Back in temporary headquarters in a sugar refinery an hour’s drive north of Manila, MacArthur decided to join a patrol of the 37th Division and revisit his Manila Hotel penthouse. It was in Japanese hands. Filipino busboys reported that the apartment was intact, perhaps because of the Japanese emperor’s vases Jean had left as talismans. The General was pinned down by machine-gun fire from the hotel when “suddenly,” he wrote afterward, “the penthouse blazed into flame. They had fired it. I watched, with indescribable feelings, the destruction of my fine military library, my souvenirs, my personal belongings of a lifetime.” He joined a team of submachine-gun men climbing the stairs. “Every landing was a fight,” he wrote. “Of the penthouse, nothing was left but ashes. It had evidently been the command post of a rearguard action. We left its colonel dead on the smoldering threshold, the remains of the broken vases . . . at his head and feet—a grim shroud for his bloody bier. The young lieutenant commanding the patrol, his smoking gun in his hand and his face wreathed in the grin of victory, sang out to me, ‘Nice going, chief.’ But there was nothing nice about it to me. I was tasting to the last acid dregs the bitterness of a devastated and beloved home.”81
An aide accompanying him took a deep breath of relief when they reached the last landing. “The higher the stairs, the wanner the bodies were,” he explains, “and I was afraid one of them might be just wounded, or shamming.” Stepping over the enemy colonel’s corpse, the aide skirted the smoldering remains of the grand piano and entered the rest of the devastated apartment. “The books were still on the bookshelves,” he recalls. “You could read the titles on their spines, but when you touched them, they just disintegrated. I thought of that later, during the troubles with the Huks and in the old European colonies—Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, and the rest. It was as though prewar Asia was coming apart before our eyes. I think the General felt a little that way, too, at the time. Maybe that’s one reason why he was so upset during the ceremony at Malacañan.”
Unlike the hotel and the House on the Wall, Malacañan Palace had survived undamaged, thanks to its non-centric position, and at 11:00 A.M. on February 27, while Intramuros was still being freed of Japanese, MacArthur strode into its red-carpeted halls and formally restored the capital to Osmeña, Romulo, Soriano, and other loyal Filipino officials who had survived the battle. He said:
More than three years have elapsed—years of bitterness, struggle and sacrifice—since I withdrew our forces and installations from this beautiful city that, open and undefended, its churches, monuments, and cultural centers might, in accordance with the rules of warfare, be spared the violence of military ravage. The enemy would not have it so, and much that I sought to preserve has been unnecessarily destroyed by his desperate action at bay—but by these ashes he has wantonly fixed the future pattern of his own doom. . . . On behalf of my government I now solemnly declare, Mr. President, the full powers and responsibilities under the constitution restored to the Commonwealth whose seat is here reestablished as provided by law. Your country, thus, is again at liberty to pursue its destiny to an honored position in the family of free nations. Your capital city, cruelly punished though it be, has regained its rightful place—citadel of democracy in the East. Your indomitable—
His voice trembled. He buried his face in his hands and wept. Then, wiping his eyes on his sleeve, he concluded brokenly: “In humble and devout manifestation of gratitude to almighty God for bringing this decisive victory to our arms, I ask that all present rise and join me in reciting the Lord’s Prayer.” In his Reminiscences he writes: “To others it might have seemed my moment of victory and monumental personal acclaim, but to me it seemed only the culmination of a panorama of physical and spiritual disaster. It had killed something inside me to see my men die.”82
MacArthur views the reconquered Pilippines
He was in a jollier mood at 6:00 A.M. on March 2, when he led the Bataan Gang and other senior officers aboard four PT boats for a return to the Rock. Admiral Barbey heard him say jovially to the young skipper, “So this is the 373. I left on the 41.” As they approached the North Dock, Kenney noted that the island “was smashed beyond recognition. . . . Even the landscape was altered where the heavy bombs had blown off the tops of hills.” Eyeing it, MacArthur said: “Gentlemen, Corregidor is living proof that the day of the fixed fortress is over.” Ashore, Colonel George M. Jones, the commander of the troops who had seized it, saluted smartly and said: “Sir, I present to you Fortress Corregidor.” The General pinned a Distinguished Service Cross on him and said: “I see that the old flagpole still stands. Have your troops hoist the colors to its peak, and let no enemy ever haul them down.” Then he paid tribute to the original defenders of the island: “Its long-protracted struggle enabled the Allies to gather strength. Had it not held out, Australia would have fallen, with incalculably disastrous results. Our triumphs today belong equally to that dead army.”83
Back in liberated Manila, less exalted responsibilities awaited him. A venereal disease epidemic had broken out among the GIs in the city, and Egeberg suggested that he consider putting the capital out-of-bounds to U.S. troops. MacArthur reflected a moment and then shook his head. He said: “Doc, you’ve seen Manila. You’ve seen the ruins. You realize how poor the people are. You’ve seen the little shops they’ve set up to sell things, and you’ve seen our soldiers. Sure, some of them want to go whoring, but I’ll bet most of them just want to get into a Filipino home to feel what it’s like to be in a home again. These men have fought their way through the jungles to get to Manila, and now you’re asking me to tell them they can’t go into Manila. . . . No, I’m not going to put Manila out-of-bounds to our troops. Besides, you’ve got some pretty good medicines for that sort of thing now, haven’t you?”84
U.S. soldiers and civilians were working together to remove the rubble in the streets, and on March 13 Sergeant Powers noted, “The lights are going on all over the city.” Monumental traffic jams were building up on the roads leading into the capital, however. The General rode out to see one of the worst ones, and an officer said, “Why don’t you order the civilians to use this road only half the day so our convoys can move along at a fair clip?” MacArthur shook his head again. “Look at those people coming towards us. You see the anxiety in their faces, the panic in some. Don’t you get the feeling that they are running away from something terrible, their houses are probably burned, they want nothing more than to put great distance between themselves and that awful warfare? And look at the people on the other side of the road. They are carrying something or pushing something, a cart or a bicycle, or they are pulling something, they are all loaded. I’ll bet you’ll find food in every one of those packages. Those people have come out to get food—to buy food for their starving relatives. Before I interfere with this innocent population, so hard hit by the horrors of war, things will have to be a lot worse for us.”85
MacArthur as the time of the Philippine reconquest
A third veto was of a proposal that he send a punitive expedition against the Hukbalahaps, who were dispossessing landlords and setting up agrarian Soviets in central Luzon. He told his staff:
Tarlac marks the border between the sugar economy and the rice country. North of there the people grow rice, and most of them own small areas of land. Did you notice how many schools there are up there, how the people dressed, looked happy, kind of prosperous? Do you see that hangdog look they have here, resentful, poorly dressed? They don’t even look clean. That country north of Tarlac is a good strong country of democracy, small landowners, opportunity for education and what goes with it. Down here most of this land is owned in Madrid or Chicago or some other distant place. If a man here does own a small strip of land he has to take his cane to the sugar mill for processing. This is really absentee ownership. No pride, few schools—little participation in government. This is where they become utterly hopeless, and organizations like the Hukbalahaps are born and get their strength. They tell me the Huks are socialistic,
that they are revolutionary, but I haven’t got the heart to go after them. If I worked in those sugar fields I’d probably be a Huk myself.86
In the abstract MacArthur was humane, even compassionate. As a benevolent autocrat he sympathized with peasants, condemned absentee landlords, and endorsed social legislation—provided, of course, it wasn’t identified as socialistic. Yet he could be wildly inconsistent when the oppressors were friends of his. The collaborationist issue now confronted him head-on. His estrangement from Osmeña, his feeling that he couldn’t “work with him,” complicated matters. Osmeña was, after all, the commonwealth’s president. Yet in Tacloban the General had called on him just four times, while Osmeña had called on the General thirteen times. As early as Hollandia MacArthur had told a counterintelligence officer, “I’m taking the business of dealing with collaborators away from the Philippine government and giving it to you.” Osmeña had counted heavily on his relationship with Roosevelt; he and FDR felt the same way about Filipinos who had served as tools of the Japanese. The President’s death in early April shattered him. When he flew to Washington he found officials too busy to see him, and the new President was vague on the subject of the Philippines; he had decided to let MacArthur handle everything there.87
Meanwhile the puppet officials in Baguio had been dismayed by MacArthur’s sweeping triumphs. They turned helplessly to Yamashita, and on March 19 Laurel and three others were flown to Tokyo via Formosa. The rest were left to shift for themselves. In mid-April, as GIs of the 33rd Division neared the summer capital, Roxas, three other ministers in the puppet government, and the chief justice of the Philippine Supreme Court entered American lines. When MacArthur heard about it, he sent a plane to fetch Roxas. He embraced him in Manila and instructed the editors of the Free Philippines, a newspaper published by the Office of War Information, to run a story under the head ROXAS IS AMONG LIBERATED / 4 CABINET AIDES CAUGHT. The text explained that “four members of the Philippine collaborationist cabinet have been captured. They will be confined for the duration of the war as a matter of military security and then turned over to the government of the Philippines for trial and judgment.” The “escape “ of Roxas, who had accompanied them, was described in terms that might have been envied by Harry Houdini or the Prisoner of Zenda. When a staff officer raised his eyebrows at the distinction between him and the others, the General explained that Roxas had helped guerrillas. But so had they; it had been prudent for all of them to take out such insurance. MacArthur, refusing to be dissuaded, put his friend back in uniform as a brigadier general. An aide quoted General Order No. 20, which he had issued the month before, under which no personnel would “be retained in the Philippine Army who have accepted appointment or performed service in a military or civil capacity in any activity controlled by the Japanese or by the so-called ‘Philippine Republic’ “ Chaplains and physicians were exempted. Roxas wasn’t, so MacArthur transferred him to the inactive list, where he could lay the groundwork for his campaign against Osmeña—which was precisely what Roxas wanted. His Manila Daily News, owned by the Roxas family, resumed publication and began running daily stories on the General’s exoneration of him, asserting, typically, that Roxas “has already been cleared by no less an authority than General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.”88
By making this one exception, MacArthur had crippled the prosecution of all the quislings. A State Department official, sent to Manila, reported to Washington that “liberals, guerrillas and anti-collaborationists are very bitter over this matter.” As seventy-six-year-old Emilio Aguinaldo said later, “Roxas became the hope of those who faced prosecution for treason, and among them were the most powerful political leaders. ” Over five thousand suspected turncoats were behind barbwire, but now they knew they had a friend in court. Osmeña’s situation, meanwhile, had worsened. MacArthur retained tight control over America’s hundred-million-dollar relief program for the islands, and Filipinos blamed the commonwealth president for everything that went wrong in the transition to peaceful rule. Inevitably, the restoration was far from smooth; for example, the General encouraged him to tell Filipino fighters that they would receive back pay of fifty pesos a month, but the Pentagon pared this to eight pesos. The soldiers felt that their president had misled them.89
Osmeña chose a cabinet among those who had kept their distance from the Japanese—guerrilla leaders, without experience in government—thereby alienating old friends in the oligarchy. He found he couldn’t run the country without civil servants, however. Many of them had been deeply compromised, thus inviting charges of inconsistency. Wealthy families of the prewar elite, realizing that Roxas was the entering wedge for political rehabilitation of their incriminated relatives, contributed heavily to his campaign war chest. Some of them had fought the enemy, but class loyalty had a prior claim on their allegiance. Soriano was one; Joaquin Elizalde, whose brother had been executed by the Japanese, was another. And MacArthur, having cleared Roxas, didn’t stop there. In an extraordinary gesture, he visited one of the barbwire compounds on Palawan to call on other old friends, prewar Filipinos of high rank now accused of having helped the invaders. He told several of them that he was sure they were victims of misunderstandings, that they would soon be absolved. With Roxas’s emergence that was, indeed, only a matter of time.90
The growing political crisis turned on the convening of the commonwealth congress which had been elected in the fall of 1941. So many of the winners had served the Laurel government in one way or another that organizing a quorum without them was impossible. Osmeña wanted to wait until the accused had been tried; otherwise, he said, legislative immunity would make a mockery of the issue. Roxas vigorously opposed the delay; he told Osmeña that as president he had no choice, that under the constitution he had to seat them, after which they would determine which of their peers were guilty or innocent. MacArthur agreed, Osmeña capitulated, and that, for all practical purposes, was the end of it. With the votes of his tarnished colleagues, Roxas was elected leader of the Senate. Sitting in joint session, the two legislative houses passed a joint resolution conveying “the profound gratitude of the Filipino people to General Douglas MacArthur and his gallant forces for the liberation of the Philippines.” MacArthur told them: “It is absolutely essential that you operate without undue friction. Petty jealousy, selfish ambition and unnecessary misunderstanding must not be permitted to impede progress and rend your country.” They interpreted this to mean that bygones should be bygones—it is difficult to see how else they could have interpreted it—and while GIs were still rooting the Japanese out of Cagayan Valley, the legislators ordered the dismantling of the stockades in which their friends and relatives were penned. Before spring was over, the leaders of the great oligarchic families would be free to supervise the reconstruction of their great mansions in the capital’s wealthy Santa Mesa district.91
On February 21 prewar Manila’s most vivacious hostess had boarded a refrigerator ship, the Columbia Express, in Brisbane, and settled in for a four-teen-day voyage back to the Philippines. She was accompanied by her seven-year-old son, his Cantonese amah, and Bonner Fellers, who had flown down to Australia to escort them back to the city they still called home. All of them were excited, Jean most of all. It had been over four months since she had seen her husband. Life without him had been drab—less so, to be sure, than that of most other soldiers’ wives, as she was the first to point out—but trying all the same. On December 23 she had written a friend: “Things go about the same with us here, except that Brisbane, as far as the American army is concerned, is almost a ghost city, & Lennon’s really seems most strange with none of the old faces around, the lobby full of civilians now. . . . My days are busy with Arthur & his schedule, & now with Christmas coming there are things to be done for him, & too I have been going over the many newspapers & clippings I have packed away, trying to get them in some kind of order for packing. So you see that my days are full but I do feel lost in a way as this is the first time I have ever been
separated from the General.”92
Five weeks before boarding the ship she had written him:
Dearest Sir Boss—
For your birthday, I send all of my love to you and may it help to form a mantle of protection for you—I love you more than you will ever know—may we be able to share in peace many more of your birthdays together—
God bless you—
JEANNIE 93
MacArthur had replied to her letters whenever he had time. On February 16, before the attack on the hotel, he had sent her word that the structure was “still unharmed but not yet in our hands. Have recovered all of our silver, which had been removed to the Watson Building near Malacañan, apparently prepared for shipment to Japan . . . . Be patient. Love, MacArthur.” After the burning of the penthouse and their belongings there he had written, “Do not be too distressed over their loss. It was a fitting end for our soldier home.” That was small consolation, and the news about the silver was misleading; Jean would never see her plate, or her mother’s, again. The General meant his own silver, the reacquisition of which he owed to a wily Filipino gardener at the home of a Japanese official in Manila. Seeing a chest with “Arthur MacArthur” engraved on it, the Filipino was moving it when the official encountered him in a hall and told him to put it away, explaining with a furtive air that it contained the ashes of MacArthur’s father, which were to be taken to Tokyo for ceremonial burial. Later the gardener peeked inside, saw the contents, and buried the box until the Americans came back. A few days after he returned it, the General had another stroke of luck. GIs found another box marked MEDICAL SUPPLIES—FOR SHIPMENT TO TOKYO in a waterfront warehouse. Within it were the General’s tea service, candelabra, and silver serving bowls. That, his set of the Cambridge Modern History volumes, in the hotel basement, and his Packard limousine, which was recovered on Corregidor, were all that remained of his personal belongings. But his wife had nothing.94
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