Shadows In the Jungle (6 page)

Hailing from a proud military family—during the Civil War his father had led the Union charge up Missionary Ridge outside Chattanooga in 1863—MacArthur had graduated from West Point in 1903, ranked first in his class. After serving in the Philippines and in Japan as an aide to his father, Maj. Gen. Arthur MacArthur Jr., he rose rapidly in prestige and was promoted to captain in 1911 and attached to the General Staff in 1912.

During World War I, MacArthur commanded the 42nd Division, which he dubbed the Rainbow Division, and proved himself an able combat leader. He was wounded during the war, and afterward became superintendent at West Point. MacArthur returned to the Philippines in 1922 as military commander.

In 1935, after a stint as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, first under Herbert Hoover, then Franklin D. Roosevelt, MacArthur returned to the Philippines at the request of President Manuel L. Quezon. The island nation had just been granted semi-independence by the United States, which had taken over control from Spain after the Spanish-American War in 1898, with a promise of full independence on July 4, 1946. Quezon requested that MacArthur create and supervise a new Philippine army.

The vain MacArthur agreed, taking the title of Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, while still remaining on active duty with the U.S. Army. Demanding, and getting, a salary equal to that of Quezon—$18,000 a year—MacArthur established himself in luxury in the penthouse suite of the world-famous Manila Hotel, which waived the $1,500-a-month room rent when MacArthur was named chairman of the Manila Hotel Corporation.

That all came crashing down on December 8, 1941, Philippine time.

Even as American sailors fought the flames that raged along Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers of the 11th Imperial Air Fleet were winging toward the U.S. air base at Clark Field on Luzon.

As early as November 27, MacArthur had been warned by his superiors in Washington about the possibility of a Japanese attack. His response was an order that his thirty-five B-17 bombers be shifted from the vulnerable Clark Field south to Mindanao, out of harm's way. But there was no rush ordered for the move, so that by December 7 only half the Flying Fortresses had been relocated.

News of the attack on Pearl Harbor arrived at MacArthur's hotel at three thirty a.m., Manila time, and was confirmed ninety minutes later. Maj. Gen. Lewis Brereton, commander of MacArthur's air force, wanted to launch an immediate strike on the Japanese airfields on Formosa. After waiting several hours for an answer, he was notified by MacArthur's chief of staff, Colonel Sutherland, that he was cleared to launch a photo reconnaissance of Formosa, in preparation for an air strike the next day. As a result, his aircrews went to chow—it was now around noon—and his planes, eighteen B-17s, plus assorted fighters, mostly P-40 Tomahawks and P-39 Air Cobras, were parked and readied to be fueled.

The Japanese weren't waiting.

Fully expecting to be met by U.S. fighters and antiaircraft fire over Clark Field, the Japanese aviators were delighted to find the skies clear and row after row of sitting ducks on the ground. Coming in at twenty-two thousand feet in several V-shaped formations, the bombers unloaded their explosives on the parked planes, while Zero fighters zoomed in for close-up kills.

Saburo Sakai, who would become Japan's leading ace, found the situation “unbelievable” as he chopped up a B-17 with his two nose-mounted 7.7mm Type 97 machine guns. He next attacked a P-40 as it tried to take off, blasting it from the sky.

By the time the planes, with the red rising sun emblazoned on their wings and fuselages, turned north toward Formosa, they had destroyed all eighteen B-17s, along with fifty-three P-40s and thirty other aircraft. Fully one-half of MacArthur's air force was gone within the first hours of the war, and eighty men lay dead.

On December 22, forty-three thousand Japanese soldiers of the 14th Army came ashore on the palm-lined beaches of Lingayen Gulf, 120 miles north of Manila. Seventy miles to the southeast, another force swarmed across the beaches of Lamon Bay. The Japanese commander Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma, the “Poet General,” whose love of Western movies and culture often put him at odds with Imperial Headquarters, planned to envelope the Americans and Filipinos in a massive pincer movement.

Against them, MacArthur could muster only about 25,000 to 30,000 regular troops, U.S. and Filipinos, and 100,000 raw Filipino recruits of questionable quality.

On December 23, MacArthur put into effect War Plan Orange, an antiquated design that called for the withdrawal of his forces to the Bataan Peninsula, there to hold out until help arrived from America. The plan, which MacArthur detested, abandoned Manila. However, with the United States holding Bataan and the island fortress of Corregidor, it still denied the Japanese use of Manila Bay. Unfortunately, the variable War Plan Orange did not take into account a naval disaster like Pearl Harbor.

The withdrawal began, as lines of trucks and troops moved along the dust-choked roads leading to Bataan. On Christmas Day, Maj. Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright, commander of the Northern Luzon Force, established a defensive line on the Agno River, but the Japanese 48th Division, with tanks and artillery, cracked it quickly. The withdrawal continued.

The prolonged battle that followed was brave, but the result was never in doubt. Without supplies and reinforcements from America, the Philippines were doomed. And no help was coming. MacArthur knew this, and mentioned it to Bulkeley on March 11. He also told Bulkeley that FDR had ordered him to Australia and for Bulkeley to prepare his boats for the trip. MacArthur had been urged to go by submarine, but he opted for Bulkeley, the one naval commander he knew and trusted.

“When do you want to shove off, sir?” Bulkeley had asked.

“I haven't decided yet,” MacArthur replied, refusing to be pinned down.

“I need to prepare the boats for the long trip to Mindanao,” the young officer insisted.

“Just get them ready, Buck,” he was told. “I'll give you the word.”

* * *

Now the word had been given, prompted by the news that General Yamashita, known now as the Tiger of Malaya after his conquest of Singapore, was en route to Luzon with reinforcements.

The flotilla's destination, two days' sailing, was Mindanao, the large, southernmost island of the Philippine archipelago. President Quezon, his vice president, Sergio Osmena, and the cabinet had already reached Mindanao, boarding a B-17 at the Del Monte pineapple plantation for a flight to Australia. MacArthur would rendezvous with a B-17 at the same place, provided he managed to elude the Japanese.

That night, while skimming across the Sibuyan Sea heading for their first stop in the Cuyo Island group, the boats became separated. Kelly's 34 boat was the first to arrive, gliding into a secluded cove as the sky purpled with the hint of the coming dawn. Dropping anchor in water so crystalline clear that the coral bottom was plainly visible, Kelly sent a man to shore with semaphore flags to watch for the others.

Within half an hour, the squadron was reassembled in the cove. As the sailors scanned the sky and the sea for any sign of pursuit, Jean MacArthur and Loh Chui spent the day relaxing in wicker chairs on the forward deck of the 41 boat, while the anguished general paced incessantly. Taking in his surroundings, Bulkeley noted the pristine white sandy beach marred only by four empty huts, probably used seasonally by men who came to the place to gather coconuts. A stray dog trotted along the shore. Bulkeley then turned and watched young Arthur, the general's only child, playing with General Tojo, the squadron's monkey mascot.

“This is a beautiful beach, General,” he told MacArthur. “I'd love to let the boy go ashore and enjoy the sand, but if we're spotted, we'll have to get out of here fast.”

MacArthur puffed thoughtfully on his pipe, also watching his son, and said, “I understand, Buck. He'll have plenty of time to play when we reach Darwin.”

According to the plan, MacArthur was to rendezvous with a submarine here, and continue the trip underwater. He was torn with indecision, between taking the obviously safer but slower route by sub or continuing on the surface with the skipper he trusted.

“We'll be in more open sea,” Bulkeley told him. “The ride will be rougher.”

MacArthur looked to Admiral Rockwell, who had joined him on the 41 boat to plan the rest of the journey.

“I'm a navy man, but I've never been able to confine myself in the cramped quarters of a submarine, especially under the water,” Rockwell said. “I'm staying with the squadron.”

MacArthur mulled it over, then concurred.

As darkness approached, the little convoy was getting ready to strike out on the last leg of the voyage. It was decided that the 32 boat was unable to continue. During the previous night, separated and alone, Lieutenant Schumacker had mistaken Bulkeley's boat, coming up from behind, for a Japanese craft, and dumped his spare fuel drums in order to speed up his escape. He now did not have the gas needed to make it to Mindanao. Bulkeley told him to await the submarine and get fuel from it, then head for Iloilo on Panay for repairs and refueling and to later rejoin the squadron. The remaining three boats headed off. (Schumacker, instead, had the sub sink his boat and take him to Australia.)

About six forty-five a.m., fifteen minutes after leaving the cove, a crewman called out, “Sail ho.” A Japanese cruiser was spotted on the horizon. On their current course, the boats would cross the cruiser's bow. Hoping the sharp-eyed Japanese lookouts might mistake the PT boats' wakes for white-top waves, Bulkeley spun his steering wheel hard to the right, to run parallel to the enemy warship. As he changed course, Bulkeley turned and saw the slight form of Mrs. MacArthur standing behind him. She looked concerned but not worried.

“My general is asleep,” she said, pronouncing it “my gineral,” with her Tennessee drawl. She always referred to her husband by using his rank, Southern style, and he in turn called her “Ma'am” or “Mrs. MacArthur,” even in private. “Do I need to wake him?”

“No, ma'am,” Bulkeley said. “Let him rest.”

The ruse worked and the cruiser was soon out of sight, and Bulkeley steered his flotilla back on course.

The seas got rougher after midnight, with lightning flashing in the distance. In the Mindanao Sea, waves of fifteen to twenty feet crashed over the bows, dousing the men on deck. Bulkeley was riding in the wake of Kelly's 34 boat, hoping to make MacArthur's ride a tad smoother.

The night was cold and pitch-black, and Bulkeley was navigating on dead reckoning. Then, in the first streaks of dawn, he could dimly discern the dark outlines of Mindanao and Negros islands.

It was just after six thirty a.m. when the trio of boats now comprising Squadron 3 tied up at the wharf. Mindanao's commander, Brig. Gen. William F. Sharp, was there to meet his boss. MacArthur stepped onto the wooden pier, followed by Bulkeley. The general shook salt water out of his cap, then flipped it onto his head and said to the PT skipper, “Buck, I'm giving every officer and man here the Silver Star for gallantry. You've taken me out of the jaws of death and I won't forget it. If these boats never accomplish anything more and were burned now, they'd have earned their keep a thousand times over. If possible, when I get to Melbourne, I'll get you and your key men out.”

With a salute, MacArthur climbed into Sharp's staff car for the trip to the Del Monte plantation.

* * *

Even as MacArthur's plane took off for Darwin, conditions were deteriorating for the men he left behind on Bataan. Sickness and malnutrition had become worse enemies than the Japanese, and by late March, one-fourth of the eighty thousand defenders were unfit for combat. And their spirits were not heartened by MacArthur's radio message to them from Australia, urging them to continue the fight. That message, and his flight to Australia, was commemorated in true GI style, in a poem the men called “Dugout Doug”:

 

MacArthur knew of the poem, and it stung him deeply, but not as deeply as the fall of Bataan on April 9, or the radio message sent to Roosevelt on May 6 from General Wainwright deep inside Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor: “With broken heart, and head bowed in sadness but not in shame, I report to Your Excellency that today I must arrange terms for surrender of the fortified islands of Manila Bay.”

To MacArthur, Wainwright radioed, “I have fought for you to the best of my ability from Lingayen Gulf to Bataan to Corregidor. Good-bye, General.”

With that, eighty thousand men, including twelve thousand Americans, went into captivity, and MacArthur's humiliation was complete.

But so was his resolve to return, and from March 1942 on, everything MacArthur did, every military plan he made, every offensive action he ordered was made with one purpose in mind: his promised return to the Philippines.

To begin with, in May the Japanese juggernaut had at last been stopped. An invasion force led by carriers and bound for the vital Allied base at Port Moresby, on the southern tip of New Guinea's Papua province, had been met by U.S. forces in the Coral Sea. While the Americans had taken the brunt of the beating, with the carrier
Lexington
sunk and
Yorktown
damaged, in return for the loss of one small enemy carrier, a Japanese invasion force, for the first time in the war, had been turned back.

In July, the Japanese made another stab at Port Moresby, this time by landing troops on the northern coast of Papua at the villages of Gona and Buna, then along the Kokoda Trail, hoping to take the port through the back door. There, amid the jagged heights of the Owen Stanley Mountains, they were met by American and Australian troops. The result was a running six-month battle as the Japanese were pushed back to the coast, culminating in the bloody slugging matches around Gona, Buna, and Buna Government Station, where men fought wearing gas masks to stave off the stench of putrefying flesh.