American Caesar

  Again and again he used the words “ethical’ and “unethical,” “virtue” and “shame.” As Barbey later wrote, “General MacArthur approached the matter from a different point of view” than the Joint Chiefs; “he felt it was as much a moral issue as a military one.” In addition, however, “he did not think the military conquest of the Philippines would be as costly, lengthy, or difficult as the conquest of Formosa, and yet the same military purposes would be accomplished.” The President wanted some reassurance on that point. Casualty lists were lengthening that summer; among those recently killed in action were Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., a flier, and the sons of Harry Hopkins and Leverett Saltonstall, both enlisted men in the Marine Corps. The war was being driven home to public men as the Vietnam War would never be. The decisions Roosevelt, MacArthur, and Nimitz were making were literally matters of life or death for thousands of American youths, and the President pointed that out. He said: “Douglas, to take Luzon would demand heavier losses than we can stand.”190

  The General vigorously denied it. “Mr. President,” he said, “my losses would not be heavy, anymore than they have been in the past. The days of the frontal attack should be over. Modern infantry weapons are too deadly, and frontal assault is only for mediocre commanders. Good commanders do not turn in heavy losses.” Luzon was a greater prize than Formosa, he further argued, because once it had been captured U.S. forces would control the seven-hundred-mile-wide South China Sea. Japan’s lines of communications with its southern conquests would be cut. Moreover, he said, the Filipinos, unlike the Formosans, would provide the Americans with powerful guerrilla support. Last—and here Leahy thought he saw Nimitz nod—Luzon couldn’t be enveloped. It was too big. Rabaul and Wewak could be bypassed because their land masses were smaller. Attempting to detour around Luzon would expose U.S. flanks to crippling attacks from the enemy’s bomber bases there.191

  According to MacArthur, at one point—just when is unclear—he was alone with FDR for ten minutes and used this opening to warn him that if King’s plan to skirt the northern Philippines were adopted, “I daresay that the American people would be so aroused that they would register most complete resentment against you at the polls this fall.” Possibly he made his audacious threat as they headed for their bedrooms, but all we know for certain about the conclusion of that evening meeting is that the President was exhausted by three hours of MacArthur’s oratory. Before retiring he told his physician, “Give me an aspirin before I go to bed.” After a pause he said, “In fact, give me another aspirin to take in the morning. In all my life nobody has ever talked to me the way MacArthur did.” Nevertheless, after the next day’s session, which ended at noon, he seemed restored. Unlike commanders of other theaters, neither MacArthur nor Nimitz had asked him for reinforcements, and they had, in Leahy’s words, sworn to “work together in full agreement toward the common end of defeating Japan.” Indeed, Roosevelt’s spirits were so high that he attempted a small joke at the General’s expense. As photographers were called in, he noticed that the fly of MacArthur’s trousers was unfastened. “Do you see what I see?” he whispered delightedly to one of them. “Quick—get a shot of it!” The cameraman was focusing his lens when the General, giving him a look of icy disdain, crossed his legs.192

  The navy had laid on an evening of native entertainment, featuring an orchestra, a singer, and a talented hula dancer. The President asked the General to stay for it, but MacArthur replied that he had to get back to his headquarters. Their precise words on parting are unknown. Back in Brisbane the General gave officers and friends at least two versions of them. In one of them Roosevelt was quoted as saying, “We will not bypass the Philippines. Carry on your existing plans. And may God protect you.” In the other, which is more theatrical, MacArthur was pictured as leaving in despair, convinced that he had failed, when Roosevelt called him back and said, “Well, Douglas, you win! But I’m going to have a hell of a time over this with that old bear, Ernie King!”193

  The second of these has been widely accepted. In telling it to Clark Lee, the General added: “You know, the President is a man of great vision—once things are explained to him.” Romulo elatedly spread the word among his compatriots that MacArthur had escaped desgracia. Eichelberger wrote home that “Sarah,” having returned from a visit with “Cousin Frank,” was “on top again . . . he will capture the Philippines.” Leahy, by his own account, leaned toward MacArthur as the General was leaving FDR’s side and whispered, “I’ll go along with you, Douglas.” Robert Sherwood, weighing all this, concluded that the President had decided that the Philippines “were more attractive politically” than Formosa, and another historian believes that “his success at Pearl Harbor helped to give MacArthur an excess of confidence in his ability to overcome presidential opposition.”194

  Newspapers and even some correspondence of that summer support the premise that the issue had been resolved at Waikiki. After MacArthur had left Hickam Field, FDR told reporters that “we are going to get the Philippines back, and without question General MacArthur will take a part in it.” Back in the United States, he said in a radio speech that he and “my old friend, General MacArthur,” had joined in “extremely interesting and useful conferences” and had found they were in “complete accord.” That same day he wrote MacArthur that “someday there will be a flag-raising in Manila—and without question I want you to do it.”195

  There was more to it than that, however. Under the Constitution Roosevelt’s power over the Pentagon was absolute, but in practice he couldn’t act without the support of the military advisers who hadn’t accompanied him to Hawaii. In effect, he, MacArthur, and Leahy had formed a coalition, the object of which was the conversion of the Joint Chiefs. Conceivably the General was displaying his irrepressible optimism in his accounts of the meeting, assuming that a good start meant everything was over except the mopping up. There is, however, a more intriguing, highly provocative possibility: that the political mastermind in the White House and his political General had struck a secret bargain under which Roosevelt would back the Luzon alternative while MacArthur’s communiques subtly boosted Roosevelt in the coming campaign with good news from the front. In an unguarded moment the General told Eichelberger that “the question of whether or not the route will be by Luzon or Formosa has not yet been settled in Washington.” Writing Brisbane from Quebec, where he was attending the Octagon summit, Roosevelt sounded as though he and MacArthur were co-conspirators: “I wish you were here because you know so much of what we are talking about in regard to the plans of the British for the Southwest Pacific. . . . In regard to our own force, the situation is just as we left it at Hawaii though there seem to be efforts to do bypassing which you would not like. I still have the situation in hand.” Nine days before the election the General would dumbfound newspapermen by announcing that the fighting on Leyte was all but over. When they remonstrated that it had just begun, one of MacArthur’s press aides would tell them off-the-record that “the elections are coming up in a few days, and the Philippines must be kept on the front pages back home.” Piecing together this and other evidence, D. Clayton James concludes that “an informal deal” may have been “made at Pearl Harbor, probably without explicit verbalization, whereby MacArthur’s releases would portray great battlefield successes stemming from increased Washington support, and the President’s influence in behalf of the Philippines plan would be exerted on the Joint Chiefs. Both Roosevelt and MacArthur were clever schemers of the first order, so such an understanding is not implausible, even if unprovable.”196

  This conjecture is strengthened by the fact that the Joint Chiefs, FDR to the contrary, continued the Luzon-or-Formosa debate through August and September. Leahy had briefed them on the Waikiki talks and told them that both he and Roosevelt were impressed by MacArthur’s political and moral arguments. The Chiefs weren’t. They insisted that the matter be decided wholly on the grounds of military merit. They agreed to a Leyte landing, but added that a “decision as to whethe
r Luzon will be occupied before Formosa will be made later.” King still wanted to land in southern Formosa, supported by American aircraft using Chiang Kai-shek’s bases. An invasion of Luzon, he argued, would tie up the navy’s fast carrier forces for at least six weeks. MacArthur replied that he needed only a small force of escort carriers for a few days, until Pat Casey could prepare strips for Kenney’s land-based planes. King wavered then, but he didn’t quit until the last weekend in September. Nimitz convinced him. The two admirals met in San Francisco, and Nimitz, pointing to recent Japanese successes against Chiang’s troops, said the United States could no longer rely on his airdromes. An attack on Formosa, Nimitz said, would now be impossible unless Luzon were seized first. Back in Washington, King withdrew his objections to MacArthur’s Philippine plans, which had been coded Musketeer I, Musketeer II, and Musketeer III. The General “and his three musketeers,” King said dryly, could redeem his pledge to the Filipinos and return.197

  MacArthur, meanwhile, had been contemplating a continuation of his steady advance northward, with each amphibious thrust providing airfields for the next, so that Kenney could always fill the skies over the beaches with friendly fighters and bombers. Under this principle their schedule had called for vaults into Morotai (September 15), the Talauds (October 15), Mindanao (November 15), and Leyte (December 20). Then, in the waning days of summer, even before King’s capitulation, Admiral Halsey gave the General a tremendous lift by proposing that the timetable be scrapped for a bolder leap.198

  Halsey had been cruising off the Philippines, launching carrier strikes at Japanese bases. One of his pilots had been shot down over Leyte, the archipelago’s midrib. Parachuting to safety and rescued by a submarine, he had reported that Leyte was held by far fewer Japanese troops than the Americans had thought. All week the admiral had noticed that his fleet was rarely challenged by land-based enemy aircraft. The rescued flier seemed to confirm his suspicion that, in his words, the central Philippines were “a hollow shell, with weak defenses and skimpy facilities. In my opinion, this was the vulnerable belly of the imperial dragon . . . . I began to wonder whether I dared recommend that MacArthur shift to Leyte the invasion which he had planned for Mindanao, and advance the date well ahead of the scheduled November 15. . . .1 sat in a corner of the bridge and thought it over.” The more he considered it, the sounder it seemed, so on Wednesday, September 13, 1944, he radioed Nimitz in Pearl Harbor, suggesting that assaults on the Talauds, Mindanao, and the Palaus be canceled. In their place he urged the swift seizure of Leyte.199

  At that moment two U.S. invasion convoys were at sea. MacArthur, aboard the cruiser Nashville, was bound for Morotai, the northeasternmost island of the Moluccas, which would be needed to launch any blow at the Philippines. The other convoy was carrying the 1st Marine Division to the Palaus. Nimitz decided that it was too late to recall the Palau force, and 9,171 Americans fell there, tragically and pointlessly. The rest of Halsey’s proposals were forwarded to Quebec, where the Combined Chiefs were attending a formal dinner as guests of Prime Minister W. L. Mackenzie King. As Hap Arnold later wrote, “Admiral Leahy, General Marshall, Admiral King, and I excused ourselves, read the message, and had a staff officer prepare an answer which naturally was in the affirmative.” There was one small difficulty. MacArthur’s approval was needed, and he couldn’t be reached; the Nashville, in enemy waters, was observing radio silence. Thus the momentous message from Canada was handed to Sutherland. That normally impassive officer’s hands trembled; he was, Kenney later recalled, “worried about what the General would say about using his name and making so important a decision without consulting him.” After a long, tense pause, the chief of staff radioed back an endorsement in MacArthur’s name.200

  The General had gone ashore on Morotai after the first wave had hit the beach. His Higgins boat had grounded on a rock, and when he stepped off the ramp he found the water was chest-deep. Staff officers were appalled—in future landings, it was decided, Dr. Egeberg would test the depth of the water—but MacArthur had been full of enthusiasm for this operation since his return from Honolulu, and if his clothes were damp, his mood wasn’t. The landing was unopposed; without losing a man, he had anchored his right flank for the next amphibious bound. By now he had evaded 220,000 enemy troops and was within three hundred miles of the Philippines. On hearing the news from Sutherland, he instantly approved. After several minutes of pacing he rolled his hips for a turn, halted, and gazed across the fastness of the Japanese emperor’s stolen empire toward Leyte, Bataan, and Corregidor. An aide approached and stood by respectfully, awaiting his attention. The young officer heard the General say softly to himself: “They are waiting for me up there. It has been a long time.”201

  SEVEN

  At High Port

  1944 - 1945

  In the fall of 1944 the Philippines was inhabited by about 18,160,000 Filipinos, 80 percent of whom worshiped the Roman Catholic God, and some 400,000 Japanese soldiers, all of whom venerated their emperor and could imagine no greater honor than to die for him in battle. The twain seldom met. Except for chronic food shortages and the repressive regime, life in the thousand-mile chain of islands had for the most part been unaffected by enemy rule, now approaching the end of its third year. Fishermen still shoved off from shore in their long, slender, hand-hewn wooden canoes; peasants harvested sugar and rice, as they had since the 1560s, when the Spaniards arrived to colonize the Malay villages; and Filipinas gossiped endlessly over afternoon tea while their husbands, on plaza benches, exchanged macho boasts. The hulk of Corregidor lay dead in the slate-gray waters of Manila Bay, and the only sign of ferocity on Bataan was the lightning rippling the lowering clouds overhead. An unwary stranger might have concluded that it was a land finished with fiery deeds, was now slumbering, indolent, indifferent. But the General knew better. He understood that the flames of ardor needed only a spark of hope to be rekindled. He had a better grasp of the Philippines than of the United States. It was his second homeland, and in some ways it was a metaphor of his intricate personality: dramatic, inconsistent, valiant, passionate, and primitive.1

  Especially it was primitive. A prewar mot had it that the people of the archipelago had spent three centuries in a convent and two generations in Hollywood, but outside the cities, in the barrios dotting the green and watery landscape, natives ignored both Spanish and English, speaking instead the islands’ eight primal tongues, with their eighty-odd dialects, some heavily laced with provincial idioms. In mountains within sight of the capital, fierce warriors hunted game with bows and arrows, monkeys chatted in the banyans, and lithe Filipinas strode past rice paddies with pitchforks balanced on their lovely heads. Out beyond the crumbling stone churches lay jungles, grassy uplands, fertile valleys, and baking lowlands—a countryside of scenes which might have been taken from a Tarzan movie, with waterfalls cascading in misty rainbows, orchids growing from canyon walls, and typhoons lashing the palm-fringed beaches from time to time. This was the very essence of the Philippines, its beauty torn by violence, its volcanoes still building the land. None of that had been changed; none could be.2

  In the cities the domed steel helmets of the victorious Nipponese were more visible, but here, too, customs were largely unchanged. The Pasig River wound its silvery way through Manila, as serene now as it had been on that desperate Christmas Eve when MacArthur and his party had boarded the Don Esteban and chugged toward the leering guns of the Rock. Though the customers had changed, the same kerosene lamps flickered on the capital’s street-corner stands, where vendors sold fruit and corn. The same scents were everywhere: those of copra, mangoes, pungent chicken-and-pork curried dishes, and the blossoms of sampaguita, the national flower. The same gongs sounded on calesas, the high-wheeled old vehicles drawn by small horses; the sound of the same Latin music drifted down the narrow, crooked streets. The General had once remarked that he had always thought of the Philippines as a Latin American country, and in many ways it had long resembled a misplaced banana repu
blic. There had always been a romantic air about its religious pageantry, its public ceremonies, its love of drama, and, above all, the rich wood paneling, heroic oil paintings, deep rugs, and gigantic chandeliers of rococo Malacañan Palace. The palace’s chandeliers had been moved elsewhere for safekeeping in the first week of the war, but nothing had altered the timeworn delicadeza characterizing transactions beneath the towering ceilings where they had hung, or the exquisite courtesy of the old civil servants, who went through their elaborate bureaucratic rituals just as though the Spaniards—under whom some of them had served—had never left.3

  While the vast majority of the captive population ignored its new masters, there were two conspicuous exceptions: the guerrillas and the collaborators. Even before Bataan and Corregidor had fallen, bands of partisans had begun forming in northern Luzon, and by the end of 1944 over 180,000 Filipinos had served the resistance in some way. One in six belonged to Luis Taruc’s Hukbalahaps, the Huks, and a few, like Taruc himself, were fervent Marxists. Yet despite the later notoriety of the Huks, most members of the underground were from the middle class. Their devotion in large part reflected their faith in the General. Sooner or later, they believed, he would recapture the archipelago and restore, or at least pay for, every last carabao stolen by the invader.4

  Early in the war their contacts with Australia had been feeble and infrequent. After Hollandia they increased, until nearly four thousand radio messages were being logged every month. No sparrow fell there but MacArthur knew of it; his files held everything from the transcripts of executive sessions in Malacarian to the guest lists of the Manila Hotel. His submarines brought the guerrillas equipment, technicians, transmitters, and commando teams, and he personally interviewed each partisan who escaped into his lines. Some of their leaders were Americans who had been left behind in the chaos of defeat, or had escaped from the concentration camps at Bilibid, Cabanatuan, Los Baños, and Santo Tomás University. Most were Filipinos, however, and their accomplishments matched those of the French Maquis. Their skills grew with their audacity; they posed as dockworkers, as red-capped Moro servants, or, carrying chicken and dried fish from village to village, as traders. The Japanese kempei-tai, the enemy’s secret police, put prices on their heads, flung those they caught into the sixteenth-century dungeon of Manila’s Fort Santiago, and publicly beheaded them. Fugitives brought MacArthur accounts of these atrocities. He vowed retribution, and Filipino coast watchers, picking up the signal, passed the word inland on the bamboo telegraph. The resistance grew and grew. Eventually it contested enemy control of three out of every four provinces, and while this may be misleading—the Nipponese held the population centers—the strategic information the partisans sent southward was priceless. Their eagerness to provide it was an index of their enthusiasm for the U.S. cause, and their devotion was translated into loyalty to two men: MacArthur and Quezon. When Quezon died of tuberculosis at Saranac, New York, the day after the General returned from his Hawaii conference with Roosevelt, MacArthur became their sole idol. He was, quite simply, the symbol of their hopes for a better postwar world. American GIs ridiculed him. Filipinos didn’t. Carlos Romulo wrote: “To me he represents America.”5