But MacArthur was growing more alarmed. American planes scouting the South China Sea repeatedly spotted Japanese troop transports heading south. On July 7 he again wrote Washington, urging the immediate establishment of a unified Far East command. In response he received a terse two-line cable from Brigadier General Edwin M. “Pa” Watson, the President’s military aide, instructing him to remain in Manila until he heard further from the White House. Roosevelt was watching Tokyo carefully, and there was a lot to watch; under Hirohito’s new minister of war, Hideki Tojo, nicknamed “the Razor,” the Japanese had seized every port on the Chinese coast except Britain’s Hong Kong. On July 23 they persuaded the feeble Vichy regime to give them bases in southern Indochina. The next day elements of their fleet steamed into Vietnam’s Camranh Bay, the best natural harbor in the Orient, and the day after that, thirty thousand Japanese troops landed at Saigon. Stimson urged the President to act, arguing that “due to the situation, all practical steps should be taken to increase the defensive strength of the Philippine Islands.”68
Roosevelt made his move on July 26. He took several steps. American and Filipino troops were merged into a single army, and MacArthur, its commander, was reappointed a major general; in twenty-four hours he would become a lieutenant general and, later, be jumped to full four-star rank. At the same time the President issued several other executive orders which made eventual war between America and Japan inevitable. All Japanese and Chinese assets in the United States were frozen. The Panama Canal was closed to Japanese shipping. Americans were forbidden to export oil, iron, or rubber to Japan. At the President’s request, Britain and Holland declared similar embargoes. Since the Japanese had none of these resources—imperial warships couldn’t even leave home waters without foreign oil—they were confronted with a blunt choice: either withdraw from mainland China or invade Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, which were rich in raw materials. Tokyo’s reaction to FDR’s actions was swift and ominous. That same day American cryptographers intercepted a coded cable from Hirohito’s foreign office to the Japanese embassy in Berlin. The President’s decisions, it said, had created a situation “so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer”; the empire “must take immediate steps to break asunder this ever strengthening chain of encirclement which is being woven under the guidance of and with the participation of England and the United States, acting like a cunning dragon seemingly asleep. ” The Japanese regarded the Philippines as a “pistol aimed at Japan’s heart.” And now, with the appointment of MacArthur, the pistol was being loaded. Raising the stakes, Tokyo demanded military bases in Siam (Thailand), with complete control over that country’s rubber, tin, and rice. The message was clear. Instead of relinquishing its gains, Japan was extending its tentacles deeper into Asia.69
MacArthur learned of his new command from a newspaper. At seven-thirty on the morning of Sunday, July 27—July 26 in Washington—the General sat down to breakfast with that morning’s issue of the Manila Tribune. He read the lead story, about the Nipponese occupation of Saigon, learned that Tojo had called a million reservists to the colors, and then glanced at a small box on the lower left-hand corner of the front page. It was a bulletin from Washington, an unverified report that the President was mobilizing the islands’ forces and that MacArthur would lead them. He was pondering this when his penthouse doorbell rang; a houseboy delivered two War Department cables confirming the Tribune flash and authorizing him to spend $10 million on Philippine defenses. Sending for Sutherland and Richard Marshall, the General led them into his library and showed them the telegrams. “I feel like an old dog in a new uniform,” he said. He had already spread a map on the nara table. Sutherland said, “You know, General, it adds up to an almost insurmountable task.” The General glanced up and replied, “These islands must and will be defended. I can but do my best.” At that moment word arrived that President Quezon was on his way from Malacañan Palace. Arriving, he embraced MacArthur, saying, “All that we have, all that we are, is yours.” Quezon’s earlier defeatism was forgotten. In a radio broadcast to the United States he said that “the stand of the Filipino people is clear and unmistakable. We owe loyalty to America and we are bound to her by bonds of everlasting gratitude. Should the United States enter the war, the Philippines would follow her and fight side by side.”70
But Sutherland had been right: the challenge was overwhelming. The Japanese had six million men under arms; their elite divisions were veterans of four years’ fighting in China. MacArthur had twenty-two thousand U.S. soldiers and Philippine Scouts, together with his commonwealth army, which by the middle of December would consist of eighty thousand Filipinos, many of whom had never even seen a rifle and most of whose military knowledge was limited to saluting. Even the British forces in Malaya were stronger. Students at the University of the Philippines laughed when Quezon warned them that “bombs may be falling on this campus soon.” The prospect of war seemed unreal to them and to their elders. The most impressive signs of militancy in the capital were ROTC cadets with papier-mache helmets drilling on the lawns surrounding the ancient walled city—they seemed “to be having a lot of fun,” Clark Lee noted—and the pacing General in the House on the Wall.71
Time described him striding “up and down in his office, purpling the air with oratory, punctuated with invocations of God, the flag and patriotism, pounding his fist in his palm, swinging his arms in sweeping gestures. Always his thesis was the same: the Philippines could be defended, and, by God, they would be defended.” That was the MacArthur the press saw, and that was the one he wanted them to see. He was, of course, engaged in much more than rhetoric. Requisitions for equipment were being sent to Washington daily, a thousand carpenters were working around the clock building camps, arriving officers were being briefed, Grunert debriefed before he sailed home, beach obstacles erected, coastal guns sited—the tasks were endless. Yet in retrospect there is an air of futility about all of it. Years earlier MacArthur had said: “Armies and navies, in being efficient, give weight to the peaceful words of statesmen, but a feverish effort to create them once a crisis is imminent simply provokes attack.” Now he himself was engaged in just such an attempt. It was, as he later conceded, “an eleventh-hour struggle.”72
His only relaxation was listening to a daily news broadcast. A few minutes before 12:30 P.M. he would leave his office—now dominated by a huge “V for Victory” poster—and step down one step into a low-ceilinged room next to it. There he would sink into a low, soft armchair. Sutherland would take another chair while a corporal turned on a new Philips radio between them. After the commentator had signed off, the two officers would return to the General’s office and briefly discuss the radiocast. Then MacArthur would be on his feet again, stalking back and forth, fingering his necktie, giving orders.73.
In Manila, as in Washington, speculation centered on Japan’s intentions, and cables flew back and forth, exchanging theories. George Marshall thought that Japan wouldn’t dare attack the islands; he argued that the risks would be too great. Most others disagreed. Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Stimson believed an invasion was inevitable—Stimson thought by January 1942. Willoughby guessed it would come in June; MacArthur, in April, when the monsoon ended. Optimistic as always, the General wrote Marshall that the constructors of barracks were making “excellent progress,” that Filipino morale was “exceptionally high,” that training had “progressed even beyond expectations” because the trainees were displaying “a real eagerness to learn,” that new airfields were being developed and PT boats expected soon—that everything, in short, was coming along splendidly.74
It wasn’t. On July 26 no reinforcement of the Philippine garrison had been contemplated. Five days later George Marshall had reversed that decision, telling his staff that “it is the policy of the United States to defend the Philippines,” and the following day MacArthur had been told that his requirements would enjoy “the highest priority.” Yet the buildup was agonizingly slow. On Se
ptember 26 the President Coolidge tied up at the Manila dock and fourteen companies of American soldiers swung down the gangplank; six weeks later the understrength 4th Marines arrived from Shanghai. The War Department assured MacArthur that 50,000 more men would land in February 1942, with ammunition for them to be shipped seven months later, but between the establishment of his new command in late July and the following December 7 his strength was increased by just 6,083 American regulars. Moreover, only half his Filipino soldiers were stationed on Luzon. The rest of them would prove to be useless, because the scarcity of inter-island shipping was appalling, and to protect it Admiral Tom Hart, MacArthur’s naval counterpart, commanded a pitifully weak force: three cruisers, thirteen destroyers, eighteen submarines, and Lieutenant John D. Bulkeley’s half-dozen PT boats.75
The General’s equipment situation was even sorrier. Signs in American defense plants read TIME IS SHORT, and key factories were working three shifts, but as weapons had grown more sophisticated, lead time had also grown. Even after the crates had been delivered to piers in the great industrial ports on America’s East Coast, a six-week voyage to Manila lay ahead. It would be November 1 before the 192nd Tank Battalion could sail. Some armored vehicles did reach Luzon, but until late November a third of MacArthur’s tank drivers had never even been inside a tank. At the end of October a War Department press release announced: “As a routine strengthening of our Island outposts we are replacing obsolescent aircraft in the Philippines with modern combat planes.” The planes referred to were held up in California because of a lack of spare parts; they were to reach the skies over Honolulu on the morning of December 7, just in time to encounter Japanese Zeros. Moreover, much of the ammunition to reach the Philippines in those last months of peace, including 70 percent of the mortar shells, proved to be duds. The mortars themselves were twenty-five years old; like the obsolete Enfield rifles and the shiny pith helmets, they were symbolic of the pacifism and isolationism MacArthur had fought so hard, arid so unsuccessfully, during his years as Chief of Staff.76
The only first-class defensive fortification in the Philippines was Corregidor’s new hundred-foot-long Malinta Tunnel, with its laterals, ventilators, trolley line, aid stations, and walls of reinforced concrete. However, even the “Rock,” as the island was known, was vulnerable to cannon salvos from Luzon and to air bombardment. In the entire archipelago there were just two radar sets; to warn Manila of approaching bombers, MacArthur largely depended upon Filipino lookouts with crude telegraph sets situated on the beaches closest to Formosa. Had Manila understood the significance of such primitive improvisations, the city would have panicked. As it was, an air of unreality prevailed. Hostesses were annoyed when the General sent word that he was too busy to attend receptions. Both Americans and Filipinos were amused by reports that Tokyo was constructing air-raid shelters, and appeared to be indifferent to the fact that Manila was building none. When a thousand Japanese departed after FDR’s order freezing their assets, Filipinos crowed. Hersey notes: “Japanese evacuees, like Japanese everything in those days, were funny.”77
Washington was just as quixotic. As autumn waned “there was still,” Mark Watson observes, “no adequate realization in the War Department of how rapidly time was running out.” Neither was there any appreciation of the burdens MacArthur now bore. In September he was loftily instructed by Washington to put aside whatever he was doing and confer with British and Dutch commanders over integrating defenses in the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, .Port Moresby, Rabaul, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra—an area larger than the continental United States. Yet not until October did someone in the War Department realize that America’s new commander of U.S. Army forces in the Far East ought to see Rainbow Five, the basic Allied strategy for waging the coming war.
When MacArthur saw it, he didn’t like it. Though it had been revised to provide a limited defense of key Philippine positions, the entrances to Subic and Manila bays, he thought its “citadel” concept too “negativistic.” He believed that he could keep the Japanese out of the Philippines altogether and use the archipelago as a base to menace enemy shipping. The General predicted, correctly, that the Nipponese would try to land at Lingayen Gulf and advance across the central Luzon plain to Manila. By April—he was still convinced there would be no attack until then—he would, he wrote Marshall, be in a position to block an amphibious assault. Therefore he proposed “the defense of the [entire] archipelago and the Philippine Coastal Frontier,” with its several thousand miles of shore.78
Marshall bought it. So, surprisingly, did Admiral Hart, who disliked MacArthur but who, like so many others, found his optimism contagious. Hart’s instructions from the navy were to retire to the Indian Ocean if threatened by Japanese warships. Now, against the advice of his staff, he asked Washington to let him fight it out with the Japanese fleet in Philippine waters. At first his request was refused (the navy, Stimson wrote in his diary, was “defeatist”), but on October. 18 Marshall told MacArthur that new plans were being drafted, and in November that the Joint Army-Navy Board approved the defense of all Philippine soil. Relations between the services being what they were, this was less than definitive, and the General in Manila knew it; to Hart he remarked, “The Navy has its plans, the Army has its plans, and we each have our own fields.” Nevertheless, his own field was now defined. He told his officers that the beaches “must be held at all costs.” They were ordered “to prevent a landing.” Should the enemy reach the shore, their troops were “to attack and destroy the landing force.”*79
The implications of this were enormous. Under the Orange and the revised Rainbow plans, quartermasters were to have stored supplies on Bataan. Now their depots were established at four points on the central plain. It was an audacious strategy, and typical of MacArthur, but its drawback was obvious. By electing to fight it out at the waterline he had chosen to risk everything on the outcome of the first encounter. Should he fail there, Allied troops withdrawing into Bataan would lack provisions for a long siege there—the very sort of siege which had been contemplated in every War Department study since 1909. That MacArthur should make such a choice is unsurprising. What is puzzling is Washington’s acquiescence. George Marshall was a more cautious officer; one would expect him to have exercised more restraint. There are two reasons why he didn’t. The first is the power of MacArthur’s personality. His confidence blinded his army critics, as it had Hart. The second explanation is more complicated. It lies in the attempts of that generation of military leaders to grapple with air power.80
To grasp what was passing through their minds one must go back to Billy Mitchell’s court-martial. No profession is so wedded to tradition as the military. World War I had provided spectacular examples of this. Lord Haig had scorned the machine gun as “a much overrated weapon,” and Kitchener had called the tank a “toy.” Marshal Joffre had refused to have a telephone installed in his headquarters. Submarines had been deplored as ungentle-manly; poison gas, adopted reluctantly by the English after the Germans had used it, had been delicately described as “the accessory.” The trench mortar had been rejected twice at the British War Office and finally introduced by a cabinet minister who had begged the money for it from an Indian maharaja. In the early stages of the war British subalterns had visited armorers to have their swords sharpened, like Henry V, before crossing to France, and as late as 1918 Pershing had cluttered up his supply lines with mountains of fodder for useless horses, still dreaming of Custer and Sheridan and the glint of Virginia moonlight on the shining saddles of Stuart’s cavalry.
Each year since then inventors had clanked out new engines of death, and each year the diehards had eyed them with more loathing. The main threat to the conventions they cherished was, of course, the warplane. It altered concepts of time, of space, of all the strategies their predecessors had developed over the centuries. Mitchell’s chief crime, in their eyes, wasn’t insubordination; it was his insistence that they take into consideration a new, and to their eyes outrag
eous, dimension of warfare. By the late 1930s they were trying to adjust to it, but they were still confused. Corregidor had been fortified before the air age, yet MacArthur’s faith in it was absolute. Later, when the enemy took Manila and he still held the island, he would say, “They may have the bottle but I’ve got the cork,” not realizing that in air power they had the corkscrew. Japanese officers were just as muddled. On November 10, 1941, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo told his flag officers: “The success of our surprise attack on Pearl Harbor will prove to be the Waterloo of the war to follow.” It would be difficult to imagine a more mixed martial metaphor. Nagumo, a naval officer, was citing a land battle to describe an engagement which would be fought by aircraft.81
Admirals were the greatest opponents of change. They were preparing for another fireaway-Flannigan like Trafalgar or Tsushima, where the ships of Heihachiro Togo virtually wiped out the czar’s fleet in 1905 and won the Russo-Japanese War. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was the Togo of 1941. He planned to strike at Pearl Harbor because ninety-four American warships, including eight battleships, were anchored there. Battleships were still regarded as queens of the sea. It seems never to have crossed Yamamoto’s mind that the airborne weapons he would use against them with such devastating effect could later be turned against him—as, at Midway, they would be. Both sides expected the coming war to be a naval campaign. Had that occurred, the anchorages at Manila Bay and Camranh Bay would have proved to be invaluable. Actually it was landing strips and carriers which would be decisive. And none of the commanders, including MacArthur, saw it.82
In retrospect American prewar appraisals of the Pacific situation are almost unbelievable. Neither the army nor the navy thought that Pearl Harbor was threatened—a blow there, it was felt, would be too hazardous for the Japanese. George Marshall believed the Panama Canal was in greater danger than Hawaii. As for the Philippines, D. Clayton James quotes an authority as saying, “There was no sense of urgency in preparing for a Japanese air attack, partly because our intelligence estimates had calculated that the Japanese aircraft did not have sufficient range to bomb Manila from Formosa.” Nipponese planes, they thought, could reach the islands only from carriers.83