Yet this begs the most crucial question of all. Why did MacArthur accept the money? Certainly he had financial reasons for doing so. Far from having enriched himself during his stay in the Philippines as critics claimed, MacArthur was overheard saying the half million dollars didn’t even cover the financial losses he had incurred by staying with the military mission.54
Yet the best explanation may be the simplest. As Geoffrey Perret points out after having gone over the evidence, MacArthur accepted the money because he never expected to spend it. He assumed he would die on Corregidor, along with his command. Most of the other recipients guessed they would never live to see their money either. The whole business “was no great affair,” Corporal Rogers noted, compared to the constant bustle and hurly-burly of matters on Corregidor, including preparing for the final siege and death.55
They could not guess how wrong they were.
—
It was a chilly night in Boston on Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 1942, where the main speaker at the annual Republican event to commemorate the occasion was the man Roosevelt had defeated in the 1940 election, Wendell Willkie. Willkie’s speech surveyed the sorry state of America’s defenses two months after Pearl Harbor. Everywhere the country was on the defensive; everywhere the enemy, both Japan and Nazi Germany, had the upper hand. Willkie demanded that one man was needed “to bring about effective cooperation” among the armed services and the Allies; one man empowered to “direct military services” in order to retrieve a desperate situation before it was too late.
“The last two months have proved we have that man,” Willkie said, “the one man in all our forces who has learned from first-hand, contemporary experience the value and proper use of Army, Navy, and Air Forces fighting toward one end: the man who on the Bataan Peninsula has accomplished what was regarded as the impossible by his brilliant tactical sense; the man who alone has given his fellow-countrymen confidence and hope in the conduct of this war—General Douglas MacArthur.”
After the stunning roar of applause died down, Willkie went on.
“Bring Douglas MacArthur home. Place him at the very top. Keep bureaucratic and political hands off him…Put him in supreme command of our armed forces under the President.”56
With Willkie’s speech the cavalcade of praise and adulation of Douglas MacArthur began that would eventually carry him away off Corregidor—and nearly to the gates of the White House.
It wasn’t just Republicans who began to rally around this idea. George Marshall first brought up the idea of MacArthur leaving Corregidor on February 4. If the forces on Bataan were doomed and only defense of Corregidor were left, he wrote to MacArthur, “under these conditions the need for your services there will be less pressing than other points in the Far East.”57
Then after Quezon’s “bombshell” letter of February 8 prompted Washington to propose evacuating the president and his family before he came to harm—or caused more mischief—Marshall urged MacArthur on February 14 to reconsider his decision to stick it out on Corregidor, and to consider Marshall’s two earlier options: moving his command to Mindanao, which was still, incredibly, largely free of Japanese soldiers, or, alternately, going directly to Australia.58
MacArthur acknowledged the message, but did not reply. Instead he told the staff that while they should start preparing for Quezon’s and Sayre’s departure, he would want to stay as long as possible if he thought his presence helped with defense.59
The change of tone is significant. MacArthur was becoming aware that whatever happened, Washington at least was not about to leave him to die.
On February 15 the news arrived at Corregidor that Singapore had fallen. Almost 80,000 men capitulated to the Japanese commander General Yamashita. It was the greatest mass surrender in British history—in spite of Winston Churchill’s admonition to the British commander, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, that he and the Singapore garrison should die to the last man.60 The possibility that MacArthur and the men on Bataan would be asked to make the same sacrifice that Percival had refused to make, was fading fast.
The next day MacArthur sent a message to Washington:
“The unexpectedly early capitulation of Singapore emphasizes the fact that the opportunity for a successful attack upon the [Japanese] lines of communication is rapidly vanishing….A determined effort in force made now would probably attract the assistance of Russia who will unquestionably not move in this area until some evidence is given of concrete effort by the Allies. The opportunity still exists for a complete reversal of the situation. It will soon however be too late.”61
MacArthur was desperate. He was playing the Russian card again. But he found no takers. What was happening in Washington, however, was something very different: a growing fear that leaving MacArthur to die would do more harm than good.
Dwight Eisenhower, for one, was for leaving him exactly where he was. He had become thoroughly disillusioned with his former mentor’s refusal to take Washington’s failure to help lying down—MacArthur and Quezon “are both babies,” he wrote—and it was reflected in his diary entries for those crucial weeks in February and March.
“He’s doing a good job where [he] is,” Eisenhower told his diary on February 23. “Bataan is made to order for him. It’s in the public eye; it has made him a national hero; it has all the essentials of drama: and he is the acknowledged king on the spot.” If he’s brought out, Ike worried, he might be given a command that would prove too difficult for him. “Public opinion will force him into a position where his love of the limelight may ruin him.”62
No one was listening to Eisenhower. Roosevelt’s military aide Colonel Edwin Watson believed that bringing MacArthur back to the States would be worth “five army corps”—and not just in military terms. The very fact that MacArthur was a national hero, especially among Republicans, was precisely why the White House couldn’t abandon him. Roosevelt didn’t want accusations that he had abandoned MacArthur haunting him in the 1942 midterm elections, or the next presidential race in 1944. Watson also pointed out that bringing MacArthur out would make it look like Roosevelt was finally taking decisive action against Japan, if only in bringing home his top field general to “live to fight another day.”
Still, Eisenhower and others, including military historian Gavin Long, could and have argued that recalling MacArthur didn’t necessarily require finding him a new command. Given his serial mistakes during the Philippines campaign, from his failed defense-on-the-beaches strategy to the Clark Field debacle, the best option would have been to bring him home, relieve him of all command, and put him safely behind a desk in Washington.63
But this overlooked the fact that MacArthur’s mistakes had also been Washington’s mistakes. To relieve him of command would present the White House with the worst of both worlds: a national war hero being unaccountably put on the bench, one who could use his intimate contacts with the opposition political party and the press to argue that he could have saved the Philippines if Washington had not misled him about sending support—who would go on to proclaim he could still win this war if President Roosevelt hadn’t pushed him into retirement.
So the idea to pull MacArthur off Corregidor was born.
—
Interestingly, the first person to act on the idea was not an American at all, but an Australian, Prime Minister John Curtin, fifty-two years old and a tough ex–union activist. From his desk in Canberra, Curtin had watched his country coming under a growing threat of invasion from Japan, including air raids on the country’s northern cities—one on Darwin sank a navy destroyer and four merchant vessels—while at the same time being all but abandoned by Great Britain after the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse.
The surrender of Singapore was the final straw. The loss of 80,000 soldiers—15,000 of them Australians—seemed to him an “inexcusable betrayal,” and it was necessary, he wrote to Winston Churchill, to do something to correct it without relying on Britain for help.
&nbs
p; “The Australian Government therefore regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia have the fullest say in direction of the Democracies’ fighting plan,” Curtin wrote in a Melbourne Herald editorial at almost the same time. “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links with the United Kingdom.”64
It was a stunning declaration of independence. As part of it, Curtin demanded that Great Britain return the three Australian divisions that Curtin had sent to join the fighting in Europe and secretly ordered the Australian Sixth and Seventh Divisions en route to Burma to help the British to return home.65 From the United States, he asked for dispatch of an American general to assume supreme command of all Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific. It was easy to guess whom he meant: General Douglas MacArthur.66
It was an idea that had now ripened in Washington as well. On Roosevelt’s desk on February 21 was a long memorandum from his special envoy to Australia, an old MacArthur friend, Brigadier General Patrick J. Hurley.
It stated that Australia was now “extremely vulnerable” to the Japanese, in part because preparations for defense were so lax. Hurley believed an American contribution to the defense effort was essential since “[t]he United States’ contributions to the defense of the Southwest Pacific [will] enormously exceed the total output and resources of the combined British Dominions in ships, tanks, planes, equipment and manpower.” For that reason, “it is logical and essential that the supreme command in the southwest Pacific should be given to an American.”
Hurley also had a clear idea as to who that should be. So did General Archibald Wavell, the British commander in the Southwest Pacific region, who “frankly stated that he would like to have MacArthur with him.”
Hurley had to explain that getting MacArthur out of the Philippines would be difficult, and “that it would be necessary for the President to definitely order MacArthur to relinquish command and proceed elsewhere and that even if such orders were issued, MacArthur might feel that he had destroyed himself by leaving his beleaguered command—that I knew MacArthur well enough to realize that his most treasured possession is his honor as a soldier.”67
That was enough for Roosevelt. The same day Stimson and Marshall were coming around to the idea of not leaving MacArthur on Corregidor, Roosevelt was realizing that ordering him to Australia would solve a number of problems at once. It would save a national war hero; it would bolster Australian confidence and prepare the way for a robust defense of the continent with American help; it would deprive Japan of an enormous propaganda victory in capturing or killing America’s greatest active soldier.
It would also keep Douglas MacArthur far away from Washington, far from where he was bound to disrupt war plans already made and develop grandiose ones of his own that would be spread to the media, all of which would center on winning the war in Asia, and avenging Pearl Harbor, instead of saving America’s European ally Great Britain.
At the same time, Roosevelt understood only too well that “the departure of MacArthur from Corregidor would be a grievous blow to the heroic men of his command” on Corregidor and Bataan, his speechwriter and advisor Robert Sherwood later recalled. “It was ordering the captain to be the first to leave the sinking ship.”68
But the decision was made. Late that day Marshall sent a radiogram to MacArthur warning him that the president was considering ordering him off the Rock.
—
A day earlier, on February 20, a single car drove through the Malinta Tunnel toward the jetty on the island’s eastern end. When it stopped, MacArthur got out, and then Sutherland. Together they helped a frail President Quezon out of the backseat. To Quezon’s longtime admirer journalist-turned-MacArthur-aide Carlos Romulo, Quezon looked like a ghost in the moonlight. Before Quezon boarded the small navy tender that would take him out to the submarine Swordfish, MacArthur embraced the old man one last time.
“Manuel,” he said, “you will see it through. You are the father of your country and God will preserve you.”
“I am leaving you with a weeping heart,” Quezon said in a note he had left behind for MacArthur. “You and I have not only been friends, we have been more than brothers….I am leaving my own boys, the Filipino soldiers, under your care.” At the quay he slipped a signet ring from his finger and gave it to MacArthur. It was the signet he had used to seal letters of state.
“When they find your body,” he said in a breaking voice, “I want them to know that you fought for my country.”69
MacArthur saluted as the tender headed out to the bay and into the darkness. Waiting for him when he returned was Quezon’s note, along with the Distinguished Service Star of the Philippines, presented by Quezon with this citation: “The record of General MacArthur’s service is interwoven forever in the history of the Philippines and is one of the greatest heritages of the Filipino people.”70
—
On the 22nd of February there was a major meeting at the White House. Besides Roosevelt, Stimson, and George Marshall, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Admiral King, and Roosevelt advisor Harry Hopkins were present. Australia, and MacArthur, were the items on the agenda. The day before, Australian prime minister Curtin and his cabinet had sent a formal request to Roosevelt that MacArthur be sent out as commander in chief of a reconstituted American, British, Dutch, Australian Command, or ABDACOM, to be dubbed Southwest Pacific Area.
Curtin wasn’t limiting himself to polite messages. Roosevelt had also learned from Churchill that Curtin had told him he wanted all Australian units pulled out of the Middle East unless something was done to reassure Australia it wasn’t being abandoned to Japanese invasion. The entire strategy that Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to, to fight the war—rallying the Allies, including Australia, to winning the war in Europe first—was in jeopardy.71
So it was, ironically, that in order to save the Europe-first strategy, Roosevelt finally agreed: MacArthur would have to be asked to leave the Philippines.
Early the next day Roosevelt and Stimson met to figure out how to phrase it. If it were put as a suggestion, the commander in chief USAFFE would reject it out of hand; if it were presented as a personal plea, it would leave MacArthur worrying about his honor.
Finally, Stimson threw up his hands. “Make it an order,” he said. Roosevelt nodded agreement. And so that morning, February 23, FDR issued a direct order to MacArthur to leave Corregidor for Australia to assume command of a new Southwest Pacific theater.72
The one lingering question was, would MacArthur obey it?
—
On the morning of February 24, MacArthur strode into the Malinta Tunnel, a crumpled cablegram clutched in his hand. In Lateral Tunnel No. 3 he found Sid Huff packing a locker full of records that were supposed to be taken away by submarine before the Rock surrendered.
Huff glanced up. “I looked at the General’s face,” Huff later wrote, “and I knew something had happened.”
MacArthur asked in a harsh voice, “Where’s Jean?”
“She’s in the other tunnel, General,” Huff answered. Dick Sutherland, who was also there, stood up.
“Come on, Dick,” MacArthur ordered in the same harsh tone. He grabbed his cap and headed for the other tunnel, with Sutherland following.73
When they found Jean, MacArthur showed them both the crumpled cable.
“The President directs that you make arrangement to leave Fort Mills and proceed to Mindanao,” it read. “You are directed to make this change as quickly as possible.” At Mindanao, MacArthur was to “take such measures as will insure a prolonged defense of that region,” but his sojourn there was to last no more than a week. His real destination was to be Australia, “where you will assume command of all United States Troops” and where Washington would arrange for the British and Australian governments to receive MacArthur as commander in chief of all Allied forces in the area.74
As he and Sutherland and Jean set
off for the gray bungalow, MacArthur’s mind was a firestorm of conflicting emotions. Despite his reputation, he was only human. One emotion had to be relief that Washington had not abandoned him, at least, or his family; when the final curtain came down on the drama of Bataan and Corregidor, they would not be there. But to leave before that final curtain—that he was not prepared to do.
For weeks “I fully expected to be killed,” he told reporter and friend Frazier Hunt later. “I would never have surrendered. If necessary I would have sought the end in some final charge.” But he knew the law of averages would have worked against that last-stand heroism. “I would probably have been killed in a bombing raid or by artillery fire….And Jean and the boy,” he paused, his eyes shaded, “might have been destroyed in some final debacle.”75
Now, at the house that afternoon, he and Jean sat on the porch as he agonized. “I am an American—Army born and bred,” he said finally, “and accustomed by a lifetime of discipline to the obedience of superior orders. But this order I must disobey.”
Then he bowed his head and wept.76
—
When he returned to the tunnel, someone who saw him said he looked old and ill, and “drained of the confidence he had always shown.” To his assembled staff, he read aloud the presidential order and spoke of his dilemma. If I disobey, I’ll be court-martialed, he told them. If I obey, I’ll be guilty of deserting my men. He suggested that maybe the best course of action was to resign. Then he could volunteer to go to Bataan as a private citizen, and be with his men until the end.
“But Sutherland and my entire staff would have none of it,” he wrote later.77
They pushed hard for MacArthur to agree to go to Australia (not forgetting that they, as his staff, would have to go too). There a concentration of men, arms, and transport would be amassing for a rescue operation in the Philippines, and MacArthur was clearly the man to lead it.
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