He was hurt, but there is no reason to believe that the snub had been deliberate. MacArthur and his officers were preoccupied by the rapidly moving pins on their situation maps, by the growing momentum of Krueger’s infantrymen. Kenney had found it hard to concentrate on the historic ceremony; he kept thinking that it “looked strange to see concrete docks and concrete or macadam roads and substantial buildings again. It made you feel as though the end of the war was in sight.” That evening in the Price house mess the General said to him: “George, I’m so tired I can’t eat.” Yet he insisted on studying battalion reports far into the night. Next morning, before daybreak, Kenney rose to explore reconquered tracts of land which might serve as landing strips. He asked the duty officer to tell the General that he could not wait to say good-bye. The officer said: “Oh, General MacArthur left for the front two hours ago.”
The excitement triggered by the Leyte invasion had quickened pulses everywhere; in far-off Manchuria, where Jonathan Wainwright and his fellow captives were swapping fountain pens, automatic pencils, and even wrist-watches for information, word of the Leyte battle was being whispered behind barbwire. Later Wainwright wrote: “Douglas, true to his promise to me on Corregidor . . . had come back . . . come back with a great fleet to support him and manpower beyond the dreams of defeated commanders such as ourselves.”47
MacArthur had achieved strategic surprise. The troops of Shiro Makino’s 16th Division were being slowly pushed back on Leyte’s Highway 2, toward an eminence which American GIs had christened Breakneck Ridge. Makino was dismayed, but Suzuki, his superior, remained optimistic. Reinforcements were arriving from Luzon every day, thirteen thousand of them in one convoy. He felt confident of retaking Tacloban in ten days. In retrospect, his doom seems to have been inevitable, but at the time MacArthur seemed to be just inching along. Unlike commanders of marines and Australians, the two other infantry forces in the Pacific, the General preferred to pause at enemy strongpoints, waiting until his artillery had leveled the enemy’s defenses. When American newspapers fretted over this, Romulo asked him: “What shall I tell the press by way of explanation?” MacArthur shook a finger in the Filipino’s face and said, “Tell them that if I like I can finish Leyte in two weeks, but I won’t! I have too great a responsibility to the mothers and wives in America to do that to their men. I will not take by sacrifice what I can achieve by strategy.”48
His greatest problem—and the reason Yamashita could reinforce Suzuki so easily—was the weather, which erased the margin that superior naval and air power should have given him. He had called Leyte a springboard, but he was discovering that it could be a very soggy one. In forty days, thirty-four inches of rain fell, turning the island into one vast bog. The steady, drenching tropical monsoon made runway grading impossible. GIs had captured five airfields, but Kenney couldn’t use any of them; they were little more than mud flats. On top of that, during the fighting Leyte was struck by an earthquake and three typhoons. This was the General’s first operation with inadequate land-based air support, and he could hardly have chosen a worse one. The Japanese, with firm fields on surrounding islands, swooped in low over the hills, baffling American radar. Every night Kenney prayed for blue skies, and every morning he was disappointed. Army engineers gloomily told him that it didn’t much matter; the island’s drainage system was such that even the best steel runway matting would be washed away. Luckily Halsey’s carriers remained offshore for a full month longer than planned; otherwise the Japanese would have been almost uncontested overhead. As it was, kamikazes hit four carriers. Finally a new strip was built on relatively solid ground at Tanauan, nine miles south of Tacloban, and P-38s began flying in and out, but Leyte never became the air base the General needed.49
Though this was hardly Kenney’s fault, he felt humiliated, and MacArthur sought to comfort him. Douglas Southall Freeman had sent the commander in chief a copy of his biography of Lee inscribed: “To General Douglas MacArthur, who is making a record as great.” Looking up from it, he said to the airman: “George, I’ve been reading about a remarkable coincidence. When Stonewall Jackson was dying, the last words he said were, ‘Tell A. P. Hill to bring up his infantry.’ Years later, when Lee died, his last words were, ‘Hill, bring up the infantry.’ ” The General paused, lit his corncob, took a few puffs on it, and said: “If I should die today, or tomorrow, or any time, if you listen to my last words you’ll hear me say, ‘George, bring up the Fifth Air Force.’ ” Another time, when A. H. Sulzberger and Turner Catledge of the New York Times were visiting the Price house, MacArthur suggested moving certain aircraft to thwart kamikazes. Kenney replied that the General must have read his mind; he had already given orders to that effect. Catledge wrote: “MacArthur turned to AHS [Sulzberger] with a flourish and at the same time put his hand on Kenney’s head. ‘There, you see,’ he declared with pleasure. ‘What did I tell you about my boys?’ Then, turning to General Kenney, who looked like a schoolboy being praised by his teacher, MacArthur added, ‘Georgie, you are the joy of my life.’ With that he popped his corncob back into his mouth, thrust his chin forward, and followed it out the door. It was an exit that a Lunt or a Barrymore could hardly have duplicated.”50
The two Times men were flattered by the General’s hospitality. “He was overflowing with cordiality,” Catledge remembers. “I thought this was not a show but the man’s natural manner.” Catledge bunked with Larry Lehrbas—they had been Washington correspondents together—and Sulzberger shared Kenney’s room with him. At MacArthur’s direction, Sutherland gave them a full briefing on how the rest of the Philippines would be retaken. It was so detailed that they were alarmed; they were traveling in battle zones, and it was not inconceivable that they might be captured by the Japanese. MacArthur reassured them; nothing, he said, could save the enemy now. In another conversation on the veranda he talked knowledge-ably about the presidential election, Eisenhower’s progress in Europe, and the Army football team, now being ably coached by one of his cadet protégés, Red Blaik (to whom he had sent the wire, after West Point’s 23 to 7 defeat of Annapolis: THE GREATEST OF ALL ARMY TEAMS STOP WE HAVE STOPPED THE WAR TO CELEBRATE YOUR MAGNIFICENT SUCCESS). He read newspapers every day, he told the Times men, and they believed him; he appeared to be aware of almost everything going on elsewhere in the world. Catledge thought it “one of the most fascinating talks with a public figure that either of us had ever experienced.” Like other visitors, they noted that he talked of the war in highly personal terms, referring to “my” infantry, “my” artillery, “my” men, and “my” strategy. “As he spoke,” Catledge recalls, “he was variously the military expert, the political figure, the man of destiny. Sulzberger and I later agreed that we had never met a more egotistical man, nor one more aware of his egotism and more able and determined to back it up with his deeds.”51
Arriving for dinner at 6:00 P.M., the Times men became aware of a voice in another part of the Price house. It sounded “so well modulated, well rehearsed, and self-assured” that Catledge assumed it was a radio address from the United States. Then Lehrbas motioned him and Sulzberger toward a small office beside the room which served as MacArthur’s office and bedroom. The voice was the General’s, and peering through a crack in the door, they saw that he was reading the riot act to Kinkaid. The admiral was leaning against the foot of the bed while MacArthur stormed at him like a trial lawyer accosting a hostile witness, flinging his arms in the air, wagging his finger under his nose, and halting from time to time, arms akimbo, chin thrust forward, to stare incredulously. The issue was Nimitz’s refusal to risk vessels of his central Pacific fleet in a leap to Mindoro, the next Philippine island on MacArthur’s schedule, until the General could provide better land-based air support against kamikazes. MacArthur demanded: “What do they have ships for?” Warships, he said, were just as prone to risk as “my tanks and my soldiers.” The U.S. Navy, he continued, “has a moth-eaten tradition that an officer who loses his ship is disgraced.” He asked rhetorically:
“What do the American people expect you to do with all that hardware if not throw it at the enemy?” During all this Kinkaid stood silently, his arms folded on his chest. Clearly this outburst was not new to him. Suddenly MacArthur stopped in front of the admiral, put both hands on his shoulders, and grinned. He said: “But Tommy, I love you just the same. Let’s go to dinner and then send them a cable.” In the morning, unaware that his guests had overheard him the previous evening, he held forth to them on the navy’s “reluctance to meet the enemy.”*52
All visitors to the Price house felt that MacArthur was living on borrowed time. The enemy tried again and again to kill him and anyone else who happened to be with him. Romulo wrote simply: “Death was in the air, all around us, all the time.” Catledge noted that the building “had been strafed repeatedly and was pockmarked inside and out with machine-gun bullet holes. My room had a gaping hole through the wall made the week before by a 20-mm. shell.” In his memoirs the General merely notes that the Japanese had designated his headquarters as a “special target, but they were never quite able to hit the bullseye.” They came close, though. Two war correspondents were killed in a building on one side of him, and twelve Filipinos in a house on the other side. Once after an enemy strafing attack aides ran toward his room, shouting ahead, “Did they get you?” He said, “Not this time,” pointing to a bullet hole a few inches away. Eichelberger wrote his wife: “I see by the news that General MacArthur had a .50 caliber bullet strike a wall a foot from his head.” In Tacloban on November 26 Eichelberger noted that three times during a luncheon conference in the Price house Zeros had swooped low over their heads: “The noise was terrific but the Big Chief went right on talking.” In another letter he wrote Miss Em: “One of the favorite knocks that one hears is that he is not brave. Of course that is pure tommyrot because I think he is as brave as any man in the army, if not more so.” One shell imprudently fired by MacArthur’s own antiaircraft crews sailed through his bedroom wall and landed on a couch. Luckily it was a dud. At mess next morning he put it in front of the officer responsible and said mildly: “Bill, ask your gunners to raise their sights just a little bit higher.” On another occasion he refused to stop shaving when a strafing aircraft came in low, and again he narrowly missed death.*54
In the Price house he observed Thanksgiving, his elevation to five-star rank, and Christmas. Thanksgiving was sad. On a trip back to Brisbane Kenney told Jean that he had ordered a turkey; she offered to contribute the cranberry sauce and wished she could be there to enjoy it, but that was impossible. MacArthur could not be reunited with his wife and son until he had retaken Manila—toward the end of winter at the earliest.56
After Congress had made him a General of the Army in December, a Tacloban craftsman melted down American, Philippine, Dutch, and Australian coins—symbols of the nations whose troops he commanded—and formed two circlets of five stars. Egeberg and Lehrbas pinned them on him, “but the old thrill of promotion and decoration was gone,” MacArthur later wrote. “Perhaps I had heard too often the death wail of mangled men—or perhaps the years were beginning to take their inexorable toll.” Indeed, he seems to have suffered several spells of depression over the holidays, despite the fact that the fighting was going well. The incessant rain, Kenney’s difficulties, and the endless air raids may have been responsible. On Christmas Eve a GI choir assembled by the veranda to sing carols, but before they could finish, searchlights sprang up and revealed an enemy plane which the antiaircraft marksmen, more accurate this time, instantly destroyed. The next day MacArthur called on Osmeña. Probably that, too, contributed to his gloom; the two men still were uneasy with each other. Nevertheless, Osmeña was the commonwealth’s chief executive, and the General usually observed proprieties—until, that is, he found a way to outflank them.57
Jean and Arthur IV in Brisbane
Jean and Arthur IV in Brisbane Christmas, 1944
His interest in Philippine politics was sharpening as the road to Manila shortened. Romulo was his favorite Filipino conversationalist at that time, and the diminutive journalist’s description of one session is evocative of the desolation around them: “We sat, MacArthur and I, on the porch of the house. . . . We drank orangeades. It was raining—when was it not during the battle of Leyte?—and the sound of the rain on the porch roof dulled the jabber of the artillery fire in the nearby hills. There was a lot of hammering going on down the road where soldiers were rebuilding the Signal Corps headquarters and the officers’ mess that had been blown up in a direct hit a few days before. All around us, in the mud and humid damp, was rising a city of war.”58
It was unlike the General to be melancholy, and in fact he shook it off when duty intervened. A constant stream of transients was passing through the Price house. Sometimes his guests were as humble as two bold privates of the 11th Airborne Division, who had come to Tacloban hoping to find out why their unit wasn’t getting more publicity; he received them courteously, showed them his situation map, and explained that he didn’t want the enemy to know of the division’s presence at this time. Others, like Catledge and Sulzberger, were influential civilians who might persuade the Pentagon to divert ETO-bound cargoes to the Pacific. Speaking off the record to a group of war correspondents just before he received his fifth star, he repeated his conviction that “the history of the world for the next thousand years will be written in the Pacific” and predicted that eventually Stalin would enter the war against Japan, his goals being a reversal of the terms of the 1905 Russo-Japanese peace settlement, recovery of the warm-water anchorage of Port Arthur, and the restoration of territory in Manchuria. MacArthur enjoyed playing the genial host. He was good at it, he knew it, and talking to outsiders was a relief from the rigid chain of command and the loneliness at the top of it.59
The staff continued to seethe and churn with plots, counterplots, and intrigues which would have been more appropriate in Medicean Florence. Dr. Egeberg and Laurence E. “Larry” Bunker, like most survivors of it, blame Sutherland; “he divided the Gs against each other,” Bunker says.* But the chief of staff could hardly have pitted officers against one another without the knowledge, and even the encouragement, of the ironhanded commander in chief. What is extraordinary is the degree to which MacArthur convinced them that he knew nothing of the turmoil. This comes through most clearly in Eichelberger’s letters to his wife. He is not uncritical of “Sarah”; after MacArthur followed the creation of Krueger’s Sixth Army with the Eighth Army, commanded by Eichelberger, the new unit was seldom mentioned in dispatches, and the Eighth’s leader concluded that because the General “has always presented the picture of the poor little boy who has done a lot with very little, he may not want to admit in a communiqué that he now has two armies to do it with.” But “Sarah,” or the “Big Chief” in the code Eichelberger employed, is usually seen by Eichelberger as immaculate, far removed from the scheming and collusion of “your Leavenworth friend” (Sutherland), “your palsy-walsy” (Krueger), “Sir Charles” (Willoughby), and “Sir George” (Kenney). To Miss Em he writes unhappily that Kenney “gives Chief wrong picture,” and that Sutherland “is one person out here . . . that I will never trust until the day he dies.” If MacArthur is too busy to see him, Eichelberger is gnawed by anxiety, wondering whether he has done something wrong, behaving more like a worried schoolchild than a three-star general. Then the General does receive him, and to his visitor’s delight says he is dissatisfied with Krueger, who “makes many excuses” and whom he may “have to relieve.” Eichelberger writes that MacArthur “said he wanted me to become a Stonewall Jackson or a Patton and lead many small landing forces in from the south just as the Japs had. Very cordial and when he left he yelled at me to come back often.” He is convinced that the General is “trying to put the screws on” Krueger, and is not even disillusioned when his palsy-walsy, not Eichelberger, gets a fourth star and is then given the key offensive role on Luzon.60
MacArthur, like Roosevelt, was exploiting his position at the center of
the staff. Kenney noted how “in a big staff meeting, or in conversation with a single individual, MacArthur has a wonderful knack of leading a discussion up to the point of a decision that each member present believes he himself originated. I have heard officers say many times, ‘The Old Man bought my idea,’ when it was something that weeks before I had heard MacArthur decide to do . . . . As a salesman, MacArthur has no superior and few equals.” In other conferences, the General would identify a military target and invite suggestions on how it might be seized. Each officer would reply, he would ask broad questions, say. “Thank you very much, gentlemen,” and go off to ponder the problem himself. Sergeant Vincent L. Powers, who was stationed in Tacloban, has described how MacArthur “could be seen at all hours walking up and down the veranda, smoking his elongated corncob pipe, strolling alone, or with an aide. . . . Should the air alert sound, he would knock the glowing ashes from his pipe, stand by the rail in the center of the porch, peer into the sky, watching the red tracers and 90-mm’s blast at the enemy. The raid over, he would resume his pacing.” Often the aide with him was Egeberg, who recalls how he would “ask me questions and then answer them. From some of these interchanges I got a clear picture of the connection between chess and war. He might say, ‘Now if we do this, which Steve suggested, they might do this, or, if they were clever, they might do that. Now if they do this, we should answer them in one of three ways,” and he would outline the other alternative, and then he would go to the Japanese answer to the six or seven possibilities. By the time he had done this for a day or a week, he would call his staff in, establish the strategy which was amazingly frequently the opposite from the feeling of the majority, and which would seem always to have been right.”61