Almost at once the artillery opened up again, this time with smoke and white phosphorous shells to keep the Japanese from spotting where the Americans were passing through the gas walls, and where they were advancing—as well as more high explosives to widen the breaches after already having fired some 8,000 rounds.35
The fighting was savage, even primitive, with American and Japanese meeting bayonet to bayonet in cellars, including in the dungeon of the old fort, while grenades and flamethrower tanks rolled into action. Desperate, angry Americans even resorted to pouring gasoline down into holes and crannies and setting them alight to finally get the last enemy fighters out.
There was a brief pause as MacArthur’s men closed on the last redoubt, a series of fireproofed government buildings. They were about to attack when suddenly the doors of nearby churches burst open and some 3,000 Filipino women and children—the men had all been executed by the Japanese—came running out. The startled Americans held their fire until they understood: the civilians were hostages, released by the Japanese at the last minute, just as they prepared to fight to the death. It was a strange, almost medieval scene, as priests and nuns in white and gray robes gathered up the survivors of their butchered flock and led them to sanctuary, and silence filled the nearby streets. Then the fighting resumed and continued to its inevitable end.
As the GIs inched their way through alleyways and basements, they found thousands upon thousands of dead Filipinos. Some had been killed by the American artillery fire, but many more had been murdered by the Japanese, hundreds of them dying with their hands tied behind their backs before being shot or having their throats severed.
It was not until March 3 that the final Japanese soldier was cleared out of the shattered, burned-out remains of the Intramuros. By then it was clear who had won and who had lost one of the epic urban battles of the Second World War, but also one of the most forgotten—and who had paid the most terrible price, namely, more than 100,000 innocent Filipinos.
—
Tom Howard and his fellow tankers had been there at the end. They had started at the Lingayen landing with seventeen tanks. They still had eleven, but they had only enough surviving crewmen to man eight at a time.
“We who were left were a motley looking crew, unwashed, unshaven, clothes in tatters. I existed as the rest did by stripping dead Japs of their jackets and pants and stockings…I had forgotten when I had last eaten a hot meal, instead of picking on a cold can of C ration, had a full night’s sleep, had taken a crap,” said Howard. Totally overwhelmed, “I remember I sat and cried for no apparent reason, uncontrollably, unashamed, and not cold, but spent[,] exhausted.”36
But even as the fight for the Intramuros ground to its horrible end, the last battles raged for control of the last portions of the city, and they included personal tragedy for MacArthur.
He had been there personally, as usual, coming up right on the heels of the soldiers who were fighting inch by inch up key streets, at one point being pinned down with his staff for half an hour while the Japanese and a platoon of the Thirty-seventh Division exchanged shots and grenades.
He also couldn’t resist joining the fighting for the Manila Hotel on February 22, where he watched the First Cavalry push up Dewey Boulevard and then lob 75 mm shells into the building. In moments flames engulfed the structure, and spread up toward the penthouse—which had been the home for his family for almost a decade.
“Suddenly, the penthouse burst into flame,” he wrote later. “They had fired it”—meaning the Japanese. “I watched, with indescribable feelings, the destruction of my fine military library, my souvenirs, my personal belongings of a lifetime”—and the lifetimes of his mother and father.
It wasn’t until nightfall that the fires were put out. MacArthur slowly walked up the stairs (with no power, the elevators were out) to the shattered penthouse.
Sprawled across the doorway he found a dead body. It was a Japanese colonel; the penthouse had been his last command post. Scattered around the body were tiny shards of porcelain, from the two enormous vases that had guarded either side of the doorway and were now shattered into a thousand pieces.
MacArthur grimaced. The vases had been given to his father by the Japanese emperor himself. They had been priceless mementos of a different era. Now, MacArthur thought, their shards made a grim shroud for the colonel’s bloody corpse.
A young lieutenant of the First Cavalry stepped up, his carbine still smoking.
He grinned at MacArthur, his face flushed with success. He evidently thought MacArthur had shot the colonel himself, and congratulated him with a confident “Nice going, chief!”
MacArthur could only shake his head. “There was nothing nice about it to me,” he later recalled. “I was tasting to the last acid dregs the bitterness of a devastated and beloved home.”37
And a devastated and beloved city.
—
“MANILA IS DYING.”
That was the headline being carried by several American newspapers, and when MacArthur saw it he flew into a fury.
“MacArthur was shattered by the holocaust,” Sergeant Paul Rogers remembered. “[H]e had gone to great lengths in 1941 to prevent needless destruction of the city he loved. Now his own forces were killing it ruthlessly and methodically, a bit at a time.”
His “habitual self-control,” after sixty days of fighting, was at an end.
“He growled an order to [public relations officer Brigadier General LeGrande] Diller to censor the offending phrase out of all copy written by any correspondent…[Reporters] were permitted to report the facts of the destruction on condition that no one would ever say, ‘Manila is dying.’ ”38
In MacArthur’s mind, the city—and the Philippines’ freedom—were being reborn, despite the destruction. And there two ceremonies that, for him, would make that process complete.
The first came on February 27. Since landing at Leyte, MacArthur had wanted to reinstall the legitimate government of the Philippines in its true capital. In February 1942, in the darkest days of the fighting, in the darkest recesses of Malinta Tunnel, he had made a promise to President Quezon. “I will put you in the Malacañan,” he had sworn, “on the point of my bayonets.” Now Quezon was dead; the promised bayonet point turned out to be napalm and gasoline. All the same, the time had come to fulfill the vow.
That morning full constitutional government was restored to the Filipinos, in a city without lights or power, four-fifths of which lay in rubble—the worst-hit Allied capital in World War Two, with the exception of Warsaw. “I passed through streets,” MacArthur said later, “with their burned out piles of rubble, the air still filled with the stench of decaying unburied flesh.” Once-famous buildings were now twisted piles of rubble. Only Malacañan survived: unlike virtually every other public or large private building in the city, it had survived intact. “Its stained glass windows, elaborate carvings, and even its richly embroidered hangings and large crystal chandeliers were still there.”39
MacArthur marched up the steps, as soldiers saluted and Filipino officials, many of them ex-guerrillas, stood at attention. Inside the state reception room was President Osmeña. They were never destined to be friends, and in a few days MacArthur would make a decision that would drive a permanent wedge between them.
But for now Osmeña and his staff were grateful for MacArthur’s help. “For me, it was a soul-wrenching moment. Nearly every surviving figure of the Philippines was there, but it was the ghosts of the past—the men who used to be—who filled my thoughts: my father, Quezon, Taft, Wood, Stimson, Davis, Theodore Roosevelt, Murphy. In this city, my mother had died, my wife had been courted, my son had been born; here before just such a gathering as this, not so long ago, I had received the baton of a Field Marshal of the Philippine Army.”
There was a microphone, and not a sound in the room. MacArthur cleared his throat and began:
“More than three years have elapsed; years of bitterness, struggle, and sacrifice—since I withdr
ew our forces and installations from this beautiful city that, open and undefended, its churches, monuments, and cultural centers might, in accordance with the rules of warfare, be spared the violence of military rampage.”
They were awkward words, more heartfelt than crafted eloquence, but he plunged on.
“The enemy would not have it so, and so much that I sought to preserve has been unnecessarily destroyed by his desperate action at bay….That struggle was not in vain. God has indeed blessed our arms. The girded and unleashed power of America, supported by our Allies, turned the tide of battle in the Pacific…My country has kept the faith.”
He turned to Osmeña and the other expressionless officials.
“On behalf of our government I now solemnly declare, Mr. President, the full powers and responsibilities under the constitution restored to the Commonwealth. Your country, thus, is again at liberty to pursue its destiny…Your capital city, cruelly punished though it be, has regained its rightful place—citadel of democracy in the East. Your indomitable…”
Then MacArthur’s voice trailed off. He could not continue. “To others it might have seemed my moment of victory and monumental personal acclaim, but to me it seemed only the culmination of a panorama of physical and spiritual disaster.” He asked the assembled to join him in the Lord’s Prayer, then left almost immediately afterward, shaken to the core.
“It had killed something inside me to see my men die” and so many Filipinos die with them in a battle that had seemed so unnecessary, and so unnecessarily cruel.40
—
The second ceremony came six days later.
On February 26 the last Japanese survivors on Corregidor had set off a massive explosive charge deep in the underground arsenal. The explosion hurled debris as far as Topside, a mile away, and threw rocks and shards on the deck of a destroyer 2,000 yards from shore. The blast and resulting landslide killed 50 paratroopers and wounded another 150—as well as exterminating the Japanese in the adjoining tunnel.41
But the blast signaled the end of Japanese resistance. Two days later Corregidor was declared secure. Taking it had cost more than 1,000 Americans killed and wounded. Of the 5,000 Japanese, only nineteen had been captured alive.
On March 2 MacArthur journeyed by PT boat to see the flag-raising ceremony on the Rock. It was his second great emotional moment in a week: for him, returning to Corregidor was almost a religious rite.42 Nevertheless he chatted amiably with thirty-four-year-old Colonel James Madison Jones, West Point class of ’35, commander of the 503rd’s paratroopers, and with the men who had been part of Rock Force assigned to take the fortress. As he toured his old hideout in Malinta Tunnel and his old office on Topside, now a complete ruin, his face remained a stoic mask. The stench of death was present everywhere and he could barely breathe as he approached the parade ground and its solitary flagpole, “a slightly bent, shell and bomb scarred ship’s mast with twisted rigging and ladders still hanging from its yardarm.”43
As the paratroopers and infantry drew to attention, Colonel Jones marched up and saluted.
“Sir, I present you Fortress Corregidor.”
MacArthur gave a brief speech, calling the capture of Corregidor one of the most brilliant operations in military history and thanking Jones and his men for their courage and skill—and presenting their commander with the Distinguished Service Cross.
Then, his voice trembling with emotion, MacArthur went on.
“I see the old flagpole stands. Have your troops hoist the colors to its peak, and let no enemy ever haul them down.”44
A moment of deep personal satisfaction, unforgettable to those who attended it. MacArthur had also received a personal message from President Roosevelt:
“Congratulations to you personally and to your commanders and troops on the liberation of Manila. This is an historic moment in the reestablishment of freedom and decency in the Far East, and the celerity of movement and economy of force involved in this victory add immeasurably to our appreciation of your success.”45
Yet the fight for Luzon, and final defeat of Japan, still had a long way to go.
—
Manila was battered beyond recognition, but free. Manila Bay was now firmly under MacArthur’s control, and open to American shipping.
But there were still 172,000 Japanese on the island, including 50,000 ensconced in the mountains east of Manila, close enough to lob long-range artillery shells into Manila itself. It was against this force that Krueger decided he would launch his first effort.46
It wasn’t going to be easy. MacArthur had informed him that, in addition to clearing Luzon, some of Krueger’s units were going to be detached for operations in southern and central Philippines, including Mindanao. And the timetable would be tight. MacArthur needed to secure southeast Luzon in order to open a quick sea route through the straits, for what would be his last mission of the war: the full-scale invasion of Japan.47
—
The joint staff planners had been working on this mammoth task since November 1944. The result was a plan code-named Operation OLYMPIC, which would begin with an assault on Kyushu scheduled for September 1, 1945, and then an invasion of Honshu, set for December 1, 1945—code-named Operation CORONET.
Both involved massive numbers of troops and ships, employing nearly all of the twenty-one army and six marine divisions already in the Pacific, with another fifteen shipped over from the United States and Europe, once Hitler was finally defeated. Twenty-two of those were to be staged in the Philippines by November 1945, while an invasion fleet of staggering size, with 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts, was being assembled.48
—
Then in the spring of 1945 the planners in Washington decided to postpone preparations for Olympic and Coronet. Indeed, they wondered if they could be staged at all.
The reason was that although the noose around the Japanese home islands was growing steadily tighter, only MacArthur’s theater showed any sign of staying on schedule.
On February 19 three divisions of marines hit the beaches on Iwo Jima, 775 miles from the Japanese mainland. It was only after weeks of savage combat, and grinding American casualties, that the relatively tiny island finally fell. On April 1 a similar assault began on Okinawa, just 350 miles from Japan, with 180,000 marines and soldiers led by some 1,200 ships, including more than 40 carriers and 18 battleships. By the second week of June, more than three months later, the battle for the sixty-mile-long island was still going on, while U.S. casualties were climbing past the 20,000 mark.
Although the navy still favored a plan that focused on the push through the central Pacific—indeed, even argued that seizing positions on the South China coast combined with a massive naval blockade and aerial bombardment of the home islands would make a full-scale invasion unnecessary—it seemed highly unlikely that Nimitz’s forces would now be ready for a December 1 deadline. MacArthur, by contrast, was moving ahead. Between February 28 and June 25, SWPA conducted no fewer than fifty-two amphibious landings on islands in the central and southern Philippines, with Krueger and five divisions focused on clearing out the last Japanese resistance on Luzon and Eichelberger’s Eighth Army running all operations south of Luzon.49
The fighting was sometimes intense, even though Japanese resistance was disorganized and their cause hopeless. As military strategist Basil Henry Liddell-Hart observed, “Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war.”
In this case, the loss of life was also lopsided: clearing the Sulu chain, which began on March 16, cost 40 American lives versus some 2,000 Japanese.
Still, a veteran of the Twenty-fourth Division remembered the fighting for Mindanao after the fall of Davao, as “the hardest, bitterest, most exhausting battle of their ten island campaigns.” Bob Eichelberger remembered the going was tough “for GI’s who had no newspapers to tell them that everything was well in hand.”50
Yet that was the impression MacArthur was able to con
vey to his masters in Washington. So they had little useful to say or object to when he proposed his own preparation for invasion by taking the battle in an unexpected direction. It would not only generate controversy with his Australian allies, but it would leave historians scratching their heads ever after.
CHAPTER 25
DOWNFALL
“Jean will be here in just over two weeks,” MacArthur quietly announced to Doc Egeberg one day in late February. He had not seen her for more than five months, the longest they had ever been separated. But they had written back and forth constantly and on his birthday, his sixty-fifth, she had sent a letter:
Dearest Sir Boss—
For your birthday, I send you all my love to you and may it help to form a mantle of protection for you. I love you more than you will ever know. May we be able to share in peace many more of your birthdays together.
God bless you,
Jeannie
Now came the news that she was leaving for Manila on a refrigeration ship and would be arriving on March 6. MacArthur sent her a sad note describing the destruction of their beloved penthouse in the Manila Hotel, and all their possessions. “Do not be too distressed over their loss,” he wrote. “It was a fitting end for our soldier home.”1
In the meantime, he had found another, a large whitewashed house inevitably called Casa Blanca in the exclusive Santa Mesa District, less than a mile from the Malacañan Palace. Its owner, Mr. Bachrach, had been a wealthy car dealer in the Philippines and had been murdered by the Japanese; his wife had escaped and joined the guerrillas up in the hills.2 After liberation, Mrs. Bachrach had heard that George Kenney was looking for a house to live in while he was ensconced in Manila, and offered him Casa Blanca. Kenney checked it out and told her agent, “OK, put my name down for it.”
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