Egeberg looked at the cannon, looked at MacArthur, and shouted to the jeep driver, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”16
Meantime, on January 29, the XI Corps of General Eichelberger’s Eighth Army had successfully landed along Luzon’s west coast, south of Clark Field, and were pushing inland. Krueger, however, conscious of the numbers of Japanese on the island, was wary of a big counterattack from Yamashita, and the longer he waited for it the warier he got, keeping his army dawdling around Clark Field.
When Krueger balked at pushing on immediately for Manila, fifty miles away, MacArthur prodded him by announcing a race between Sixth and Eighth Armies to see which could first liberate the city. That put some fire into Krueger and he resumed his southward drive.17
For his part, Eichelberger planned to have his 11th Airborne Division make an amphibious assault about fifty miles southwest of Manila and march on the city from there. But General Kenney, the airman, made an excellent suggestion—why not have the division make an airborne assault on the airport, barely three miles from the center of the city. It would save all that marching and fighting and, most important, time. The air force chief promised to secure for the 11th Division all the air transport and close air support it needed. Kenney’s was a bold idea, but Eichelberger lacked vision. He feared the risks were too great, that his men might parachute into a hoard of Japanese tanks or that the Japanese might have put obstacles on the drop zones, and so forth.
Meantime, MacArthur, unaware of the discussion between Kenney and Eichelberger, had decided that his idea of turning the liberation of Manila into a contest between commanders worked so well that he tried it again with Krueger, who was expecting the crack First Cavalry Division to land at Lingayen on January 27. Why not make it a race between the 37th Division, which was already at Clark Field, and the Cav that was just now hitting the beaches?
To supervise progress and be close to the action, MacArthur moved his headquarters farther south to a sugar plantation hacienda near Tarlac. What he had to observe was three infantry divisions converging on Manila, about 60,000 men. The 11th Airborne had the roughest time of it; the Japanese had thoroughly fortified numerous lines of defense south of the city, including Nielson Field, where Kenney had suggested to Eichelberger that he parachute the division in. For days, intense rivalries were involved—infantry versus cavalry versus airborne; Sixth Army versus Eighth Army.
The cavalry finally won the race. On February 2 the First Cav organized two “flying columns” and tore down Route 5, capturing bridges before the Japanese had a chance to dynamite them. In one case, after the defenders had lit the fuses and fled, brave troopers rushed to extinguish them. At another point, they encountered a convoy of Japanese coming from the direction of Manila and machine-gunned the startled enemy soldiers as the two columns advanced.
By February 3 the lead column was in the northern Manila suburbs and, before dark, inside the city limits. Their first stop was Santo Tomas University, which almost three years earlier had been turned into a prison camp for nearly four thousand American and other Allied civilians. The guards at the gate put up a fight but were quickly overcome and the First Cav freed the miserable prisoners, who were pitifully ragged and emaciated. Next they liberated Malacañang Palace near the center of the city. By February 5 the rest of First Cav was encamped at Grace Park just north of the city.
On February 4 the 37th Division, having overcome numerous obstacles, managed to liberate Old Bilibid Prison containing a mixture of thirteen hundred American military and civilian prisoners. The Japanese guards fled, leaving the victors to assume that enemy resistance would be light.
Around the same time, the 11th Airborne Division, just south of the airport, encountered the redoubtable Genko Line, fortified with mortars and machine guns and artillery, some of it from the heavy guns of ships sunk or damaged in the harbor.
Although the fighting there was ferocious, MacArthur’s headquarters on February 6 foolishly sent out a bulletin proclaiming: “Our forces are rapidly clearing the enemy from Manila. Our converging columns entered the city and surrounded the Jap defenders.” This elicited congratulatory telegrams from Roosevelt, Stimson, Churchill et al. Moreover, they began planning a big World War I Champs-Élysées-type victory parade through the broad avenues of the city, led by MacArthur in an “army drab” Cadillac convertible.18
What nobody knew—including Yamashita, who had pulled his army troops out of Manila after declaring it an “open city” (meaning that it was to be spared fighting over)—was that still lurking within Manila’s limits were 20,000 Japanese marines under Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, a bloodthirsty fanatic who had no intention of surrendering or retreating. Before he would let the Americans conquer the city he determined to reduce it to ashes and its million-plus inhabitants to crow bait.
When the Japanese began destroying the port facilities, a fire spread quickly to shacks in the poorer section of Manila and turned into an enormous conflagration that burned for several days, laying tens of thousands of homes to utter ruin.
On February 7, MacArthur finally entered the city and visited the now free inmates of Old Bilibid Prison who “dragged themselves to some semblance of attention beside their cots.” As MacArthur “passed slowly down the scrawny, suffering column, a murmur accompanied me as each man barely speaking above a whisper, said, ‘You’re back,’ or ‘You made it,’ or ‘God bless you.’ I could only reply, ‘I’m a little late …’ I passed on out of the barracks compound and looked around at the debris that was no longer important to those inside: the tin cans they had eaten from, the dirty old bottles they had drunk from. It made me ill just to look at them.”19
It was around this time that word got back from Filipino guerrillas that a large compound of U.S. prisoners were in desperate straits near the town of Cabanatuan. For three years following the Death March, these men had been starved and abused by the Japanese and were dying at an alarming rate. Worse, word had come that the Japanese had begun executing American prisoners if it appeared they would be repatriated.
A pilot who had been a prisoner at the camp on Palawan Island but managed to escape told the horrifying tale of what his Japanese captors did when they saw a U.S. convoy in their area (it was actually headed to Mindoro). They herded all 160 prisoners into a covered air raid trench and poured gasoline over them. Then they set them afire and machine-gunned those who tried to escape (somehow, nine of them did). It was a chilling forewarning of what was to come for the remaining American prisoners as the U.S. Army seized territory from the Japanese.
With a sense of great urgency, a group of rangers from Krueger’s Sixth Army developed a daring plan to lead an expedition thirty miles behind Japanese lines and rescue the prisoners. The force consisted of eighty Filipino guerrillas, fourteen Philippine scouts, and one hundred twenty U.S. Army Rangers led by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci, who made a harrowing nighttime march around large Japanese concentrations to fall on the Japanese garrison of the camp.
Armed with Thompson submachine guns, a bazooka team, and a new P-61 “Black Widow” from the 547th Night Fighter Squadron the rescuers arrived in the vicinity of the camp after dark on January 30. The fighter plane pretended to be crippled and on the verge of crashing in order to distract the Japanese guards while the rescue force sneaked up to the main gate and a sergeant shot the padlock off with his .45. Then all hell broke loose. During the ensuing firefight, which lasted half an hour, an estimated five hundred to a thousand Japanese were killed, with very few U.S. casualties.
When a head count was made, 522 emaciated prisoners had been freed, out of an estimated 10,000, the rest having perished or been shipped to slave labor camps in Japan or Manchuria, an activity the Japanese began in 1944 in contemplation of being defeated in the southern islands. The POWs in Cabanatuan, however, were in such wretched condition that some died on the way to freedom, and more than a hundred oxcarts had to be commandeered to get them to safety—though with the slow speed of 2 miles an hour by th
e Philippine carabao, or ox, the team remained in constant fear of being attacked or overtaken by the furious Japanese.
The success of the raid was celebrated in the United States and raised a terrific storm of indignation and disgust when survivors told their stories of the brutality they had suffered—starved, beaten, shot for little or no reason. The furor added to the public’s opinion that the Japanese needed to be fully conquered, in their homeland if necessary, and punished for their behavior.
MacArthur too found himself depressed after seeing the utter degradation of the POW inmates and decided a little time at the front might cheer him up. “Doc,” he said to the unenthusiastic Egeberg, “this is getting to me. I want to go forward till we meet some fire.” (“He had no respect for sniper fire,” Egeberg wrote later.) Earlier that month, at a Japanese roadblock, MacArthur was standing up when an enemy machine gun began to chatter. An infantry lieutenant said, “We’re going after those fellers but please get down sir, we’re under fire.” MacArthur stood his ground and replied. “I’m not under fire. Those bullets are not intended for me.”20
Emboldened and accompanied by the doctor and two other aides, they rode in a jeep before getting out and walking to the sound of the battle. Rounding a corner, they came upon a scorched Japanese truck filled with the charred corpses of Japanese soldiers “all erect and dead—victims of a flamethrower.” They walked through an infantry platoon that was crouching under cover whose members “looked at them as though they were insane.”21
Presently, with the racket of gunshots reverberating all over the landscape, on the banks of a river they came upon a brewery that happened to be owned by the family of one of MacArthur’s aides, Andres Soriano. The workers warned that they were in Japanese territory but, recognizing Soriano, they invited the group inside for a glass of San Miguel beer.22
When it became apparent that the Americans would not be “crushed,” as ordered, Admiral Iwabuchi was ordered by Yamashita to break out of Manila and join him in the Luzon mountains. The arrival of the First Cav, however, spoiled that plan also and drove the admiral and his marines into the Intramuros, a historic walled city dating back to the 1500s when the Spanish colonialists arrived. The walls of the old fortress, made of giant stone blocks, were estimated to be forty feet thick at the bottom and rose twenty feet above the streets. It was where MacArthur’s penthouse apartment was located atop the Manila Hotel, with its vast military library containing perhaps eight thousand volumes, some from the collection of his father.23
After their interlude at the beer brewery, MacArthur led his little party forward once more to the wall of the Intramuros, where they could go no farther. Looking up they saw an enemy officer observing them with binoculars. Undaunted, MacArthur assumed “the stance,” for which he had become well known—erect, legs spread apart, hands on hips—and stared the Japanese officer down until at last he looked the other way.
As they walked along the wall, MacArthur’s party began to attract the attention of enemy snipers who fired no fewer than twenty-eight bullets at them, according to Egeberg, before he stopped counting. An American infantryman under cover warned them about a machine gun ahead that suddenly opened up, prompting MacArthur to at last abandon his excursion and stalk slowly away “showing his contempt for peril.”
When Egeberg wanted to know why MacArthur unnecessarily put himself in danger, he was told, “Hell Doc, those weren’t real sharpshooters. They were just a scared rear guard. Aiming at me, they were likelier to hit you!”24
During the first week of February MacArthur decided to visit his old apartment suite atop the Manila Hotel. He arrived with a patrol from the 37th Division, which was promptly pinned down by Japanese machine gun fire from the hotel itself. As he lay on the ground he watched in astonishment as flames and smoke suddenly shot from the penthouse. The Japanese had set it afire.
Two men with submachine guns accompanied him when the patrol worked its way to the hotel. “Every landing was a fight,” MacArthur wrote in his memoirs. Of the penthouse, nothing was left but ashes, and a Japanese colonel lay dead in the threshold, flanked by two large oriental vases presented to MacArthur’s father by the former emperor of Japan. Everything was gone, MacArthur agonized, his fine military library, grand piano, silver, and china—the possessions of a lifetime. “It was not a pleasant moment,” he said.
KENNEY HAD WANTED TO BOMB the Japanese out of Intramuros but MacArthur forbade it. “You would probably kill off the Japs all right,” he told the airman, “but there are several thousand Filipino citizens in there who would be killed too. The world would hold up its hands in horror if we did anything like that.” Whatever misgivings MacArthur had, he nevertheless lifted his ban on the use of artillery in the city, and soon the big guns filled the air with great booms and dust.
Admiral Iwabuchi’s reaction was to send his men on a carnival of boiling vengeance in which rape, robbery, and murder became the order of the day. Nearly a hundred thousand Filipinos were slain by the Japanese in a rampage that overshadowed even the infamous Japanese Rape of Nanking in 1937–38. William Manchester, one of MacArthur’s most prominent biographers, describes it this way: “Hospitals were set afire after their patients were strapped to their beds. The corpses of males were mutilated; females of all ages were raped before they were slain, and babies’ eyeballs were gouged out and smeared on walls like jelly.” The Japanese went on a riot of arson in which a majority of Manila’s residential housing, buildings, utilities, and factories were destroyed. The enemy had to be rooted out house to house and room by room as once more the Japanese preferred to die to a man for their emperor.25
The Americans accommodated them but at a terrific cost to themselves and the city proper. The artillery MacArthur had permitted didn’t do as much damage as the Japanese campaign of arson, but it did its share. In the end, which did not come until March 3, Manila was officially declared a secured city; 16,665 Japanese marines and soldiers, including Admiral Iwabuchi, who committed suicide, were counted dead, as well as 1,010 U.S. soldiers killed in action with 5,565 others wounded.
Because most of the war correspondents assigned to SWPA were on MacArthur’s “payroll,” so to speak, little news leaked out of the savage Battle of Manila, and after the previous official announcement that Luzon had been taken MacArthur received little or no second-time congratulatory telegrams.
BY THE END OF FEBRUARY it had become apparent that Japanese resistance was coming to an end. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes had been waging a furious war with the White House to overturn MacArthur’s scheme to return the Philippines to self-governance and keep the island as a Pacific possession—with Ickes himself as a kind of czar or dictator. In the end, Roosevelt sided with MacArthur. Perhaps it was MacArthur’s argument that Ickes’s “personality was such as to insure friction” and that he had no experience in the Orient, never even made a visit, that turned the table MacArthur’s way.26 For his part, Ickes from that time on considered MacArthur an archenemy and rarely lost the opportunity to impugn him.
Nevertheless, when the U.S. invasion force had secured its beachhead, MacArthur decided to perform his long-awaited civic duty—to restore the presidency of the Philippines under the old commonwealth constitution. Thus in the early spring of 1945 MacArthur delivered a lengthy address to a gathering of Filipino civilians and his top army brass at the old Malacañang Palace, which had miraculously escaped destruction.
“More than three years have elapsed,” he told them, “years of bitterness, struggle, and sacrifice.” It was pure MacArthur. He spoke of agonizing over obeying Roosevelt’s order for him to withdraw. He painted a picture of prewar Manila with its lovely churches, boulevards, and public and historic buildings and apologized for the damage done. He spoke of democracy and “destroying evil forces that have sought to suppress it by the brutality of the sword.” He installed Osmeña, “on behalf of my government,” as president of a free Philippine commonwealth and declared Manila “the Citade
l of Democracy of the East.”
Then his voice suddenly cracked and he choked up; tears filled his eyes and he could not go on for a long, tense moment with everyone looking up at him, their own breath caught up in awe. But he recovered and finished, at the end asking the audience to join him in the Lord’s Prayer.
Later MacArthur said of the moment, “To others it may seem like the culmination of a panorama of physical and spiritual disaster. [But] it had killed something inside me to see my men die.”
It was too true; whatever his other personal deficiencies, MacArthur cared deeply for the welfare of his soldiers. Any combat general, MacArthur perhaps more than most, realizes that men under his command will die, and he has to do everything he can to keep the cost low. George Patton’s method was to keep moving fast and hit hard on the theory that a slow, drawn-out battle will cause more casualties than a swift, fatal strike. MacArthur’s approach was different; he liked carefully planned, methodically executed attacks along paths of least resistance to maneuver the enemy where he could best get at him.
He remained dismayed at the navy’s style of fighting and shook his head at the terrible casualties taken by the Marine Corps at such places as Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, and Saipan, which he felt were out of proportion to the number of troops employed. His own casualties in the battle to retake Luzon were bad enough: more than 10,000 Allied soldiers killed and 37,000 wounded. But MacArthur had two entire armies employed—nearly a quarter million men.
Within two weeks another alarming fact arrived adding to concerns over American men dying in increasing numbers as the Allies neared Japan: the casualty figures for the Battle of Iwo Jima, a tiny island between the Philippines and the southern Japanese mainland. Nearly 7,000 U.S. Marines had been killed out of a total of 70,000 marines employed—a nearly one-man-out-of-ten ratio.