“In conducting war all of the ferocity of humanity is brought to the surface.”
—ARTHUR MACARTHUR,
CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY, APRIL 8, 1902
GENERAL MACARTHUR PACED THE DECK OF THE LIGHT cruiser Boise as it steamed north along the west coast of the Philippines at ten knots on the afternoon of January 8, 1945. The pulse of the 9,700-ton warship’s engines reminded the sixty-four-year-old general of the last time he had plowed through these blue waters, obsessed only with a desire to return. Two years, nine months, and twenty-nine days had passed since MacArthur had climbed aboard the motor patrol boat and slipped away under the cover of darkness, forced to watch in despair as the silhouette of Corregidor vanished on the horizon. His fortunes had since changed dramatically. He had traded the four worn-out patrol boats that had spirited him, his family, and aides to safety for an armada of more than eight hundred aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, and transports, the largest invasion force America had ever put to sea in the Pacific.
Despite that power, the same tension that had marked MacArthur’s escape years earlier now clouded his return. American forces only weeks earlier had seized the Philippine island of Leyte, followed by Mindoro, but the ultimate prize still eluded MacArthur—the main island of Luzon, home to his beloved Manila. In less than twenty-four hours, the first of more than two hundred thousand soldiers would slog ashore on the beaches of Lingayen Gulf and begin the 110-mile race south to liberate the capital. In advance of the landings, navy carrier pilots had blasted Japanese airfields on Okinawa and Formosa to block any reinforcement of the Philippines before pounding the enemy’s airbases scattered across Luzon. Poor weather, however, had limited the success of America’s early raids, triggering Japan to unleash its infernal new weapon, kamikazes—a monsoon of metal and flesh that rained down daily on MacArthur’s forces.
The threat from suicide planes had crystallized four days earlier when at 5:12 p.m.—just as sailors prepared to sit down to supper—a twin-engine bomber armed with two five-hundred-pound weapons crashed through the wooden flight deck of the escort carrier Ommaney Bay. “A tremendous explosion shook the ship so violently it seemed as if a gigantic pile driver had hit us,” recalled Chaplain Robert Anderson. The carrier’s hangar deck, filled with racks of torpedoes and armed planes fueled to capacity, erupted in an inferno. Fifty-caliber machine-gun rounds exploded, ricocheting off bulkheads. The skipper had no choice but to order his ship abandoned just thirty-eight minutes after the attack. Survivors watched from the water as exploding torpedoes caused part of the flight deck to collapse, a horror captured in the ship’s war damage report: “Intensity of fire remained such as to insure that the ship was practically gutted in the next hour.”
The destruction of the Ommaney Bay foreshadowed MacArthur’s troubles. Two days later pilots tore into fifteen ships, including the bridge of the 32,000-ton battlewagon New Mexico. The fiery crash killed the skipper along with British Lt. Gen. Herbert Lumsden—Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s liaison—and Time magazine’s Bill Chickering, all of whom were later wrapped in canvas, weighted down with five-inch projectiles, and buried at sea after sunset. “The action was so fast and so continuous that it is hard to sort out the images of what happened,” Chickering wrote to his wife only hours before his death. “They came in from all sides.” The ferocious kamikazes that would ultimately sink two dozen ships and damage another sixty-seven signaled the strategic and symbolic importance of the coming invasion. This was far more than just the capture of another island in America’s push across the Pacific.
“If the Lord will let me land this one,” the general had announced to his aides that morning over breakfast, “I’ll never ask so much of him again.”
In the years since he slipped through the Japanese blockade, MacArthur had never let go of the pain of his defeat. Barely one month after his escape, on April 9, Bataan fell, followed by the surrender of Corregidor a little more than three weeks later, cementing his fate. The rugged Philippine peninsula where thousands of MacArthur’s men had fought and died had since become an emotional brand burned deep into the general’s conscience. “Always Bataan,” headquarters clerk Paul Rogers recalled, “never to be forgotten.” MacArthur made sure. At his new headquarters in Australia, he had demanded his staff answer the phone with the single word “Bataan,” the same name he gave his personal B-17 bomber. But he refused to speak publicly about his loss, except once each year to mark the anniversary of the surrender. “Bataan is like a child in a family who dies,” he confided in his aides. “It lives in our hearts.”
The Axis powers had ridiculed MacArthur for his escape. Germany’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called him the “fleeing general,” while the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini labeled him a “coward.” The Japan Times and Advertiser dubbed him a “deserter” who had “fled his post.” MacArthur’s secret departure had shocked many of the officers and troops he left behind, most of whom learned of his evacuation only after he was gone. “A foul trick of deception has been played on a large group of Americans by a Commander in Chief and small staff who are now eating steak and eggs in Australia,” wrote Brig. Gen. William Brougher, a divisional commander who along with thousands of other Americans ended up as a Japanese prisoner of war. “God damn them!” Troops turned MacArthur’s famous vow to return to the Philippines into a joke. “I am going to the latrine,” soldiers quipped, “but I shall return.”
Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall had countered the negative hype by recommending MacArthur for the Medal of Honor, the prize he had long coveted in his quest to equal his father, a hero of the Civil War. The differences between the father’s and son’s actions could not have been more stark. The elder MacArthur had led his men to victory in battle; the younger had left his behind. Marshall, who drafted the citation, was blunt with Roosevelt about his motivation in recommending MacArthur for the medal. “This action was taken,” he told the president, “among other things, to offset any propaganda by the enemy directed against his leaving command and proceeding to Australia in compliance with your orders.” Others saw through the politics, including Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who later declined his own medal for his role in the North Africa invasion, “because he knew of a man who had received one for sitting in a hole in the ground.”
America had rebounded since those dark early days of the war, when MacArthur had begged for bombers, carriers, and destroyers. A nation that had enlisted housewives and even grandmothers in the industrial fight now hammered out as many as eight flattops a month and a plane every five minutes. The navy and the marines meanwhile had battled the Japanese back across the central Pacific, while MacArthur’s reconstituted forces had clawed north through the sweltering jungles of New Guinea. But the path to this pivotal moment in the Philippines had required MacArthur to combat more than just the enemy—he had brawled with his own commander in chief.
America’s success in the Pacific had led some senior naval leaders to advocate bypassing the Philippines entirely and instead seize the island of Formosa to the north, a move that would have landed U.S. forces even closer to Japan. American B-29 bombers, based on the recently captured islands of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, had already begun to target Japan’s key industrial cities in a campaign that would ultimately incinerate more than fifty square miles of Tokyo. There was no need to risk American lives on a costly invasion of the Philippines when the imminent fall of Japan would end the occupation. The proposal had outraged MacArthur, who viewed the enemy’s forces as too perilous to sidestep. More important, failure to liberate the islands would abrogate MacArthur’s promise to return. “We must be careful,” Marshall had cautioned him, “not to allow our personal feeling and Philippine political considerations to override our great objective, which is the early conclusion of the war with Japan.”
But MacArthur had refused to back down.
In a showdown in a beachfront mansion in Hawaii in late July 1944, MacArthur fought to bend American strategy in his favor, going so far as to threaten Roosevelt. “Mr. President,” the general warned during a private moment, “if your decision be to bypass the Philippines and leave its millions of wards of the United States and thousands of American internees and prisoners of war to continue to languish in their agony and despair—I dare to say that the American people would be so aroused that they would register most complete resentment against you at the polls this fall.” The shocked Roosevelt retreated to bed that night, summoning his physician and demanding an aspirin. “In fact,” he said, “give me another aspirin to take in the morning.”
For MacArthur, returning to the Philippines—and fulfilling his promise—had become an obsession, as the white whale was to Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick. Brig. Gen. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, summed it up best: “Every battle action in New Guinea, every air raid on Rabual or PT boat attack on Japanese barges was a mere preliminary for the reconquest of the Philippines.”
The Philippines, for MacArthur, meant one thing: Manila.
And each day—each hour now—he closed in on that goal.
MacArthur needed only to look east to confirm that his story was on the verge of coming full circle. Some sixty miles beyond the Boise’s rail, he could make out faint yet familiar landmarks, including Mount Mariveles perched on Bataan. Across from it was the rugged island fortress of Corregidor, whose tunnels had been, in the words of one of the general’s aides, “both a refuge and a prison.” Beyond them both rose the elegant high-rises of Manila, the city where MacArthur had abandoned his prized family possessions and that still held his remembrances of falling in love with his wife and the birth of his son. MacArthur stood there on the cruiser’s deck, transfixed by the view. “One by one, the staff drifted away, and I was alone with my memories,” the general recalled of that day. “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.”
MacArthur drew confidence from the powerful warships that punched through the waves, a product of America’s industrial might where ninety-six cents of every federal dollar spent went to the war. A convoy of transports stretched over forty miles—a virtual sea of steel—filled with soldiers assembled from sixteen bases across the Pacific. Other ships carried tanks, amphibious tractors, ambulances, and drums of gasoline, everything needed when troops hit the sand in the morning. This was the force MacArthur had dreamed of when Japanese bombs shook the tunnels, filling the humid air with dust. He could not escape noticing the fact that he had been offered a rare second chance, an opportunity to turn defeat into victory. He remembered an old gambling adage: “They never come back.” The five-star general filled his corncob pipe. “I had a warm feeling in my heart,” he wrote, “that sometimes the betting boys might be wrong.”
MORE THAN JUST THE BURN of defeat drove Douglas MacArthur. Since his birth on an army base in Little Rock more than six decades earlier, his entire life had been shaped by the powerful influences of his mother and father. He had long held his father up as an icon of the American soldier. The son of a Wisconsin judge, Arthur MacArthur had enlisted in the Union Army in August 1862 at the age of just seventeen. Barely fifteen months later, the teenager seized his regiment’s fallen flag—after previous color-bearers were bayoneted, shot, and even decapitated by cannon fire—and led his troops on a victorious charge up Missionary Ridge in Tennessee, earning the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for heroism. He went on to fight in thirteen battles and was wounded four times during Gen. William Sherman’s march across Georgia. The senior MacArthur was promoted to full colonel at nineteen—the youngest in the Union Army—where his heroics coupled with his youth earned him the nickname the “Boy Colonel.”
After the war, Arthur MacArthur decided to practice law but found the experience anticlimactic, so he climbed back into uniform, albeit with a reduction of his wartime rank. Like that of other professional soldiers, his career languished in the years after the Civil War. He spent twenty-three years as a captain, ricocheting throughout the Southwest and the Dakotas with his young family in tow, fighting during the Indian Wars as American settlers pushed the nation’s boundaries west. For the young Douglas MacArthur, the experience was paradise. “It was here I learned to ride and shoot even before I could read or write,” he wrote, “indeed, almost before I could walk and talk.”
Arthur MacArthur’s career prospects improved as America closed in on the twentieth century. He was ordered to Washington in 1889 with the Adjutant General’s Department, a move that exposed his son to the political world that would prove vital later in his career. “Washington was different from anything I had ever known,” Douglas MacArthur later wrote. “It was my first glimpse at the whirlpool of glitter and pomp, of politics and diplomacy, of statesmanship and intrigue.” The senior MacArthur’s career reached its climax a decade later, when he helped end more than three centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines. His success, however, proved short-lived. The voracious reader with a sterling intellect was ultimately felled by his own runaway hubris, a trait that would reverberate through his son’s life. He repeatedly clashed in Manila with his civilian counterpart and future president William Taft, resulting in his recall in 1901. The ouster effectively ended his military career, a fate confirmed when he was passed over for chief of staff. “Arthur MacArthur was the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen,” his aide Col. Enoch H. Crowder once remarked, “until I met his son.”
Arthur MacArthur’s life would come to an end in the same dramatic fashion he had lived it. The sixty-seven-year-old attended the fiftieth reunion of his Civil War regiment in Milwaukee on September 5, 1912, where he regaled about one hundred of his former troops with stories of the Atlanta campaign a half-century earlier, a time when he had led men to victory and himself into history. “Your indomitable courage—”
MacArthur suddenly faltered, raising his hand to his heart.
“Comrades,” he finally said. “I am too weak to go on.”
The general collapsed into his chair, his eyes closed. “Already his face assumed the pallor of death and he lay back in his chair breathing easily,” one witness told the Milwaukee Sentinel. “Tenderly we moved him to a couch and everyone stood at a respectful distance while the doctors worked busily.”
The regimental surgeon, who had his ear to MacArthur’s chest, finally straightened up. “Our commander,” he declared, “has gone to his last rest.”
A single sob punctured the silence.
The Reverend Paul B. Jenkins, in a voice broken by emotion, began to recite the Lord’s Prayer: “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”
The men who had been with Arthur MacArthur that long-ago day on Missionary Ridge encircled their fallen leader and joined in the prayer. When it ended, the adjutant took down from the wall a battle-scarred American flag and draped the Stars and Stripes over MacArthur’s fallen body. Overcome by the moment, the adjutant then collapsed, though he later recovered. “He died the death of a soldier,” Gen. Charles King told MacArthur’s widow that night, “in the midst of his comrades.”
For thirty-two-year-old Douglas MacArthur, who would receive word of his father’s death by telegraph, life would never be the same. “My whole world changed that night,” he recalled. “Never have I been able to heal the wound in my heart.”
The job of molding the future of Douglas MacArthur fell that night to the general’s mother, the other dominant pillar in his life. Mary Pinkney Hardy, known to most simply as Pinky, had grown up the daughter of a wealthy cotton merchant on the banks of the Elizabeth River outside Norfolk, Virginia. Her family could trace its roots back to Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America. She boasted relatives who had served under George Washington in the Revolutionary War and Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. Her own brothers had fought as Confederate soldiers in the Civil War, two of whom refused to attend her wedding a decade later to a veteran officer of the Union Army.
Life on the dusty plains as the wife of an American soldier proved far different from Pinky’s comfortable childhood at her family’s Riveredge Plantation. She busied herself educating the couple’s three sons, the youngest being Douglas. “Our teaching included not only the simple rudiments, but above all else, a sense of obligation,” he recalled. “We were to do what was right no matter what the personal sacrifice might be.” The couple’s middle son, Malcolm, died at age five of measles, while appendicitis later claimed the life of the oldest, Arthur. With the death of each son, Pinky’s focus zeroed in more on Douglas, upon whose shoulders the weight of the family’s future legacy rested. She reaffirmed his importance each night when she tucked him in bed. “You must grow up to be a great man,” she told him, “like your father.”
Pinky did everything in her power to advance her son’s studies and later his career. To help secure an appointment to West Point, she hired a local high school principal to tutor him and even relocated the family to a district represented by a congressman who had been a friend of MacArthur’s grandfather. When her son’s curved spine forced him to fail the physical, she again sprang into action, hiring a Milwaukee specialist who worked with him for a year to correct it. The night before the admissions exam, the anxious MacArthur could not sleep. The next morning he felt nauseous when he arrived at City Hall for the test.
His mother pulled him aside. “Doug, you’ll win if you don’t lose your nerve,” she assured him. “You must believe in yourself, my son, or no one else will believe in you.”
MacArthur scored 93.3, besting the next applicant by sixteen points. But his mother’s efforts did not stop with his admittance. Rather, she moved to West Point, renting a room for four years at Craney’s Hotel, where from her window she could make sure his study lamp burned late into the night. Each day he reported to her for a half hour before supper, allowing the two enough time for an afternoon stroll so she could quiz him on his studies. Pinky’s tireless efforts paid off when MacArthur graduated first in the class of 1903 with one of the finest records in West Point’s history.
Pinky played an increasingly active role after her son proved his courage in combat and began his climb up the army’s ranks. During a standoff between the United States and Mexico in 1914, MacArthur killed seven bandits near Veracruz, a feat that led to his nomination for the Medal of Honor. Three years later he demonstrated his bravery again, this time on the muddy battlefields of France. “The dead were so thick in spots we tumbled over them,” he recalled. “The stench was carnal to the point of suffocation.” Gassed twice, MacArthur refused to quit, one time climbing out of bed while still vomiting to resume command. For his heroism during World War I, he was again nominated for the Medal of Honor and ultimately earned two Distinguished Service Crosses, a Distinguished Service Medal, and seven Silver Stars. “On a field where courage was the rule,” one citation read, “his courage was the dominant feature.” One of his soldiers was far more laudatory: “He alone made victory possible.”
Once he was home from the war, Pinky assumed the role of host for social events for her unmarried son. She even went so far as to lobby senior officers for promotions, writing to Gen. John Pershing, then America’s top soldier, “Won’t you be real good and sweet—The ” Dear Old Jack’ of long ago—and give me some assurance that you will give my Boy his well earned promotion before you leave the Army?”
Pinky’s involvement strayed far beyond her son’s professional life. Much to her horror, he fell in love with Louise Cromwell Brooks, a divorced socialite with two children. When MacArthur married her on Valentine’s Day 1922, Pinky refused to attend, foreshadowing the marriage’s doom seven years later. In his memoir, MacArthur addressed it with a single sentence, failing to even mention his first wife’s name: “I entered into matrimony, but it was not successful, and ended in divorce years later for mutual incompatibility.” Brooks was far less polite, blaming the couple’s split not only on his lack of bedroom skills but more so on his meddling mother. “It was an interfering mother-in-law who eventually succeeded in disrupting our married life.”
Douglas MacArthur was not blind to the strong influence his parents exerted on him, though as a dutiful son, he abided. Later in life, however, he admitted it was hard. “My mother put too much pressure on me,” he confessed. “Being number one is the loneliest job in the world, and I wouldn’t wish it on any son of mine.”
MacArthur advanced in part because of his family’s connections but also because of his own formidable abilities, demonstrable courage, and hard work. The efficiency reports that filled his personnel file fawned over his many talents.
“A brilliant, young officer of great promise for the future,” one report said.
“One of the most efficient, energetic and talented officers I have ever known,” stated another.
“Well fitted for positions requiring diplomacy and high-grade intelligence.”
At thirty-eight, while fighting in France, MacArthur was promoted to brigadier general, the youngest in the army, a feat he followed up seven years later when he claimed the mantle of America’s youngest major general. Along with his advancement in rank came increasingly prestigious assignments. He was appointed superintendent of West Point—again, the youngest—commanded the Manila District, and even served as director of the 1928 Olympic Committee for the games in Amsterdam, where the United States won twenty-four gold medals. In August 1930, while in Manila, MacArthur received a radiogram that the president planned to name him the next army chief of staff, a move that would give him the coveted fourth star on his shoulder and make him the nation’s most powerful soldier, not to mention the youngest officer to ever hold that post. It was the job his father had always sought but, because of his own personal failings, had slipped away. “My first inclination was to try to beg off,” MacArthur said. “I knew the dreadful ordeal that faced the new Chief of Staff, and shrank from it.” Pinky sensed his reluctance and cabled him, demanding he accept. “She said my father would be ashamed if I showed timidity,” MacArthur later wrote. “That settled it.”
Pinky, of course, was thrilled; her life’s work was accomplished. “If only your father could see you now!” she said. “Douglas, you’re everything he wanted to be.”
Like his father, MacArthur possessed an impressive intellect. He prided himself on never forgetting a name, while his aides often lauded his uncanny skill to peruse a draft of a speech and recall whole portions of it verbatim. He likewise had a unique ability to boil complex issues down into simple concepts.
“His mind was a beautiful piece of almost perfect machinery,” recalled Philip La Follette, who served as a public affairs officer on MacArthur’s staff.
“He was a brilliant man,” added Maj. Gen. Richard Marshall.
“He was a genius—just a genius,” gushed Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers.
In addition to having a sharp mind, MacArthur was a gifted speaker and storyteller, skills that allowed him to enrapture dinner parties for hours and even helped him charm his second wife, Jean Faircloth. “I never in all my life met a more interesting talker,” she wrote in a letter to a friend after meeting him. “I sit there really spellbound.”
A couple of quirks marred his rhetorical savvy, including his peculiar habit of speaking about himself in the third person. “The sensation was unusual,” recalled Dwight Eisenhower, who served for several years as MacArthur’s chief of staff. “In time, I got used to it and saw it not as objectionable, just odd.” MacArthur likewise suffered from a tendency to monopolize a conversation. “ ”Discuss’ is hardly the correct word,” Eisenhower added. “Discussion suggests dialogue and the General’s conversations were usually monologues.” Still, many others, like Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans, who often traveled with the general, marveled at his oratorical skills. “Always it was an experience to hear MacArthur talk,” the journalist recalled. “He often used archaic words and terms as one might a rare spice for extraordinary flavor.”
For all the attributes his parents had given him, the duo had likewise contributed to his greatest flaw, the same one that had toppled his father and that General Pershing singled out in a 1922 efficiency report: “Has an exalted opinion of himself.” Pershing wasn’t the only one who noticed. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, in a vicious diary entry, captured the feelings of the general’s many opponents: “MacArthur is the type of man who thinks that when he gets to heaven God will step down from the great white throne and bow him into his vacated seat.” Even those who worked closest with the general, like Eisenhower, suffered under his ego: “MacArthur could never see another sun, or even a moon, for that matter, in the heavens so long as he was the sun.”
MacArthur’s sense of superiority—even destiny—led him to clash with civilian leaders, including his commander in chief. “He talks in a voice that might come from an oracle’s cave,” President Roosevelt once said of him. “He never doubts and never argues or suggests; he makes pronouncements. What he thinks is final.”
On the deck of the Boise, one thought indeed consumed MacArthur.
His return to Manila.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MACARTHUR’S return was far greater than just his desire to avenge his personal defeat. The Philippines was like a sun around which MacArthur and his family had revolved for nearly a half-century. His father had been the first one drawn into the volcanic archipelago’s orbit, ordered to help drive out the Spanish at the turn of the twentieth century. But even then the seventeen-year-old Douglas had felt the tug of the islands, the promise of adventure, begging his father to allow him to skip his studies at West Point to accompany him. “My son,” he said, “there will be plenty of fighting in the coming years, and of a magnitude far beyond this. Prepare yourself.”
As much as Douglas MacArthur romanticized his father’s legacy in the Philippines, America’s early involvement there proved naïve, rudderless, and violent. U.S. troops had landed in the Philippines in 1898 as part of the Spanish-American War, a four-month fight that had begun as a way for the United States to help liberate Cuba, which was then part of the Spanish Empire. The war soon engulfed the Philippines, another colonial Spanish possession whose population likewise hungered for independence. In a sign of how insular America was, President William McKinley confided in a friend that when he received the cable from Rear Adm. George Dewey that the Philippines had fallen, he had to look up the nation’s location on a globe: “I could not have told where those darned islands were within two thousand miles.” At the war’s end, Spain ceded the Philippines, along with Puerto Rico and Guam, to the United States for the sum of $20 million. The acquisition sparked a heated debate over whether America, which had fought a war to cast off its own imperial chains, wanted to become a colonial power. “We have about ten million Malays at two dollars a head unpicked,” House Speaker Thomas Reed famously quipped. “Nobody knows what it will cost to pick them.”
As history shows, it cost a lot.
McKinley assured the American public, in a speech delivered in Boston on February 16, 1899—one Douglas MacArthur later credited with guiding him during America’s postwar occupation of Japan—that control over the Philippines would be short-lived. “No imperial designs lurk in the American mind,” he promised. “They are alien to American sentiment, thought and purpose. Our priceless principles undergo no change under a tropical sun.” The president later backtracked on that sentiment, deciding that unlike Cuba, which had gained its independence at the war’s end, the Philippines were not prepared for self-government, a conviction no doubt colored by the commercial value of America’s new Asian acquisition. “There was nothing left for us to do,” McKinley said, “but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them.”
Relations between the United States and its new colony deteriorated. Filipino fighters who had teamed up with America to defeat the Spanish turned on it in a conventional conflict that soon devolved into a guerrilla war. Many of the American troops had fought in the Indian Wars, a conflict marked by a deep racial undercurrent and punctuated by massacres and atrocities on both sides, including mutilation, torture, and the burning of villages. The Philippines proved no different. Soldiers derogatorily looked down on Filipinos as racially inferior—no different from Apache, Comanche, and Navajo—often calling them by the same slurs, like “niggers,” “injuns,” and “savages.”
“The country won’t be pacified until the niggers are killed off like the Indians,” one Kansas soldier told a journalist.
“The only good Filipino is a dead one,” explained another.
“No cruelty is too severe for these brainless monkeys, who can appreciate no sense of honor, kindness or justice,” a Utah private wrote in a letter.
Many senior officers were similarly racist. Brig. Gen. Robert Hughes, who had served as the provost-marshal-general of Manila and later head of the military department in Visayas, expressed such views openly during testimony before Congress: “These people are not civilized.” Brutalities soon escalated, particularly in the wake of various atrocities. One time a captured American soldier was buried alive up to his neck. Guerrillas had propped open the soldier’s mouth with a stick and sprinkled a trail of sugar into the woods. “Millions of ants,” one report noted, “had done the rest.” American troops retaliated, unleashing a reign of terror upon Filipinos that would mirror the horrors executed by the Japanese a half-century later. Soldiers waterboarded suspected guerrillas, herded them by the thousands into concentration camps, destroyed food supplies, and torched villages and towns, the latter referred to by Hughes as “black paint.”
“You know what ”black paint’ is?” the brigadier general queried gunboat commander Yates Stirling. “I hope you use plenty of it.”
Stirling did as ordered. So did many others.
“After we finished up, there was little left to speak of,” Stirling recalled. “We burned the villages; in fact, every house for two miles from either bank was destroyed by us. We killed their livestock; cattle, pigs, chickens, and their valuable work animals, the carabaos. It seemed ruthless; yet it was after all war, and war is brutal.”
One of the more infamous cases surrounded Brig. Gen. Jacob Smith, known as “Hell-Roaring Jake.” After Filipino insurgents overran an American outpost in Balangiga on September 28, 1901, killing forty-eight Americans, Smith ordered Marine Maj. Littleton Waller to turn the island of Samar into a “howling wilderness.”
“I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me,” Smith instructed Waller. “I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.”
Waller asked how young.
“Ten years,” Smith replied.
“Persons of ten years and older are those designated as being capable of bearing arms?” the surprised officer replied.
“Yes,” Smith concluded.
The fight dragged on for three and a half years, sparking a fierce debate in Washington after reports of American atrocities erupted in the press, including a drawing of troops waterboarding a Filipino that ran on the cover of Life magazine. The conflict ultimately cost taxpayers $600 million and resulted in more than seven thousand American casualties, including 4,234 killed. The Filipinos paid a much higher price with an estimated 20,000 fighters killed and another 200,000 civilians dead from starvation and disease, the by-product of America’s scorched-earth tactics. When asked before a congressional hearing about the lopsided casualties, Arthur MacArthur appeared aloof when he blamed the losses on bad marksmanship. “The Filipino soldier,” he testified, “does not know how to shoot.” The high price paid by both American troops and Filipinos—in blood, treasure, and, in the case of the United States, principles—seemed to echo the words President McKinley muttered to a friend: “If old Dewey had just sailed away after he smashed that Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us.”
As the fight wore down, Arthur MacArthur, as American military governor, faced the daunting task of stitching the nation back together again. “The U.S. conquest of the Philippines had been as cruel as any conflict in the annals of imperialism,” historian Stanley Karnow observed, “but hardly had it ended before Americans began to atone for its brutality.” Under the leadership of MacArthur and his successors, the United States began building railways and roads, overhauling the court system, and improving public health, from digging sewers to vaccinating villagers. In addition, more than a thousand teachers arrived from the United States, fanning out across the archipelago. “The educational work under the American military occupation of the Philippines is one of the most romantic chapters in Philippine history,” the younger MacArthur later said. “While some countries conquered by means of the Cross, or subjugated by means of the sword, it remained for the United States to colonize through the agency of education.”
The senior MacArthur’s bullheaded personality, however, sabotaged his tenure after he repeatedly clashed with William Taft, a former federal judge and solicitor general appointed by McKinley to head the Philippine Commission. MacArthur resented the civilian intrusion and bucked protocol, refusing to greet Taft at the port when his steamer arrived, instead sending a colonel. When the two met in the general’s office, Taft described his reception as so cold that he “almost stopped perspiring,” no easy feat for the more-than-three-hundred-pound commissioner in Manila’s sweltering climate. Though initially forgiving, Taft soon soured on MacArthur’s acerbity; he derided him in letters to his family and to War Secretary Elihu Root as a “small man” and a “military martinet.” His complaints worked. Thirteen months later MacArthur, relieved of his command, boarded a steamer home. In the end, the Philippines had proven both the pinnacle of MacArthur’s career and his downfall. “When he died,” wrote historian Carol Petillo, “the measure of his bitterness about the situation could be gauged by the fact that he left instructions forbidding a military funeral or burial in the National Cemetery at Arlington, Virginia.”
The Philippines likewise had proved a revolving door in the life of Douglas MacArthur, who served four times in the islands, including his first assignment after graduation from West Point. When he first disembarked in Manila from the transport Sherman—barely two years after his father departed—the younger MacArthur was amazed at the mix of Asian, Spanish, and American cultures. “The Philippines charmed me,” he remembered, “fastened me with a grip that has never relaxed.” He hiked the jungles of Bataan, worked on the fortifications at Corregidor, and befriended Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña, two young University of Santo Tomas law graduates who would later lead the Philippines. MacArthur likewise tasted his first adventure when he was jumped on a jungle path by two desperados. “Like all frontiersmen, I was expert with a pistol,” MacArthur later said. “I dropped them both dead in their tracks, but not before one had blazed away at me with his antiquated rifle. The slug tore through the top of my campaign hat and almost cut the sapling tree immediately behind me.”
Douglas MacArthur returned on future assignments of increasing importance, serving as the commander of the Military District of Manila and later as head of the army’s Philippine Department, where he commanded all troops in the islands. He saw in the Philippines the same potential as his father, one the senior MacArthur had articulated best during his 1902 testimony before Congress. “The archipelago,” he told lawmakers, “is the finest group of islands in the world. Its strategic position is unexcelled by that of any other position on the globe.” Douglas MacArthur shared not only his father’s bullishness on the Philippines’ future but also his progressive racial views. During his years in the islands, the senior MacArthur had invited Filipinos into his home and admonished officers and spouses who drew the “color line.” He appeared insulted during a Senate hearing when a Texas lawmaker asked him to compare Filipinos to African Americans. “I have never made that comparison,” Arthur MacArthur chafed. “I have never had any occasion to consider that. I should not want to compare Filipinos with any other people. I might reach conclusions unjust to both.”
Douglas MacArthur proved no different, developing deep relationships with Filipino leaders, a fact that triggered resentment and even antagonism from some of his fellow American businessmen and officers who still clung to the idea of white superiority in the islands. The confident MacArthur shrugged it off. “Attitudes die hard,” he said, “and the old idea of colonial exploitation still had its vigorous supporters.” The general’s relations went beyond just friendship. In the wake of his failed first marriage, he found solace with a Filipina mistress, sixteen-year-old Isabel Rosario Cooper, a half-Scottish, half-Filipino vaudeville star known by her stage name Dimples. In his private letters to her, MacArthur often signed them “Daddy,” a reference to the three-decade age difference. When he returned to Washington as chief of staff, MacArthur put her up in an apartment in Georgetown. The relationship ultimately was doomed, but as Petillo observed, MacArthur seemed to find both in his romance with Cooper and in his life in Manila an escape from the rigid pressures of Washington officialdom. “For Douglas MacArthur,” she wrote, “the Philippines were home.”
With MacArthur’s tenure as chief of staff about to end in 1935, Philippine president-elect Manuel Quezon visited him in Washington. The United States had agreed to grant the Philippines independence in 1946, and Quezon had questions for MacArthur.
“Do you think that the Philippines can be defended?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” MacArthur replied. “I know that the Islands can be protected, provided, of course, that you have the money which will be required.”
Quezon then offered MacArthur a job. Would the general return to the Philippines and help build the fledgling nation’s new military?
Neither MacArthur nor Quezon could escape the symbolism that hung over the offer. Barely four decades earlier MacArthur’s father had fought to pacify the islands; now his son had been invited to return to build it a modern army.
MacArthur accepted.
The opportunity came with the generous salary of $18,000 a year, plus another $15,000 in expenses and a rent-free home in a new air-conditioned penthouse suite to be built atop the luxurious Manila Hotel. MacArthur departed for the Philippines for the fourth time in October 1935 aboard the steamer President Hoover, joined by his eighty-three-year-old mother, Pinky, who became ill and spent most of the voyage in her stateroom. Onboard the ship, MacArthur met Jean Faircloth, a beautiful thirty-five-year-old brunette from the small town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He sent her a basket of flowers and invited her one morning to coffee. The duo hit it off amid the shipboard festivities, which included evening cocktail parties on deck featuring bowls of ice with caviar in the middle followed by formal dinners and dancing. From an old southern family, Jean was everything MacArthur’s flapper first wife and his Filipina mistress were not, down to her grandfather’s Bible, which she carried in her luggage.
Pinky’s health continued to deteriorate after the Hoover docked in the Philippines. She died of cerebral thrombosis on December 3, 1935, just five weeks after arriving. Her final breath, as she lay in bed at the Manila Hotel, was of the humid sea air of the Philippines that had come to define the lives of both her husband and her son. MacArthur was crushed, ordering her room to remain empty for a year, the doors locked. Gone was his closest companion, friend, and cheerleader of more than half a century. Dwight Eisenhower, who served as MacArthur’s chief of staff, recalled that the general was sullen for months, a grief he expressed in letters to his friend Cal O’Laughlin: “Mother’s death has been a tremendous blow to me and I am finding the greatest difficulty in recoordinating myself to the changed conditions.” MacArthur followed up a week later. “My loss has partially stunned me and I find myself groping desperately but futilely,” he wrote. “For the first time in my life, I need all the help I can get.”
MacArthur found that help in Jean, courting her nightly with trips to the movies, often to the Ideal Theater, where the couple sat on the upholstered seats of the center loge. The couple married in a small ceremony at the Municipal Building in New York while on a return trip to the United States on April 30, 1937. The normally loquacious leader was brief in his public comments after the ceremony. “This,” he simply declared, “is going to last a long time.” Ten months later, at Sternberg Hospital in Manila, the couple welcomed Arthur into the world. MacArthur asked President Quezon, who as a guerrilla had once fought against his father, to be his son’s godfather. The christening took place in the family’s home atop the Manila Hotel on what would have been Arthur MacArthur’s ninety-third birthday. In Manila, freed from the yoke of his parents and with a successful career behind him, Douglas MacArthur found what had evaded him for much of his life—happiness. “With my little family,” he wrote, “I would be lonely no more.”
But Japan’s near simultaneous attacks on Hawaii and the Philippines in December 1941 had in hours destroyed MacArthur’s idyllic world. Unlike his War Department counterparts back in Washington, far removed from the capsized battleships at Pearl Harbor and the smoldering airfields around Manila, MacArthur and his family lived on the front lines of America’s fight against Japan. From the veranda of his home, MacArthur could see black smoke hovering over the blasted American naval base at Cavite, across the bay and the walled city of Intramuros just blocks away. Japanese fighters and bombers buzzed over the parks he strolled with Jean and the sidewalks where young Arthur rode his new tricycle, an early Christmas gift. On December 22, 1941, the main Japanese invasion force of 43,000 troops sloshed ashore at Lingayen Gulf and began the drive toward the capital. MacArthur felt he had no choice but fall back to Corregidor, declaring the capital an open city. The general wasn’t just moving his post.
He was abandoning his home.
On the afternoon of Christmas Eve 1941, Jean rushed to reduce the family’s life into a couple of suitcases. Along with food and clothes for Arthur—not to mention his beloved stuffed rabbit—she grabbed a few photos of the general’s parents, her grandfather’s Bible, and the brown coat with a fur-lined collar she had worn at her wedding. As she prepared to depart, Jean spotted the glass case that held some of her husband’s medals and the gold baton President Quezon had presented him when he became field marshal of the Philippine government. She bundled them up in a hotel towel and stashed them inside another suitcase, snapping it closed. Atop the grand piano, Jean eyed two vases given by Emperor Hirohito’s grandfather to Gen. Arthur MacArthur during the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the history of the gifts engraved on their bases. Jean snatched the pair and placed them on a table in the reception hall. “Maybe when the Japanese see it,” she said with a half smile, “they will respect our home.”
The family boarded the steamer Don Esteban for the twenty-seven-mile trip to Corregidor, joined by President Quezon and his wife and children, who traveled aboard the Mayon. Up on deck, members of MacArthur’s staff watched the receding lights of the Manila Hotel and the Army and Navy Club, two institutions that had long served as the epicenter of American life in the Philippine capital; an era that was coming to a dramatic end. A bright moon shone down from above as several officers began to sing Christmas carols, including “Silent Night.” Capt. William Morse shot a glance at MacArthur, who sat with his head slumped in his hands, the gravity of the situation hanging over him. The city his father had fought to capture, he now fled under the cover of darkness. “Behind us Manila was burning, a spectacular display of sound and light,” recalled Paul Rogers, headquarters chief clerk and stenographer. “Fire and smoke illuminated our departure, and exploding munitions dumps added to the sound. Ahead the sky was filled with stars.”
MacArthur and his family endured seventy-seven days in the tunnels on Corregidor before evacuating that doomed fortress for Australia. His defeat in the Philippines had shaped MacArthur’s entire wartime strategy: every subsequent action was driven solely by his desire to return to Manila. He clawed his way back across the jungles of New Guinea on limited resources that led his staff to describe the fight as the “poor man’s war,” “Operation Shoe String,” and “the Cinderella war.” But MacArthur had realized that New Guinea was any commander’s nightmare, a tropical island filled with impassable jungles, towering mountains, and disease. Rather than battle the Japanese directly, he turned the island against them, leapfrogging over strongpoints and cutting the enemy off from reinforcements, allowing them to “die on the vine.”
“The jungle! Starvation,” he told one of his generals. “They’re my allies!”
Each successful landing in MacArthur’s march north up the coast of New Guinea, his intelligence chief noted, was another milestone on the “road to Manila,” where the general had left behind thousands of his troops and his home.
But Japan, for the pending fight for the Philippines, had put a new commander in place. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita had defeated the British in Malaya and Singapore in the opening months of the war. Yamashita had then vanished off the battlefield like a ghost; officers in his own army even speculated that he had died. But the Japanese had now resurrected the famous general and sent him to the Philippines to stop MacArthur. As he closed in on his goal, MacArthur likewise changed his strategy. No longer would he bypass the Japanese. The time for battle had arrived. “I’m going to meet the enemy head on,” he told one of his generals, “and destroy him.”