Numbed though he was, MacArthur of all people should have been aware of this peril. Why wasn’t he? There are several theories, none of which makes much sense. One is that the General was unaware of the minor raids on northern Luzon. But Brereton, Sutherland, Quezon, and Sayre had known about them for several hours; surely the garrison’s commander must have been among the first to hear. A historian familiar with MacArthur’s sympathy for Filipinos’ hopes that Nippon would spare their islands has suggested that he wanted to be sure they had no doubt about which great power was the aggressor: “If he made the wrong move now, MacArthur knew his whole delicately constructed plan of local self-defense might collapse.” Yet before 7:00 A.M. Quezon had handed a woman reporter for the Philippine Herald a handwritten statement: “The zero hour has arrived. I expect every Filipino—man and woman—to do his duty. We have pledged our honor to stand by the United States and we shall not fail her, happen what may.” These words, which were being broadcast by radio station KMZH again and again, could be heard over every set, including the Philips radio in the low-ceilinged room next to the General’s office.14
Great leaders, statesmen and generals alike, rarely admit mistakes, and MacArthur had fewer misgivings about his judgment than most. As he would subsequently demonstrate, his confidence in himself was usually well-founded. But not on this day. Some of the frantic officers moiling about on the Calle Victoria heard that the General was expecting a paratroop attack. He never acknowledged that bizarre assumption, but to the end of his life he did believe that the Zeros which attacked him were launched, not on Formosa, but from enemy carriers. His version of that day’s events is further complicated by his protective feelings toward all who served under him, including Brereton, whose recollections sharply contradicted his own. The General once told Dr. Roger O. Egeberg, his wartime physician, that he believed the most important qualities in a soldier were loyalty, courage, and intelligence, in that order. “And by loyalty, ” he added, “I mean loyalty up and loyalty down.” His interpretation of loyalty down led him to write deviously in his memoirs that “at 11:45 a report came in of an overpowering enemy formation closing in on Clark Field. Our fighters went up to meet them, but our bombers were slow in taking off and our losses were heavy. Our force was simply too small to smash the odds against them.”15
The truth is more ignominious. Shortly before noon Iba’s lone radar operator began to pick up blips of the approaching armada, its V formations pointing toward Clark. Moments later, Filipinos keeping vigil on Luzon’s shores sighted the hostile planes. The Japanese were flying at about twenty-five thousand feet, the coast watchers reported, and there were nearly two hundred of them. Warnings were sent to Clark by teletype, by radio, and by phone. The teletype didn’t get through because the Clark operator, like most of the B-17 and P-40 fliers, was at lunch. Static (probably caused by the Japanese) made the radio message incomprehensible. An aircraft warning officer finally raised a lieutenant at Clark. The connection was faint. The lieutenant promised to pass the word “at the earliest opportunity.” He never did, and that, as it turned out, was the defenders’ last chance to be tipped off by radar. At Iba fifty-four Mitsubishis and fifty-six Zeros peeled off to swoop down on the single grass landing strip and the little radio shack beside it. It was characteristic of the Americans’ bad luck that Monday that Iba’s pursuit squadron had just returned, low on fuel, after a patrol over the South China Sea. All sixteen P-40s were either on the grass or about to touch down, and all of them were blown to bits, together with the radar operator and his set.16
Forty miles to the east lay Clark, the chief Japanese target. Crewmen scanning the skies in the one airborne B-17 saw what appeared to be a thunderstorm sweeping toward the field. The time was somewhere between 12:10 and 12:35—accounts vary that much—and the men on the ground, having finished lunch, were lolling around, smoking and watching the three B-17s which were to reconnoiter Formosa taxi into position. A shout of glee came from the operations office, and a lieutenant appeared in the doorway to explain his mirth. Don Bell, a KMZH commentator, had just announced: “There is an unconfirmed report that they’re bombing Clark Field.” As the laughter and catcalls died down, the fliers heard what one survivor later described as “a low moaning sound.” It grew louder, and they all peered up. “Here comes the navy!” someone shouted. A sergeant focused his Kodak on the first V of Mitsubishis, which were just now dropping to twenty-two thousand feet. A pilot asked: “Why are they dropping tinfoil?” Then the airraid sirens began to shriek. A navigator yelled: “That’s not tinfoil, those are goddamned Japs!” and everyone looked around for slit trenches, of which there were none. Antiaircraft men raced toward their weapons, but the few obsolete shells they managed to fire burst between two and four thousand feet below their targets. P-40 pilots leaped toward their cockpits. Only four of them got off the ground.17
The Japanese, as they told their postwar interrogators, could hardly believe their good fortune. There lay their prey, bunched together, wing tips almost touching. The three Fortresses waiting to take off were the first to go; they exploded within seconds of one another. The attackers came in three waves: heavy bombers, dive-bombers, and fighters. The fishtailing bombs were terrifying, but the strafing Zeros inflicted greater damage. Coming in low, they ignited one fuel tank after another with tracer bullets. As these blew up, the operations office, the field’s headquarters, and the fighter control shack erupted in flame. By 1:37 P.M., when the last Japanese plane soared away, Clark was unrecognizable. All the hangars had been demolished. The parked aircraft had been reduced to tortured, charred skeletons, and a black, roiling pillar of oily smoke, towering into the sky, was visible as far away as Manila, where Jean MacArthur and three-year-old Arthur watched in stunned silence from their aerie five floors above Dewey Boulevard.18
On Wednesday mother and son, standing on the penthouse’s other balcony, witnessed the destruction of the U.S. Navy’s mighty base at Cavite, eight miles southwest of Manila, by eighty Mitsubishis and fifty-two Zeros. By now American fliers could offer the Japanese only token opposition. Nipponese planes were bombing and strafing targets all over Luzon: Nichols Field, Nielson Field, San Fernando, La Union, Rosales, and Vigan. U.S. ground crews were so demoralized that when two of the remaining P-40s tried to land at what was left of Clark, they were machine-gunned by their own countrymen. In Hap Arnold’s words, the United States, “within a few hours,” had “lost most of our airplanes in the Philippines—practically all the B-17s and most of our fighters on the ground.” At negligible cost to themselves—seven fighters—the enemy had eliminated one of the two great barriers to Nippon’s southward expansion. The second obstacle fell even as Cavite burned. Early Wednesday afternoon Japanese torpedo-bombers vindicated Billy Mitchell’s concept of air power by sinking England’s Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya.19
That decided Tom Hart. Trembling with helpless rage, Hart was looking out at flaming Cavite from the roof of Manila’s two-story Marsman Building on Calle Santa Lucia, a quarter-mile from Jean and Arthur, when a navy yeoman brought him the word that Sir Tom Phillips and his command had been sent to the bottom, destroying the only two Allied capital ships west of Hawaii. Two weeks would pass before Hart moved his headquarters to the Dutch East Indies, but already, as he told Rear Admiral Francis W. Rockwell, he had made up his mind to go.20
MacArthur—once more in full possession of his faculties—was startled. The General was counting on Hart to keep sea-lanes open for transports bringing him troops and supplies, and he had been elated by news that the Pensacola convoy, which the navy had turned back toward Hawaii upon outbreak of war, was being rerouted to him, at President Roosevelt’s direction, by way of Brisbane, Australia. The admiral bluntly predicted that the convoy would never reach Manila. The Japanese, he said, had the Philippines blockaded. MacArthur replied that it was only a “paper blockade.” Hart disagreed. The General called him a fearmonger and cabled Marshall: IF THE WESTERN PACIFIC IS TO BE SAVED IT WILL
HAVE TO BE SAVED HERE AND NOW. Should the Filipinos discover that they were being abandoned, he argued in another message to Washington, the islands’ social and political institutions would collapse. He radioed: “The Philippine theater of operations is the locus of victory or defeat.” Saving the archipelago, he said, would justify “the diversion here of the entire output” of U.S. “air and other resources.” But naval support was crucial to such a strategy, and Admiral Harold R. Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, had reached the conclusion that the Philippines would have to be written off. Already deprived of air power, MacArthur was about to lose the support of sea power, too. Afterward he would be bitter about this. The navy, he would write, had been terrorized by Pearl Harbor. He became convinced that the admirals had made “no effort to keep open our lines of supply” when a westward sally by the Asiatic fleet might have “cut through to relieve our hard-pressed forces.”21
At the time he simply refused to believe it, and, as we shall see, high officers in Washington supported his illusions. His essential optimism asserting itself, he had put the Clark-Iba disaster behind him. Everyone who was around him agrees that he was successfully suppressing whatever anxieties he had about the lives of his wife and child. Certainly he had none about his own. Hatless and with his feet spread far apart, he stood in the Calle Victoria counting a formation of Mitsubishis flying seventeen thousand feet over the city. “Fifty-five,” he muttered to Sid Huff. John Hersey heard an aide say, “Don’t you think you’d better take cover, General?” Still watching, and moving for a better view, MacArthur said, “Give me a cigarette, Eddie.” Clark Lee wrote: “His gold-braided cap was tilted jauntily. His shoulders were back. He was smoking a cigarette in a long holder, and swinging a cane.” To another observer the General said: “You know, I feel Dad’s presence here.”22
His own presence in the thick of peril was being faithfully reported in newspapers and newsmagazines back home, where, to a country outraged by Pearl Harbor, he was swiftly becoming a symbol of national defiance. Because Germany and Italy had declared war on the United States four days after the attack on Hawaii, and because Roosevelt was committed to victory in Europe before an all-out drive against the enemy in the Pacific, this was bound to create vexing problems in Washington. Already the President, preoccupied with Hitler, had quixotically offered Churchill the Pensacola convoy; he had backed off only when his advisers told him that news of the switch might reach the public. Americans were praying for the Filipinos, who were looking to MacArthur, who told them: “My message is one of serenity and confidence. ”23
Believing that carriers would bring him more planes, he ordered bulldozers to work day and night building four airstrips in the central Philippines and nine on Mindanao. (Hap Arnold, who shared his faith in those early days of the war, told an RAF commander that if eighty B-17s and two hundred P-40s could get to the islands, he believed “we could regain superiority of the air in that theater.”) The switchboard operator in the House on the Wall answered all phone calls, not with the customary “United States Army Forces in the Far East,” but with the single word “War.” When an aide suggested to MacArthur that the Stars and Stripes over the building be struck, on the ground that the colors identified the target for enemy planes which were overflying the city at will, the General said: “Take every normal precaution, but let’s keep the flag flying.” Manila citizens were being evacuated to the countryside. Schools were closed; fathers stayed to dig shelters, build sandbag walls around key buildings, and fill garbage cans with water in case the mains were cut.24
Those who were puzzled by MacArthur’s later acts as a political general in Korea should ponder his actions at this time. Like his father, he had always seen himself as a military statesman, and the development of this self-image had been encouraged by, among others, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, FDR, and Quezon. Now he began to emerge as a global geopolitician. Fearful that British troops in Malaya might be unable to stem the Japanese onslaught, and aware that the Dutch East Indies were almost defenseless, Australians began to turn toward the United States for help. His eyes on MacArthur, Prime Minister John Curtin announced: “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links with the United Kingdom.” Churchill was chagrined, and his indignation mounted when he learned that Curtin and MacArthur had established radio contact. Receiving no reprimand from Washington, the General next began to ponder ways in which the Soviet Union might help him.25
If Russia entered the war against Japan, he cabled the War Department, a “golden opportunity” would arise for a “master stroke” against Nippon. Endorsing this, Gerow recommended to his superiors that “every effort be made to bring Russia in the [Pacific] war.” Both FDR and George Marshall found the proposal persuasive; with Japan knocked out of the war, all Allied forces could join in an assault on captive Europe. Roosevelt wired Moscow, urging the Russians to convene a joint planning” conference and discuss the possibilities raised by his General in Manila. Stalin’s reply was cool. He preferred, he said, to defer judgment on the matter until spring. Studying his reply, Marshall and Stark decided it would be unwise to press the issue. Churchill also rejected MacArthur’ advice, and that was the end of it. The incident is worth remembering, however, because it occurred to no one that MacArthur had crossed the line separating military and civilian authority.26
The soundness of his generalship in the first two weeks of the conflict is another matter. With the enemy in firm control of the skies overhead and the seas around the Philippines, the arrival of masses of Japanese infantrymen was only a question of time. MacArthur knew it; he was, he said, “holding my reserves in readiness.” On the third day of the war, General Homma made minor, unopposed landings at Legaspi in southeast Luzon, at Aparri in northern Luzon, and at Vigan in western Luzon. MacArthur correctly interpreted these jabs as attempts to divert him, encouraging him to weaken his defenses by spreading himself too thin. Despite his peacetime pledge to repel all amphibious assaults at the waterline, he could not, he told war correspondents, contest every beach. “The basic principle in handling my troops,” he said, “is to hold them intact until the enemy commits himself in force.” He was still convinced that the main Japanese thrust would come at Lingayen, and he was right. His error lay in waiting for the blow to fall before withdrawing into the Bataan peninsula.27
He seems to have known that it would come to that in the end. On the first day of the war he told Sutherland that eventually they would have to “remove . . . to Bataan.” Later in the week he said the same thing to Quezon and to Major General Jonathan M. Wainwright, who led his North Luzon Force and who believed their only hope lay in prompt retirement into the peninsula. But he hesitated. In the opinion of Harold K. Johnson, then a lieutenant in the 57th Infantry and later a chairman of the Joint Chiefs, MacArthur’ decision to oppose the Lingayen landings was “a tragic error.” While the General was motoring around Luzon in a dusty old Packard sedan, encouraging Filipinos to fight where they stood, he could have been supervising the shipment of supplies, which would be desperately needed later, into Bataan. One depot alone, at Cabanatuan on the central Luzon plain, held fifty million bushels of rice—enough to feed U.S. and Filipino troops for over four years. The failure to move it was a major blunder, one which must be charged to MacArthur’s vanity. Having scorned the Orange plan (WPO-3) as “stereotyped” and “defeatist,” he could not bring himself to invoke it until he had no other choice. As long as the slimmest chance remained of hurling the invaders into the sea, he would station his men on the Lingayen coast a hundred miles north of Manila, keeping vigil on the low, sloping beaches.28
The capital and the General lived in a world of fantasy for two crucial weeks, rejoicing in the absence of enemy troops and feeding on vague rumors of Japanese defeats. Then, on the third morning before Christmas—the day, ironically, that Roosevelt restored MacArthur’ fourth star—the blow fell. Forty
-eight hours earlier the U.S. submarine Stingray had reported sighting a large fleet of Japanese troopships, with a powerful escort of heavy cruisers, fifty miles off the coast of northern Luzon. Four Flying Fortresses left behind by Brereton dropped their bombs on the transports, scoring no hits, turned away, and flew down to Australia. At 2:00 A.M. on December 22 Homma’s veterans of the China war started going over the side, and by the first gray light of dawn they were ashore at three points. On only one beach did they encounter resistance. Elsewhere the untrained, undisciplined Filipinos dropped their heavy Enfield rifles and fled. After a brief pitched battle at Rosario, the invaders linked up with Japanese troops from the Vigan beachhead. By afternoon they were swinging down Route 3, the old cobblestoned military highway that leads to Manila.29
MacArthur and Jonathan M. Wainwright, December 1941
Still MacArthur vacillated. It took him forty more terrible hours to overcome his aversion to the Orange plan. He radioed Marshall that he desperately needed P-40s to strafe the foe and asked: “Can I expect anything along that line?” Marshall radioed back that the navy said it couldn’t be done, that the closest friendly pursuit planes were in Brisbane. With the Japanese a hundred miles from Manila, MacArthur climbed into his Packard and drove toward the front lines on Luzon’s central plain to see for himself how things were going. Newspapermen were told that the General and his staff had “taken the field.” New rumors swept the capital. MacArthur was said to be massing his forces north of the city. A decisive battle was being fought there. The outcome hung in the balance. News of it was expected momentarily.30