American Caesar

  On the Columbia Express she had borrowed some navy sheets, and she was cradling them in her arms when the ship entered Manila’s harbor, now strewn with wreckage, on Tuesday, March 6, the day after the city had been declared secure. Not a single wharf had survived Admiral Iwabuchi’s demolition squads, so the General and three aides rode out to the refrigerator ship in a Higgins boat. Nearly five months had passed since the little family had been together, and MacArthur held his wife and son in a tight embrace for a long, moving moment. Just as they docked a formation of several hundred U.S. fighters and bombers passed overhead. Jean flinched instinctively, then turned to Kenney and said: “Isn’t it wonderful to see our airplanes? The last time I was here, they were all Japs, and instead of watching them we were running for cover. But George, what have you done to Corregidor? I could hardly recognize it when we passed it! It looks as though you had lowered it at least forty feet.” He agreed that it did look lower in the water, which wasn’t surprising; his men had dropped four thousand tons of bombs on it before its recapture.95

  They toured the ruins of familiar landmarks—the penthouse, No. 1 Calle Victoria, Santo Tomás, the Army and Navy Club, the Elks Club, the University Club, the high commissioner’s home, and Military Plaza. Jean was shocked; the city she had loved looked, she thought, like one vast graveyard. She wondered where they would live. That evening they dined with the Osmeñas. As they prepared for bed, somewhere outside the capital 155-millimeter Long Toms began shelling an enemy position. Unable to sleep, she arose and walked the floor. Her husband awoke and comforted her. Jean said, “I wonder what Arthur is doing. ” She entered the child’s room. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, wide-eyed and trembling. He asked, “Are those our guns, Mom?” She assured him that they were, and he relaxed, lay back, and instantly fell asleep.96

  Next morning was much grander. Kenney had moved into “Casa Blanca,” a mansion belonging to Manila’s richest car dealer, a man named Bachrach, east of Malacañan and a few blocks from the river. It was equipped with a swimming pool and a sauna, and surrounded by beautiful gardens. He described it to MacArthur, who disappeared for a few hours and reappeared to say: “George, I did a kind of dirty trick on you. I stole your house.” The airman said he had expected it, that he hadn’t forgotten how his room had been filched in Port Moresby’s Government House. Then he disappeared and returned to say he had found a new home, “a better one than yours.” MacArthur perked up and asked, “Where is it?” Kenney said, “I’m not going to tell you. I made one mistake, and I’m not going to repeat it.” The General said, “Oh, come on and tell me where it is. Kind of describe it to me.” All Kenney would say was that the cook was the former chef at San Francisco’s Saint Francis Hotel. “Well, I’m a son of a gun!” MacArthur said enviously. “Why didn’t I wait a little longer and get that one?” But Casa Blanca suited Jean perfectly. When Eichelberger, whose first call there had been at night, saw it in daylight, he wrote Miss Em, “Their house is even more beautiful than I had realized.”97

  In another letter Eichelberger wrote that “your old Leavenworth friend” was “worried about Sarah. He said he felt she had made the biggest mistake of her career in having her family . . . join her” because he thought it “might be seized upon by unfriendly columnists. He said when he questioned Sarah that she threw him out.” In the light of his own extracurricular activities, Sutherland was the last man to broach this subject with the General, but someone had to bring it up. The troops were bound to resent the fact that the theater commander was the only American officer in the Southwest Pacific to be accompanied by his wife. The MacArthur’ recognized the need for discretion; unless a VIP like Lord Louis Mountbatten was visiting them, they held no dinner parties. In the Watson Building war correspondents were told that Jean had come “to aid and assist in such ways as she can in the care of internees and rehabilitation of the city and its inhabitants. ”98

  That was partly true. One of her first calls was at the Santo Tomás stockade. Afterward she recalled: “When we drove through the gates, and I saw the condition of the people and the rags they were still wearing, I had a horrible feeling about my own clothes . . . . So I had the driver stop, and I quickly took off my hat and gloves, but there wasn’t much else I could do about it.” She toured internee camps and hospitals, writing to the families of men from whom nothing had been heard since early 1942 and gently urging her husband to intervene on behalf of starving Filipinos whose homes had been gutted. But there was never any doubt that he and their son came before everything else with her. She was always in the doorway of Casa Blanca when he came home from headquarters, and she and Ah Cheu were still fighting valiantly to prevent the General from spoiling Arthur.99

  It was a losing battle. MacArthur continued to be the most permissive of parents. If the son had a single unhappy moment, the father became visibly upset. He gave him a puppy, and one day the General’s car, turning into the circular drive in front of the mansion, ran over the dog and killed it. The boy was distressed, but MacArthur was stricken. A new pet was obtained, the iron gates leading to the driveway were closed and locked, and a sentry was posted with orders to admit no automobile under any circumstances. The first driver to test this was Kenney. The sentinel faced the front bumper, his rifle at port arms. “Look here,” the airman protested amiably, “I’ve got four stars on my shoulders.” The guard refused to step aside, and MacArthur had to come out to the drive before the car could be admitted.100

  Arthur had been tutored in Brisbane. Jean had hoped to enter him into a public school in Manila, but all the school buildings had been leveled. A friend, the wife of an officer who had fought on Corregidor, suggested as a governess an Englishwoman who had taught in a private Baguio school before the war and had been interned by the Japanese. Her name was Mrs. Phyllis Gibbons. The family christened her “Gibby.” Engaged, Gibby would stay with them through the postwar years in Tokyo, encouraging the child’s emerging musical talents, particularly at the Bachrach piano. But inevitably the dominant figure in the small boy’s life was his father. Before the arrival of his family, MacArthur had roamed Luzon day and night. Now, moving his headquarters into Manila City Hall, he kept regular hours, often leaving early to spend sunlit hours with the child, playing hide-and-seek with him, teaching him close-order drill, and telling him Aesop’s fables and Grimms’ fairy tales.101

  Some of our most illuminating glimpses of MacArthur’s complicated personality are from this period. Long ago Arthur had been adopted as a kind of mascot, or surrogate son, by other officers separated from their own children. Now their awareness of him increased, for soon he would begin to develop into an individual in his own right. In speculating on his father’s probable influence on him, they discussed the General’s characteristics among themselves. Some of their observations were trivial. They wondered, for example, whether the boy would display his father’s contradictory traits. MacArthur was an honorable man, yet he could not be trusted to keep his word. He was obsessed with personal neatness—with Manila collapsing around him, he insisted on summoning a seventy-one-year-old Filipino barber he had known before the war and having his hair cut—yet his famous cap and his uniforms always looked threadbare because he couldn’t bring himself to discard old clothes. Instead, he would tell an orderly to cannibalize them, piecing them together, rather than get new ones.102

  Virtually everyone who had spent any time with the General agreed that he possessed a remarkable mind. Even OWI’s Robert Sherwood, John Gunther reported, emerged from a three-hour session with him on March 10 as a convert: “MacArthur impressed him enormously, because he had already worked out to the uttermost detail the administration of Japan when it should be conquered. His conception was so brilliant, broad, and daring that Sherwood left him thinking that, no matter what happened in the military sphere, the General should certainly be given the chance to put his vast plans (which at that time seemed wildly chimerical) into full effect.” Among other things, MacArthur told Sherwood that
victory over Japan “will make us the greatest influence on the future of Asia. If we exert that influence in an imperialistic manner, or for the sole purpose of commercial advantage, then we shall lose our golden opportunity; but if our influence and our strength are expressed in terms of essential liberalism, we shall have the friendship and the cooperation of the Asiatic peoples far into the future.” The General also discussed the coming occupation of Nippon with another visitor, James V. Forrestal, who noted in his diary: “The two great ideas which he said he believed America could oppose to the crusade of Communism were (a) the idea of liberty and freedom, and (b) the idea of Christianity.” Forrestal believed the General had “a high degree of professional ability, mortgaged, however, to his sensitivity and his vanity.”103

  Gunther observed: “MacArthur’s imperiousness mounted as his campaigns progressed.” Most of the officers around him did not see that; they adored him, and could imagine no way in which he could be improved upon. Yet some had grave, significant reservations. Eichelberger, who resembled him in many ways, considered him “a queer genius” who “has many of the qualities that make for greatness,” but, Eichelberger told Miss Em, “He certainly has many funny sides which would appeal to your feminine mind. . . . He does not intend . . . that any other actor shall walk on the stage and receive any applause if he can help it. He will not change and I think he will probably get worse as he grows older. . . . The big thing is that the Big Chief has been getting victories, and for that reason I would be for him no matter if he had horns and a tail.” Eichelberger concluded that he was “quite a peculiar individual.”104

  Because of his infectious ways—younger officers around him even imitated his mannerisms, pacing as they talked—his strengths, weaknesses, and eccentricities affected the entire staff. The headquarters of other commanders would have been in a euphoric, generous mood after the triumphs of Hollandia, Leyte, and Luzon, but MacArthur’s craving for adversaries behind the lines, like his need for victories at the front, was unquenchable. He and his aides still felt they were the Allies’ poor cousins, that conspiratorial forces in other Allied capitals were continually undermining them. Sherwood thought he was bringing Willoughby good news when he told him that Bradley’s GIs had captured the priceless Rhine bridge at Remagen. Willoughby said curtly: “We don’t give a goddam out here for anything that happens in Europe.” Sherwood reported to Roosevelt that among the men on MacArthur’s team “there are unmistakable evidences of an acute persecution complex at work. To hear some of the staff officers talk, one would think that the War Department, the State Department—and, possibly, even the White House itself—are under the domination of ‘Communists and British Imperialists.’ ” Inexplicably, Sherwood omitted the Navy Department, where resentment of the General continued to be strongest. After all the navy had done for him in supporting his landings, he objected bitterly to a Pentagon directive instructing him to send warships in the Southwest Pacific to Nimitz for the Okinawa attack, just as he protested “a shocking order” to send seventy freighters to Vladivostok, where they were needed if Hitler was to be crushed that spring.105

  Yalta provides an excellent illustration of MacArthur at his trickiest. While he was seizing Intramuros, the Allied heads of state and their advisers were meeting in the Crimea. Later Yalta would bring out the worst in FDR’s critics, but at the time it seemed that he and Churchill had won more concessions from Stalin than anyone had any right to expect. He secretly agreed to join the anti-Japanese coalition. In return, in the Far East the Soviet Union would be given certain privileges in Manchuria, the Kuril Islands, and northern Korea; and recognition of Outer Mongolia’s autonomy. Except for the Kurils, the Russians were given nothing they couldn’t have had for the taking. The Combined Chiefs had told the President and the prime minister to yield whatever the market demanded. They and their theater commanders, including MacArthur, appeared to have every reason to be pleased, and they were. In February an officer designated as MacArthur’s spokesman told war correspondents that a Soviet attack against the Japanese army was “essential,” that “we must not invade Japan proper unless the Russian army is previously committed to action” against the Nipponese, and that “we should make every effort to get Russia into the Japanese war.” After conferring with the General, the new secretary of the navy, James Forrestal, wrote in his diary: “He said that he felt that our strength should be reserved for use in the Japanese mainland, on the plain of Tokyo,” that “this could not be done without the assurance that the Japanese would be heavily engaged by the Russians,” and that the Soviets “would have to be induced to come into Manchuria with sixty divisions if we were to conquer Japan.” Indeed, MacArthur’s appeals to the Pentagon, couched in this same language, had led the Joint Chiefs to advise Roosevelt to grant Stalin almost anything he demanded at Yalta, on the ground that Soviet participation in the Far East war was indispensable.106

  At the time this seemed reasonable to all Allied leaders. The testing of the first atomic bomb was months away. Few thought it would work. And the generals and admirals, having underestimated the Japanese at the outbreak of the war, were overestimating them now. They didn’t realize that the enemy was already on his knees, that the Russians weren’t needed. MacArthur was wrong, but so was everyone else. The difference, as Philip LaFollette perceptively observed, was that he couldn’t acknowledge it. Ten years later, when he had become the idol of arch-conservative Republicans, he would call the Yalta agreements “fantastic,” charging that “my views and comments were never solicited,” and say that if he had been consulted he “would most emphatically have recommended against bringing the Soviet into the war at that late date.”107

  He was lying, and what gave his lie an ironic twist was that if anyone had a right to feel abused after Yalta, it was the Joint Chiefs, who had been deceived by MacArthur. During the Crimean conference they had told the British that they had no plans for retaking the rest of the Philippines and Indonesia; George Marshall said he assumed that “Filipino guerrillas and the newly activated Army of the Philippine Commonwealth” could “take care of the rest of their country,” and that “Anglo-Australian forces” would “recover the N.E.I. [Netherlands East Indies]. ” They hadn’t checked with MacArthur, because it hadn’t been necessary. As their subordinate, he was subject to their instructions. Yet without even informing them of his intentions he proceeded to plan and execute nearly a dozen major amphibious landings in the central and southern Philippines over a four-month period.

  Samuel Eliot Morison writes: “It is still somewhat of a mystery how and whence . . . MacArthur derived his authority to use United States Forces to liberate one Philippine island after another. He had no specific directive for anything subsequent to Luzon . . . the J.C.S. simply permitted MacArthur to do as he pleased, up to a point.” D. Clayton James observes that these illegitimate engagements were “surely MacArthur’s most audacious challenge to the Joint Chiefs during the war, but neither he nor they seem to have regarded his action as an affront to them. It is little wonder that this same commander less than six years later would act with insolence toward his superiors in Washington.”

  Confronted with a fait accompli, the Pentagon lamely gave retroactive endorsement to his unauthorized invasions of seven Philippine islands—Negros, Guimaras, Tawitawi, Palawan, Panay, and Cebu—and, since he had gone that far, they gave him carte blanche for attacks on eastern Mindanao, Bohol, and Jolo in the Philippines; Tarakan Island, off the northeast coast of Borneo; and Brunei and Balikpapan on the Borneo mainland. It is difficult to understand why any of these operations were necessary. As Robert Ross Smith notes in Triumph in the Philippines, the army’s official history of the archipelago’s reconquest, none of these previously bypassed islands had “strategic importance in the campaign for the recapture of the Philippines and the East Indies.” Later MacArthur claimed that he had been depriving the Japanese of Indies’ oil, but after Leyte Gulf the enemy was no longer capable of transporting petroleum northward,
and Kenney’s bombers had pounded the Balikpapan refineries so hard that they could not be rebuilt in less than a year. The General’s real motives were personal, political, and humanitarian. He wanted to become the liberator of all the Philippines. He thought it important to prepare Indonesia for the return of peace—he proposed to take Java as well as Borneo, but the Joint Chiefs drew the line there—and he believed the Japanese, enraged by their defeats, might turn savagely on the natives, especially the Filipinos. The last of these had some validity. Certainly the Japanese had showed themselves capable of such atrocities. But these decisions weren’t his to make. His superiors, because they failed to rebuke him, must share responsibility for them. His arrogance and their timidity postponed a showdown, but at a dreadful price. Eventually he would have to be disciplined, and the cost in pride and passion would be exorbitant.108

  That much having been said, it must be added that each of the operations was a strategic masterwork, magnificently executed, with a minimal loss of life. As he had promised Eichelberger before Manila, his deployment of Eichelberger’s Eighth Army resembled Robert E. Lee’s use of J.E.B. Stuart, moving light forces in great sweeping maneuvers that hit the Japanese where least suspected and, using terrain to cut enemy troops off from their supply bases, trapped them in culs-de-sac. Typically he landed on an obscure beach the Japanese had left unguarded and chased them into the hills, where forewarned guerrillas ambushed them. These feats attracted little attention in the United States, except among the families of GIs fighting there, because the country was preoccupied with the collapse of the Third Reich and because the places he captured were, if anything, less familiar than his New Guinea conquests. His communiques were sprinkled with names like the Agusan Valley, Bohol Island, and the Sulu Archipelago; with allusions to anchorages like Macajalar Bay, Butuan Bay, Sarangani Bay, and Davao Gulf; with references to such towns as Puerto Princesa, Sanga Sanga, Bacolod, Parang, Kabacan, Digos, and Impalutao. Yet any student of warfare must admire his virtuoso performances. There was so much glory that he shared it, for once, with his field commander. Eichelberger elatedly wrote Miss Em that “when I went in to talk with the Big Chief I never received so many bouquets in my life,” that while the General had criticized “your palsy-walsy” as an “old-fashioned Army general who wants to do everything by the rules . . . the type like Meade, the Union general in the Civil War who used to make Grant so angry,” the Eighth Army, MacArthur said, “had been handled just the way he would have wanted to have it done had he been an army commander— speed, dash, brilliance, etc.”109