One enemy problem was that Nipponese commanders were beginning to believe their own propaganda. As their need for victories had grown, they had resorted to exaggerating American losses while minimizing their own. Inevitably the yearning for good news trickled downward; junior officers, anxious to please, distorted their accounts of encounters with the foe. While MacArthur’s great flotilla was assembling at Manus and Hollandia—fifty thousand bluejackets were required just to crew the ships—U.S. task forces prowled the seas, sending out clouds of naval aircraft to pound Japanese bases. Formosa was one of their most important targets. Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome tried to ambush them there. His pilots were green but cocky. As their Zeros rose to challenge the Americans and zoomed into their formations, Fukudome saw blazing specks drop from the sky and plunge into the sea. He clapped his hands and chortled until an aide brought him the bad news. The plunging craft were his own planes, 312 of which had been lost. His heart sank and then rose when the survivors landed and reported that they had sunk eleven U.S. carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and one destroyer or light cruiser. The admiral immediately issued a communiqué claiming all this, and Hirohito proclaimed a national holiday, with festivities in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park. Actually the Americans hadn’t lost a single vessel. Halsey radioed Nimitz: THE THIRD FLEET’S SUNKEN AND DAMAGED SHIPS HAVE BEEN SALVAGED AND ARE RETIRING AT HIGH SPEED TOWARD THE ENEMY.
The most cheerful news, for many Japanese, was the identity of the new overall commander of Philippine defenses. He was Lieutenant General To-moyuki Yamashita, the legendary “Tiger of Malaya” of the war’s opening weeks. Jealous of his fame, Tojo had shunted him off to minor posts, but now Tojo was out of office, and Koiso needed someone in Manila in whom the country had faith. Yamashita seemed to be just the man; his appointment as MacArthur’s adversary meant that two gifted generals, each at the height of his powers, would be pitted against each other. Like MacArthur three years earlier, however, the Japanese commander was gravely handicapped by circumstances. He believed Fukudome’s preposterous communique. He took it for granted that the troops he would lead were trained and alert. He believed he would be allowed to fight the coming battles as he wished. And he thought he had time. None of these was true. American naval strength was still overwhelming; Japanese soldiers stationed in the Philippines had grown fat and soft; Marshal Terauchi denied his request that he lie in wait for the GIs on Luzon; and Yamashita reached Manila just ten days before the great blow fell. His chief of staff, Akira Muto, who had also been banished by Tojo to an inactive front, didn’t arrive from Sumatra until the first waves, of U. S. invaders were ashore. He lacked baggage and his uniform was slimy; on his way to the city from Clark Field, he had dived into a sewage ditch to save himself from strafing U.S. warplanes. Yamashita told him the news. “Very interesting,” said Muto, dripping swill on the Malacañan rug. “But where is Leyte?”19
Leyte at that moment was under the awesome guns of two U.S. fleets, Halsey’s Third and Tom Kinkaid’s Seventh. Kinkaid was subordinate to MacArthur, but Halsey—whose force was faster and far more powerful—was answerable only to Nimitz in Honolulu. The split command worried MacArthur. He had repeatedly urged the Joint Chiefs to designate one commander in chief, and had even offered to step down if they thought that necessary. They didn’t believe he was serious, and they were probably right. In any event, shunting a national idol aside in the middle of a presidential campaign was unthinkable, especially when he belonged to the party out of power. George Marshall wouldn’t agree to an admiral as supreme commander, so the flawed command structure remained. Presently it would lead the Allied cause in the Pacific to the brink of disaster.20
MacArthur had led his staff aboard the cruiser Nashville on Monday, October 16, 1944, for the two-day voyage. He was in high spirits; only a year earlier, he reminded them, they had been bogged down in the humid, filthy, sweltering swamps of New Guinea, fifteen hundred miles away from the nearest Filipino. Now he and his “three Ks,” as he called them—Kenney, Krueger, and Kinkaid—were moving into high gear. He had 200,000 veteran troops formed into two armies, Krueger’s Sixth and Eichelberger’s Eighth, and he had perfected a battle plan which he considered his best yet. After the war Vincent Sheean agreed: “His operations towards the end . . . were extremely daring, more daring and far more complicated than those of Patton in Europe, because MacArthur used not infantry alone but also air and seapower in a concerted series of jabbing and jumping motions designed to outflank and bypass the Japanese all through the islands. The operation in which he jumped from Hollandia to Leyte will remain, I believe, the most brilliant strategic conception and tactical execution of the entire war.”21
Seizing the Visayas, MacArthur told his officers on the Nashville as the huge convoy zigzagged northwestward, would put them “in a position to be masters of the archipelago,” and in his Reminiscences he would later forge a splendid mixed metaphor: “Leyte was to be the anvil against which I hoped to hammer the Japanese into submission in the central Philippines—the springboard from which I could proceed to the conquest of Luzon, for the final assault against Japan itself.” He knew that his reputation was as imperiled as the lives of his men. Kenney had pointed out one glaring flaw in the plan—until Japanese landing strips had been captured, they would be fighting five hundred miles beyond the range of their fighter cover. Kenney recalls: “He stopped pacing the floor and blurted out, ‘I tell you I’m going back there this fall if I have to paddle a canoe with you flying cover for me with that B-17 of yours.’ ”22
In the Nashville’s wardroom, on the evening of Thursday, October 19, he and his staff made last-minute preparations for tomorrow’s landing. He loaded his father’s derringer and slipped it in his hip pocket, a precaution against being taken alive. He ordered all officers to wear steel helmets and to take Atabrine tablets, as usual, to protect them from malaria. As usual, he would do neither. Nor, though timing was essential for the success of the assault, would he wear a wristwatch. He rarely had; someone else could always tell him the time. Then he produced the manuscript of a brief speech which he intended to read into a Signal Corps microphone on the beach, thereby reaching all Filipinos with radios. Later his text would be ridiculed by American sophisticates as narcissistic, sacrilegious, corny, and in appalling taste. Actually there were fewer “I’s” in it than in Eisenhower’s D-Day broadcast to Europe. Kenney defends its tone; “It was not meant for the people back home. It was meant for the Filipino people and they really liked it . . . . The results were apparent immediately. We got pledges for help and calls for instructions from all over the country . . . . It was an emotional appeal to an emotional people.”23
The General himself had misgivings about it, and passed it around the wardroom, asking for criticism. Dr. Egeberg put his finger on a reference to “the tinkle of the laughter of little children returning to the Philippines.” He said: “You can’t say that.” MacArthur asked: “What’s the matter with it?” The doctor said: “It stinks. It’s a cliche.” The General, Egeberg recalls, “was defensive for a moment and then crossed it out.” Two other aides told him that there was too much Christianity in one three-paragraph passage. MacArthur angrily trod the deck, then halted in front of them and shook his finger in their faces. He said: “Boys, I want you to know that when I mention the Deity, I do so with the utmost reverence in my heart.” He paused. Then: “I’ll leave off the three paragraphs.”24
He was keyed up. Here, on this same date in 1903, he had reported as a second lieutenant to the nearby town of Tacloban. Now, on the evening before this decisive battle began, he paced the cruiser’s bridge. The first land he sighted was the island of Suluan, the first glimpsed by Ferdinand Magellan when he discovered the archipelago on March 16, 1521. Then, the General would write in his memoirs:
We came to Leyte just before midnight of a dark and moonless night. The stygian waters below and the black sky above seemed to conspire in wrapping us in an invisible cloak, as we lay to and waited for daw
n. . . . Now and then a ghostly ship would slide quietly by us, looming out of the night and disappearing into the gloom almost before its outlines could be depicted. I knew that on every ship nervous men lined the rails or paced the decks, peering into the darkness and wondering what stood out there beyond the night waiting for the dawn to come. There is a universal sameness in the emotions of men, whether they be admiral or sailor, general or private, at such a time as this. On almost every ship one could count on seeing groups huddled around maps in the wardrooms, infantrymen nervously inspecting their rifles, the crews of their ships testing their gear, last-minute letters being written, men with special missions or objectives trying to visualize them again. . . . Late that evening I went back to my cabin and read again those [biblical] passages . . . from which I have always gained inspiration and hope. And I prayed that a merciful God would preserve each one of those men on the morrow.25
At daybreak the U.S. warships opened fire on the beach. The General stood on the bridge. The shore was dimly visible through an ominous, rising haze shot with yellow flashes; inland, white phosphorus crumps were bursting among the thick, ripe underbrush of the hills. The light of the rising sun spread rapidly across the smooth green water of the gulf. “And then,” MacArthur wrote, “just as the sun rose clear of the horizon, there was Tacloban. It had changed little since I had known it forty-one years before on my first assignment after leaving West Point. It was a full moment for me.”26
The designation “D-Day” having been preempted by Eisenhower in Normandy four months earlier, that Friday was called “A-Day.” MacArthur watched the Higgins boats race through the waters toward Red and White beaches, just below Tacloban—other small craft bearing GIs were landing at Violet and Yellow beaches, near Dulag—and scanned the skies for hostile aircraft. There were many more than he had expected. Halsey had been misinformed; the enemy was nowhere near as weak as the admiral had thought. Imperial General Headquarters had been holding back, waiting until MacArthur committed himself. Even more alarming, Kenney would discover before the day was out that because of the island’s unstable soil, airfields there were unusable during the rainy season, which had just begun. U.S. air support would be limited to carrier planes through most of the coming engagement.27
After an early lunch in his cabin, the General reappeared on deck wearing a freshly pressed khaki uniform, sunglasses, and his inimitable cap. He stood, arms akimbo, watching the diving enemy planes zooming overhead; then he looked shoreward, where the sand spits, palms, thick underbrush, and tiny grass-thatched huts were obscured by the bursts of exploding shells and tall columns of black smoke. Kinkaid flashed him a blinker message: “Welcome to our city.” Turning to Sutherland, MacArthur smiled and clapped him on the back, saying jubilantly: “As Ripley says, believe it or not, we’re here.” An aide recalls: “He was as excited as a kid going to his first party.”28
In his Reminiscences he writes that he went in with the third assault wave. Actually the invasion was four hours old when he descended a ladder to a barge; his staff and war correspondents followed him aboard, and the coxswain paused at the transport John Land to pick up Osmeña and Romulo. After Romulo had scrambled down, the General embraced him, crying, “Carlos, my boy! How does it feel to be home?” Osmeña descended more slowly, and was less elated. Ickes had warned him against returning in MacArthur’s shadow. Dual Fil-American government was difficult at best; under martial law it would be frustrating for him and exasperating for his people. Though their elected president was dead, they still felt that I’etat, c’etait Quezon. Many Filipinos would regard his successor as a usurper. As David J. Steinberg has observed, “Osmefia’s great dilemma was that he could neither compete with Quezon, a dead hero mourned by the people, nor with MacArthur, a living symbol already revered as a demigod.” But he had already committed himself; during a recent visit to Warm Springs President Roosevelt had asked him to go in with the first troops, and he had reluctantly agreed.29
Yet once in the barge and on the way to Red Beach, Osmeña put all that out of his mind. His fever of anticipation was as great as that of the others. Those with maps were poring over them, orienting themselves and wondering aloud how quickly word of the invasion would spread through the archipelago. Then, fifty yards from shore, they ran aground. That was unexpected. MacArthur had counted on tying up to a pier and stepping majestically ashore, immaculate and dry. Most of the docks had been destroyed in the naval bombardment, however, and while a few were still intact, the naval officer serving as beachmaster had no time to show them where they were. Like all beachmasters, he was as autonomous as the captain of a ship. When he growled, “Let ‘em walk,” they had no choice. The General, impatient and annoyed, wouldn’t wait for Egeberg to test the depth of the water. He ordered the barge ramp lowered, stepped off into knee-deep brine, and splashed forty wet strides to the beach, destroying the neat creases of his trousers. A newspaper photographer snapped the famous picture of this. His scowl, which millions of readers interpreted as a reflection of his steely determination, was actually a wrathful glare at the impertinent naval officer. When MacArthur saw a print of it, however, he instantly grasped its dramatic value, and the next day he deliberately waded ashore for cameramen on the 1st Cavalry Division’s White Beach. By then the shore was safe there, and troopers watching him assumed that he had waited until Japanese snipers had been cleared out. Later, seeing yesterday’s photograph, they condemned it as a phony. Another touch had been added to his antihero legend.30
On Red Beach that first afternoon there were plenty of snipers, tied in trees or huddled in takotsubo — literally, “octopus traps,” the Nipponese equivalent of foxholes. In his braided cap, pausing to relight his corncob from time to time, he once more made a conspicuous target. A Nambu opened up. He didn’t even duck. As he strolled about, inspecting four damaged landing craft and looking for the 24th Division’s command post, with the diminutive Romulo skipping to catch up, Kenney heard the General murmur to himself: “This is what I dreamed about.” Kenney thought it was more like a nightmare. He could hear the taunts of enemy soldiers, speaking that broken English which was so familiar to soldiers and marines in the Pacific: “Surrender, all is resistless!” and “How are your machine guns feeling today?” and “FDR eat shit!” The airman heard a GI crouched behind a coconut log gasp: “Hey, there’s General MacArthur!” Without turning to look, the GI beside him drawled, “Oh, yeah? And I suppose he’s got Eleanor Roosevelt along with him.” Apparently enemy soldiers were just as incredulous. After the war Yamashita said that despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he couldn’t believe that MacArthur was really there on that first day of the invasion. If he had known, he said, he would have sent a suicide mission to kill him on the beach. Even after he had seen the picture of the General wading in, he was unconvinced. He thought the photo must have been a fake, staged in Australia.31
The General turned to Romulo, pumped both his hands, and said again: “Carlos, we’re home!” Hearing heavy fire inland, he strolled in that direction, jovially asked an astonished fire team of the 24th, “How do you find the Nip?” and, seeing several fresh Japanese corpses, kicked them over with his wet toe to read their insignia. According to Romulo, he said with deep satisfaction: “The Sixteenth Division. They’re the ones that did the dirty work on Bataan.”* Then he watched with even greater relish as colors were hoisted on the two tallest coconut trees to survive the naval bombardment. One was the Stars and Stripes; the other, a Philippine flag, had been sewn together the night before by a sailmaker on the John Land. Watching them flutter above the foxholes, MacArthur said to Romulo: “Congress gave you political equality, but no law could have given you social equality. You won that on Bataan.” Back at the shore, he sat on a coconut log by four wrecked Higgins boats, his back to the surf. A nervous lieutenant pointed toward a nearby grove and said, “Sir, there are snipers over there.” The General seemed not to have heard him. He continued to stare entranced at the Leyte wilderness. Presently t
he snipers were flushed and shot; Osmeña joined him; they sat at either end of the log, like Mark Hopkins and his legendary student, conferring. Osmeña left, and MacArthur scrawled a letter to President Roosevelt.32
“This note,” he began, “is written from the beach near Tacloban where we have just landed. It will be the first letter from the freed Philippines. I thought you might like it for your philatelic collection. I hope it gets through. The operation is going smoothly and if successful will strategically as well as tactically cut the enemy forces in two.” Strategically, he explained, it would sever the enemy’s “defensive line extending along the coast of Asia from the Japanese homeland to the tip of Singapore”; tactically, it divided Japanese forces “in the Philippines in two and by by-passing the southern half of the Philippines will result in the saving of possibly fifty thousand American casualties.” Granting the Filipinos independence swiftly, he predicted, “will place American prestige in the Far East at the highest pinnacle of all times.” On “the highest plane of statesmanship” the General urged “that this great ceremony be presided over by you in person”; such a step would “electrify the world and redound immeasurably to the credit and honor of the United States for a thousand years.” MacArthur concluded: “Please excuse this scribble but at the moment I am on the combat line with no facilities except this field message pad.”33