American Caesar

  At last they cast off. It was a balmy, moon-bright tropical evening. Ordinarily the air would have been thick with fireflies and fragrant with the exotic scent of frangipani. Tonight the only odors were those of cordite and burning petroleum. Across the shimmering water Manila lay dark and quiet under a dense pall of smoke drifting over the city from the heavily bombed Pandacan oil fields. Blacked-out Corregidor, thirty miles ahead, was invisible. Off the port bow they could see the flames of Cavite, still blazing brightly. Except for the General, who wore a light leather jacket, the men were in short-sleeved shirts. It was hard to believe that this was Christmas Eve. One officer started to sing “Silent Night.” Nobody joined in. After a few bars his voice died away. Several men reached for their whiskey bottles. There was no conversation, almost no sound at all except the chugging of the Don Esteban and the writhing water at the prow and the stern. They were all at close quarters. There wasn’t even room for the General to walk.48

  Stumbling ashore on the island’s North Dock, they were led to the 1,400 feet long Malinta Tunnel, in which the Catholics, including all the Filipinos, celebrated midnight mass, trying not to glance anxiously at Quezon; the president’s tubercular coughing fits, exacerbated by the damp, stale underground air, were long and exhausting. Then the Quezons were bunked in the tunnels hospital section. “We’ve partitioned off another section for women,” said Major General George Moore, the garrison’s commanding officer, as he escorted the MacArthur’ to their cots. “We’ve never had women around here, and things may be a little crude.” The General said shortly that he had no intention of living in this dank cave. “Where are your quarters?” he asked Moore. “Topside,” Moore replied. “We’ll move in there tomorrow morning, ‘ MacArthur said. Moore pointed out that his home was exposed to air attack. “That’s fine,” said the General. “Just the thing.”49

  There is more to the Rock than rock. Shaped like a pollywog, the volcanic isle ascends in three dark green terraces which are named, because of their varying height, Topside, Middleside, and Bottomside. Corregidor is about the size of Manhattan. Atop one crest stands a little white Spanish chapel which, in those days, flew the Stars and Stripes. At the time that MacArthur retreated to the island, its defenders shared it with monkeys and a few small deer. As the men’s hunger grew and the unharvested rice and cavalry horses were consumed, both the monkeys and the deer became endangered species and then extinct. Bataan peninsula, where the hunger was even greater, lay by the side of the island resembling a tadpole’s tail. There the Rock’s shallow beaches, fringed with coconut palms, are ideal for landing craft. That was where the Japanese would come when they came.50

  Before the events which were to make its name synonymous with the Alamo and Dunkirk, Corregidor had competed with Singapore for the name “Gibraltar of the East. ‘ Now its impregnability, like Singapore’s, had become a casualty of advanced technology. Moore had done all he could to discourage invaders. Twenty miles of barbwire had been strung along the shores. Coastal defense guns had been sited, concrete trenches poured, cable barriers and mines laid off the isle’s little harbors, foxholes dug, and tank traps constructed after clearings had been hacked from the thick jungle vegetation with bolo knives. It was all in vain. During the brave stand of the ten-thousand-man Fil-American garrison and the two thousand civilians, the Japanese would fly more than three hundred bombing missions over the Rock, and once the enemy had extinguished the fires at Cavite and wheeled in batteries of cannon, shells from Japanese 105-millimeter, 150-millimeter, and 240-millimeter howitzers began to demolish Moore’s work. The daily barrages landed between 8:30 and 11:30 A.M., when morning haze and the rising sun made it impossible for the understrength American and Filipino artillery crews to spot the flashes of the enemy guns. Shrapnel from Cavite gouged and furrowed the island. The departing wounded thinned the defenders’ ranks. The tunnel’s hospital laterals filled up. The thermometer seemed to be stuck at ninety-five degrees. Corregidor, once beautiful, became very unlovely.51

  After the party from Manila had spent its first night on the island, MacArthur sorted them out, assigning a permanent billet to each refugee. The desk the General and Sutherland shared had to be at the end of the tunnel’s dimly lit Lateral No. 3, because the communications center was there, but MacArthur had meant what he said to the garrison commander; as it turned out, he wouldn’t sleep underground again until long after a roof had literally fallen in on him. He moved his family into the cottage on Topside, commenting enthusiastically on the view of Bataan from there. His aides, like Moore, pointed out that the building was an inviting target for enemy aircraft. The General said nothing. Neither did Jean, though she was uneasy. Later she would tell a friend: “Corregidor was the longest part of the war for me. Those three months were longer than the three years in Australia.”52

  Huff had scarcely settled down when the General summoned him and ordered him to retrieve some documents in Manila. He added: “While you’re in my apartment look in the drawer of my bedside table. You’ll find my Colt .45—the one I carried in the first World War. Bring that. And if you look in the cupboard, you’ll see my old campaign hat. I’d like to have that.” After a pause he said, “I think if you look in the dining room you may see a bottle of Scotch. Just as well to bring that, too. It may be a long, hard winter over here.” Huff made the trip in one of Bulkeley’s torpedo boats, picking up oranges and more cereal for Arthur while he was at it. He was apprehensive, and with reason; packs of drunken pillagers were everywhere, and Major General Koichi Abe’s Japanese patrols were already approaching the outskirts of the city. Two days later they discovered that the General had fled the capital. Their superb intelligence net told them exactly where he had gone, and at eight the next morning eighteen white, twin-engined, mothlike Mitsubishis appeared in the brilliant blue sky, headed straight for the Rock and, it developed, for the pollywog’s head—six-hundred-foot-high Topside.53

  Jean swept up Arthur and ran to a nearby shelter. It wasn’t much of a refuge; the old iron doors wouldn’t close, and whenever a bomb fell close they would swing in and out, “clanging,” she would recall afterward, “like a four-alarm fire.” The raid lasted for three hours and fifty-seven minutes. Whenever there was a lull she would ask a soldier with whom they were sharing this noisy sanctuary—and who, having been caught taking a bath in the open, was wrapped in a blanket—to dash out and find out what was happening to the General. Each time the”“report was the same: MacArthur was standing by a hedge with a brown, curved-handle walnut cane under his arm, his cap pushed back, and a Lucky Strike in his black cigarette holder, ticking off the seventy-two raiders “as coolly as if keeping a baseball score” while watching the geysers of water and the swift-rising plumes of earth that followed each detonation. A direct hit exploded in the cottage’s bedroom, shattering the building. Then another bomb, much closer to him, scattered shrapnel in every direction. The General had ducked behind the hedge while his orderly, Sergeant Domingo Adversario, had removed his own steel helmet and held it over MacArthur’s head. A fragment from one stick of bombs dented the helmet; a steel splinter from another laid Adversary’s hand open. As the Mitsubishis roared off, Jean arrived on the run and found her husband rising from a crouch to dress the orderly’s wound with his handkerchief. Glancing around at the debris he said mildly, “Look what they’ve done to the garden.”54

  Next he went to Quezon. In his memoirs the president wrote: “While the bombing was going on, my anxiety for General MacArthur was indescribable. . . . There was no one who could say what had happened to the General.” He taxed MacArthur with recklessness. The General smiled and said lightly: “Oh, you know, the Japs haven’t yet fabricated the bomb with my name on it.” Then he said seriously: “Of course, I understand what you mean, and I know I have no right to gamble with my life, but it is absolutely necessary that at the right time a commander take chances because of the effect all down the line, for when they see the man at the top risking his life, the man at the bottom
says, ‘I guess if that old man can take it, I can, too.’ ”55

  MacArthur inspected the bomb damage. Both the tunnel’s electrical system and the water pipes had been hit. For days they drank brackish water, and casualties brought into Malinta were treated by flashlight. By then services there had been restored. Outside it was not so easy, however. Every building on Topside had been leveled, and the MacArthur’ settled into a small gray bungalow on Bottomside, about a quarter-mile west of the entrance to the tunnel. Cots were set up in one of the laterals for the MacArthur’, and Jean would take Arthur and Ah Cheu there during raids, but the General refused to spend his nights in Malinta until the bombardments became intolerable. That presented his wife with a dilemma. She was determined to protect her son, but she didn’t want to leave her husband alone. So she made arrangements. A car was parked beside their Bottomside home. A Filipino noncom named Benny slept in a foxhole beside it. When the siren sounded, Benny would drive Jean, the boy, and the nurse to Malinta. The trip took about ninety seconds. Leaving Arthur and Ah Cheu in the tunnel, Benny would drive Jean back to the General. After a raid they would pick up the child and the nurse and return to Bottomside. Sometimes they would repeat this routine three or four times in a single night. One evening she had just put the boy down and poured the last glass from their only remaining bottle of sherry when the sirens screamed. “Oh dear,” she moaned. “Shall I drink it quickly or wait till I come back?” MacArthur smiled and suggested she wait. After depositing her two charges in the tunnel, she came back and slowly sipped the sherry during the raid. Later that night, and on other nights, the General would stroll back and forth on the path outside the cottage, thinking out loud. Jean’s shoes had high heels. Some mornings she could scarcely stand, but she wouldn’t let him walk alone.56

  Often the MacArthur’ were preoccupied with mundane housekeeping details. One reason the General disliked Malinta was that the quarters there were so crowded. The tunnel was only twelve feet high and thirty-five feet wide at its widest. Each lateral housed twenty-eight people who shared a communal shower, toilet, and washbasin. Everyone was distracted by thoughts of food; except for an occasional carabao or mule steak, or fresh fish from the bay, their diet was limited to canned salmon and rice. Manning coastal batteries after dark was a problem because the gun crews, lacking vitamin A, suffered from night blindness. During his first eight weeks on the Rock, the General lost twenty-five pounds. No one slept well. In Malinta the wounded moaned at all hours. Except for them, the sickest man on the island was Quezon. He had given up his cigars—MacArthur was smoking them now—but at night his hacking could be heard throughout the tunnel. Dona Aurora would rise in the lateral she shared with her daughters, Elizabeth Sayre, and the American nurses, and glide to her husband’s side. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep without a medic’s injection of morphine.57

  Like everyone else on the island, Jean was angry at the American radio commentator who, safe in his California studio, beamed a challenge ten thousand miles to Tokyo: “I dare you to bomb Corregidor!” Her husband, on the other hand, was proud of the Rock’s primitive Signal Corps propaganda broadcasts by Carlos Romulo, whom the General had christened “The Voice of Freedom. ‘ MacArthur chuckled at an enemy propagandist’s enunciation of his own name—it came out “Makassar”—but he was apprehensive about the fate of his Filipino friends in Manila, and with good reason. Though time has blurred the jagged contours of Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, it should be remembered that in the early 1940s the Japanese were a savage foe. Hong Kong nuns were raped in the streets and then murdered. European colonial officials were forced to dig their own graves and then shot. English soldiers in Malaya were tortured to death, emasculated, their penises sewed to their lips by the foreskins, and signs hung around their necks reading HE TOOK A LONG TIME TO DIE; then their corpses were tied in trees where Allied patrols would find them. Manila had no sooner been proclaimed an open city than Mitsubishis bombed it, razing the old church of Santo Domingo, the college of San Juan de Latran, and the Philippine Herald, which Quezon had founded. Seizing the capital, Homma announced that natives who were unenthusiastic about the occupation would be confined in concentration camps or beheaded. It is a remarkable testimony to American administration of the archipelago over the previous forty years that these tactics, which worked wonderfully in Dutch, French, and British colonies, were far less successful in the Philippines. There guerrillas harassed the conquerors until MacArthur’s return. If he wasn’t always a hero to his own countrymen, he was to the Filipinos. Indeed, his stand on Bataan would have been impossible without the loyalty of the Filipino regiments.58

  Every soldier who has seen action knows that the closer to combat men are, the less they want to be reminded of it. The watching world was astonished by the tenacity of MacArthur’s defense of the peninsula and the skill with which he maneuvered his emaciated, ragtag army of native troops, civilians, and American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. Despite the distant rumbling from the peninsula and the flashes of light on the horizon, however, the people on Corregidor regarded the fighting as something the General directed from his desk in Lateral No. 3. The high points of existence on the island were events which the people there actually witnessed. One was the departure of the submarine Trout with twenty tons of the Philippines’ gold and silver—the rest was sunk in the bay—and another was the burning of several million dollars of U.S. paper money to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. Oil was set afire in the bottom of an iron drum. After the serial numbers had been noted and radioed to the Treasury Department in Washington, the bills were torn up into small pieces and flung into the flames. Sid Huff was lighting a cigarette with a thousand-dollar bill when a Japanese gunner in Cavite, spotting the smoke from the barrel, began shelling them.59

  One of the most poignant memories for those who survived Corregidor was the second inaugural of Quezon and Sergio Osmeña, his vice-president. They had been overwhelmingly reelected in November. Their first inauguration, six years earlier, had been a magnificent, colorful affair; Washington had sent a large delegation of distinguished men, led by Vice-President John Nance Garner. Now soldiers hammered together a crude wooden platform on an outdoor cooking and rest site near the mouth of the tunnel. Two chairs were placed on this dais for the president and the General. Spectators held small mimeographed programs. At 4:30 that afternoon a chaplain’s organ played “Hail to the Chief.” Quezon took the oath and spoke of the Filipinos’ determination to become an independent country. His voice was high-pitched, excited, and interrupted from time to time by spasms of coughing. Turning to MacArthur, he said that there were “no words in any language that can express to you the deep gratitude of the Filipino people and my own for your devotion to our cause, the defense of our country, and the safety of our population.” When the General’s turn came, his tone was so quiet and so low that the audience had to strain to hear him. He said: “Never in all history has there been a more solemn and significant inauguration. An act, symbolical of democratic processes, is placed against the background of a sudden, merciless war. The thunder of death and destruction, dropped from the skies, can be heard in the distance. Our ears can almost catch the roar of battle as our soldiers close on the firing line. The air reverberates to the dull roar of exploding bombs. Such is the bed of birth of this new government, of this new nation.” He concluded: “Through this, its gasping agony of travail . . . from the grim shadow of the valley of death, oh merciful God, preserve this noble race.” He turned away, his face streaked with tears.60

  A happier occasion was his son’s fourth birthday party. The Sayres and Elizabeth Sayres fifteen-year-old stepson Billy organized it. Mrs. Sayre found some canned orangeade and enough ingredients to bake a small cake. Though the post exchange store had been bombed twice, Jean salvaged two presents for the General to give Arthur, a toy iron motorcycle and a fiyswatter. Huff, who had noticed that the boy liked to imitate his father by pretending to puff on a pencil, had m
ade him a cardboard cigarette holder. The most inspired gift, however, came from the amah. Ah Cheu had discovered that there was another Chinese on the island, a tailor. She had persuaded him to make a miniature overseas cap for the child, who adored it the moment he saw it. The next morning an enlisted man, meeting him near the tunnel entrance, saluted smartly and said: “Good morning, General.” Arthur frowned. He said crossly: “I’m not a general.” The soldier said: “Excuse me. What is your rank?” Arthur said: “I’m a sergeant.” The man asked why he was a sergeant, and the boy answered: “Well, it’s because sergeants drive cars.” Thereafter he was “the Sergeant” to everyone except the nurses, who called him “Junior.” Among themselves the nurses would say: “As long as Junior is with us, we’re going to be O.K.” In those days it never occurred to them that there was anywhere else he could go.61

  The General’s son seemed to be the best-adjusted inhabitant of Corregidor. He liked to run up and down the tunnel singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the top of his lungs or shouting, when the sirens blew, “Air raid! Air raid!” The nurses adopted him as their mascot one day when he lunched with them. Their mess had a metal table with stools attached to it. The stools swung out on pivots and could be spun, like miniature merry-go-rounds. On rejoining his mother, the boy kept saying, “Mommy, I’m hungry! I want to go to the tunnel!” She discovered that he wasn’t hungry at all; he wanted to spin around with the pretty nurses.62