He appears to have been aware of, and troubled by, GI hostility to him. That is the likeliest explanation for his hospitality toward the two intrepid paratroopers, whom Eisenhower would have turned away and Patton would have put under arrest. He never lost an opportunity to remind his staff that while they were talking, other, younger men were dying. Before leaving Hollandia, each of the headquarters officers had chipped in twenty dollars apiece to buy liquor. The shipment had arrived after they had left for Leyte, and it could not be forwarded without the General’s permission. They chose Dick Marshall as their spokesman. After mess that evening, he cleared his throat and explained the problem. MacArthur asked, “What about the men? Have they got anything?” Marshall explained that they had beer. The General thought awhile and then said: “If beer is good enough for the enlisted men, it’s good enough for the officers.”62
That was the end of it. None of them would have dreamed of disobeying him—none, that is, except Sutherland. To make sure there was no misunderstanding, MacArthur had told his chief of staff that after Hollandia, the roundheeled Australian captain must return to Brisbane, that under no circumstances could she cross the equator. Then one day in Tacloban Jack Sverdrup, Casey’s engineering deputy, told Egeberg that she was on Leyte; Sutherland had just ordered him to build a cottage for her ten miles down the coast. They huddled with Lehrbas and Bonner Fellers. Everyone agreed that MacArthur should be told, but they couldn’t decide who should do the telling—each was either regular army, junior in rank, or a recent bearer of bad tidings to MacArthur. Egeberg mentioned it obliquely to the General. Nothing came of it; MacArthur made inquiries, and other officers covered it up, fearful of an explosion between the commander in chief and the chief of staff. Sutherland’s mistress got her cottage, and he frequently repaired there.
Then one day Lehrbas told Egeberg that he had just talked to her on the phone; she was demanding that certain articles of government equipment be delivered to her door. Clearly something had to be done. The doctor crossed Santo Niño Street from the staff headquarters to the Price house and found MacArthur in a rocking chair on the veranda. Sitting on another chair, Egeberg tried to think how best to broach the subject. He asked perfunctorily about Jean and then sat in silence, trying mental telepathy, concentrating on the cottage dweller’s name. Presently the General turned to him and asked, “Doc, whatever happened to that woman?” The doctor spoke her name aloud. MacArthur said, “That’s the one.” Egeberg said, “She’s ten miles down the coast. Larry just talked to her.” The General’s jaw sagged and then set in a grim line. He said: “Get Sutherland!”
The doctor brought him and left him with MacArthur on the second floor. As he descended the stairs, Egeberg heard the General say gutturally, “You goddamned son-of-a-bitch!” and follow it with a remarkable stream of four-letter words. The sentry at the bottom of the stairwell had his fingers in his ears, but on the other side of the street officers had hands cupped to theirs, anxious not to miss a word. Sutherland was put under house arrest while his pushover was bundled off to Brisbane on the next plane, “so fast,” another officer recalls, “that she might have been shot out of a cannon.” But that wasn’t the end of it. MacArthur learned that she was divorcing her husband. The possibility of sensational headlines in Allied capitals was both real and nasty. Meanwhile Sutherland, tired of sleeping alone, apparently decided that he might as well be hanged for a sheep. Just as the Luzon operation was beginning, ominous allusions began appearing in Eichelberger’s letters to his wife: “the Big Chief and your old friend Sutherland had quite a row,” the chief of staff was doing “crazy things,” Eichelberger doubted he would “last long,” and—oddly—“your Leavenworth friend is getting his teeth fixed.” According to Dr. Egeberg, the chief of staff suddenly announced that he had a toothache. The closest dentist was in Hollandia. As he boarded a C-54, he told an officer that if dental care there was inadequate, he would continue on to Brisbane. And he did precisely that, shacking up with his adulteress while MacArthur and Dick Marshall handled his paperwork. When he returned, the General’s attitude was frigid. Never again were they on intimate terms. Instead MacArthur turned more and more to Courtney Whitney, who, as his new alter ego, pranced in and out of his office and often sat in a chair just outside it, monitoring his conversations and performing other chores so that he would become an indispensable man. The General’s talents were rare and varied, but his judgment of men was often appalling.63
Yamashita’s doubts about fighting on Leyte were growing with every dispatch from the front. Sitting at his desk in eastern Manila, just below the Pasig River, he fired off plea after plea to Field Marshal Terauchi, arguing that the defense of the island was a lost cause, that troops should be concentrated on Luzon for MacArthur’s inevitable thrust there. Terauchi, unimpressed, ordered him to “muster all strength to totally destroy the enemy on Leyte.” Yamashita submissively replied, “I fully understand your intention and will carry it out to a successful end,” but his heart wasn’t in it, particularly after Halsey’s carrier planes attacked a Japanese convoy off Ormoc, the main Nipponese base on Leyte. In the aftermath ten thousand troops drowned—almost an entire division. Eventually, Yamashita knew, the rains would stop, and then his further reinforcement of the garrison would be impossible. On November 15 he virtually forsook hope, radioing Suzuki: IN THE EVENT THAT FURTHER TROOP SHIPMENTS CANNOT BE SENT, LUZON WILL BECOME THE MAIN THEATER OF FUTURE OPERATIONS IN THE PHILIPPINES.
He was determined now to stop the sacrifice of veteran troops, to abandon the doomed attempt to hurl MacArthur into Leyte Gulf. He was too late, however, and he probably knew it. Already Suzuki’s frantic demands had drained Yamashita’s elite units on Luzon. On A-Day Leyte had been defended by the 16th Division and support troops, some 15,000 men in all. Now, at Terauchi’s insistence, they had been strengthened by three more divisions. Over 60,000 Nipponese soldiers were trapped there by Krueger’s 180,000 GIs. After seizing Tacloban and Dulag, MacArthur had expanded his flanks in the first week of November, taking Abuyog, midway down the right root of the molar, and Carigara Bay, at the molar’s crown. Breakneck Ridge had fallen on Thanksgiving Day, and the Americans had poured down Route 2 toward Ormoc, on the left side of the molar.
At that point the General benefited from a curious paradox. Kenney’s lack of runways on Leyte actually hastened the conquest of the island. MacArthur’s row with the navy—on which Catledge and Sulzberger had eavesdropped—had ended in a compromise. Nimitz’s support of the Mindoro invasion was postponed ten days. The General had contemplated going ahead without Nimitz, sending unescorted transports into the narrow seas around Mindoro, but Kinkaid and Kenney had talked him out of it, so the 77th Division, “New York’s Own,” which MacArthur had planned to land there, was idle. Therefore he proposed to put it ashore three miles south of Ormoc, behind enemy lines. Though apprehensive of kamikazes, Kinkaid agreed, and the blow fell on the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Suzuki had erected no beach obstacles there. His forces were quickly split in half. A true samurai, he led his decimated regiments up a twelve-hundred-foot ridge clothed with rain forests and defied the GIs to come after him. On Christmas Day Yamashita radioed him that Terauchi had finally agreed to write Leyte off. Though Suzuki was free to launch counteroffensives and spoiling attacks, which he did until his death on the following April 16, he could have had no illusions about the fate of his command.
The day after Christmas MacArthur announced that the Leyte campaign “can now be regarded as closed except for minor mopping-up . . . General Yamashita has sustained perhaps the greatest defeat in the military annals of the Japanese.” That was true in the sense that MacArthur had suffered the greatest defeat in American military annals on Bataan. In neither instance could the field commander be held accountable for the collapse of organized resistance. MacArthur’s communiqué had another distressing aspect. Here, as in New Guinea, he was offending the American infantrymen who had to wield the mops—Eichelberger’s Eighth Army. The Eighth relieved K
rueger’s Sixth so that MacArthur and Krueger could plan the coming invasion of Japan. In the weeks ahead Eichelberger’s men killed over twenty-seven thousand enemy soldiers. “It was,” he later wrote, “bitter, exhausting, rugged fighting—physically, the most terrible we were ever to know.”64
For the foe, however, Leyte had been a catastrophe. The Japanese had lost sixty-five thousand crack troops, the backbone of their fleet, and virtually all of their air force except for the kamikazes, which, though lethal and frightening, could hardly affect the outcome of the war. The Nipponese supply line to the Dutch East Indies, vital for the raw materials they needed to survive, had been pierced. After the war Mitsumasa Yonai, the Nipponese navy minister, told interrogators: “Our defeat at Leyte was tantamount to the loss of the Philippines.” At the time, Hirohito summoned Prime Minister Koiso to the palace and sharply reminded him that he had promised the nation that Leyte would be the Tennozan of World War II. The emperor asked what he proposed to tell them now. Koiso mumbled that his pledge would be redeemed on Luzon, but he stumbled as he left the throne, and he knew that it was only a question of time before he would stumble from office.
Meanwhile MacArthur, holding Nimitz to the Mindoro compromise, had captured that island. It lay just two hundred miles southwest of Manila. The move was audacious; Mindoro, three hundred miles from Leyte Gulf, was within easy reach of the enemy’s powerful airdromes around the Philippine capital. The Pentagon had advised the General that the operation was “too daring in scope, too risky in execution,” but MacArthur, though no one noticed it at the time, was beginning to disregard cables from Washington, even when, as in this instance, doubts there found echoes in his own staff. Eichelberger, who was at the planning conference, noted that “Kinkaid objected violently. He pointed out that to get to Mindoro his fleet must pass through Surigao Strait and the Sulu Sea, where the vessels would be clay pigeons for Jap land-based planes. In the end, of course, Kinkaid accepted the assignment, and the Seventh Fleet did its usual fine job.” MacArthur’s intuition had told him that Yamashita had no stomach for another Leyte, that he was husbanding his strength for the coming struggle before Manila. The General had been right; Mindoro was defended by less than a hundred Japanese. In a few hours the GIs had taken four abandoned airstrips.
Unlike Leyte’s, these were dry and solid. Halsey’s carrier pilots turned away marauding Zeros and Mitsubishis in spectacular dogfights until New Year’s Day, when Kenney, jubilantly claiming the island as his newest base, constructed two more fields to give the General an umbrella for his next, pivotal campaign. With Kenney’s shield, Willoughby later wrote, MacArthur could “return to his strategy of never leaping ahead of his own air cover.” The capture of Mindoro had a further advantage: it cut Yamashita off from his garrisons in the southern Philippines. For MacArthur it was, as he wrote, his “last steppingstone” to “Lingayen, which was to be my point of assault on Luzon.” As such it was priceless, for he knew, and the enemy knew, that if Yamashita lost there, only the island bastions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa would stand between the Americans and Japan.65
On the evening of Wednesday, January 3, 1945, Sergeant Powers looked up at the Price house veranda and saw the General silently treading back and forth. Powers noticed that “tonight his demeanor, his pace was different from all other times. He wasn’t smoking. His famous Bataan hat was missing. With head bared, he walked, hands clasped behind. The pace was measured, reverently slow. He was alone on the porch. . . . The majestic figure, in silent thought, moved slowly in deep deliberation.”
MacArthur’s reflections, as he himself later wrote, were on the approaching fight for Luzon, the climax of World War II in the Southwest Pacific. Thursday at dawn he would board the light cruiser Boise, his flagship for the voyage to Lingayen Gulf. Altogether he would command nearly a thousand ships, accompanied by three thousand landing craft, many of them new arrivals from Normandy, and 280,000 men—more than Eisenhower’s U.S. strength in the campaigns of North Africa, Italy, or southern France; more than the total Allied force in the conquest of Sicily. But Yamashita was lying in wait for him with 275,000 men, the largest enemy army to be encountered in the Pacific campaigns. Three days before Christmas the Japanese general had begun preparing for the inevitable. That morning he had transferred José Laurel’s puppet regime, including Manuel Roxas, to the more defensible Philippine summer capital of Baguio, in the mountains 130 miles north of Manila. Now, as MacArthur’s tremendous convoy streamed toward him, Yamashita moved his own headquarters there. The stoical, huge (six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound), bullet-headed Japanese commander—he shaved his pate daily—was publicly confident, even boastful. He said: “The loss of one or two islands does not matter. The Philippines have an extensive area and we can fight freely to our heart’s content. I shall write a brilliant history of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the Philippine Islands.” After interviewing him a Radio Tokyo commentator announced: “The battle for Luzon, in which 300,000 American officers and men are doomed to die, is about to begin.”66
Privately, we now know, Yamashita despaired. Although he had thirty-six thousand men on the Lingayen beaches, he withdrew them, having concluded that American firepower made resistance at the shoreline pointless, and that with Halsey roaming the seas the best he could do was to prolong the struggle for the island, tying up MacArthur to buy time for the Japanese now furiously digging in on the home islands of Dai Nippon. An army on the defensive has certain tactical advantages, however, and Yamashita knew precisely where the Americans would strike. The General would have preferred to surprise him, but the great central Luzon plain, an ideal battlefield for maneuvering U.S. tanks, could be approached only from Lingayen. Thus MacArthur would be landing on the same beaches Homma had used three years earlier. Romulo still remembered his “cold horror” then when he had heard on a Manila radio: “Eighty enemy transports have been sighted in Lingayen Gulf.” Thirty-seven agonizing months had passed since then, and as the U.S. armada streamed toward his homeland he wrote: “Now it is their turn to quake!”
But the men on Kinkaid’s ships were quaking, too. The kamikaze terror was approaching its peak—forty U.S. vessels were sunk or damaged by suicidal Japanese pilots during the trip—and enemy submarines were active. MacArthur stood erect by a battery near the quarterdeck, watching the action with professional interest. He observed the approaching wakes of two torpedoes fired at the Boise, nodded approvingly at the skipper’s evasive action, and nodded again when the sub surfaced on the cruiser’s port side and was rammed by a U.S. destroyer. Later he was below in his cabin when a kamikaze dove out of a cloud and plunged toward the Boise. Dr. Egeberg, petrified, watched as it came closer and closer. The Zero was three seconds away when the flier veered toward another ship, was hit by flak, and exploded, shaking the Boise’s decks. The doctor went below and found the General stretched out on his bunk, his eyes closed. Egeberg thought he must be faking, that no one could be that calm under such circumstances, yet when he stood in the doorway and counted MacArthur’s respiration, it was sixteen breaths a minute, indicating a tranquil pulse of seventy-two. Entering, he took one of his patient’s wrists. That awakened MacArthur. The physician asked how he could sleep at a time like this. The General said, “Well, Doc, I’ve seen all the fighting I need to, so I thought I’d take a nap.”67
His interest in the view topside quickened, however, as the convoy approached its destination. In his words, when the armada “steamed close enough inshore to see the old familiar landmarks” he could make them out “gleaming in the sun far off on the horizon—Manila, Corregidor, Marivales [sic], Bataan. I could not leave the rail. One by one, the staff drifted away, and I was alone with my memories. At the sight of those never-to-be-forgotten scenes of my family’s past, I felt an indescribable sense of loss, of sorrow, of loneliness, and of solemn consecration.” Even after the light had failed, he lingered. The great fleet steamed past Luzon and feinted toward Formosa, where Halsey’s carrier-based planes had b
een pounding enemy airfields all day; then, in darkness, it swung back toward Lingayen. Still the General remained on the quarterdeck, pacing and pausing from time to time to peer off the port beam, as though hoping for another glimpse of land, or even of his adversary, who was also spending a tense, sleepless night at Baguio.68
Before dawn on Wednesday, January 10, the Americans lay to off the landing beaches, and a thousand anchors plummeted into the gulf. It was a calm sea; there was less surf than anyone could remember. A typhoon had darted away at the last moment, and the different reactions of Americans and Filipinos to that lucky circumstance says much about their views of the General. U.S. war correspondents wondered whimsically whether he would walk on the water. To the Filipinos it was no laughing matter; many of them believed then, and believe to this day, that the gentle waves lapping the white sands were a consequence of divine intervention. MacArthur was the last man to disillusion them. He knew the power of myth in the minds of the islands’ people. If they thought him capable of miracles, their conviction added a powerful weapon to his arsenal, one which his showmanship would polish. After Krueger’s first four divisions had splashed ashore, the commander in chief followed in his Higgins boat. In his memoirs he writes: “As was getting to be a habit with me, I picked a boat that took too much draft to reach the beach, and I had to wade in.” Actually, according to Kinkaid, a Seabees bulldozer had pushed out a little pier, but when MacArthur realized that the coxswain was heading for it, “he said no, he wouldn’t land there. So they bypassed the pier . . . and he jumped out in the water and waded ashore. That is how MacArthur happened to wet his pants in Lingayen Gulf.” It should be added that a group of peasants watching on the shore cheered lustily and hurried inland to spread the word of his second coming. That, of course, is precisely what he wanted them to do.69