by James Webb
After breakfast I stood on the bridge for hours. The Nashville laid to, and the barrage continued on the beaches, leaving trees stripped and broken and setting hundreds of buildings ablaze. Nearby the troopships dropped their heavy nets over the sides until the nets reached the sea and then an unending stream of burdened, struggling soldiers began to crawl down the nets toward the water. The soldiers worked the nets like ladders and then dropped down into rectangular landing craft that bobbed next to the troopships in the gentle sea. The small landing craft were lined up behind and beside one another in the water like waiting taxis. Each in its turn took on a load of assault troops and then powered away to the open waters. The craft gathered at their rallying points, circling and circling until all the other boats in their wave had joined the curling column. Finally the assault flags raised from the mother boats, signaling the invasion. The landing craft straightened out side by side into lines of assault waves, leaving long white tails of foam behind them as they churned toward the shore. Half of them went toward Red and White Beaches, near Tacloban. The other half approached Violet and Yellow Beaches, a few miles away, near Dulag.
On the beaches the shells still fell steadily, the drifting clouds of smoke and phosphorous continually replaced anew as explosions saturated the tall trees and the grass huts and tore into the enemy’s positions. Lush, sharp hills rose abruptly behind the beaches. Now the shells crumped and flashed inside those tangles of rocks and trees and vines. The ships were “lifting” their guns away from the beachhead as the soldiers poured from their landing boats and seized positions just off the water. We knew that most of the Japanese would now be moving back from the beaches, seeking to draw our army into the hills and jungles, where artillery would not favor us, where rifles and grenades informed the battles, and where they could best attempt to take a life for every one they gave.
The skies filled also. Throughout the morning, dogfights burst into my vision like dancing kites. Enemy fighters suddenly would appear from behind the distant hills as they attempted to strike the ships in the gulf, only to be intercepted by American planes launched from nearby aircraft carriers. The Japanese had preserved their forces until MacArthur made his final move, wanting to fix his positions and to stall the ships. Now that much of the navy was at anchor they would try to confuse the assault and lure our guns away from the beaches. We did not yet know it, but the Japanese navy would soon make its boldest move of the war, in an effort to cripple our navy and to cut off support to the invasion force as it struggled to keep its beachhead ashore.
Through much of the morning, MacArthur stood on the bridge, flanked by a small group of senior officers. His mood alternated between serene self-confidence and childish anticipation. But his face became lit with undeniable ecstasy when the early sun rose above the smoking, belching beachhead and he could finally see the small town of Tacloban. He walked over to me and grabbed my shoulder, pointing toward it as if we were tourists, immune from the violence that surrounded us.
“Tacloban, Jay! There it is! It looks not a bit different from when I first saw it forty-one years ago this morning!”
I thought I noticed a rather obvious difference, so I ventured a careful response. “It’s on fire, General.”
He waved my irrelevant observation away as if he were swatting a mosquito. “Of course it is. The fires are the price of freedom. They’ll go out, and the lights will go on. And Tacloban will be free!”
In great spirits, the General returned to his cabin for a quick lunch. When he returned on deck he was wearing a freshly pressed khaki uniform and his trademark sunglasses. He was ready to again set foot on the Philippines, and he wanted to do so in a crisp uniform while the guns blazed and the smoke still rolled down off the flaming hills.
A landing craft bobbed below us in the gentle waves, lashed to an external ladder that ran down the side of the ship. Our small staff boarded it along with a handful of war correspondents, followed by the beaming, effervescent MacArthur. Sunglassed, starched, and scrubbed, he looked picture-perfect. He even wore his famous soft military cap, after having ordered us to wear our helmets. Standing near him as the boat powered away toward a nearby ship I noticed that he was so adrenalized that his hands were trembling.
American aircraft now patrolled the skies overhead. Our small boat lashed up to a landing at the bottom of the troopship John Land’s external ladder. On the platform awaiting us were the leaders of the Philippines’ government-in-exile, which MacArthur would reestablish at Tacloban. Its president, Sergio Osmena, its secretary for national defense, General Basilio Valdez, and the president’s aide, Brigadier General Carlos Romulo, were pictures of mixed emotions as the boat’s coxswain helped them aboard. Osmena descended slowly into our boat, nervous and visibly burdened by his coming tasks. He was trapped between the memory of the wildly popular Manuel Quezon, who had served as president of the exiled government until dying of tuberculosis a few months before, and a future with the near-spiritual presence of MacArthur, who was sure to overshadow his every move during the coming months. Osmena stifled a frown as MacArthur embraced him once he stepped inside the boat. And then we were off, powering toward the still-uncertain battleground of Red Beach.
The beaches in front of us were no longer contested, the bulk of the assault forces having gone further inland toward the smoking hills. But our bombardment had blown away most of the docks and piers, and those still standing were choked with supply boats and landing craft that were busily loading wounded soldiers. MacArthur noticed this as well. He called to our coxswain, asking him where he was going to land. The coxswain, a petty officer about my own age, searched frantically to his front for a place along the shore. Then suddenly the boat ground to a halt and it did not matter. Fifty yards from the beach we had run aground.
“What is the problem, Sailor?”
The coxswain threw his hands helplessly into the air, an apology. MacArthur scowled back at him, furious. Then as if to rebuke the lowly sailor he marched to the bow and ordered the boatswain to drop the front ramp of the landing craft. It fell slowly forward and MacArthur walked down its ramp, resolutely stepping out into the waves, followed by our little coterie of liberators. The General had dreamed long and worked hard for this moment, and no fool coxswain or mushy sandbar was going to deprive him of its fullness.
A newspaper photographer on the beach raised a lucky camera and caught it all: the perfect, redemptionist scowl and the jutting chin underneath the sunglasses and the ruination of the General’s just-pressed trousers as he waded toward the beach from a few yards offshore. The picture became instantly famous, dramatizing the moment of MacArthur’s return far better than speeches and maps ever could. The world did not know that the General’s fierce frown was mostly the product of his pique at the careless coxswain for having dumped him off on the edge of a sandbar at the very moment of his prophesized and acutely choreographed return.
But it was his moment, and he seized it with relentless purpose. The island, the anniversary, the exiled Filipino leaders, even the ongoing battle itself provided mere backdrop for the message MacArthur was intent on sending by standing on the invasion beach only hours after the first wave of assault troops had poured from their boats. The message went worldwide, but the symbols MacArthur was piling up hour by hour were meant to be digested here. In East Asia, myth and bravado were the building blocks of power. MacArthur was showing them the very omnipotence of his return. He had not been driven out, he had escaped in order to find and energize the reinforcements. He had not sent the liberating troops, he had brought them. He was not afraid to die in battle, he was like his father before him bred to it, at home under fire.
Throughout the afternoon he treated the world to a one-man standup theater. Sniper rounds cracked overhead as he strode the fresh battleground. Japanese soldiers could be heard in the near distance, calling out insults in broken English. He brought us forward, calmly seeking the sound of the guns, unflinching under fire, surprising many infantry soldi
ers with his sudden appearance.
Near one foxhole he turned over the bodies of two freshly killed Japanese soldiers with his foot, identifying their unit insignia. “Good,” he said, making sure his infantrymen as well as the correspondents heard him. “These soldiers are from the regiment that did the dirty work at Bataan.” For even on Leyte, even in the midst of another battle, the humiliation of that campaign was never far from his mind.
As evening approached we returned to the relative calm of Red Beach. MacArthur took a seat on the log of a newly fallen coconut palm. For the first time showing the edges of weariness, he stared for a long moment into the yeasty, smoking jungle.
“Jay,” he finally called, summoning me.
“Yes, sir.” I jogged up to him, nervous and exhausted by the enormity of our day.
“My field message pad.”
I reached into my knapsack and handed him a notepad and a pen. Sniper bullets still visited the beach area. In the distance a fierce firefight erupted. Mindless to the sounds of battle, MacArthur scrawled out two letters. Once finished, he rose from the log. Nearby a group of soldiers and the exiled Philippines leaders waited for him at a just-off-loaded truck. They had hooked up the Signal Corps microphone. He would soon broadcast his announcement throughout the Philippines that the Americans were again on Philippines soil.
He handed the letters to me as he passed me on the way to the waiting microphone. “Post these.”
“Yes, sir.”
I could not contain my curiosity. Walking behind him, I quickly read over the letters he had written. The first was to President Roosevelt, who over the years had been alternately a friend and fierce rival. The note was subtly boastful yet also shrewdly ingratiating, as if his warrior father had written the note and his calculating but wise mother had carefully edited it. He informed the president that he was writing from near Tacloban and that this was the first message sent from the “freed Philippines,” adding that it might be appropriate for his “philatelic collection” and that MacArthur hoped “it would get through” from the battlefield. He then protected himself from his critics by reinforcing the strategic value of the invasion. Aware that the letter would no doubt be leaked, he asked that Roosevelt consider granting the Philippines immediate independence. He finished with more self-congratulation by apologizing for the writing equipment, noting that he was “on the combat line with no facilities except this field message pad.”
The second, shorter note was to his wife, Jean, back in Australia. He told her he had returned, and that he hoped soon they would be together in their former home in Manila. He signed the note, “Love, MacArthur.”
Love, MacArthur. I snickered quietly despite my almost fearful regard for the Great Man. It was as if I had just peeked into the privacy of his bedroom. Did she call him MacArthur when they made love? Did he ask her to get MacArthur an aspirin when he had a headache? Or did he perhaps think she might not recognize the handwriting if he had merely signed it, Love, Doug?
As MacArthur neared the waiting Signal Corps microphone it began to rain. This was his most important moment of the day. His hands were trembling again as he took the microphone. He started to speak and then took a step back, looking down, testing his voice, for the first time that day seeming almost unsure of himself. The rain attacked us now, East Asian rain, torrential and insistent. In the foothills the fighting holes would fill with water tonight. MacArthur nodded to the technician and began speaking into the microphone. I struggled mightily to listen to his words in the rain with the sound of gunfire in the distance and the big shells from the ships still screaming over us and crunching into distant hills.
“People of the Philippines,” he began, “I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil.” He faded in and out of my helmeted earshot, but his voice grew stronger as he spoke. “Rally to me,” he was saying. “Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on. Rise and strike. Strike at every favorable opportunity. For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike! Let no heart be faint!”
President Osmena and General Romulo followed MacArthur to the microphone, and in a few rainwashed minutes the ceremony was over. The weather whipped us as we headed down the beach to find the boat that would take us back to the Nashville. We did not yet know it, but the Japanese fleet was riding in behind the rain. In a few days the Japanese would bet almost their entire navy on knocking us off the beaches and out of the Pacific. The Battle of Leyte Gulf would begin in terror but would end with the virtual destruction of the enemy’s fleet.
On the boat heading out to the Nashville the General cast a longing eye toward Tacloban, still smoldering despite the rain. He smiled broadly, his face now serene and confident. MacArthur was on the move. It had been a complete day for him. He had not only reclaimed his past but had laid down a stake for his future, the final leavings of a life well fought, with much to do after wars were over. MacArthur had always clung to a vision of himself as the great spiritual benefactor of the Philippines, but it was clear to me he believed his understanding of the ways of these islands transcended their sprawling reach. His grasping, cunning intellect sought now to embrace all of Asia.
In the landing craft the moon was for a moment shining through the rainful sky, casting us in a pale and eerie glow. It reflected on MacArthur’s wet face. And in his eyes I saw a look that told me he had made a secret vow.
CHAPTER 2
At Leyte our soldiers continued to pour ashore and press into the rain-soaked jungle. Soon we left the ship and joined them, stopping at the water’s edge. As was his practice, the General chose for our headquarters Tacloban’s most beautiful mansion, which the Japanese had used as their officers club. Its owner, an American businessman named Walter Price, was at that time imprisoned at Santo Tomas, outside Manila. His Filipina wife, who had been tortured by the Japanese earlier in the war, was living in the jungle with their children.
When told that MacArthur wanted to use her house, Mrs. Price was reported to be flattered, insisting that we stay as long as we liked. And so MacArthur, ever courtly, ever chivalrous in his decorum, gratefully sang her praises as he seized her house and left Mrs. Price and her children to their own devices. And we stayed at her mansion in Tacloban for three more months.
Out at sea, a once-great navy died. Just after the invasion the Japanese launched a bold but eventually disastrous naval attack, trying to dislodge our fleet and destroy our transports and thus regain control of Leyte. For three days the waters around us were filled with the sounds of heavy guns and droning aircraft as hundreds of ships converged from distant points. Their energies spent, the Japanese precipitously retreated, leaving four aircraft carriers, three battleships, six heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and eight destroyers at the bottom of the sea. Leyte Gulf had been a spike through the imperial navy’s heart. Their navy would continue to fight, but it would never again pose a serious threat.
In the jungle all was mud. Out in the rain our soldiers endured an earthquake and three typhoons. Beyond the beaches the troops moved forward underneath leaking ponchos and the Japanese stood firm in insect-laden mud holes and both sides fought until they died. The General ordered airfields to be built but the slick, mud-covered ridges mocked him. Whole convoys of trucks lost their way, sliding door-deep into mucky road banks.
Each afternoon the mud-smeared trucks passed in front of the Price mansion on their way back from the front lines, having exchanged their loads of food and ammunition for that day’s tally of dead and wounded soldiers. The soldiers who could still stand and see peered numbly from the truck beds down at us in our clean and pressed uniforms and our mudless boots, telling us all we wanted to know of life on the other side of the mountain.
Thus motivated, I thankfully shuttled about my little tasks, happy to be a few miles from the blood and drek. We who shared this beachfront headquarters communicated our good fortune to one another without words,
as if to mention it would cause us to be taken from our lovely sanctuary and sent out to die. Combat engineers who might otherwise have been building pontoon bridges or blowing up captured ammunition grinned conspiratorially as they daintily patched bullet holes in the stucco and followed MacArthur’s orders to level off the lawn so that his view might be improved. He did love the view as he paced the wide veranda and looked out at the mountains and the sea. Enemy soldiers hid in those mountains, but old memories laced them too, warm reminders of his youth.
The weeks passed. We took Dagami and Burauen, then pushed against the Japanese positions in the central mountains, capturing the key towns of Baybay and Carigara. More Japanese arrived to fight. Against his wishes, General Yamashita had been ordered by the general staff in Tokyo to reinforce Leyte from faraway Luzon, thinking he might turn the island into a decisive battlefield. Half of the Japanese replacements were drowning at sea as our navy sank their transports. But three divisions of reinforcements had already entered through the port of Ormoc and joined the battle. So we attacked and closed the port.
I knew all these intricacies even then, because MacArthur loved to talk about them to anyone who would listen. And now that the beachhead was secure, a constant stream of media and dignitaries began arriving at Tacloban. It was one of my main duties to be their escort. The General was fond of showering them with elaborate, map-filled briefings. He was at his grandest when pacing before a ceiling-high situation map and pointing out the pivots and the turns of battle, his hands making sweeping gestures that brought a grandeur to the muddy, small-unit brawls. It was his favorite place also to compare his brilliance with the more mundane trudgings of Eisenhower’s European effort and the numbing casualty counts from the Marine Corps assaults to our north in the central Pacific drive. To MacArthur, Eisenhower was still the soft-voiced, baby-faced subordinate who tended to his ego years before in one staff assistant job after another, while the Marines were a mindless bunch of overpromoted sergeants, wasting their people in frontal assaults because they lacked his finesse.
