American Caesar

  MacArthur needed a weapon; something had happened to the .45; either it was too heavy or had been lost or misplaced—the records are not clear. Drawing Huff aside, he produced from his pocket a small, old-fashioned derringer with a polished wooden butt, two barrels, and two triggers. “This belonged to my father when he was in the Philippines,” he said. “I want you to get a couple of bullets for it.” The bore was an odd size, but Huff, he has recalled, was able to “scrounge” two cartridges. The General broke the pistol open, loaded it, and slipped it back in his pocket. He peered across the water toward Bataan and said in a hushed voice, “They will never take me alive, Sid.” That was the Cyrano in MacArthur, but there is no question that he meant it. Long afterward he told Frazier Hunt: “I fully expected to be killed. I would never have surrendered. If necessary I would have sought the end in some final charge. I suppose the law of averages was against my lasting much longer under any circumstances. I would probably have been killed in a bombing raid or by artillery fire. . . . And Jean and the boy might have been destroyed in some final general debacle.”108

  But George Marshall was having second thoughts about the prospect of losing his Far East commander. MacArthur was the only Allied general who had proved that he knew how to fight the Japanese, and in whom the public therefore had confidence. He was the best-informed U.S. officer in the Far East, America’s one hero in the war thus far, an irreplaceable man who could provide leadership and example in the Pacific campaigns that lay ahead. In addition, if he were captured or killed, die Japanese would have scored a tremendous psychological victory. Marshall had no illusions about MacArthur; he told Stimson he foresaw “rows” between the General and the navy because MacArthur had “bitterly complained of the Navy during die last two months.” Unlike Eisenhower, however, he believed the General’s loss at this time would be catastrophic.109

  Roosevelt agreed, for political as much as for military reasons. Demands that MacArthur be brought out were being published every day. The leaders of the Republican party were calling for it; Hanson Baldwin recommended it in the New York Times; Knute Hill, a Democratic congressman from the state of Washington, had introduced a bill which would make the General supreme commander of all American military forces. There was a great deal of speculation over whether or not he would come. Hugh Johnson, his West Point classmate, wrote in his newspaper column that the General would never obey an order to leave his men, “regardless of his soldierly respect for superior authority.” Stimson worried about that. J. Monroe Johnson, who had served with MacArthur in France, said that he would ignore any such instruction unless it came directly from the President. Hurley agreed. He cabled home that the President must “definitely order MacArthur to relinquish his command elsewhere,’ but that his evacuation must be handled carefully so as not to compromise “his honor and his record as a soldier.”110

  MacArthur’s name was raised twice at presidential press conferences. At the first one, FDR was asked whether there was friction between the General and Washington over the failure to reinforce him. Roosevelt was uncharacteristically incoherent: “I wouldn’t do any—well, I wouldn’t—I am trying to take a leaf out of my notebook. I think it would be well for others to do it. I—not knowing enough about it—I try not to speculate myself.” The second time, a reporter inquired, “Mr. President, would you care to comment on the agitation to have General MacArthur ordered out of the Philippines and given over-all command?” He replied: “No, I don’t think so. I think that is just one of ‘them’ things they talk about without very much knowledge of the situation.” Whatever its other merits, extricating the General from the Philippine trap would relieve a great deal of pressure on the White House.111

  Yet it is almost certain that he would have been left to die on the Rock had Australia not intervened. As members of the British Empire, its Anglo-Saxon inhabitants had sent their young men to fight Rommel in the North African desert, and now their country lay directly in the path of the advancing Japanese. John Curtin, their prime minister, bluntly told Churchill that he wanted his three divisions of “diggers”—colloquial for Australians—returned to him at once. Churchill replied that this was impossible, which, if the Germans were to be stopped short of the Suez Canal, it was. Robert E. Sherwood has noted that there was a “rather strained relationship at this critical time between the United Kingdom and Australia.” Something had to be done to still the sense of panic which was developing throughout the entire Southwest Pacific area, and it had to be done quickly.112

  The key lay in an accord reached by Roosevelt and Churchill the day the Dutch position on Java became hopeless. The American-British-Dutch-Australian alliance (ABDA) had collapsed, and under a new agreement Britain would assume responsibility for the defense of Burma and India, while the United States defended the whole of the Pacific Ocean. That put Australia in the American sphere. Curtin, informed of this, called a special meeting of his cabinet. On Saturday, February 21, they formally voted to modify their demand that their three divisions be brought home if an American general were named supreme commander of their theater of war, with a promise that American troops would follow him. New Zealand concurred, and Churchill laid the whole matter before Roosevelt. The outcome of the forthcoming Battle of El Alamein hung in the balance. Without the diggers, Field Marshal Montgomery would lose it. He could keep them, and win, if the United States now made a firm commitment down under.113

  On the afternoon of Sunday, February 22, the President weighed the alternatives in the executive mansion’s second-floor study. He knew which general Churchill had in mind. “When I was at the White House at the end of December, 1941,” the British prime minister would write in Their Finest Hour, “I learned from the President and Mr. Stimson of the approaching fate of General MacArthur and the American garrison at Corregidor. I thought it right to show them the way in which we had dealt with the position of a Commander-in-Chief whose force was reduced to a small fraction of his original command.” He showed them the message by which he had ordered Lord Gort out of Dunkirk when the Allied position in France and the Low Countries became hopeless, thus depriving the Germans of a “needless triumph.” Churchill recalled that “the president and Mr. Stimson read the telegram with profound attention, and I was struck by the impression it seemed to make upon them. A little later in the day, Mr. Stimson came back and asked for a copy of it, which I promptly gave him.” Roosevelt had it before him that bleak Washington’s Birthday, and as dusk thickened outside, he reached his decision. If possible, MacArthur must be saved. But Curtin would not be told now. The odds against a successful escape from the Philippines were enormous. The fewer the people who knew of it, the smaller the risk.

  In the third week of February the General, unaware of these momentous developments, said farewell to the Sayres and the Quezons. His parting words to Sayre, as the high commissioner stepped aboard the submarine Swordfish, were: “When next you see daylight, it will be an altogether different world.” His good-bye to Quezon was more emotional. MacArthur half carried the old man to the Swordfish gangplank. Quezon slipped his signet ring on the General’s finger and said brokenly: “When they find your body, I want them to know that you fought for my country.” The sub slipped away, and Romulo, who was among those remaining, wrote in his diary: “They are leaving us, one by one. 114

  In the hold of the submarine was a footlocker addressed to the Riggs National Bank of Washington, with instructions that it be held in safekeeping until the MacArthur’’ legal heirs called for it. Within were his medals, their wedding certificate, their wills, some stocks and bonds, less than a hundred dollars in U.S. currency, Arthur’s baptismal certificate, his first baby shoes, many photographs of him, and several articles about the General which Jean had clipped from magazines.115

  The first inkling MacArthur had that he himself might live to claim the locker came in a terse cable from Marshall alerting him to the possibility that the President might send him to Mindanao to organize the defense of the s
outhern Philippine islands. The presidential order, which had been drafted by Roosevelt, Stimson, and Marshall, started coming in over the Malinta radio at 11:23 A.M., February 23, Manila time. Decoded, it was handed to the General at 12:30 P.M. He was directed to proceed to Mindanao, where he would determine the feasibility of “a prolonged defense” of the island, but after no more than a week there, he was instructed to continue on to Melbourne, “where you will assume command of all United States troops.”116

  Clark Lee of the Associated Press, who saw him a few moments later, was shocked at the change in him; he looked old, ill, and “drained of the confidence he had always shown.” All that staff officers would tell Lee was that he had just received an important cable from Washington. In what Huff describes as a “harsh” manner, MacArthur asked where Mrs. MacArthur was and was told that she was in another lateral of the tunnel. He strode there with Sutherland at his heels. Sutherland, Jean, and the General walked to the gray bungalow. They stayed inside, Huff says, “for quite some time.” Then MacArthur told Sutherland to call a staff meeting inside Malinta. When the officers had gathered, the General read the President’s message to them and said that he faced an impossible dilemma. If he disobeyed Roosevelt he faced a court-martial. If he obeyed, he would desert his men. Therefore he intended to resign his commission, cross to Bataan, and enlist as “a simple volunteer.”117

  They protested. All week the island had been buzzing with rumors that a great relief expedition was assembling in Australia. Obviously, they argued, MacArthur was being sent there to lead it back before the garrison’s food and ammunition would be exhausted. The General told them he wanted a review of all cables received from Washington since Christmas Eve. The results seemed to strengthen the staff’s interpretation. So, in fact, did a careful study of this new order. The wording had been made deliberately vague because, according to Sherwood, “Roosevelt knew full well that the departure of MacArthur from Corregidor would be a grievous blow to the heroic men of his command and thus to the whole United States. It was ordering the captain to be the first to leave the sinking ship.” Thus FDR had tried to soften the blow. And thus the General once more misunderstood him.118

  Torn, MacArthur dictated a draft of his resignation anyhow. At Sutherland’s suggestion he agreed to sleep on it. In the morning the prospect of a great counteroffensive seemed more substantial, and he radioed Roosevelt, agreeing to go but asking that he be permitted to pick the right “psychological time,” on the ground that “I know the situation here in the Philippines, and unless the right moment is chosen for so delicate an operation a sudden collapse might result.” The next day Marshall replied: “Your 358 has been carefully considered by the President. He has directed that full decision as to timing of your departure and details of method be left in your hands since it is imperative that the Luzon defense be firmly sustained.” Nine days passed. MacArthur seemed to be wavering. On March 6 another coded cable arrived from Washington: “The situation in Australia indicates desirability of your early arrival there.” Still he hesitated. Carlos Romulo, who had moved into the cottage next to MacArthur’s when Quezon moved out, thought the General felt he would be “breaking, in his own mind, his pledge to die with his men on the Rock.”119

  On March 9 Roosevelt nudged him again. By now the importuning of his staff had fully converted him, and the question was not whether but how. He radioed that he expected to depart the Rock on March 15 and reach Australia on March 18. In one of his Caesarean moods he told his staff: “We go with the fall of the moon; we go during the ides of March.” He planned to leave on the submarine Permit. But the Permit couldn’t reach the island until March 13 at the earliest, and he discovered that he didn’t have that much time. With the issue of his breakout being raised in presidential press conferences and being discussed by American newspapers and broadcasters, the Japanese had got wind of it. The possibility that he could slip undetected through twenty-five hundred miles of enemy-controlled waters, most of them poorly charted or not charted at all, must have seemed fantastic to Tokyo. U.S. naval officers on Corregidor thought that at best he would have one chance in five of making it. Tokyo Rose was predicting that he would be captured in a month at the outside, and the Nipponese wanted him in a POW stockade before then. Filipino lookouts radioed the Rock that a Japanese destroyer division was sailing north from the southern Philippines at flank speed. The number of enemy patrols checking Corregidor moorings tripled, and there was a noticeable increase in the activity of surface vessels on Subic Bay, northwest of Bataan. “It was only too apparent,” Lieutenant Bulkeley later wrote, “that the Japanese navy not only expected General MacArthur to leave Corregidor, but would do everything it could to intercept him.”120

  The bearded, swashbuckling PT commander—MacArthur called him “Buck,” or “Johnny Bulkeley, that bold buckaroo with the cold green eyes”—had been in the General’s mind for over a week. His Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, tethered at a small fishing dock in Bataan’s Sisiman Bay, had been reduced to four decrepit craft comprising parts cannibalized from scrapped vessels. MacArthur felt a special affection for the PTs, however, having introduced them to the islands, and they appealed to his adventuresome spirit. On March 1 he ordered his four remaining P-40s at Kindley Field to seize air superiority over four square miles of Manila Bay for a half hour, the limit of their capability. Meanwhile Bulkeley had roused the seventeen crewmen of his PT-41 from their bunks in Sisiman’s nipa huts and told them they were leaving immediately on an urgent mission.121

  The sailors thought they might be bound for China. Instead they picked up the General and Jean at the North Dock. MacArthur wanted her to have some idea of what a torpedo-boat voyage would be like. Actually the placid bay was a poor example of what they would face on the storm-tossed open sea. Even this tame ride made Jean queasy, but she tremulously insisted she could make it. Returning to the island, MacArthur again assembled his staff in his underground command post. The implications of the increased enemy naval activity were clear, he said; if he was going, he would have to go soon. Therefore, he named a new date and time of departure—Wednesday, March 11, at sunset. He said, “Buck tells me we have a chance to get through the blockade in PT boats. It won’t be easy. There will be plenty of risks. But four boats are available, and with their machine guns and torpedoes we could put up a good fight against an enemy warship if necessary. And, of course, the boats have plenty of speed. If we can get to Mindanao by boat, bombers from Australia can pick us up there and fly us the rest of the way.”122

  That night he radioed Brett that he would require three B-17s at Mindanao’s Del Monte Field. For the next ten days he conferred with Bulkeley every morning, working out details of the coming voyage. Squadron Three, the lieutenant was told, would conduct no more offensive raids before the Wednesday departure; they couldn’t risk the boats or spare the gasoline. At the hour of their departure from Manila Bay, Philippine Q-boats would stage a diversion off Subic Bay to give the impression of PT activity there. Bulkeley’s squadron would sail in a diamond formation, with PT-32, PT-34, and PT-35 at first base, home plate, and third base, and the lieutenant’s flagship, PT-41, leading them at second base. Since none of the craft were equipped with a pelorus, navigation would be by compass, by the imperfect charts, and by dead reckoning. The General, his family, and Sutherland would be among those on the 41 boat; Admiral Rockwell would be on the 34 boat. Bulkeley expected them to reach Tagauayan, in the north end of the Sulu Sea, 250 miles south of Corregidor, by dawn Thursday. If the little fleet was attacked, the flagship would turn away and try to escape while the other three engaged the enemy. Alternate rendezvous points and hideaways were designated should the boats become separated for that or any other reason.123

  MacArthur issued food-rationing orders to assure the survival of the Bataan and Corregidor garrisons until July 1, by which time he expected to be back. He also drew up his passenger list. Roosevelt had authorized the departure of the General and no one else. The War D
epartment had amended this to include Jean and Arthur, but MacArthur wasn’t going to let George Marshall or anyone else decide who would accompany him on such an occasion. He had been prepared to die with his men. His commander in chief had decided otherwise. He accepted that, but as long as he remained among the living, he meant to travel in style. Moreover, if he was going to lead a great counteroffensive soon—and he now felt certain of this—he would need his staff. Therefore, in addition to the MacArthur’ and Arthur’s Cantonese nanny, the party would include thirteen army officers, two naval officers, and a staff sergeant—a technician. Marshall didn’t learn that the exodus was this large until the trip was over. He said he was “astonished,” which shows how little he understood the monocratic MacArthur. The most controversial member of the group was Ah Cheu. The General justified her inclusion on the ground that the Japanese would regard her as one of his family and torture her to death. That was conjecture, and considering the fate that awaited those who would soon be captives of the enemy, the Death March and the rest, it seems reasonable to suggest that he might have chosen someone else, perhaps one of the nurses in the tunnel.124