Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  It came at 1:00 A.M., preceded by small-arms and mortar fire. This time the Scouts and Americans opened with everything they had, including 75 mm artillery, as wave after wave of screaming Japanese headed for the barbed wire in front of the Fifty-seventh’s I Company, some throwing themselves on the wire as human bridges for the Japanese soldiers following them.51

  Firing furiously, I Company tried to stand its ground as first light came up.

  When its commander was seriously wounded, however, the men began to fall back. Fry threw L Company in to plug the gap, but when this failed, the Fifty-seventh’s commander, Colonel Clarke, sent in a company of his reserve battalion. The line was still holding when Japanese tanks arrived, but many Japanese were infiltrating around the ends of the Second Battalion’s lines and opening up with light machine guns on the exposed flank. All day teams of volunteers had to ferret out the snipers one by one. The most effective group was led by a junior lieutenant, Alex “Sandy” Nininger, who had arrived in the Philippines back in November, as part of reinforcements. With a Garand rifle, a Japanese submachine gun, and an armful of grenades, Nininger brought down one Japanese infiltrator after another like a hunter on safari.

  Then on one of his ventures into the thicket, he didn’t come back. His men later found him propped up against a tree, dead. Three Japanese soldiers who had charged with bayonets were dead at his feet. Nininger would win the first posthumous Medal of Honor of the Second World War.52

  The fighting dragged on all that day and night, as the Scouts counterattacked again and again until they found themselves back at their original line. At dawn on January 12 the scene that greeted the surviving Scouts “was one of utter chaos and devastation,” the regiment’s adjutant, John Olson, remembered. “Broken and bloody bodies were sprawled all over the foxholes and open ground throughout the I and left of K Company sectors….Mangled Japanese bodies were strung on the barbed wire like dirty laundry.” It was a scene MacArthur had witnessed dozens of times during his war in France, but it was new to these young Americans and Filipinos. Occasionally the quiet was broken by shots as the Scouts rooted out the last resistance. But no one, least of all the Japanese, seemed eager to resume the battle.53

  The Fifty-seventh had lost more than a hundred men in the battle of the cane field, and the Japanese had left between two hundred and three hundred dead behind. Their total casualties were considerably more.54 It had been an American-Filipino victory, but there had also been problems that were harbingers of trouble to come.

  Lieutenant Colonel Fry, for example, discovered that the ammunition for his heavy mortars was World War One vintage, and six out of every ten shells had been duds—and the ammo for the new light mortars had never arrived, forcing them to abandon their guns. When the Fifty-seventh’s executive officer tried to get additional ammunition and supply to replace what had been lost, those in charge said no: his request exceeded their standard replacement schedule. In desperation he went over their heads to Sutherland, who overruled them. Sutherland also began a search for a new commander for the Fifty-seventh, since the current commander had been slow to respond to the crisis going on around him on the 10th and 11th, and had become, according to his executive officer, “phobic” about air attack.55

  The other problem was that the Japanese, despite their losses and proof that the Americans and Filipinos were going to stand and fight, were not going to let up. That same day a determined attack tore a hole through the Fifty-first Infantry sector to the left of the Scouts, and plugging it up required a counterattack by an entire battalion.56

  By nightfall it was evident that the Japanese were shifting their effort against II Corps to the west. That would spell eventual disaster, although there was only one person on the Rock who had already guessed it.

  —

  That person was not MacArthur. He had returned from his ten-hour tour of Bataan with a renewed sense of confidence. He went down into the tunnel to convey his enthusiasm to President Quezon, who was now virtually confined to his cot by his constant hacking fits.

  “There’s no reason to worry,” MacArthur told him. “I can hold Bataan and Corregidor for months; the morale of our forces is high.” The Filipino reservists, with their five and a half months of training, he said proudly, “have become veterans in less than one month of actual fighting against a determined and superior force.”57 He almost certainly showed Quezon the letter that had reached him while he was on Bataan.

  “You are well aware you are doomed,” it read. “The end is near.”

  It was a surrender ultimatum from General Homma, arriving by sheer coincidence even as MacArthur was touring his troops.

  “The question is how long you can resist. You have already cut rations in half. I appreciate the fighting spirit of yourself and your troops….However, in order to avoid needless bloodshed and to save the remnants of your divisions and your auxiliary troops, you are advised to surrender.”

  MacArthur’s only reply had been to increase the artillery fire from II Corps sector.58 Surrender was out of the question, especially when his men were fighting so splendidly—and so much depended on standing firm both on Bataan and on Corregidor.

  The man who did guess the truth, that the shift of fighting to the II Corps sector could signal disaster, was MacArthur’s chief of operations, Dick Marshall. But by the time he and Sutherland could convince MacArthur to take measures to stave off defeat, it would already be too late to save the men on Bataan.

  —

  Mac’s life on the Rock began every morning before dawn with a shave that left his face clean but rubbed raw, since the water he—like everyone else—used for shaving was seawater. His orderly, Sergeant Adversario, would present him with polished shoes and his general’s uniform neatly pressed, except that the uniform now hung in folds. MacArthur lost twenty-five pounds during his first eight weeks on Corregidor.59

  Then he would leave the small Bottomside cottage, trying not to wake Jean, and walk with a deliberate stride around the house several times to gather his thoughts before setting off, jauntily swinging his walnut cane, a cigar or cigarette holder (the famous pipe would come later), jammed in his mouth on the one-mile walk to the tunnel and his office.

  The office, General Headquarters USAFFE, was in Lateral No. 3, where MacArthur, Sutherland, Willoughby, and the others shared a row of desks illuminated by huge drop lights that would sway eerily whenever an air raid took place overhead—which after December 29 became an almost daily occurrence. Pieces of cardboard had to be put over stacks of documents to keep them from getting soaked by the damp that dripped down the limestone walls. On one side was a large mounted map of the Philippines on which an orderly would occasionally move pins representing USAFFE and Japanese units, especially on the section showing the Bataan Peninsula—pins that were usually remorselessly headed south.60

  Telephones bolted into the walls would ring constantly while MacArthur paced the narrow corridor, his hands “clasped behind him,” a Filipino officer remembered, “his head bowed a little, his hawk like face cast in bitter lines.”61 What that face tried but failed to disguise, was a growing rage at his own helplessness in a war, and in a crisis, that was rapidly running beyond his control.

  The lack of supplies was dire. On January 10, and again on January 17, he fired off warning messages to Washington explaining the seriousness of the situation. He pointed out that his men were now on half rations, and “the result was becoming evident in the exhausted condition of the men.”62 New supplies could reach them only by submarine or the occasional intrepid steamer that was willing to run the ever-tightening Japanese blockade.

  One of the latter was the Legaspi, a small craft of less than a thousand tons piloted by a Filipino captain, Lino Conejero, that made the run from Corregidor to the Visayan province coast to load up on food for the garrison on the Rock. Legaspi came back a week later to Corregidor under cover of darkness and unloaded 1,400 sacks of rice, eggs, chickens, sugar, and salt from its hold even as the
Japanese pounded the pier with artillery fire. Captain Conejero and his first mate were being interviewed in the tunnel by Captain Carlos Romulo when MacArthur burst into the room.

  He “spoke to me as though I were his son,” the astonished Conejero told a questioner later, and praised him for “risking his life for his country” in order to feed the beleaguered garrison. “I’m going to decorate you both,” MacArthur kept saying, barely choking back the tears.

  When Conejero left MacArthur, the commander in chief of USAFFE “was crying like a baby.” On her next smuggling run to Corregidor, the Legaspi was caught by a Japanese gunboat, ran aground on rocks off Mindoro, and sank. Conejero and his crew managed to escape into the hills.63

  Corregidor did not undergo the half-ration regime—a source of some anger on Bataan, where soldiers had bitter fantasies of the Corregidor garrison dining on eggs, fruit, and other delicacies. In fact, meals on Corregidor consisted mostly of rice and tinned salmon, Paul Rogers later recalled, served twice a day at a field kitchen set up at the east entrance of the tunnel. Once in a great while there was a special treat, as when wieners appeared on the menu or mule steak when five were killed by Japanese artillery fire.

  Still, “rice was the basic ingredient of our meal,” Rogers remembered, “with fish or other bits of meat that must have included carabao”—although no one inquired too closely, since they knew that in the Philippines dog was considered a delicacy. A dog named Duke made the rounds at each meal, begging for scraps and Rogers would sometimes share his meager meal, even his spoon with the animal, knowing full well that at some point he might be eating Duke himself.64

  The daily routine on Corregidor was punctuated by air raids—and after February 5 by Japanese artillery on the mainland—and while the sound of warning sirens sent everyone scurrying into the safety of the tunnel, including Jean and little Arthur (it was a ninety-second car ride from their Bottomside cottage to the entrance of the tunnel—and she had it timed precisely), there was always one person coming out—MacArthur himself. Some thought his determination to be present at every raid, even count the planes, an unnecessary risk; others, since he refused to wear a helmet, viewed it as foolhardy madness. Still others wondered if he half believed what he had said in jest to Quezon after the air raid on the 29th: that destiny would choose when and where he would die, so why not meet fate head-on instead of retreating from it?

  Most, however, found his courage awe-inspiring, even unworldly. Artillery Captain Godfrey Ames caught sight of him once at the Topside battery, “standing tall and never taking the field glasses from his eyes” as a flight of Zeros came in low to drop their bombs. Ames pleaded with his commander in chief to take shelter or at least put on a helmet; Mac ignored him and simply said, “The bombs will fall close.” They did, less than one hundred yards away. MacArthur was unmoved, watching impassively as the planes circled wildly overhead.

  President Quezon, even after his trust in MacArthur was revised downward, summed up the feelings of many when he wrote: “On the rock of Corregidor, Douglas MacArthur was a rock of strength.”

  MacArthur knew what he was doing. “There was nothing of bravado in this,” he wrote years later. “It was simply my duty. The gunners at the batteries, the men in the foxholes, they too were in the open. They liked to see me with them at such moments”—which, he believed, helped tamp down feelings of panic, or just plain exhaustion.

  “Leadership is often crystallized in some sort of public gesture,” he wrote in a powerful and revealing passage. “In war, to be effective it must take the form of a fraternity of danger welded between a commander and his troops by the common denominator of sharing the risk of sudden death.”65 It was a leadership principle that MacArthur would give himself many opportunities to practice.

  Still, if there was a member of the MacArthur family who was a hero to the common soldier and civilian on Corregidor, it was probably Jean. Her spare, lively figure was seen everywhere, and everyone got a beaming smile and a kind word even in the tensest hours of a Japanese air raid or power failure. People would remember her sitting with her knitting outside the tunnel as soldiers and officers walked in, sometimes wearing sunglasses and sometimes not, and greeting every passerby as if it were a casual Murfreesboro Sunday.

  The social highlight of the Corregidor siege was little Arthur’s fourth birthday. The MacArthurs were joined by the Sayres’ fifteen-year-old stepson, Billy, the only other child on the island. Mrs. Sayre managed to procure some cans of orangeade and enough flour, sugar, and other ingredients to bake a small cake. Jean and the general gave Arthur two presents that they had salvaged from the wreck of the post exchange store, a toy iron motorcycle and a flyswatter.

  Arthur’s ayah, Ah Cheu, came up with a more elaborate present. She had found a tailor on the base who made up a miniature overseas garrison cap. Sid Huff’s gift, a fake cardboard cigarette holder made to resemble his father’s, completed the outfit. Arthur was delighted, and paraded around the tunnel in his new finery.

  The cap and cigarette holder became an inseparable part of Arthur’s outfits. Once a soldier ventured to salute him and call him “general.” Arthur was furious.

  “I’m not a general,” he said in a hurt voice. “I’m a sergeant.”

  “Why a sergeant?”

  “Because sergeants,” the boy promptly replied, “get to drive automobiles.”66

  At other times, Jean spent hours at the hospital, tending to the wounded. Often MacArthur would come in to find her, and kneel down at the foot of the hospital bed to talk to her quietly.

  Evenings were a trial. They usually consisted of gathering around the radio to catch whatever news broadcast could be interpreted or picked up on shortwave. The news was uniformly bad. Hong Kong had fallen to the Japanese on Christmas Day. America’s remaining outpost in the western Pacific, Wake Island, fell a few days later. One Japanese army was bounding down the Malay Peninsula for Singapore, while another was advancing into Burma. Thailand had been overrun as well as Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies were next. Meanwhile, a large force of Japanese infantry and engineers was headed for Rabaul, to turn that island into a fortress-base, giving the Japanese navy and air force complete command of the South Pacific.

  As MacArthur’s troops were digging in on Bataan, imperial Japan controlled one-quarter of the earth’s surface.67 And no one had yet found a way to stop it from acquiring more.

  Then there was news from the States, of senators and congressmen speaking of MacArthur’s heroic defense on Corregidor, and of the heroes on Bataan whom the country would not abandon or allow to die in vain. MacArthur would listen with an expressionless face. Then once came news that a Japanese submarine had shelled Santa Barbara, California. MacArthur broke off to say with a straight face, “I think I’ll send a wire to the California commander, and tell him if he can hold out for thirty more days, I’ll be able to send him help.”68

  Then, before retiring, MacArthur would walk out into the night air for a final smoke, as Jean swung along beside him, but sometimes following behind while MacArthur walked with his head bowed, thinking, planning, then shaking his head and thinking some more.

  In those moments Jean would listen to the rumble of the PT boats in the harbor and the boom of Japanese artillery far off on Bataan, and think, “This is hopeless.”69

  It was not long before everyone would learn how right she was.

  CHAPTER 16

  BACK TO THE WALL

  Tell the president I will never surrender. Tell him I will stay here with my men til we rot. Tell him.

  —DOUGLAS MACARTHUR TO DEPARTING U.S. ARMY OFFICER, MID-DECEMBER, 1941

  On January 16 things on Bataan began to come apart.

  The trouble started in II Corps sector on the right flank, where at dawn the Fifty-first Division counterattacked the Japanese to regain vital ground lost in fighting on the previous day. The commander of the Fifty-first, General Jones, had fought against General Parker’s order to advance. He insisted h
is position was too weak, and his troops too exhausted and depleted, for an effective counterstrike. Parker, however, overruled him, and at first it looked as if he had been right. The advance went well—too well, in fact, as the division’s lead regiment shoved the Japanese so far back that a dangerous gap appeared in the Fifty-first’s line.1

  The Japanese at once pounced from three sides. The regiment disintegrated as a fighting unit, and the entire line might have collapsed if Jones hadn’t stationed an emergency reserve force 4,000 yards behind the point at which the attack had started. Still, by that evening, Homma’s commander on the scene, General Akira, was in a position to turn the entire II Corps line.2

  On the 17th, Parker sent in his one American regiment, the Thirty-first Infantry, and the Forty-fifth Philippine Scouts to retrieve the situation. They fought hard and bravely, but their attack was piecemeal. Japanese resistance was fierce, and a day later the Japanese were still holding their ground and the line was still in danger.3 Another attack on the 19th proved just as useless and just as costly, as did attacks during the next couple of days. Parker’s men, worn out, sleepless, pounded by incessant Japanese air attack, and seriously underfed, could stand no more as the defense of Bataan on the eastern side verged on collapse.

  On the other side of the peninsula, the situation was also deteriorating fast.

  The entire plan for holding Bataan depended on maintaining a defensive line that cut across both coastal highways, with Mount Natib in the middle. Holding that line depended in turn on the assumption that Natib and surrounding peaks were impassable to Japanese troops, and could be left largely undefended. Dick Marshall, for one, thought this was a mistake. He believed the line of defense should have started farther up the peninsula in order to protect the northern approaches to Natib from an enemy who, “were he in possession of Mount Natib,” Marshall warned Sutherland, could turn both lines while cutting I and II Corps off from each other.