The October 20, 1944, landing had taken the Japanese by surprise, and Douglas MacArthur was holding on to the Philippine island of Leyte by little more than an eyelash, as the enemy fought furiously to prevent the Americans from gaining a stronghold in the islands. The Philippines, after all, were the key to protecting Japan’s lifeline to the oil, rubber, rice, copra (from coconut), and mineral resources of Southeast Asia and the southern seas. Since moving south, following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had virtually made slaves of the populations of numerous nations and islands and set them to working for the self-defined Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was, in fact, the Japanese empire.
For several days after the landing, MacArthur’s men had fought a bitter inch-by-inch battle to push the Japanese army back from its beachhead, but unbeknownst to the Americans a potential disaster was brewing on the high seas. The Japanese Imperial Navy had summoned its entire naval force—four fleets, one from as far away as Brunei—a mixture of aircraft carriers and heavy surface ships, including the monster “super battleships” Yamato and Musashi whose 18-inch guns were superior to any warship in the world. What followed would turn out to be the greatest naval battle in history.
The Japanese strategy was to get their heavy ships to the invasion beaches at Leyte, isolate the American troops by destroying the U.S. naval ships there, wreck the supply dumps on the beaches, then pound the U.S. forces into oblivion. The gunfire of just one super battleship could equal the firepower of nine battleships and twenty cruisers in the combined Japanese fleets. To ensure the safe passage of these valuable vessels, to get at the American beachhead, the Japanese avoided being caught in open ocean by timing night passages through two straits—one northern and one southern—that provided passages through the Philippine Islands from the west into the Leyte Gulf and the Philippine Sea.
Still, an enormous obstacle for the Japanese was lack of aircraft and pilots following an ill-advised tangle four months earlier with American naval forces in the Battle of the Philippine Sea or, as it became known, the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” In an overwhelming U.S. victory the Japanese lost three fleet carriers and some six hundred warplanes—and their pilots—for all practical purposes putting the Japanese air arm out of business.
On the American side, the U.S. Navy had assigned Admiral Thomas Kincaid’s Seventh Fleet to protect MacArthur and facilitate his invasion of Leyte and, in addition, Admiral Bull Halsey’s Third Fleet in case the Japanese came in full force with their navy, which they did.
It was Halsey’s practice to go after Japanese aircraft carriers whenever and wherever he found them and in the Leyte Gulf battle he found them far to the north of the invasion site. The problem was that the enemy carriers were decoys, because following the Philippine Sea debacle the Japanese navy barely had enough planes and pilots to man a single light carrier. Not realizing this, Halsey took the bait and steamed his fleet out of the action, chasing a phantom enemy carrier force.
The battle began in earnest during the early morning hours of October 25, when the powerful Japanese task force from Brunei entered the San Bernardino Strait near Palawan Island. It was spotted by two American submarines, USS Darter and the USS Dace, which shadowed Admiral Takeo Kurita’s armada of six battleships, twelve cruisers, and ten destroyers before firing numerous torpedo spreads that sank two cruisers—including Admiral Kurita’s flagship Atago, which went down so swiftly the admiral had to be fished out of the sea—and knocked still another cruiser out of the fight.
Shaken, Kurita continued on through the strait where he reached the Philippine Sea and steamed southward toward the Leyte beachhead. Because of confusion and some questionable orders by Halsey, the only thing standing in Kurita’s way was “Taffy 3,” a grab bag of sixteen small, slow, unarmored light escort carriers with several hundred older-model planes and some unarmored destroyers. From a distance, however, Admiral Kurita wrongly perceived that he had encountered Halsey’s fleet carriers. The Americans were just as surprised to see the large battleships and cruisers looming ahead of them, but Rear Admiral Thomas Sprague immediately ordered the escort carriers to launch all planes with whatever weapons were on hand. This Taffy 3 did, convincingly, attacking the big enemy battleships and cruisers like a swarm of pesky horseflies—in fact, another of Kurita’s cruisers was sunk. Hits were made on both super battleships. When all the American torpedoes were used up, the torpedo bombers made “dummy runs” at the enemy just to keep them feeling threatened.
By all rights, Sprague’s weak force should have been destroyed in detail by the heavy guns of Kurita’s battleships and cruisers, but Taffy 3 laid down such a heavy smoke screen it simply vanished from sight on the bridges of the enemy ships. The defense of Leyte by Taffy 3 was one of the more heroic events of the naval war in the Pacific. Faced with this startling development, and confused by faulty communications, Kurita retreated back through the San Bernardino Strait, persuaded that he had saved his entire fleet from annihilation.
Meanwhile, further confusion developed on the American side when Halsey sent a message that seemed to indicate he had detached a powerful force of U.S. battleships and cruisers under Admiral Willis “Ching” Lee to guard the approaches to Leyte Gulf, but in fact he had meant to say that he would form such a force, if necessary. In any case, it quickly became necessary as reports from scout planes, PT boats, and submarines signaled that several large Japanese task forces were converging on Leyte Gulf. In the south, elements of Kincaid’s Seventh Fleet were engaging Japanese warships coming through the Surigao Strait and he sent out a plain-language message: MY SITUATION IS CRITICAL, and requested “fast battleships and air strikes” from Halsey. Matters were made more difficult by the fact that there was no unified command in the battle. MacArthur could ask Halsey for help but could not order him.
Halsey had located, and was attempting to destroy, the Japanese force that had decoyed him north. Fortunately, however, Kincaid’s emergency message soon found its way to the desk of the commander in chief of the Pacific Theater of Operations (CINCPAC), Admiral Chester Nimitz, in Honolulu, three thousand miles away. Nimitz ordered his operations people to get in touch with Halsey and find out what had happened to Ching Lee’s task force, which was supposed to be protecting the approaches to the Leyte Gulf.
Halsey, in the midst of a battle of his own, took offense when it seemed that CINCPAC wanted to know where he was and he went into one of his rages when at the end of the message he read the statement THE WORLD WANTS TO KNOW, referring to where he was. What Halsey at the time took for sarcasm is now believed to be “padding” or “wrapping,” in which the teletype operator sending secure messages would include nonsense phrases to fool the enemy, should anyone be eavesdropping.
In any case, Halsey was soon steering back south and between him and Kincaid the Japanese took another beating from which they would never fully recover. The Imperial Navy’s toll at the end of the Battle of Leyte Gulf was one fleet carrier and two light carriers sunk; three battleships, ten cruisers, and eleven destroyers sunk; three hundred Japanese planes (mostly land based) destroyed; and 12,500 sailors killed. U.S. losses were comparatively negligible. From then on, the Allies had nearly total command of the seas, and at least for the moment Douglas MacArthur and his army were safe.1
THE RELIEF OVER THE OUTCOME of the Leyte Gulf fracas did not last long. The Japanese army had lots more land-based fighter planes, bombers, and fighter-bombers up on Luzon, the northernmost Philippine island, and no misgivings about using them, especially against MacArthur who, because of the poor conditions of the captured Japanese airfields on Leyte, still required all of his aviation support from the navy. According to MacArthur the Japanese maintained “a continuous, powerful, aerial offensive” against the U.S. landing force never before seen in the Pacific war.
To make matters worse, Leyte saw the introduction of the dangerous and fearsome kamikaze weapon, in which half-trained Japanese suicide pilots made themselves human bombs by personally crashing onto the decks of American warships. To counter this, the U.S. Navy had to keep heavy “air caps” over the fleet hoping to dispatch the kamikazes before they struck, which meant far less air support for MacArthur’s ground operations.
Heavy monsoon rains hampered the advance, and the Japanese began sending major reinforcements onto Leyte. Declaring (against his better judgment) that the decisive Battle of the Philippines “will be fought on Leyte,” the Japanese commander Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita—the infamous “Tiger of Malaya”—boasted to reporters, “The only words I spoke to the British commander [Lieutenant General Sir Alfred Percival] during negotiations for the surrender of Singapore were ‘All I want to hear from you is yes or no.’ I expect to put the same question to MacArthur.” For his part, MacArthur said General Yamashita “talked too much.”2
The Japanese were receiving their supplies and reinforcements through the port of Ormoc on the opposite, or western, side of the island, and they had measured out something known as the “Yamashita Line” constructed of heavy logs and interlocking trenches, at which the Imperial Japanese Army intended to stop the American advance.
After a month of bitter fighting, which included three days of a typhoon, the Allied forces had seemingly stalled. MacArthur, however, in a brilliant strategic move, joined with the navy on December 6 to convoy a full infantry division around the southern tip of Leyte and land it on beaches near Ormoc. Within five days they had seized the city and the port, slamming shut Leyte’s “back door,” splitting the center of the Yamashita Line, and trapping the Japanese army between the two pincers. As always, the Japanese fought valiantly and viciously and almost to the last man.
On December 18, MacArthur received word that he had been promoted to the five-star rank of general of the army. In his memoirs he wrote, “The old thrill of promotion and decoration was gone. Perhaps I had heard too often the death wail of mangled men—or perhaps the years were beginning to take their inexorable toll.” Maybe so, but he was not about to let the occasion pass by without a bit of drama. MacArthur told his aides to collect silver coins from America, Australia, the Netherlands, and the Philippines—representing the forces he commanded—and have a silversmith from Tacloban melt the coins down and fashion the metal into five silver stars shaped into a wreath. These were pinned by his aides on his collar lapels after a ceremony at General Headquarters the day after Christmas 1944.3
Meantime MacArthur conducted operations of the South West Pacific Area (SWPA) command in Tacloban from a luxurious two-story estate whose owner, a successful businessman named Walter Price, was murdered by the Japanese after they seized his house for their officers’ club. The building soon became the object of a general attack by Japanese aircraft and snipers.
Smoking his oversize corncob pipe, MacArthur could frequently be seen day and night pacing the spacious veranda of the Price house. Some of the younger staff members swore they could tell the general’s mood by the way he paced and puffed. When an idea began to germinate in his fertile mind, they said his pace quickened and his pipe smoke resembled that of a choo-choo train. He got little or no exercise other than the pacing but somebody figured out that he paced approximately five miles a day.4
People were also stunned by MacArthur’s lack of concern during enemy bombing raids. Once as he was briefing senior army and navy people, Japanese planes made a bombing run at the house. Standing at a map with pointer in hand, MacArthur never missed a beat but continued to speak calmly as explosions burst all around them. When he concluded his talk he turned to a subordinate and said, “Better look in the kitchen and outside. That bomb was close and someone may be hurt.” At least three people in the kitchen had been wounded by the bomb and one was killed, according to what Eighth Army commander Robert L. Eichelberger told his chief of staff.
Another time, a U.S. antiaircraft shell, apparently aimed at low-flying enemy planes, crashed through the wall and landed on a couch in MacArthur’s bedroom. Fortunately it was a dud. MacArthur had it defused and taken to the antiaircraft unit commander with the message, “Bill, ask your gunners to raise their sights just a little bit higher.”5 The Japanese then sent a number of snipers to lurk at the edges of Tacloban waiting for targets of opportunity. MPs and other military units killed a number of these but it is nevertheless astonishing that MacArthur, with all of his public appearances—including the pacing on his veranda or patio—was not a victim.
A month after the original landings, MacArthur was paid a visit by Turner Catledge and A. H. Sulzberger of the New York Times. Catledge wrote that MacArthur’s quarters were “a principal target,” and had been “strafed repeatedly and was pockmarked inside and out with machine-gun bullet holes. My room had a gaping hole in the wall made the week before by a 20-mm. shell.”
The two joined MacArthur on his veranda for “one of the most fascinating talks with a public figure that either of us had ever experienced,” wrote Catledge. “As he spoke 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.”
Others came away with similar impressions. To a news correspondent, MacArthur began forecasting the future of the world and predicting that “the lands touching the Pacific will determine the course of history for the next ten thousand years.” But as usual he wound up his conversations with a blast against “that crowd in Washington,” who were by now guilty “of treason and sabotage” for not properly supplying the war in the Pacific.6
It was around this time that MacArthur’s relationship with his imperious chief of staff Richard Sutherland became severely strained. Sutherland, it seemed, had taken a mistress while in Australia, one Elaine Bessemer-Clarke, daughter of the wealthy Sir Norman Brookes, a two-time Wimbledon tennis champion and his wife, Mabel, a leading Australian socialite. Both Elaine and Sutherland were married with children, but while his marriage was somewhat nondescript she was married to Captain Reginald Bessemer-Clarke, the British heir to the Bessemer steel fortune, who was presently residing in a Japanese prison, having been captured when the Australian unit he was serving with surrendered in Malaya.
The damage to international relations if the affair became public did not seem to factor into Lieutenant General Sutherland’s thinking, for he not only took Elaine along when MacArthur moved from Melbourne to Brisbane, he somehow managed to finagle her into the U.S. WACs (Women’s Army Corps) as an army captain with no qualifications whatsoever. By most accounts she was an unpleasant, domineering person “much like Sutherland himself” whom—speculates MacArthur biographer Geoffrey Perret—Sutherland fell for because “like other bullies who are cowards at heart, he fell in love with her because she dominated him.”7
A story about Elaine and Sutherland is told by MacArthur’s B-17 pilot Major Henry C. Godman, who some months earlier obtained a jeep for himself that he proudly upholstered in red leather. Elaine coveted the vehicle and one day, when Godman was off flying, she called the motor pool and commandeered it for herself. When Godman returned and found the jeep missing, he discovered the cause and, using his spare keys, quietly liberated it from “Captain Bessemer-Clarke.”
Within two days the astonished Godman was standing before Sutherland who told him, “You have been transferred from MacArthur’s headquarters. I’m sending you back to combat.” Having already flown the required quota of thirty missions, Godman protested, but to no avail. It remains an amazing and revolting example of people who have such little regard for their fellow man that they would put someone’s life in jeopardy over a jeep.8
In any event, the affair between the WAC captain—with her husband a Japanese prisoner—and the chief of staff of the supreme commander of the South West Pacific Area first came to MacArthur’s attention when he discovered Sutherland had moved Elaine to Hollandia, New Guinea, and MacArthur ordered him to send her home.
Imagine MacArthur’s astonishment then, and surprise, when he learned that Sutherland had not only defied his order, he had even moved her to Leyte and installed her in a house that he had ordered built by the corps of engineers—right down the road.
An enraged MacArthur stormed into Sutherland’s office and began to curse and berate him “using every profanity acquired in a lifetime of military service.” He reminded Sutherland in between oaths that he had given him a direct, written order to get rid of the woman and threatened him with arrest. MacArthur’s browbeating went on for fifteen minutes without cessation and was so disconcerting that the military sentry at the door was said to have put his fingers in his ears. “That woman will be flown out of Tacloban immediately! And if she is not out of here within 24 hours I will court martial you for disobedience of a direct order!” shouted MacArthur.9
This time the dour chief of staff seemed to get the message for, as a staff officer recalled, the speed with which Sutherland had Elaine shipped out of Leyte reminded him of “the stunt in the Barnum & Bailey Circus of the man shot from the mouth of a cannon.”
After this incident, it was said that things were never the same between MacArthur and his chief of staff. Why he didn’t fire Sutherland is puzzling, but MacArthur did apparently begin to rely on, as a confidant, his intelligence chief Lieutenant Colonel Courtney Whitney. MacArthur had known Whitney as a Manila lawyer before the war and, in time, it was said that Whitney became MacArthur’s “alter ego.”
WITHIN TWO WEEKS AFTER THE LANDING at Ormoc, the American army had killed about 50,000 of the estimated 60,000- to 75,000-man Japanese army and took only 386 prisoners. General Eichelberger stated that his Eighth Army, charged with “mopping up,” killed 27,000 more Japanese. The rest are presumed to have escaped north through the jungle, or starved there. (Another 20,000 to 40,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors were thought to have perished in replacement convoys from Japan that were sunk by U.S. Navy planes and submarines.) MacArthur was particularly proud that there were no survivors from the Japanese 16th Division, which had implemented the cruel and disgraceful “Death March” on Bataan. American casualties since the landing at Ormoc were 15,500, with 3,508 killed.10
MacArthur also assumed civil duties regarding governance of the Philippines, which was then being run by a Japanese-backed puppet regime in Manila. This put him at odds with the difficult and powerful U.S. secretary of the interior Harold Ickes. Before the invasion of Leyte, Ickes wrote MacArthur that it was his intention to “take charge” of the Philippine government once the country was liberated, a notion MacArthur found unacceptable. “He seemed to think of the islands as another one of his National Parks,” MacArthur wrote afterward. “It was his claim that the archipelago [the Philippines had been a U.S.-affiliated commonwealth before the Japanese took over] was a ‘possession’ of the United States.”
After MacArthur made his escape from Corregidor in 1942, and it was clear the country would fall to the Japanese, Philippine president Manuel Quezon, vice president Sergio Osmeña, and other officials made their way to Washington, D.C., to form a government in exile. Upon Quezon’s death in 1944, Osmeña became president. MacArthur had him brought back for the invasion with the intention of formally installing him in office once a beachhead was secured.
Ickes violently objected to this plan, assuming that because many Filipinos had cooperated with the Japanese they were a traitorous race undeserving of self-government.* It was evident, MacArthur said, that Ickes “intended to shoot or hang any Filipino who had anything to do with the puppet government, no matter what reasons they had for cooperating.”11 Because of his service in the islands before the war, MacArthur was familiar with most of the officials who later cooperated with Japan. Many in high administrative positions, MacArthur said, collaborated in order to alleviate the ordeal and suffering imposed on the people by the Japanese.
When the war began, the Roosevelt administration had urged MacArthur to assume control of the Philippine government, but he’d resisted that idea on grounds that the Filipinos were capable of governing themselves. Secretary of War Henry Stimson agreed with MacArthur’s plan, which was to restore civil government to each Philippine province as soon as the Japanese were pushed out. As to alleged collaborators or disloyalists, MacArthur promised that they would be brought to a fair trial under terms of the Philippine constitution.
MACARTHUR’S NEXT BIG GOAL was the island of Luzon and the nation’s capital, Manila. Because the soil of Leyte was so marshy, General Kenney and the army engineers were still unable to provide satisfactory runways for his air force, so MacArthur decided to invade the island of Mindoro, to the north, right below Luzon, and establish airfields there. He ran into trouble when Admiral Kincaid balked at the idea of sailing his light, slow, and unarmed escort carriers with the invasion convoy because they would be highly vulnerable to enemy kamikaze attacks.
In fact a single kamikaze could sink an escort carrier and had done so during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Sometime in the afternoon of November 30, MacArthur cornered Kincaid in his quarters and began trying to persuade him to change his mind. For more than an hour he belabored the admiral, “giving him hell about [his] fear of kamikazes,” questioning his loyalty, pacing furiously, waving his hands, sometimes whispering, cajoling, and all the while Kincaid was slumped exhaustedly on a bedpost; when he was finished, said Turner Catledge, who witnessed the episode, MacArthur walked up to Kincaid, put his arms on his shoulders, and said, “But Tommy, I love you still. Let’s go to dinner.”12
Afterward, Admiral Kincaid relented and the invasion got under way on December 12 and landed successfully on December 15. Mindoro was lightly garrisoned, the Japanese were taken completely by surprise, and the operation was successful, although kamikazes smashed through an air cap of P-38s and crashed into two destroyers, three landing ships, and an escort carrier. It was the worst amphibious landing the navy had experienced since a heavy-casualty debacle on Italy’s coast at Anzio earlier that year.
By December 23 engineers had established two runways, and a third airfield was near completion. Both MacArthur’s Sixth Army under Krueger and Eighth Army under Eichelberger were transferred to Mindoro. This latest invasion also forced Yamashita to cancel a major counterinvasion he had organized because his line of communications had been severed. Landing on Mindoro was a decisive move by MacArthur, without which, the official army history says, MacArthur’s Luzon operations would have been “considerably more hazardous and difficult.”
The Luzon invasion began with a massive subterfuge. MacArthur had Kenney’s air force fly dummy missions over southern Luzon, and bombers bombed targets in the south. Photographic planes flew over southern targets; Kincaid’s navy cleared mines in southern harbors; PT boats patrolled southern waters; and guerrilla groups were instructed to harass Japanese operations in the south.
At sunrise on January 9, 1945, nearly a thousand ships lay just offshore in the Lingayen Gulf, a bight in the South China Sea on the northwest coast of Luzon, and the American Sixth Army began landing on the beaches. “No plan ever worked better,” MacArthur said.13
It was not, however, without travails. As soon as the American convoys were spotted by the Japanese, the kamikazes began their dreadful work. Even though General Kenney had planned to keep an air cap of at least sixty fighters over each U.S. convoy as it came within kamikaze range, some of the suicide planes inevitably broke through. Before it was over, kamikazes had crashed on forty-seven U.S. Navy ships and one Australian cruiser, sinking four and badly damaging the others and leaving more than 2,100 casualties, with 738 men, mostly sailors, dead. The kamikazes seemed to be aiming at the capital ships, which was a relief of sorts to MacArthur who told an aide that if the kamikazes began attacking the troopships they might have to turn back.
As they neared Luzon, MacArthur could often be seen at the rail of his flagship, the cruiser USS Boise, watching the action: a sky full of whining warplanes, deafening antiaircraft fire, kamikazes splashing into the sea, ships suddenly engulfed in flame.
When they passed Corregidor in late afternoon, MacArthur became visibly riveted by the sight of Bataan and the entrance to Manila Bay. “I could not leave the rail,” he said. “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.” As night fell, a Japanese destroyer came barreling out of Manila Bay and was immediately set upon by four American destroyers. Gunfire hit the enemy ship’s magazine and she exploded in spectacular fashion, a sight that could be seen clearly from the decks of Boise.14
From that point on, the convoys were beset by intensified kamikaze attacks and swarms of Japanese midget submarines, looking to MacArthur like “black whales.” When the hundreds of American ships finally arrived and anchored at Lingayen, the Japanese sent out seventy small suicide motor craft packed with explosives and instructions to ram as many ships as possible. U.S. destroyers took care of most of them but not before they sank two landing craft and damaged four LSTs (landing ship tanks).
When it was over, MacArthur’s battle strategy proved solid and bold. Once Sixth Army established a beachhead and began moving inland toward Manila, Yamashita would undoubtedly move as much of his army as possible northward to stop the Americans. That’s when elements of Eichelberger’s Eighth Army would land about midway along Luzon’s west coast, which by then, according to plan, should be lightly defended. Once ashore, both armies would then “close like a vice on the enemy and destroy him,” MacArthur said.15
It has been suggested by more recent historians that Yamashita knew all along that MacArthur would land at Lingayen Gulf but was fearful to meet him on the beaches, instead preferring to dig in on the mountains and hills, then hit the Americans in the flank and cut off their drive south. But the Americans, too, suspected that the Japanese thought they would land at Lingayen, for that was where their own General Homma had landed in 1941, and the area contained the best beaches on Luzon. Even if Yamashita planned to strike the Americans hard on their southward march, there is little evidence that he attempted to do so. Also Yamashita must have recognized the futility of attacking across the broad central plain where the American mechanized forces could best employ their superiority in planes, tanks, and self-propelled artillery.
Whatever the Japanese strategy, the men of four divisions of General Krueger had landed to almost no resistance and, despite Krueger’s misgivings, headed down Route 3, which ran a hundred miles through the center of Luzon’s central plain to the capital city of Manila. Even though MacArthur’s SWPA headquarters intelligence section had forecasted that Yamashita’s remaining army was 152,000-strong, Krueger’s own intelligence people thought he had as many as 250,000.
MacArthur tried to argue that that figure was too high, but Krueger was unpersuaded. In fact, they were both wrong. The Japanese army on Luzon was 275,000-strong but because of the ravagings of Halsey’s Third Carrier Fleet the Japanese lines of communication were so disrupted that Yamashita was experiencing major shortages of ammunition and other supplies. As a result, Krueger’s army was able to race fifty miles down Route 3 in five days to capture Clark Field and its six airstrips. It had cost the Americans just 250 men killed. The difficulty, however, quickly set in. The Americans soon discovered that the Japanese ensconced in the mountains had the runways under artillery fire and it became necessary for the infantry to assault the mountains and drive the Japanese beyond artillery range so that General Kenney could bring in his P-38s, B-24s, and B-17s.
MacArthur was elated during this period, having traveled in the forefront of the infantry drive, sometimes even getting ahead of it. At one point, riding with his personal physician, Colonel Roger Olaf Egeberg, MacArthur suddenly shouted for his jeep driver to stop. With Japanese artillery peppering the road ahead, he led Egeberg over to an old black muzzle-loading cannon set in concrete with a plaque and told him, “On that spot, Doc, about forty-five years ago, my father’s aide-de-camp was killed standing at his side.”
Egeberg looked at the cannon, looked at MacArthur, and shouted to the jeep driver, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”16
Meantime, on January 29, the XI Corps of General Eichelberger’s Eighth Army had successfully landed along Luzon’s west coast, south of Clark Field, and were pushing inland. Krueger, however, conscious of the numbers of Japanese on the island, was wary of a big counterattack from Yamashita, and the longer he waited for it the warier he got, keeping his army dawdling around Clark Field.
When Krueger balked at pushing on immediately for Manila, fifty miles away, MacArthur prodded him by announcing a race between Sixth and Eighth Armies to see which could first liberate the city. That put some fire into Krueger and he resumed his southward drive.17
For his part, Eichelberger planned to have his 11th Airborne Division make an amphibious assault about fifty miles southwest of Manila and march on the city from there. But General Kenney, the airman, made an excellent suggestion—why not have the division make an airborne assault on the airport, barely three miles from the center of the city. It would save all that marching and fighting and, most important, time. The air force chief promised to secure for the 11th Division all the air transport and close air support it needed. Kenney’s was a bold idea, but Eichelberger lacked vision. He feared the risks were too great, that his men might parachute into a hoard of Japanese tanks or that the Japanese might have put obstacles on the drop zones, and so forth.
Meantime, MacArthur, unaware of the discussion between Kenney and Eichelberger, had decided that his idea of turning the liberation of Manila into a contest between commanders worked so well that he tried it again with Krueger, who was expecting the crack First Cavalry Division to land at Lingayen on January 27. Why not make it a race between the 37th Division, which was already at Clark Field, and the Cav that was just now hitting the beaches?
To supervise progress and be close to the action, MacArthur moved his headquarters farther south to a sugar plantation hacienda near Tarlac. What he had to observe was three infantry divisions converging on Manila, about 60,000 men. The 11th Airborne had the roughest time of it; the Japanese had thoroughly fortified numerous lines of defense south of the city, including Nielson Field, where Kenney had suggested to Eichelberger that he parachute the division in. For days, intense rivalries were involved—infantry versus cavalry versus airborne; Sixth Army versus Eighth Army.
The cavalry finally won the race. On February 2 the First Cav organized two “flying columns” and tore down Route 5, capturing bridges before the Japanese had a chance to dynamite them. In one case, after the defenders had lit the fuses and fled, brave troopers rushed to extinguish them. At another point, they encountered a convoy of Japanese coming from the direction of Manila and machine-gunned the startled enemy soldiers as the two columns advanced.
By February 3 the lead column was in the northern Manila suburbs and, before dark, inside the city limits. Their first stop was Santo Tomas University, which almost three years earlier had been turned into a prison camp for nearly four thousand American and other Allied civilians. The guards at the gate put up a fight but were quickly overcome and the First Cav freed the miserable prisoners, who were pitifully ragged and emaciated. Next they liberated Malacañang Palace near the center of the city. By February 5 the rest of First Cav was encamped at Grace Park just north of the city.
On February 4 the 37th Division, having overcome numerous obstacles, managed to liberate Old Bilibid Prison containing a mixture of thirteen hundred American military and civilian prisoners. The Japanese guards fled, leaving the victors to assume that enemy resistance would be light.
Around the same time, the 11th Airborne Division, just south of the airport, encountered the redoubtable Genko Line, fortified with mortars and machine guns and artillery, some of it from the heavy guns of ships sunk or damaged in the harbor.
Although the fighting there was ferocious, MacArthur’s headquarters on February 6 foolishly sent out a bulletin proclaiming: “Our forces are rapidly clearing the enemy from Manila. Our converging columns entered the city and surrounded the Jap defenders.” This elicited congratulatory telegrams from Roosevelt, Stimson, Churchill et al. Moreover, they began planning a big World War I Champs-Élysées-type victory parade through the broad avenues of the city, led by MacArthur in an “army drab” Cadillac convertible.18
What nobody knew—including Yamashita, who had pulled his army troops out of Manila after declaring it an “open city” (meaning that it was to be spared fighting over)—was that still lurking within Manila’s limits were 20,000 Japanese marines under Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, a bloodthirsty fanatic who had no intention of surrendering or retreating. Before he would let the Americans conquer the city he determined to reduce it to ashes and its million-plus inhabitants to crow bait.
When the Japanese began destroying the port facilities, a fire spread quickly to shacks in the poorer section of Manila and turned into an enormous conflagration that burned for several days, laying tens of thousands of homes to utter ruin.
On February 7, MacArthur finally entered the city and visited the now free inmates of Old Bilibid Prison who “dragged themselves to some semblance of attention beside their cots.” As MacArthur “passed slowly down the scrawny, suffering column, a murmur accompanied me as each man barely speaking above a whisper, said, ‘You’re back,’ or ‘You made it,’ or ‘God bless you.’ I could only reply, ‘I’m a little late …’ I passed on out of the barracks compound and looked around at the debris that was no longer important to those inside: the tin cans they had eaten from, the dirty old bottles they had drunk from. It made me ill just to look at them.”19
It was around this time that word got back from Filipino guerrillas that a large compound of U.S. prisoners were in desperate straits near the town of Cabanatuan. For three years following the Death March, these men had been starved and abused by the Japanese and were dying at an alarming rate. Worse, word had come that the Japanese had begun executing American prisoners if it appeared they would be repatriated.
A pilot who had been a prisoner at the camp on Palawan Island but managed to escape told the horrifying tale of what his Japanese captors did when they saw a U.S. convoy in their area (it was actually headed to Mindoro). They herded all 160 prisoners into a covered air raid trench and poured gasoline over them. Then they set them afire and machine-gunned those who tried to escape (somehow, nine of them did). It was a chilling forewarning of what was to come for the remaining American prisoners as the U.S. Army seized territory from the Japanese.
With a sense of great urgency, a group of rangers from Krueger’s Sixth Army developed a daring plan to lead an expedition thirty miles behind Japanese lines and rescue the prisoners. The force consisted of eighty Filipino guerrillas, fourteen Philippine scouts, and one hundred twenty U.S. Army Rangers led by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci, who made a harrowing nighttime march around large Japanese concentrations to fall on the Japanese garrison of the camp.
Armed with Thompson submachine guns, a bazooka team, and a new P-61 “Black Widow” from the 547th Night Fighter Squadron the rescuers arrived in the vicinity of the camp after dark on January 30. The fighter plane pretended to be crippled and on the verge of crashing in order to distract the Japanese guards while the rescue force sneaked up to the main gate and a sergeant shot the padlock off with his .45. Then all hell broke loose. During the ensuing firefight, which lasted half an hour, an estimated five hundred to a thousand Japanese were killed, with very few U.S. casualties.
When a head count was made, 522 emaciated prisoners had been freed, out of an estimated 10,000, the rest having perished or been shipped to slave labor camps in Japan or Manchuria, an activity the Japanese began in 1944 in contemplation of being defeated in the southern islands. The POWs in Cabanatuan, however, were in such wretched condition that some died on the way to freedom, and more than a hundred oxcarts had to be commandeered to get them to safety—though with the slow speed of 2 miles an hour by the Philippine carabao, or ox, the team remained in constant fear of being attacked or overtaken by the furious Japanese.
The success of the raid was celebrated in the United States and raised a terrific storm of indignation and disgust when survivors told their stories of the brutality they had suffered—starved, beaten, shot for little or no reason. The furor added to the public’s opinion that the Japanese needed to be fully conquered, in their homeland if necessary, and punished for their behavior.
MacArthur too found himself depressed after seeing the utter degradation of the POW inmates and decided a little time at the front might cheer him up. “Doc,” he said to the unenthusiastic Egeberg, “this is getting to me. I want to go forward till we meet some fire.” (“He had no respect for sniper fire,” Egeberg wrote later.) Earlier that month, at a Japanese roadblock, MacArthur was standing up when an enemy machine gun began to chatter. An infantry lieutenant said, “We’re going after those fellers but please get down sir, we’re under fire.” MacArthur stood his ground and replied. “I’m not under fire. Those bullets are not intended for me.”20
Emboldened and accompanied by the doctor and two other aides, they rode in a jeep before getting out and walking to the sound of the battle. Rounding a corner, they came upon a scorched Japanese truck filled with the charred corpses of Japanese soldiers “all erect and dead—victims of a flamethrower.” They walked through an infantry platoon that was crouching under cover whose members “looked at them as though they were insane.”21
Presently, with the racket of gunshots reverberating all over the landscape, on the banks of a river they came upon a brewery that happened to be owned by the family of one of MacArthur’s aides, Andres Soriano. The workers warned that they were in Japanese territory but, recognizing Soriano, they invited the group inside for a glass of San Miguel beer.22
When it became apparent that the Americans would not be “crushed,” as ordered, Admiral Iwabuchi was ordered by Yamashita to break out of Manila and join him in the Luzon mountains. The arrival of the First Cav, however, spoiled that plan also and drove the admiral and his marines into the Intramuros, a historic walled city dating back to the 1500s when the Spanish colonialists arrived. The walls of the old fortress, made of giant stone blocks, were estimated to be forty feet thick at the bottom and rose twenty feet above the streets. It was where MacArthur’s penthouse apartment was located atop the Manila Hotel, with its vast military library containing perhaps eight thousand volumes, some from the collection of his father.23
After their interlude at the beer brewery, MacArthur led his little party forward once more to the wall of the Intramuros, where they could go no farther. Looking up they saw an enemy officer observing them with binoculars. Undaunted, MacArthur assumed “the stance,” for which he had become well known—erect, legs spread apart, hands on hips—and stared the Japanese officer down until at last he looked the other way.
As they walked along the wall, MacArthur’s party began to attract the attention of enemy snipers who fired no fewer than twenty-eight bullets at them, according to Egeberg, before he stopped counting. An American infantryman under cover warned them about a machine gun ahead that suddenly opened up, prompting MacArthur to at last abandon his excursion and stalk slowly away “showing his contempt for peril.”
When Egeberg wanted to know why MacArthur unnecessarily put himself in danger, he was told, “Hell Doc, those weren’t real sharpshooters. They were just a scared rear guard. Aiming at me, they were likelier to hit you!”24
During the first week of February MacArthur decided to visit his old apartment suite atop the Manila Hotel. He arrived with a patrol from the 37th Division, which was promptly pinned down by Japanese machine gun fire from the hotel itself. As he lay on the ground he watched in astonishment as flames and smoke suddenly shot from the penthouse. The Japanese had set it afire.
Two men with submachine guns accompanied him when the patrol worked its way to the hotel. “Every landing was a fight,” MacArthur wrote in his memoirs. Of the penthouse, nothing was left but ashes, and a Japanese colonel lay dead in the threshold, flanked by two large oriental vases presented to MacArthur’s father by the former emperor of Japan. Everything was gone, MacArthur agonized, his fine military library, grand piano, silver, and china—the possessions of a lifetime. “It was not a pleasant moment,” he said.
KENNEY HAD WANTED TO BOMB the Japanese out of Intramuros but MacArthur forbade it. “You would probably kill off the Japs all right,” he told the airman, “but there are several thousand Filipino citizens in there who would be killed too. The world would hold up its hands in horror if we did anything like that.” Whatever misgivings MacArthur had, he nevertheless lifted his ban on the use of artillery in the city, and soon the big guns filled the air with great booms and dust.
Admiral Iwabuchi’s reaction was to send his men on a carnival of boiling vengeance in which rape, robbery, and murder became the order of the day. Nearly a hundred thousand Filipinos were slain by the Japanese in a rampage that overshadowed even the infamous Japanese Rape of Nanking in 1937–38. William Manchester, one of MacArthur’s most prominent biographers, describes it this way: “Hospitals were set afire after their patients were strapped to their beds. The corpses of males were mutilated; females of all ages were raped before they were slain, and babies’ eyeballs were gouged out and smeared on walls like jelly.” The Japanese went on a riot of arson in which a majority of Manila’s residential housing, buildings, utilities, and factories were destroyed. The enemy had to be rooted out house to house and room by room as once more the Japanese preferred to die to a man for their emperor.25
The Americans accommodated them but at a terrific cost to themselves and the city proper. The artillery MacArthur had permitted didn’t do as much damage as the Japanese campaign of arson, but it did its share. In the end, which did not come until March 3, Manila was officially declared a secured city; 16,665 Japanese marines and soldiers, including Admiral Iwabuchi, who committed suicide, were counted dead, as well as 1,010 U.S. soldiers killed in action with 5,565 others wounded.
Because most of the war correspondents assigned to SWPA were on MacArthur’s “payroll,” so to speak, little news leaked out of the savage Battle of Manila, and after the previous official announcement that Luzon had been taken MacArthur received little or no second-time congratulatory telegrams.
BY THE END OF FEBRUARY it had become apparent that Japanese resistance was coming to an end. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes had been waging a furious war with the White House to overturn MacArthur’s scheme to return the Philippines to self-governance and keep the island as a Pacific possession—with Ickes himself as a kind of czar or dictator. In the end, Roosevelt sided with MacArthur. Perhaps it was MacArthur’s argument that Ickes’s “personality was such as to insure friction” and that he had no experience in the Orient, never even made a visit, that turned the table MacArthur’s way.26 For his part, Ickes from that time on considered MacArthur an archenemy and rarely lost the opportunity to impugn him.
Nevertheless, when the U.S. invasion force had secured its beachhead, MacArthur decided to perform his long-awaited civic duty—to restore the presidency of the Philippines under the old commonwealth constitution. Thus in the early spring of 1945 MacArthur delivered a lengthy address to a gathering of Filipino civilians and his top army brass at the old Malacañang Palace, which had miraculously escaped destruction.
“More than three years have elapsed,” he told them, “years of bitterness, struggle, and sacrifice.” It was pure MacArthur. He spoke of agonizing over obeying Roosevelt’s order for him to withdraw. He painted a picture of prewar Manila with its lovely churches, boulevards, and public and historic buildings and apologized for the damage done. He spoke of democracy and “destroying evil forces that have sought to suppress it by the brutality of the sword.” He installed Osmeña, “on behalf of my government,” as president of a free Philippine commonwealth and declared Manila “the Citadel of Democracy of the East.”
Then his voice suddenly cracked and he choked up; tears filled his eyes and he could not go on for a long, tense moment with everyone looking up at him, their own breath caught up in awe. But he recovered and finished, at the end asking the audience to join him in the Lord’s Prayer.
Later MacArthur said of the moment, “To others it may seem like the culmination of a panorama of physical and spiritual disaster. [But] it had killed something inside me to see my men die.”
It was too true; whatever his other personal deficiencies, MacArthur cared deeply for the welfare of his soldiers. Any combat general, MacArthur perhaps more than most, realizes that men under his command will die, and he has to do everything he can to keep the cost low. George Patton’s method was to keep moving fast and hit hard on the theory that a slow, drawn-out battle will cause more casualties than a swift, fatal strike. MacArthur’s approach was different; he liked carefully planned, methodically executed attacks along paths of least resistance to maneuver the enemy where he could best get at him.
He remained dismayed at the navy’s style of fighting and shook his head at the terrible casualties taken by the Marine Corps at such places as Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, and Saipan, which he felt were out of proportion to the number of troops employed. His own casualties in the battle to retake Luzon were bad enough: more than 10,000 Allied soldiers killed and 37,000 wounded. But MacArthur had two entire armies employed—nearly a quarter million men.
Within two weeks another alarming fact arrived adding to concerns over American men dying in increasing numbers as the Allies neared Japan: the casualty figures for the Battle of Iwo Jima, a tiny island between the Philippines and the southern Japanese mainland. Nearly 7,000 U.S. Marines had been killed out of a total of 70,000 marines employed—a nearly one-man-out-of-ten ratio.
But that number also meant it was time to close in on the Japanese home islands and someone had to command the effort. It had come down to a choice between Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur and Roosevelt picked MacArthur. Air Corps General Kenney told him about it before the official announcement because he had seen the president on a recent trip to Washington and was asked to “tell Douglas that I expect he will have a lot of work to do North of the Philippines before long.”
“I don’t believe it,” growled MacArthur when Kenney told him he “had heard a rumor that he was going to command the show in Japan.”
MacArthur said he had information that Nimitz was to be in charge and that he would be relegated to clean up the Philippines and then move south to the Dutch East Indies. “Who gave you that rumor anyhow?” he asked.
“A man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Kenney replied.27
Still, it was decided that the next invasion would be to secure airfields on the enemy stronghold of Okinawa in the northern Pacific, only three hundred miles south of Japan. It was shaping up as the worst and biggest battle yet, but MacArthur would not be in it. Nimitz’s Central Pacific Command would run that show with a combination of U.S. Marines and U.S. Army divisions. MacArthur, however, had other things to occupy him, namely the arrival of his wife Jean, son Arthur, now seven, and Ah Cheu the amah, or nanny. They had been in Australia and MacArthur had not seen them in nearly five months.
WHILE THE AMERICANS HAD mostly overtaken the Philippines, Japanese remained almost everywhere in the islands. They still needed to be suppressed, and MacArthur sent Eichelberger’s Eighth Army south to do the job while Krueger’s Sixth Army on Luzon “mopped up” the remnants of Yamashita’s force who had taken to the mountains.
In a phrase that some saw as confusing or contradictory, MacArthur in dispatches or press releases generally referred to the elimination of such concentrations as “mopping up,” a term usually understood to mean dealing with an enemy incapable of organized resistance—but in more than one case the Japanese garrisons proved far larger that the SWPA chief predicted.
For instance, MacArthur told Eichelberger he “did not believe there were four thousand Japanese left alive on Mindanao,” when in fact there were nearly twenty-four thousand.28
Included in the southernmost of these operations were Australian troops under MacArthur’s command, which caused the Australian government to balk at the notion of losing more men this close to the end of the war, but MacArthur countered by saying the assaults were in part to secure the rich oil fields of the Dutch Indies in preparation for the invasion of Japan. (Unfortunately and ironically, when Australian troops invaded Borneo they found the oil fields there so smashed up from Allied bombing they could not resume production for over a year.)
Some historians and biographers have criticized MacArthur for initiating these secondary operations because he didn’t seek permission from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But MacArthur evidently did not think he needed permission for what he considered housekeeping. The Japanese were oppressing the people throughout the archipelago and elsewhere and in his view the sooner they were disposed of the better. MacArthur was a sensitive and caring figure when it came to the civilian populations, especially in the Philippines, and he looked on the Filipinos in an almost fatherly way.
Also, MacArthur had secured from Washington a massive $100 million in relief funds to rebuild Manila, much of which had been destroyed between the pyromaniacal urges of the Japanese and the U.S. artillery bombardments during the final battle. His wife Jean was a constant presence during the relief and reconstruction effort, which seemed to subdue some of MacArthur’s critics, who had been complaining that no other officer kept his wife and family in the theater of war.
They lived during this period in a fine mansion that had survived the fighting. Casa Blanca was the home of a Mrs. Bachrach, whose husband, the country’s wealthiest car dealer, had been killed by the Japanese. It was swank, with a swimming pool, sauna, and lovely gardens. MacArthur had euchred his friend General Kenney out of the home after Kenney—who originally found the house and put in a request for it as his personal quarters—told MacArthur how great it was and, foolishly, where it was. MacArthur had been unhappy with the quarters he’d been provided prior to Jean and little Arthur’s arrival. It had been a house on the Pasig River that was “dank” and the river “a sewer” in which more than the occasional dead body floated past.29
The morning after filing his paperwork for the estate, Kenney went looking for MacArthur but he couldn’t find him. Later that day the supreme commander of SWPA informed the astonished Kenney, “George, I did a kind of dirty trick on you. I stole your house.”30
Kenney eventually one-upped his boss when he found an even swankier home in the neighborhood. Mrs. Bachrach, it seemed, had a sister who was equally rich and who had ordered her builder to construct something “better” than her sister’s house.31
After moving in, MacArthur used whatever spare time he had doting on little Arthur, instructing him to march in close order drill, reading to him from Grimms’ Fairy Tales and other children’s books. Since all the schools in Manila had been destroyed in the fighting they hired an English tutor for the youngster, who stayed with the MacArthurs throughout the war.
In the meanwhile, MacArthur and his staff were busy planning for the invasion of Japan. Although he denied it later, MacArthur thought it would be necessary to bring the Russians into the war with Japan, “with a hundred divisions in Manchuria.”
On April 12 the day Franklin Roosevelt died, MacArthur received a message from George Marshall asking his opinion of how best to end the war against Japan. One school of thought, Marshall said, recommends a blockade and constant aerial bombardment instead of invasion; the other recommends “driving straight into Japan proper.” MacArthur favored the latter.
There is nothing on the record as to MacArthur’s personal reaction to the president’s death but it must have affected him deeply. He’d been on intimate terms with Roosevelt ever since he was appointed chief of staff of the army in 1930. Neither man fully trusted the other but each enjoyed the other’s company and respected his talents. Roosevelt, for his part, had favored MacArthur over the navy, which had always wanted to control the war in the Pacific, and the president had named him as commander for the invasion of Japan.
On the other hand, MacArthur was never comfortable serving under anyone else, and probably considered Roosevelt his true boss, bypassing George Marshall and the chiefs of staff. He was therefore wary of Harry Truman when he assumed the presidency after Roosevelt’s passing. Truman was an entity unknown.
No matter who the president, MacArthur believed an invasion of Japan would be relatively easy compared with some of the battles being fought lately. He was appalled by the slaughter at Iwo Jima, and now Okinawa, which was “just awful”—12,520 soldiers and marines had shed their lives and 35,600 were wounded. In his view, the navy’s Central Pacific Command continued “needlessly” losing men’s lives by insisting on killing the Japanese to the last man.
In less than a week, in all these landings, MacArthur posited, the marines and army forces had secured all the area they needed for airfields and should have gone on the defensive and let the Japanese break themselves on the Allied lines—perhaps forgetting that is exactly what the marines did in 1942 at Guadalcanal where they suffered 7,100 dead of 60,000 engaged, a dreadful killed-to-deployed ratio in which one in every eight men died.
By now, MacArthur said, the Japanese were nearly prostrated. Japan’s navy lay at the bottom of the ocean, its air force was decimated, the means of transportation and production were smashed to atoms, and the nation’s major cities were firebombed to char.
Japan did, however, possess a large land defense force if home militias were included, filled with conscripted males between the ages of fifteen and sixty and females from seventeen to forty, some equipped only with ancient muskets, spears, bows and arrows, and scythes. All told, on paper the Japanese could field a home army of 34,600,000, but only 2,350,000 of those were regular soldiers. With the war in Europe coming to an end, even without Russia, the Allies could put twelve to fifteen entire armies into the fight, with all their artillery and armor as well as the enormous airpower they possessed.
MacArthur didn’t think it would come to that, and said so. He believed the Japanese politicians would ultimately force the army to make a peace—but it wouldn’t be easy owing to the Allied insistence on “unconditional surrender” advanced by President Roosevelt at the 1943 Casablanca Conference.
However, by this time, Japanese diplomats were known to be making entreaties to the Soviet Union, which remained officially neutral in the contest, to broker a negotiated peace in which the emperor would continue to rule. The powers in the War Department did not subscribe to this scenario and were making every effort to assemble a powerful force to invade the Japanese mainland and crush the empire for good.
WHEN KRUEGER’S SIXTH ARMY had nearly eliminated any threat from the rest of Yamashita’s Japanese on Luzon, MacArthur got a hankering for combat again and on June 2 once more cast off aboard Boise with a handful of staff members for what Eichelberger cavalierly described as a “grand tour” of the current battlefields. The big cruiser stopped at all of the large islands of the central and southern Philippines where, to the dismay of his staff—especially his personal physician Colonel Egeberg—MacArthur again insisted on going ashore into, and often beyond, the front lines.
Like George Patton, MacArthur seemed drawn to danger that fueled some militant compulsion in his psyche, perhaps needing to prove over and again that he was bulletproof; Patton himself in his letters to Beatrice had compared this sort of syndrome with steeplechasing, in which the expression “riding at breakneck speed” is no mere coin of phrase—in jumping fences and hedges, as in battle, death was always the outrider. June 10 found the cruiser Boise lying off Borneo’s Brunei Bay so that MacArthur could watch Australian troops hit the beaches to retake Brunei City. On the following day he went ashore and waded through a mile of swamp to waiting jeeps that were to take his entourage to the battlefront.
This “Brass Hat Party,” as Kenney characterized it, drove inland “to the accompaniment of an occasional sniper’s shot and a burst of machine-gun fire.” MacArthur was “enjoying himself hugely,” when a firefight broke out just ahead between an Australian tank and enemy snipers hidden in trees. The tank won, and MacArthur and party left the jeeps and walked forward to inspect the scene. Two dead Japanese lay in a ditch. MacArthur remarked that they were probably part of a suicide outfit left to resist to the last. Intensely wary, Kenney and the others were “nodd[ing] nonchalantly (as possible)” when suddenly a photographer standing right next to MacArthur collapsed to the ground with a sniper’s bullet in his shoulder.
MacArthur nevertheless wanted to move even farther forward, which was enough for Kenney, one of the few people, if not the only person, in SWPA who would stand up to the chief. He told MacArthur it was important to get back to the Boise in time for dinner; that as guests of the navy to do otherwise would be discourteous, and that the captain had promised to serve chocolate ice cream (MacArthur’s favorite) for dessert.
This caused MacArthur to smile. He said, “All right, George, we’ll go back. I wouldn’t have you miss that chocolate ice cream for anything.”32
THERE IS AMPLE EVIDENCE that MacArthur favored giving the Soviet Union concessions in the Far East for revoking their treaty and declaring war on Japan, but when he learned of the extent of the compromises agreed to by President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference he professed to be “shocked.”
Neither MacArthur nor other top military commanders were informed of the Manhattan Project, the ultra-top-secret undertaking to build an atomic bomb. They were told of the existence of the bomb only a few days before the first one was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Ten days earlier, at a top-level conference at Potsdam, Germany, the Allies had issued an ultimatum for Japan to either surrender or become, as it did in MacArthur’s words, “the victim of the most destructive and revolutionary weapon in the long history of warfare.”
Two days after the first bomb was dropped the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and the day after that a second U.S. atomic bomb destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki. That was enough for the Japanese government, which despite violent internal opposition agreed to the terms of surrender offered by the Allies.
The Truman administration picked MacArthur to preside over the formal surrender ceremonies, which were set for early September 1945. MacArthur’s staff was “unutterably opposed” to his plan of flying into Atsugi air base, near Yokohama, which was home to a large renegade band of kamikaze pilots who only days before had revolted against the surrender, stormed the palace grounds, and murdered the commanding general of the emperor’s Imperial Guard, among others. With this in mind the Japanese military had entered the air base and removed the propellers from all of the aircraft.
Nevertheless on August 30 MacArthur landed at Atsugi in his C-54 Bataan in the shadow of what his military secretary recorded as Japan’s “greatest opportunity for a final and climactic act.” Taking note of the many antiaircraft batteries surrounding the airfield and Japan’s flagrant disregard for “the usual laws of war,” Brigadier General Courtney Whitney was genuinely surprised when they were not blown out of the sky, and only after they were safely on the ground did he concede that MacArthur had been right not to worry about treachery. “He knew the basic Japanese character too well to have thus gambled blindly with death.”33
Smoking his corncob pipe, MacArthur left the plane and met General Eichelberger who had arrived a day earlier. “Well Bob,” he said, “from Melbourne to Tokyo is a long way, but this seems to be the end of the road.”
They were soon met by what Whitney called a string of “the most decrepit vehicles I have ever seen.” It was, however, the best means of transportation the Japanese could assemble for their ride to Yokohama’s New Grand Hotel, which would be the Allied headquarters for the time being. All along the tedious fifteen-mile drive past heaps of bombed-out rubble tens of thousands of armed Japanese soldiers stood at attention with their backs to MacArthur in the same “gesture of respect” they showed to their emperor.34
That evening, MacArthur was just sitting down to dinner when word came that General Wainwright was in the hotel lobby. Rising immediately, MacArthur strode toward the door when suddenly there was “Skinny” Wainwright, whom MacArthur had left in command at Bataan in 1942 and who had suffered horribly for three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. He was shriveled and walked with the aid of a cane.
“He made an effort to smile,” MacArthur said, moved to tears, “his hair was snow white and his skin looked like old shoe leather.” When MacArthur embraced his old friend, Wainwright began to choke up.
“He’d imagined himself in disgrace for having surrendered Corregidor,” said MacArthur, and he believed that he would never hold active command again.
“Why Jim,” MacArthur told him, shocked, “your old corps is yours whenever you want it.” The emotion that shone on Wainwright’s face at that moment haunted MacArthur until the day he died.35
MACARTHUR WAS SENT A FORMAL SURRENDER document approved by the highest authorities in Washington, but he was on his own as to what to say. To whom to say it, however, was a different matter—virtually a who’s who of the entire Pacific war would be on hand to witness the momentous event, which was held aboard the battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945. Besides MacArthur’s gang, there were bigwigs from every nation at war with Japan, plus Nimitz and Halsey from the navy, Hap Arnold and Jimmy Doolittle from the air force, and George Marshall and the other chiefs of the services, while nearly every foot of deck space was occupied—even the turrets and long barrels of the 16-inch guns—by jubilant sailors from the fleet.
The Japanese delegation was a woebegone lot; for a nation that made idolization of pride a matter of personal honor these high-ranking militarists and diplomats suffered the uttermost humiliation imaginable. No one would volunteer for the “odious duty” and so selections had to be made, the choice to represent the diplomatic mission falling at last on Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and, to stand for the military, General Yoshijiro Umezu, a die-hard militarist who threatened to commit hara-kiri if forced to sign a surrender treaty.
These two men were accompanied by a dozen or so aides, the diplomats dressed somewhat formally in morning clothes with white gloves and incongruous-looking top hats, and appeared before the thronged deck of Missouri looking as embarrassed as if they had on no clothes at all. One of their number, a Japanese diplomat named Toshikazu Kase, a graduate of Amherst and Harvard, recorded the following reaction: “We waited for a few minutes standing in the public gaze like penitent boys awaiting the dreaded schoolmaster. Never have I realized that the glance of glaring eyes could hurt so much.”
Beneath graying skies MacArthur, flanked by the pitifully thin generals Jonathan Wainwright and Arthur Percival (who had also endured the hardships of Japanese incarceration after the surrender of the British army at Singapore), stepped forward to the forum, which was an old mess table covered in green felt cloth.
“We are gathered here,” MacArthur said to a live worldwide radio audience, “representatives of the warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace can be restored.” He went on to note that the issues leading into the war had been settled on the battlefields, and that both the victors and the vanquished should put aside “hatreds and distrust” and “rise to that higher dignity” that peace would bring. “It is my earnest hope,” he told the audience, “that a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded on faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance and justice.” He then called for the two Japanese delegates to come forward and sign the document of surrender.
Shigemitsu, a peacemaker, clattered across the deck with his cane, limping heavily on his wooden leg, followed by a scowling General Umezu. They put their names on the peace treaty. MacArthur then signed it as Supreme Commander of all the Allied Powers and on behalf of the United States as well, giving Wainwright and Percival each a pen that he had used.† Then representatives of the other warring nations were invited to sign and MacArthur stepped to the microphone: “Let us pray now that peace be restored to the world and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are closed.”
“At that moment,” Kase wrote afterward, “the skies parted and the sun shone brightly through the layers of clouds. There was a steady drone above and now it became a deafening roar and an armada of U.S. airplanes paraded into sight, sweeping over the warships.” When the flights of thousands of planes had moved on, MacArthur stepped to the microphone for a final time.
“Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death—the seas bear only commerce—men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight … In reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the silent lips forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way … We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war.
“A new era is upon us,” MacArthur continued, his voice rising at its theatrical best. “The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concept of war … We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.” MacArthur’s voice echoed across the decks of the battleship Missouri and into the homes of millions worldwide, dramatic, profound, stirring. It was statesmanlike MacArthur at his very best.
Then he turned to his soldiers’ families listening at home, telling them, “Today I report to you that your sons and daughters have served you well and faithfully … Their spiritual strength and power has brought us through … They are homeward bound—take care of them.”
* Harold Ickes was an avid New Dealer and hatchet man for President Roosevelt. Whenever the press wanted a stinging, acerbic comment about a policy or a person that the White House would find awkward to make, they would seek out Ickes.
† General Yamashita had held out to the last in the Luzon mountains and surrendered his diminished army to American forces after the emperor’s broadcast on August 15. He did so in the presence of the Allied generals Wainwright and Percival who had been released from Japanese prison camps and flown to the Philippines for that purpose.