Shedden began meeting regularly with MacArthur in April. “Anyone who has had close relations with General MacArthur,” he wrote later, “cannot come away without [sic] any other impression than that he has been in the presence of a great masterful personality” with “a broad and cultured mind and a fine command of English,” although Shedden admitted that some might be put off by “a certain demonstrative manner and his verbosity.”
Still, Shedden found “he has great enthusiasm for his work, but becomes depressed at the political frustrations which, in his view, shape world strategy, to the detriment of the Southwest Pacific Area.” It was a considerable shock, for example, to hear MacArthur openly lament his lack of resources in Australia and say that he had “lost heart and wanted to give his job up.”30
If his cri de coeur was meant to rally a nervous prime minister, and an equally nervous cabinet, to MacArthur’s cause, it succeeded perfectly. Shedden presented Curtin with a letter—it may have been written by MacArthur himself—endorsing the plan to commit all Australian forces to MacArthur’s command. “You have come to Australia to lead a crusade,” the letter enthused, “the result of which means everything to the future of the world and mankind. At the request of a sovereign State you are placed in supreme command of its Navy, Army, and Air Force, so that with your great nation, they may be welded into a homogeneous force and given that unified direction which is so vital for the achievement of victory.”31
No more was heard about incorporating Australian officers into MacArthur’s evolving South West Pacific strategy, let alone admirals. He now had the tiller in his hands and his only—except for the permission he needed from the Joint Chiefs in Washington, and except for what Admiral Nimitz and his boss, Admiral King, were willing to assign as naval assets to carry out their plans.
Then, just as MacArthur was regaining his confidence and gaining political purchase for the campaigns to come, the worst news of all emerged.
Bataan had surrendered.
—
When MacArthur had left, Homma’s Japanese forces had still been regrouping and resupplying for the final assault. On April 2 they were ready. That night the skies over Bataan opened with an air and artillery bombardment that rivaled World War One.
When the sun rose on the next day the peninsula was literally on fire. “The artillery fires were reinforced periodically by the heavy thumps of bombs,” an eyewitness said, “which shrieked in clusters from dive bombers which flew with almost complete impunity back and forth across the lines.”32
After five hours of relentless pounding, the Japanese had blown a hole through the jungle where the Forty-first Philippine Division was situated. “The defenders had been reduced to a dazed, disorganized, fleeing mob,” John Olson, an American officer with the Fifty-seventh Philippine Scouts, observed. Elsewhere Japanese tanks punched holes in lines and the Americans had no chance of plugging them.
Back on Corregidor, Paul Bunker got the news. “It appears that our Philippine Army Bataan Force had crumpled and run, letting the Japs penetrate our center and roll up our right,” he confessed to his diary. On April 7 Japanese troops had reached Mount Samat, the 2,000-foot promontory overlooking the entire peninsula.
General Clifford Bluemel and his men were steadily falling back as their flanks collapsed. On the night of April 8 they halted by a quick-rushing stream, and General Parker reached Bluemel by field telephone to order him to form a new line of defense.
“I have no staff, I have no transportation, no communications except the phone I hold in my hand,” Bluemel bellowed. “My force consists of the only units that have fought the enemy, not run from them….Where is the food we need to revive our starving bodies? Where is the ammunition we need to fire at the enemy?…I’ll form a line, but don’t expect it to hold much past daylight. OUT!”33 Back on Corregidor, Wainwright sent a desperate message to MacArthur. “I am forced to report that the troops on Bataan are fast folding up.” He listed three divisions that over the past forty-eight hours had ceased to exist. “The troops are so weak from malnutrition that they have no power of resistance.”
But from his office in Melbourne, MacArthur was still not writing off Luzon Force. He knew, following FDR’s directive, that there was no possibility of surrender. So he drafted a last-minute three-part plan, with I Corps on the left staging an artillery bombardment, II Corps on the right launching a surprise attack, followed by I Corps doing the same on the left. If II Corps could reach Subic Bay, MacArthur reasoned, there was a slim chance they could get supplies and make a fresh stand. If the attacks failed, the survivors, “after inflicting important losses upon the enemy, could escape through the Zambales Mountains and continue guerrilla warfare” with partisan forces operating in northern Luzon.34
It was a wild, desperate plan. Historians, conveniently forgetting about Roosevelt’s order, have had a field day criticizing MacArthur’s vision of American and Philippine soldiers, 80 percent of whom were crippled by malaria and/or dysentery, carrying out a formal surprise attack, then conducting an orderly withdrawal into the mountains. But in MacArthur’s mind, this was all that was left. Washington had no better ideas, but refused to endorse his plan.
To the end of his life MacArthur was convinced it could have gotten at least some of the American and Filipino soldiers into the relative safety of Luzon’s hinterlands. Whatever deprivations awaited them there, they would be better than the humiliation of the biggest mass surrender in American history—and the horrors of what came afterward.35
Skinny Wainwright, on the other hand, was closer to realities on the ground. He was seeing surrender as the last remaining option to avoid wholesale massacre. But he could not disobey Roosevelt’s order not to surrender. So in the end he left the question up to the commander of I Corps, General Edward King.
It was a gross abdication of the responsibility of command—almost exactly what MacArthur would be wrongly accused of doing for years afterward. But no one can dare blame Wainwright for exercising it. He and King spoke by field telephone on April 8. When he hung up, King explained to his staff that while Wainwright could not authorize a surrender, he would not interfere if King decided on his own authority to surrender.
Hungry and exhausted, many of them began to weep.
“If I survive to return home I fully expect to be court-martialed,” he told them. “History won’t deal kindly with the commander who surrendered the largest force the United States had ever lost.”36
The next day two officers from King’s staff set out toward the front line with a white flag. They were charged and nearly killed by a platoon of Japanese infantry, until frantic waving of the flag made it clear that the Americans had had enough and wanted to see the Japanese commanding officer.
After a ninety-minute meeting with General Kameichiro Nagano, commander of the Twenty-first Infantry Group, King reluctantly accepted unconditional surrender. During the talks fighting was still going on—including for Bluemel’s Thirty-first Philippine Division, who may have fought the last engagement on Bataan. Meanwhile, the air was punctuated with the sound of ammo dumps being blown up across the peninsula. Finally, on April 10, orders came for the garrison on Bataan to stack arms and put out white flags.
The news came to MacArthur in Melbourne like a bolt of lightning. He canceled all appointments and retreated to his office. Captain Ray found him there, relentlessly pacing like a caged panther. When MacArthur turned, tears were streaming down his face.
To make it worse, the same day he received a message from FDR. The president had decided to rescind the official No Surrender order he had issued to MacArthur on February 9 and to Wainwright on March 23, and left it up to Wainwright to decide what to do—but “only if you concur both as to substance and timing,” he said in an aside to MacArthur.37
What MacArthur wanted was now irrelevant; Bataan had surrendered. In its final days MacArthur had adhered to his president’s wishes, and now looked like the coldhearted villain for leaving his men behind. To
some, including some Bataan veterans, he still does. What MacArthur didn’t realize was that Roosevelt had only wanted the appearance of an Alamo on Bataan, to rally public opinion. MacArthur, in his literal-minded way, had given him the reality.38
Now only Corregidor still held out—although it was obvious that nothing could save its tiny garrison once the Japanese brought their full weight to bear.
After April 10 MacArthur’s plans focused on a new objective, once he had secured Australia. It was the biggest Japanese base in the region, and the key to the entire South West Pacific Area: Rabaul.
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Since the Japanese had captured Rabaul during the last week of January, they had turned this easternmost tip of the island of New Britain into one of the most lethal pieces of real estate in the Pacific. More than 100,000 troops were garrisoned there, while engineers cleared six airfields with 166 concrete revetments for bombers and 265 revetments for fighters. Rabaul was also a major naval airbase and had anchorages for seaplanes, while forty massive coastal guns backed by twenty powerful searchlights earned it the nickname “Pearl Harbor of the South Pacific.”
Rabaul not only gave Japan air superiority for a thousand miles in every direction. It could also serve to block seaward access to Australia from the east, including from the United States, and to protect new Japanese conquests to the west, including Borneo and the Philippines. Finally, it was the perfect jumping-off point for a fresh wave of Japanese invasions, aimed right for the capital of New Guinea, Port Moresby, and even Australia itself.
But before MacArthur could begin planning his routes to Rabaul, the U.S. Navy carried out three operations that began to shift the balance of power away from the Japanese for the first time, and would give MacArthur breathing space to transform looming disaster into a springboard for taking the offensive.
The first came on March 10, when planes from the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Lexington, en route for a raid on Rabaul, caught a number of Japanese ships landing troops on the coast of New Guinea at Lae and Salamaua in the Huon Gulf (the first Japanese arrived on the 8th). The planes sank two large transports and two other ships, and pounded nine others, including a light cruiser and two destroyers. It was the U.S. Navy’s first big success in battle, and proof that the American carriers could be as effective as their Japanese counterparts had been at Pearl Harbor. The raid also spurred the Japanese to decide that if they were going to conduct bigger operations against Australia and MacArthur’s forces there, they would need a more forward air base from which to operate—namely, Port Moresby on the southeastern tip of New Guinea.39
News that a Japanese invasion fleet was aimed at Moresby, under the protection of no fewer than three aircraft carriers, prompted the navy’s second big success, as Admiral Nimitz sent the Yorktown and the Lexington to meet them. On May 7 the two forces tangled over the skies of the Coral Sea, in the first carrier-on-carrier conflict in history. The Lexington took a pounding from the Japanese planes, then fell victim to a submarine, leaving Nimitz with just one carrier, the damaged Yorktown, and forty pilots. But the Americans managed to take out one Japanese carrier, the Shoho, and damage another so severely that it had to head back to its base on Truk for repairs. Overall, the Japanese lost so many planes and pilots in the Battle of the Coral Sea that the invasion fleet had to turn back.
Even though the battle had been squarely in the middle of his Southwest Pacific Area, MacArthur himself had played no part in the fight, except to send a small force of Australian and American cruisers and destroyers under his naval commander, Australian rear admiral J. G. Grace.40 Yet the action in the Coral Sea had stopped a Japanese invasion of New Guinea cold, before MacArthur would have been prepared to meet it, and it set the stage for the navy’s third and most decisive contribution to leveling the playing field in the Pacific, the Battle of Midway on June 4, 1942.
News of the impending Japanese invasion had come from navy codebreakers who had penetrated the Japanese navy’s most secret plans (MacArthur’s codebreakers in Australia, by contrast, were still baffled by the Japanese army’s ciphers).41 During the last week of May the codebreakers learned the date, time, and locations of a far bigger Japanese operation than the invasion of Port Moresby: a simultaneous strike on the Aleutian Islands and on the remaining U.S. possession in the central Pacific, Midway Island, backed by no fewer than six aircraft carriers and nine battleships hoping to entice the U.S. fleet out for a final decisive battle.
The mastermind of the Midway operation, Admiral Yamamoto, got more of a battle than he bargained for. When it was over, Nimitz’s carriers Hornet, Enterprise, and Yorktown had sunk the four Japanese carriers headed for Midway along with a heavy cruiser, while damaging another. American losses—the carrier Yorktown and a destroyer—seemed miraculously light compared to the crippling blow they had delivered to the Japanese navy and to Yamamoto’s reputation as the reigning naval genius of the age (he had also masterminded the attack on Pearl Harbor).
Very suddenly the entire picture of the war in the Pacific had changed. The possibility of Japan’s using its naval strength to gain the upper hand across the two areas of command, Nimitz’s and MacArthur’s, had diminished almost to the vanishing point. Never again would the Japanese navy be able to mount large-scale offensive operations, and certainly not against Australia. This meant the next phase of the war against Japan was going to be a land war, retaking Japan’s Pacific conquests one by one. And Coral Sea and Midway together had bought MacArthur the time he needed to build up his forces for taking on that vital task.
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By June 1942 MacArthur’s American forces, which had seemed so pitifully thin on the ground in March, had steadily built up. The core was the men of the Thirty-second Division, now joined by large elements of the Forty-first Division, as well as new air and artillery units. All the same, the bulk of MacArthur’s forces in SWPA would be Australian, even though MacArthur made sure that the Australians played no role in the shaping of overall strategy.42
This was strange, since his very first order for the organization of SWPA, issued on April 18, assigned as his immediate subordinates two Australians, General Blamey in charge of Allied Land Forces and Vice Admiral Herbert Leary in charge of Allied Naval Forces, along with Major General Julian Barnes in charge of United States Forces in Australia and Wainwright commanding United States Forces in the Philippines (a command that soon ceased to exist). Yet none of this mattered, since all his senior staff who did the SWPA planning and supervised execution of the plans were Americans, and all except three had been with him in the Philippines, the group that posterity branded the Bataan Gang.
The gang included the usual suspects such as Sutherland as chief of staff; Dick Marshall, deputy chief of staff; Charles Stivers, personnel (G-1); Charles Willoughby, intelligence (G-2); Hugh Casey, engineer; Billy Marquat, antiaircraft; and LeGrand Diller, public relations.43 The newcomers were Stephen Chamberlin, head of planning (G-3); Lester Whitlock, head of supply (G-4); and Adjutant General Burdette Fitch, chief administrative officer.
As a cohesive team, they soon found themselves enmeshed in the personal and turf battles that were typical of any large command staff, and especially MacArthur’s at SWPA. Sutherland was as abrasive as ever; Chamberlin proved to be a fatherly man with a great capacity for hard work and an almost hero-worship attitude toward MacArthur. But he also suffered from almost-fatal caution when it came to planning military operations that his chief constantly had to battle against. Willoughby’s affectations, including his polished, Prussian-like manners, continued to irritate many on the staff. His inconsistent and sometimes wildly off-the-mark intelligence estimates irritated them more, although MacArthur never seemed to lose faith in the man who was, above all, dedicated to MacArthur officially and personally.
The outstanding figure on MacArthur’s staff over the next two years, however, would be former Lieutenant Colonel, now Brigadier General, Spencer Akin, officially chief signal officer but in fact MacArthur’s leadin
g codebreaker.
Tall and gangly with a pencil neck and Lincolnesque features, Akin had served in the office of the army’s chief signal officer, in charge of signal intelligence from August 1939 until April 1941. Then MacArthur had personally asked to have him sent out to the Philippines to head his own intelligence unit, which Akin set to work intercepting Japanese radio traffic.44
Nothing they did had helped in any way to learn of the attack on the Philippines, but MacArthur never lost his personal interest in Akin’s activities. When Akin and his team evacuated to Australia in March 1942, MacArthur ordered the creation of the Central Bureau in April, combining American and Australian intelligence gathering and code breaking under one roof, literally, in offices on Henry Street in Melbourne.
Akin was in charge, and put his team to work sifting daily through Japanese radio traffic and translating and deciphering whatever they could find. What Akin produced, Willoughby as head of G-2 analyzed (together with whatever deciphered messages the navy passed along from its code breaking or Operation ULTRA), while it was up to Sutherland to decide whether MacArthur would see the results or not.45 It was a grueling, frustrating job. For months, Akin and the men on Henry Street struggled to turn Morse code dots and dashes in Japanese into actionable intelligence, an almost impossible task, given the fact they had no way to decipher the various codes. But increasingly they would provide MacArthur with a situational awareness, if only by showing where and when Japanese military traffic was increasing, that would gradually strip away the mystery from the enemy’s moves on the SWPA chessboard—until by 1944 Central Bureau could give MacArthur and his staff almost unlimited insight into every Japanese move before it happened.
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