after that I must tame Japan. But the future does begin with battle. And in battle, brave men die, no matter how well the plans are conceived and no matter how flawlessly they are executed. So now I will return to my stateroom and read from my favorite biblical passages and pray to the Almighty that He will grant our gallant soldiers a swift and merciful victory. Good night.”
We rose to our
feet, standing at attention as he abruptly departed. After that we slowly retook our chairs, remaining alone with our coffee and cookies and small conversations. The usual, defensive cynicism of the lesser generals and senior colonels floated across the wardroom in little taunts, for by now they were used to his vanity, and comfortable with one another.
“You’re welcome, General. Anytime, sir.”
“Wait a minute, let me get this straight. Is he going to pray to God, or is God going to pray to him?”
“How’s anybody else going to get shot when he’s fighting this war all by himself?”
The sarcasm was short-lived, though. For behind the quick asides that protected other egos, they all knew that there was no better place to view a war than from the backseat as Douglas MacArthur steered our army through it.
I say “they” instead of “we,” for I was a very junior officer, a note-taker, errand-runner, and coffee-pourer among very senior colonels and generals. As was my careful practice, I had said nothing as they ventilated their emotions. To some of these more senior officers, my mere continued presence after the meeting had ended was an act of presumption. And so within minutes I left also.
I needed to write another letter to my mother, who was unnecessarily worried about my safety in the wake of my brother’s death. I was not really at risk, not like the infantrymen who tomorrow would busy themselves with slaughter. But I was also young and nervous, sick with the thought of battle.
Dawn revealed a horizon of lush and epic grandeur, soon embellished by the sounds and smells of carnage. We had entered the gulf. Its serene and emerald waters were now cluttered with the imposing majesty of our armada. I awoke early and rushed from my stateroom to the main deck and began walking toward my favorite place just underneath the eight-inch guns. As I neared them the guns suddenly erupted with black smoke and ugly tongues of flame, spewing shells onto the whispery, smoking beaches with a series of explosions that cracked my ears and sent me stutter-stepping to catch my balance. The guns continued and I retreated, walking along the main deck toward the wardroom. Dozens of ships now joined in this heavy, thunderous barrage, until Leyte before us seemed to shift and reverberate from explosions and fairly disappeared behind a veil of smoke and haze.
