The Quezons would be bunked in the hospital section, Moore explained. Though the president’s tuberculosis left him often helpless with hacking coughing fits, he would have to endure the dank, damp air of the tunnel.
“We’ve partitioned off another section for women,” Moore said apologetically. “We’ve never had women around here before, and things may be a little crude.”
MacArthur looked around him, then announced that he would never live in this dank cavern.
“Where are your quarters?” he asked Moore.
“Topside,” Moore answered, meaning the flat northern part of Corregidor, with barracks, officers’ quarters, and offices, rising from cliffs more than six hundred feet above the water.
“We’ll move in there tomorrow morning.”
Moore tactfully pointed out that Topside, and his own quarters, were exposed to almost daily Japanese air attack.
“That’s fine,” MacArthur replied. “Just the thing.”6 At midnight President Quezon and his fellow Filipinos celebrated Christmas Mass in the tunnel.
—
The next morning Sid Huff had scarcely settled down in his new billet on Topside when he was ordered to see MacArthur. The general had assigned everyone on his staff quarters on Topside despite the threat of Japanese air raids, while a small cottage nearby became home to Jean, MacArthur, and little Arthur. From the veranda MacArthur could admire the view of Bataan, just two miles away. During the day, however, he shared an office with Sutherland at the end of Lateral Tunnel No. 3, and that’s where Huff found the general.
“I need you to go back to Manila,” MacArthur announced to Huff. “There’s some documents I need there.”
As Huff recovered from his shock and surprise, the commander of USAFFE added, “While you’re in my apartment look in the bedside table, where you’ll find my Colt .45—the one I carried in the First World War. Bring that. And if you look in the cupboard you’ll see my old campaign hat. I’d like to have that.”
Huff nodded, saluted, and made ready to go. Then MacArthur had a final thought.
“I think if you look in the dining room you may see a bottle of Scotch. Just as well bring that too. It may be a long cold winter over here.”7
Huff set out that night in one of Commander Bulkeley’s torpedo boats to evade enemy planes. At the Manila Pier he found a city on the verge of moral and civic dissolution. Marshall’s demolition teams were still continuing their work, as the moist night air was punctuated by the sounds of explosions and the sky was lit on all sides by bonfires of supplies and stockpiles of ammunition.
Crowds of looters continued to roam the streets night and day, as Huff found out when he set out the next morning to round up the general’s things and buy some additional supplies for Jean and little Arthur. Yet stores remained open, in a brave show of normalcy. There were two forlorn Santa Clauses out on the Escolta; one of them was grimly piling sandbags in front of his store. Huff came back to Corregidor under cover of darkness, laden with MacArthur’s hat and gun, oranges and jars of baby food for little Arthur—and General MacArthur’s bottle of Scotch.8
MacArthur’s new headquarters were on the ground floor of the artillery barracks on Topside. It occupied three rooms in the southeast corner of the building, sheltered by a veranda that faced the parade ground. MacArthur took over a corner office, with Sutherland next door. Willoughby, Sutherland’s aide Lieutenant Colonel Francis Wilson, and some clerks and Rogers, shared the third.9
From the veranda MacArthur could look out over the 2.75 square miles of the island, with a golf course adjoining the parade grounds. Next to Topside sat Middleside, with more quarters for officers and noncoms, a hospital, a white clapboard service club, and schools for service families’ children.10 From there the land fell away to the east almost to sea level, where a strip of land six hundred yards wide dubbed Bottomside offered docks, warehouses, a small barrio, and the island’s power plant—the plant that generated electricity not only for the island’s wells and refrigeration plant, but also powered the electric railroad that supplied Corregidor’s military installations.
Those were formidable, at least by the standard of the First World War. Corregidor bristled with massive coastal artillery pieces, most housed in impregnable concrete bunkers, while three smaller adjoining islands—Fort Hughes, Fort Frank, and Fort Drum—sported similar heavy artillery. Fort Drum itself, which guarded the southern entrance to Manila Bay, was built like a concrete battleship with twenty-foot-thick walls and fourteen-inch guns, while antiaircraft batteries ringed the island’s principal peaks, including Topside and Malinta Hill.
No enemy ship could pass in or out of Manila Bay without coming under withering fire from Fort Drum’s guns, or the other batteries. No wonder MacArthur could confidently tell his staff that the Japanese might “have the bottle” by occupying Manila and the surrounding bay, but “I have the cork.”11
There was only one problem. While Corregidor might be impregnable from the sea, no one had considered what would happen if it came under determined attack from the air, especially if bombs knocked out its vital power plant. The island had a tiny airstrip, but no warplanes—and the antiaircraft guns were old, with second-rate ammunition.
That day they had their first air raid. Antiaircraft fire drove off the bombers, which then headed on to pound Manila and Cavite. Some of MacArthur’s staff breathed a sigh of relief; maybe they were invulnerable to air attack after all.
Others who knew better said nothing. They knew the optimists would learn the truth soon enough.
—
The next day Manila was officially an open city. Little changed on the ground. People continued to stream out of the city into the hills. Conventional haunts like the Yacht Club and hotel bars “looked like funeral parlors,” according to one eyewitness. But there were some changes. American officers still completing their demolition jobs passed without sidearms; American flags disappeared from flag poles. Japanese prisoners of war were set free and, unarmed, wandered the streets like tourists.12
The biggest change was the night the blackout ended. From Corregidor the defenders could see the bright glow—although not as bright as before the war. MacArthur would have watched as he smoked a last cigarette before heading for bed. The island was quiet; for a few hours the war must have seemed very far away. The only indication that it was still on was the arrival of men from the Fourth Marines, who had come to Corregidor from their positions on the opposite side of the bay, as part of the last evacuation of American forces.
The marines would be part of the island’s last-ditch defense, if or when Bataan fell. MacArthur hoped, and perhaps even believed, that would not happen. He was still convinced that help from America and Hawaii would arrive in time.
“I can give you anything but time,” Napoleon used to tell his generals. Yet that was what MacArthur was asking for now; not just from Wainwright and Jones, his commanders on Bataan, but from himself. Time for Washington to order a relief convoy, to send help, to redeem its promise to the Philippine people—and to save its most distinguished general from inevitable defeat and capture.
Soon after the war, a reporter asked MacArthur if he really believed Washington would send help in time to save him and his army. “By God, I did believe it,” MacArthur exploded. “And you know, those messages didn’t say yes, but they didn’t say no. They [were] full of meanings that could be interpreted two ways.
“I see now,” he added sadly, “I may have deluded myself.”13
—
One such message came from General Marshall on December 27. It was in response to what Marshall called the “splendid conduct of your command and troops through trials of Christmas Day….Your reports on arrangement of your command setup and disposition of your air forces are acknowledged.” It added, “The president again personally directed the navy to make every effort to support you. You can rest assured [the] War Department will do all in its power in Far East to completely dominate that region.”14
/> MacArthur radioed back: “The following is my present strategic concept of the situation. Enemy penetration of the Philippines resulted from our weakness on the sea and in the air,” especially the withdrawal of Admiral Hart and the navy. “The enemy has utter freedom of naval and air movement,” and this, he predicted, would give them complete freedom for air operations from Mindanao to assist the conquest of the Dutch East Indies. MacArthur was reiterating his most intimate fear: that the fall of the Philippines would have a domino effect, threatening the entire region. It was, he stressed, essential that the United States Navy act. “Strong naval forces must seek combat with the enemy,” he wired. It was an optimistic view that the navy itself, with its biggest battleships sunk or crippled at Pearl Harbor, was not inclined to endorse. That didn’t matter to MacArthur. “I wish to emphasize the necessity for naval action,” he concluded, “and for rapid execution by land, sea, and air.”15
Combined operations on the scale MacArthur envisioned had never existed before in the U.S. military—or indeed in most other militaries around the world.
More importantly, there were no resources to be had. Instead, while the navy nursed its wounds and cleared up the debris from the December 7 attack, there was only a shortwave radio message. It came from President Roosevelt to the Philippine people. The refugees jammed in the tunnels and on Topside of Corregidor could eavesdrop as the familiar sonorous voice with its mid-Atlantic accent voiced these confident words:
News of your gallant struggle against the Japanese aggression has elicited the profoundest admiration of every American. The people of the United States will never forget what the people of the Philippine Islands are doing this day and will do in the days to come. I give to the people of the Philippine Islands my solemn pledge that their freedom will be redeemed and their independence established and protected. The entire resources, in men and in materials, of the United States stand behind that pledge…The Philippines may rest assured….The United States Navy is following an intensive and well planned campaign against the Japanese forces which will result in positive assistance to the defense of the Philippines.16
That was on December 28. The next day saw the first serious Japanese air raid on Corregidor.
It began at 11:45 when the air-raid siren blasted a warning, just as MacArthur’s forward echelon staff on Topside was starting to think about lunch. The officers quickly left their desks and headed for the veranda to check the number and type of aircraft.
MacArthur was there, of course. He was carrying a brown curved-handle walnut cane under his arm, with his cap pushed back on his head, and a Lucky Strike stuck in his black cigarette holder. He was casually counting off the Japanese bombers as they came in, “as coolly as if keeping [a] baseball score,” an eyewitness remembered, and muttering to himself, “seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three…”
There were in fact more than eighty, plus ten dive bombers, and as the first bombs dropped the spectators realized that this was no idle raid. This was meant to annihilate MacArthur and his command as decisively as they had overwhelmed Pearl Harbor.
“I guess we’re in for it,” Sutherland muttered as he watched. Most were too paralyzed with shock to nod and agree.17
The bombs hit the water first, throwing up great geysers, then began exploding on Topside as dirt and smoke flew in all directions. MacArthur told Jean to take shelter at once. She grabbed little Arthur and dashed into a bomb shelter, whose iron door refused to shut behind them so that with each bomb burst it banged and clanged from the blast. Shortly afterward, a bomb hit the cottage where they had all been standing, destroying the structure.
MacArthur continued to watch, standing in the open on the veranda. Then a bomb exploded close, almost too close, throwing shrapnel in every direction. MacArthur stooped behind a hedge, and his orderly, Sergeant Domingo Adversario, stripped off his own tin helmet and shoved it on MacArthur’s head. Just then a shard of shrapnel ripped past them both, tearing open Adversario’s hand and denting the helmet, but leaving the general unharmed. MacArthur wrapped up his sergeant’s hand himself as the bombs kept falling. Later he made sure Adversario got the Purple Heart.
In the midst of the pandemonium, Sutherland was still working at his desk—even though a chunk of shrapnel had killed a Marine standing in MacArthur’s office. Corporal Rogers, like the others, curled up under his desk when the first wave of bombers passed and the buzzer sounded.
Rogers then trotted down the hall with his steno pad in hand. Sutherland had just begun dictating another memo when they heard a second wave of bombers passing overhead. Outside there was another deafening clatter as explosions rocked the room. Japanese bombs delivered direct hits on the station hospital and the barracks. Army doctor Captain John K. Wilson was outside searching for casualties as planes continued to pass overhead, bombing and strafing. He ran into MacArthur out there, and MacArthur stopped counting planes long enough to ask Wilson about casualties.
Between explosions, the doctor gave the commander of USAFFE his best-guess answer. In the end there would be twenty-two dead and eighty wounded. The two men spoke for only two or three minutes, but Dr. Wilson remembered later it was more like two or three hours.18
Finally, after bombing Corregidor continuously for three hours and fifty minutes, the planes faded into the distance. Topside was a smoking ruin, with a circle of bomb craters ringing the headquarters end of the barracks, which had virtually collapsed. Power was out all across the island; the power generator on Bottomside had taken a direct hit. Meanwhile, soldiers and civilians were scrambling to retrieve the wounded and put out the scattered fires.
MacArthur was standing outside, impervious to the destruction around him. When Jean found him, he was adjusting the bandages on Sergeant Adversario’s arm. The general smiled ruefully at his wife and gestured toward the debris. “Look what they’ve done to the garden,” he said.19
That evening they reluctantly moved out of Topside.
In the end his staff found a small house for the MacArthurs down on Bottomside, not far from the damaged power plant. The place was entirely unfurnished, and Sid Huff and others had to scrounge around to find everything from beds and an overstuffed armchair to a refrigerator, complete with a bullet hole through the door.20 For a couple of days until the power plant was repaired, everyone had to drink brackish water and read reports by candlelight. Meanwhile, Doc Wilson was using a flashlight to work on the wounded at the hospital.
MacArthur’s disappointment and chagrin were lightened somewhat by reports from Wainwright. The withdrawal was proceeding as planned; the North Luzon Force had pulled back to the Bamban-Arayat line in front of San Fernando, the last stop before crossing to the Bataan Peninsula. The South Luzon Force was expected to clear San Fernando on January 1. Within forty-eight hours the two halves of his army would be united and ready to defend Bataan.21
Before the day was over MacArthur paid a visit to Quezon in the tunnel. The president’s tuberculosis was bad, made worse by the damp conditions in his tunnel quarters. He was barely able to get words out between agonizing fits of hacking coughing. But he got out enough words to make it clear that he was furious about MacArthur’s remaining out in the open during the raid like that.
The general drew himself upright. “Don’t you know,” he said in his sonorous voice, “the Japanese haven’t yet made the bomb with my name on it?”
He smiled, then said seriously, “Of course, I understand what you mean, and I have no right to gamble with my life, but it’s absolutely necessary [that] at the right time a commander take chances.” Then the men under his command, MacArthur said, when “they see the man at the top risking his life, the man at the bottom says, ‘I guess if that old man can take it, I can, too.’ ”22
In a few weeks the men on Bataan would have a very different perspective on MacArthur and his future prospects for mortality.
—
The day after the big raid, December 30, a solemn ceremony took place at the mouth of the
Malinta Tunnel. It was the second inauguration of President Quezon.
The first had been a magnificent affair, with U.S. Vice President John Nance Garner in attendance and whirling couples dancing in the candlelight at Malacañan Palace. This time a team of marines had hammered together a wooden platform on an outdoor cooking site. Two wooden folding chairs were set on the crude dais, one for MacArthur and one for Quezon, as a chaplain’s organ played “Hail to the Chief.”23 Then Quezon took the oath of office and spoke to the small throng assembled there. He spoke of the future of the Philippines as an independent country, then turned to MacArthur.
“No words in any language,” he said between bouts of coughing, “can express to you the deep gratitude of the Filipino people and my own for your devotion to our cause, the defense of our country, and the safety of our population.” Quezon sat down, and then MacArthur spoke in tones so low that even those closest to the dais had to strain to hear him.
“Never in all history,” he said, “has there been a more solemn and significant inauguration. An act, symbolical of democratic processes, is placed against the background of a sudden, merciless war. The thunder of death and destruction, dropped from the skies, can be heard in the distance. Such is the bed of birth of this new government, of this new nation.”
His final words were these: “Through this, its gasping agony of travail, through what Winston Churchill called ‘blood, sweat, and tears,’ from the grim shadow of death, oh merciful God, preserve this noble race.” Then he turned away, his face wet with tears.24
That same day in Washington, Roosevelt fired off a memorandum to Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Henry Knox. “I wish that War Plans would explore every possible means of relieving the Philippines,” it read. “I realize great risks are involved but the object is important.”25
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