Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  Whitney ventured to say, “General, it must give you a sense of great power having such a mighty armada at your command.”

  Mac surprised him by saying, “No, Court, it doesn’t.” His mood was somber, not triumphant. “I cannot escape thinking of those fine American boys who are going to die on the beaches tomorrow morning.”20

  It was a dark moonless night when the Nashville and the rest of the armada entered the Gulf of Leyte on October 21. “I knew that on every ship nervous men lined the rails or paced the decks,” MacArthur wrote later, “peering into the darkness and wondering what stood out there beyond the night waiting for the dawn to come.” MacArthur at least had an inkling of what was there. As it happened, he had done an official survey of the Tacloban coast where the Twenty-fourth Division would be landing, on his first army assignment after leaving West Point, more than forty years before. He knew that the ground this time of year was soft from the rains, and that the Tacloban airfield might not be solid enough to hold bombers taking off and landing—although he had reassured his own engineering staff that such a miracle was possible.

  MacArthur adjourned to his cabin. He wrote a letter to be sent to FDR from the beach, dated October 20. Then he wrote a brief letter to Jean, saying he was “in good fettle and hope to do my part tomorrow and in the days that followed.” He signed it “Sir Boss.”21 He reread favorite passages from the Bible to steady his nerves.

  Give me, O Lord, that quietness of heart, that makes the most of labor and of rest. Save me from passionate excitement, petulant fretfulness and idle fear.

  Teach me to be alert and wise in all responsibilities, without hurry and without neglect. When others censure, may I seek thy image in each fellow man, judging with charity as one who shall be judged.

  Then “I prayed that a merciful God would preserve each one of those men on the morrow.”22

  At four o’clock the troop transports accompanying the Nashville came to life. Captain Paul Austin of F Company, Thirty-fourth Regiment, Twenty-fourth Division, was awakened for “the usual pre-landing breakfast, steak and eggs. This was the only time we ever got that kind of food,” Austin later remembered. He and his men had fought through the horror of Biak. Now they would be part of the second wave on Red Beach, the main objective of Tenth Corps—the capture of Tacloban.23

  Moments later sailors on the battleships scheduled to cover the landing were scrambling to their stations, stowing gear, clearing decks, and loading their great naval guns. The battleships were six in number, all survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack, and all ready to take their revenge, along with three heavy cruisers, four light cruisers including the Nashville, and twenty-one destroyers. In the predawn light the gun turrets of every ship slowly swiveled, and readied to fire.

  At precisely 6:00 A.M. American naval guns opened up along an eighteen-mile stretch of the Leyte coastline. On the Nashville’s deck, MacArthur watched and later remembered, “Thousands of guns were throwing their shells with a roar that was incessant and deafening. Rocket vapor trails crisscrossed the sky, and black, ugly pillars of smoke began to rise. High overhead, swarms of airplanes darted into the maelstrom. And across what would have been a glinting, untroubled blue sea, the black dots of the landing craft churned towards the beaches.”24

  Han Rants was a phone linesman with the Twenty-fourth’s Second Battalion Headquarters company. He remembered the landing barges going over the side by crane and cargo nets being lowered down the side of the ships before the bombardment started. Men descended by groups of fifteen, and if one stepped on another’s hand on the net ropes (as happened with exhausted men after a sleepless night and with frayed nerves) they could fall twenty to thirty feet to the bottom of the boat as it rose and fell in the waves.

  He also remembered men being sick in the bobbing boats, with the smell of diesel fumes making everyone choke. At 10:00 A.M. the boats spread out and started in. “The beach seemed to be one big explosion,” Rants later wrote. “We got to feeling confident that there couldn’t be anything alive in there with all of this.”25

  It was the usual confident prediction troops made watching a massive naval bombardment prior to an amphibious landing, and as usual, they were wrong. The Japanese were firing on the boats all the way to the beach. “I looked out at sea and saw a landing boat take a direct hit,” Rants wrote. “That boat literally disappeared, nothing left except a few pieces of scrap and steel helmets.” Other boats, including two LSTs and LCIs, were blazing wrecks.

  As their boat hit the sand, Paul Austin and his men bailed out. Although his company was supposed to be part of the second wave, they were shocked to find that the first wave was still there. Machine guns and snipers and mortars were keeping them pinned down, as the men and their officers clung to every bit of cover, including the thousands of palm trees blasted down by the bombardment.

  The fire “was coming in pretty heavy,” Austin remembered. “Our Captain Wye from regimental headquarters was killed a minute after he set foot on the beach. Another company commander from the 1st Battalion was killed very near Colonel Red Newman.”26

  It was on that same beach that MacArthur was now planning to land with his staff and the exiled president of the Philippines and Quezon’s successor, Sergio Osmeña.

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  On the voyage from Hollandia, MacArthur spent his evenings drafting and redrafting the two speeches he planned to give, one on the beach and the other when he restored the government of the Philippines, and after putting down his pencil he would read them both aloud to Egeberg and Lehrbas, who made constant corrections and comments. “That’s a worn-out cliché,” one of them would say at a particular phrase, or even “It stinks,” and MacArthur would start over.27

  In his mind, however, it was vital that he and Osmeña be seen, heard, and photographed on Filipino soil as soon as possible, to make it clear to the millions of Filipinos that their government and MacArthur were back—and that the Americans would never abandon them again.

  Now he brought to his cabin the four correspondents who would be accompanying him in the landing craft. It was 11:00 and the third wave was going in; the sky was filled with pillars of smoke from the beach ten miles away, as flights of navy planes roared overhead to continue pounding Japanese positions. After his somber mood the night before, MacArthur was ebullient and upbeat, sucking on his corncob pipe and assuring the reporters that everything was going according to plan. It was forty-one years ago, he told them, when he had first been here as a shavetail second lieutenant and crossed to Tacloban in a tiny interisland steamer. Now, he didn’t need to tell them, it would be at the head of the biggest invasion force the Pacific had ever seen.28

  At 1:00 P.M. MacArthur and his party set out for the rail and began descending the ladder to the LCM that would take them to the beach.

  There were Kenney and Kinkaid, followed by Whitney and Sutherland, as well as Dr. Egeberg and Lehrbas, the journalists, and MacArthur’s Filipino orderly. The last to board was engineer Pat Casey. He was supposed to inspect the Tacloban airfield once it was captured, to see if it was up to handling large bombers, but he had severely injured his back falling into a hole on Hollandia; Egeberg concluded it was probably a slipped disk. Casey shouldn’t move with that back, Egeberg told MacArthur.

  “Doc,” MacArthur finally told Egeberg, “I don’t think I have ever called anyone indispensable, and at this time Pat Casey is indispensable. So you get him ashore.” And so Casey went on board the LCM strapped to a stretcher, with an armful of painkillers.29

  The LCM roared off. They stopped briefly beside the transport ship John Land to pick up President Sergio Osmeña. They were not friends the way MacArthur and Quezon had been; during the two months Osmeña had been at Hollandia they had barely spoken. But now he and MacArthur would be landing at the same time to restore a free government to the Philippines, and rouse the Philippine people to rise up against their occupiers.

  The rest of the way in, MacArthur sat on the engine housing, Osmeña on
his left, Sutherland on his right, as they crashed through the waves. On the ninety-minute trip they passed dozens of landing craft heading back, some damaged and others carrying dead and wounded from the first three waves. One of them was a barge from one of Kinkaid’s battlewagons.

  “Hail that barge,” Mac ordered the coxswain.

  The barge came about as the LCM pulled alongside.

  “Son,” MacArthur called out to the helmsman, “where is the hardest fighting going on?” The helmsman pointed to Red Beach, where the Twenty-fourth Division was still pinned down.

  MacArthur turned to the coxswain. “Head for that beach,” he ordered, and they roared off again.30

  As they got closer, they passed four big landing craft that had been hit by Japanese mortars, “and one was burning nicely when we landed,” Kenney remembered. Another had just capsized and sunk.

  MacArthur turned to Sutherland. “Dick, believe it or not, we’re back.”

  It was now 2:30 and while the men of the Twenty-fourth Division had managed to advance inland 300 yards, there was still plenty of fighting as they tackled a line of Japanese pillboxes. Kenney could hear the snap of sniper bullets whizzing overhead as the LCM’s engines reversed and the craft came to a halt and dropped its ramp.31

  At that moment a MacArthur icon, and a legend, were born.

  The LCM had come to rest on a shallow sandbar, and as the four reporters, including two photographers, went down the ramp they found themselves in water up to their knees. MacArthur did not hesitate; he descended, followed by Osmeña, Kenney, and the rest. The cameras rolled, and the image of Douglas MacArthur, sternly wading ashore in his field marshal’s cap and Ray-Bans, became stock footage for newsreels and appeared on the front page of newspapers around the country.

  The photo, one of the most iconic of World War Two, also started a rumor that quickly circulated among MacArthur critics, and would live on in two opposite myths. The first was that the whole thing had been staged and even rehearsed before being played out in front of the cameras.* The second was that MacArthur had been furious and berated everyone for so undignified an arrival. But as biographer Geoffrey Perret points out, he had waded ashore at Morotai in even deeper water.32 Douglas MacArthur didn’t mind getting his feet wet, and besides, that afternoon there were other things to think about.

  One was the sniping along the beach. Jan Valtan, a rifleman and reporter with the Twenty-fourth, was one of the first to see the little cluster of khaki-clad men wading up from the water’s edge. “You stare, and you realize that you are staring at General Douglas MacArthur….He walks along as if the nearest Jap sniper were on Saturn instead of in the palm tops a few hundred yards away.”33

  The party also passed troops clustered behind fallen palm trees and firing ahead, as Kenney overheard one flustered soldier say to another, “Hey, there’s General MacArthur.” The other didn’t bother to turn around as he surveyed the fighting in front of him. “Oh, yeah?” he drawled. “And I suppose he’s got Eleanor Roosevelt along with him.”34

  A steady rain began to fall. MacArthur prowled around for nearly an hour, talking to officers and soldiers and getting a “feel for the fighting,” as he told his divisional commanders, Generals Irwin and Sibert, who had pulled up in their landing craft a few moments before MacArthur had arrived. What he was really waiting for was a radio transmitter, which finally showed up on a tracked weapons carrier. It was to broadcast his message in several frequencies in hopes that it would reach Filipino guerrillas and anyone in Manila or other towns who still had radios.

  Then at two o’clock MacArthur lifted the microphone and began to speak.

  “People of the Philippines, I have returned! By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil…Rally to me! Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on….Rise and strike! For your homes and hearths, strike! Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!”

  Mac’s hands were trembling as he handed over the microphone to Osmeña. Onlookers had noted that his voice had “taken on the timbre of deep emotion.” When Osmeña finished a ten-minute address to his people, the technician had to tell MacArthur the recording device had not worked. Could the general possibly read the speech again? MacArthur did, and then he and Osmeña sat under some trees for a while and talked, even as Japanese bombers swooped in and dropped their bombs.35

  MacArthur made one last visit to Irwin’s command post when some Japanese mortar shells began to land nearby. MacArthur’s pilot, Dusty Rhoades, had followed the general every step but now he began to edge away to find the shelter of a tree trunk.

  MacArthur looked up. “What’s the trouble, Dusty, are you worried?”

  Rhoades said he was going to be less worried the closer he was to a large tree.

  “Well,” MacArthur said, reassuring him, “the Almighty has given me a job to do and he will see that I am able to finish it.”

  “I’m just not convinced that God is equally interested in my survival,” Rhoades promptly answered.

  MacArthur said nothing, just broke into a broad grin.36

  The last thing he did at the command post was write a message to President Roosevelt.

  “This note is written from the beach, near Tacloban, where we have just landed,” it began. “It will be the first letter from the freed Philippines and I thought you might like to add it to your [stamp] collection.”37

  Then the landing craft took everyone back to the Nashville for the night—but not before a Japanese Kate bomber flew low over their heads and dropped a torpedo that crashed smack into the cruiser Honolulu, leaving her badly damaged and listing.

  When MacArthur got back on the ship, he found a message waiting for him. It was from FDR: “I know well what this means to you. I know what it cost you to obey my order to leave Corregidor.”38

  Did the message lift at last the sense of resentment, and of shame, that Roosevelt’s order had brought MacArthur for more than two and a half years?

  His memoirs give no indication. More significant, he says, was a very old Filipino man who greeted him on the beach and said, “Good afternoon, Sir Field Marshal, glad to see you. It’s been many years—a long, long time.”39

  He had returned. And now nothing, and no one, would get him to leave again.

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  The soldiers and officers who been there on the beach that afternoon knew they had witnessed history. Some were miffed that MacArthur had said “I have returned” instead of “We have returned,” and some in the States thought the speech was overblown and, with its frequent references to God, even “sacrilegious.” Others thought the references to Bataan and Corregidor were poor salesmanship.

  MacArthur, however, had known what he was doing, The speech was not for Americans, but for the Filipinos; MacArthur had made his return to the islands a matter of both personal and national honor. By making good on his promise, he had proven not only his own good faith but that of his country as well.

  Phil Hostetter learned that the next day. He had been busy patching up GIs at his first-aid station on the beach, when someone said, “Do you know who was just here? General MacArthur and some admiral!” He was told the general and his party had watched him at work, but then moved on without disturbing him.

  The next day a radiantly happy Filipino guerrilla soldier showed up, asking, “Where is General MacArthur?”

  “He was here yesterday, we all saw him,” Hostetter replied, lying slightly.

  “Oh, I cannot believe it,” he answered with great joy. “This means you are here to stay.”40

  Even the nonadmirers were impressed. “We really didn’t have a lot of love for MacArthur,” Han Rants remembered, “because as a general he wanted to win wars fast.” But even Rants conceded, “While seeming to be a kind of grandstand thing…it really took some courage for a man at that level to be there….As much as we disliked the guy,” he conclud
ed, “we knew there was no one who knew the Philippine Islands better, and we knew if we had landed somewhere else, we probably would have had a lot more people killed than we did.”41

  And casualties were light—fewer than 50 killed and only 192 wounded—but not just because MacArthur and his staff had chosen the right beach. Japanese naval intel had given their army counterparts no warning about the Leyte invasion, and by chance the landings had caught the Japanese in the midst of a change of command and communications networks, making it almost impossible to coordinate resistance.

  Instead, the Japanese found themselves steadily shoved back until by nightfall Krueger’s Sixth Army held two large beachheads more than a mile deep, with the First Cavalry and Twenty-fourth Division holding the Tacloban airstrip and a hill dominating the northern beaches, and the Twenty-fourth Corps closing on the airfield at Dalog.42 More than 50,000 troops had landed, and some 4,500 vehicles.

  The advance resumed the next morning, as MacArthur continued his tour of the battlefield, this time with the First Cavalry. With fighting intensifying just two miles away, he held a ceremony at Tacloban signifying the return of the Philippine president and government in exile to their homeland. American and Philippine flags were flown in profusion, while Filipinos lined the streets and cheered MacArthur and his men. The town would now serve as SWPA headquarters for the rest of the operation.

  That operation was going well. Within a week Krueger’s men had all but secured the eastern part of Leyte, and the Japanese were sent reeling back into the hills of the interior. The only disappointment was that the Tacloban and Doga airfields were, as MacArthur had feared, unsuitable for heavy bombers to provide adequate air cover. They were going to need support from Halsey’s carriers a little longer.

  Unfortunately, out at sea events were unfolding that would strip away that support, and even put the entire invasion of the Philippines at risk.

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