The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (20 page)

On Bataan, Wainwright and Parker’s soldiers—on half rations and exhausted from constant combat—were simply attempting to survive. “The unrelenting summer heat had set in and the roads had turned to dust, which was everywhere and coating everything,” Wainwright remembered. “The soldiers prayed for rain, which never came, and welcomed the cool night, though the setting sun brought Japanese soldiers out of their foxholes and through the jungle in waves of attacks.” These assaults were relentless (except for three silent hours at midday, when the Japanese took their lunch) and confirmed the Japanese belief that the singular willpower of their soldiers, and their willingness to die, would bring them victory. Philippine Colonel Carlos Romulo visited American and Filipino soldiers manning the lines and then reported to MacArthur. His description reflected the cost of constant battle: Wainwright and Parker’s men were exhausted and hungry, their features pancaked with mire and grit. “They looked like albinos,” he said. “Pallid dust caked their hair and uniforms and skins.” What Romulo didn’t report, but which was everywhere apparent, was the deep bitterness that infected even the hardiest soldiers. They felt abandoned not only by Roosevelt (who had “wiped us off the page and closed the book”), but also by MacArthur, whom they never saw.

At night, during lulls in the fighting, American soldiers listened to the broadcasts of “Tokyo Rose,” whose transmissions they found enormously entertaining. Rose aimed much of her propaganda at American soldiers on Bataan (“Hey, she’s talking about us,” they would say), deriding their defenses, dismissing their courage, and predicting their defeat.
MacArthur would be captured, she said, and hung as a war criminal in Tokyo. “You’re out on the end of a 6,000-mile limb,” she said one night. “The Japanese Imperial Forces are sawing that limb in two. Get smart and give up. Why starve in the stinking jungle while the folks back home make big profits?” This brought laughs, as did the threat to MacArthur. If the Americans fighting with Wainwright and Parker couldn’t find MacArthur, they joked, what made the Japanese think
they
could? He wasn’t on the front lines with them, but was somewhere back on Corregidor. Soon enough, he too became the object of derision and the focus of a combat ditty sung to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It would follow him for the rest of his life.

    
Dugout Doug MacArthur lies ashakin’ on the Rock

    
Safe from all the bombers and from any sudden shock

    
Dugout Doug is eating of the best food on Bataan

    
And his troops go starving on

Jonathan “Skinny” Wainwright was everywhere. He urged his soldiers south to their new positions, helped them wrestle artillery pieces through Bataan’s mud, spoke at length with his commanders, and promoted his best officers. In the midst of his withdrawal from Bataan’s Abucay-Mauban line, Wainwright met with Colonel Clinton A. “Clint” Pierce. The Brooklyn-born, tough-talking colonel commanded the 26th Cavalry Regiment, a battle-hardened outfit that was a part of the always-reliable Philippine Scouts. Pierce was one of Wainwright’s best fighters: He had enlisted with the Illinois National Guard in 1916, served for a time as a cavalry commander on the Mexican-American border, fought in the Great War, and then climbed through the ranks. Staid, gruff, quick to anger but colorful and immensely popular, Pierce was a natural leader. Wainwright directed Pierce to take the 26th south and west to Quinauan and Longoskawayan Points, on Bataan’s western coast, to block a Japanese landing that threatened the American defenses from the rear. Haunted by the fate of his wife and daughter, who were out of reach in Japanese-occupied Manila, Pierce peered out at Wainwright through his grizzled features, acknowledging that he knew what was expected of him.

The 26th Regiment was understrength and already exhausted, but it had the best troops at hand. Still, this would be a tough assignment, and Wainwright wanted to reassure his subordinate. “Colonel,” Wainwright said, “when I was promoted to be a brigadier general, the information was given me by General Malin Craig. He not only gave me the information but he reached up and detached two stars from the stars he wore on his shoulder. I now wish to inform you that you are from this moment on a brigadier general.” Wainwright opened his right fist, showing Pierce the two stars. “These are the stars that Malin Craig gave me,” Wainwright said. “I want you to have them and wear them always—no matter how many more stars you get. Also, I want you to proceed to the west coast and kick hell out of the Nips who have landed there.” Pierce pinned the two stars on his uniform, nodded his agreement, fired off a salute, and went to organize his men.

By the night of January 25, a new defensive line—Orion-Bagac—had been formed; shorter than the Abucay-Mauban line, it snaked uncertainly through thick jungle, which would impede Japanese attacks. The Japanese, believing they had the Americans on the run, struck hard, penetrating Wainwright’s position. But Homma overreached. Wainwright struck back, cutting off Japanese units that had breached his lines and leaving them isolated in pockets and fighting desperately to extricate themselves. It was the first time since the invasion that the Americans and their Philippine allies had the upper hand. Wainwright ordered his men forward to reduce the pockets, then put himself near the front to watch the results.

Yard by yard, day by day, the Americans tallied victory after victory, prying the Japanese from their emplacements. But these victories were only temporary, as Wainwright knew. From the moment he sent his men forward, he pleaded with MacArthur for yet another retreat to the south, to Bataan’s waist, where his line could be further shortened and strengthened. MacArthur turned him down. “Were we to withdraw to such a line now it would not only invite immediate overwhelming enemy attack,” he told Wainwright, “but would completely collapse the morale of our own forces. Sooner or later we must fight to the finish. Once again, I repeat, I am aware of the enormous difficulties that face you and am proud, indeed, of the magnificent effort you have made.
There is nothing finer in history. Let’s continue and praise the fair fame that we have so fairly won.” This flowery statement was MacArthur urging further exertions. But in private, he harbored nagging doubts. Months before, he had told Clare Boothe Luce that fighting on the defense was a prescription for defeat, and the assertion loomed before him now in the form of retreating soldiers weakened by lack of food, their ranks thinned by disease. After sending his message to Wainwright, he instructed Sid Huff to find shells for his father’s small Derringer. “They will never take me alive, Sid,” he said.

The so-called Battle of the Pockets pitted Americans and Filipinos against Japanese soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, a necessity given the thick jungle cover. The Americans couldn’t bring their artillery to bear, but neither could Homma. Finally, on February 10, Wainwright’s men reduced the last of these incursions, eliminating the final Japanese pocket with a headlong infantry assault. The firefights were brutal, close-in, and reminiscent of the fighting that MacArthur had seen on the front lines during the Great War. Filipino and American troops fought the Japanese at such close quarters that commanders feared that their troops would fire into each other. The Battle of the Pockets was a battle of annihilation, a sobering textbook example of how the Japanese fought. It was now clear to MacArthur and his commanders that “the war to end all wars” had been but a prelude to what they were facing in the Pacific. Surrounded in their pockets and under constant pressure, the Japanese were urged to surrender, but replied with gunfire.

Back in Manila, with his forces on Bataan bloodied and battered, an embarrassed Masaharu Homma studied his maps and reviewed his casualty figures. On February 8 (as the Filipinos and Americans crashed in on the last Japanese pocket), he decided he had had enough. He reluctantly cabled Tokyo for more reinforcements, then ordered his forces into a general withdrawal. The Japanese general had failed in his mission to take the Philippines by storm and force an easy surrender of his American enemy. On Corregidor, MacArthur noted the cessation of attacks and breathed a sigh of relief. He had gained a badly needed respite. “The enemy has definitely recoiled,” he cabled Marshall. “He has refused [bent back] his flank in front of my right six to ten kilometers and in other sectors by varying distances. His attitude is so passive as to
discount any immediate threat of attack.” Marshall cabled his response: MacArthur’s defense was “heroic,” he said—and help was on the way.

M
acArthur and Marshall gained invaluable information from the Battle of Bataan, gleaning crucial insights into how the Japanese fought. MacArthur summarized these lessons by pointing out to his aides that as long as Japanese commanders had a plan, they performed well. But when the plan was interrupted, or when Japanese commanders were required to improvise, they could be defeated. The Japanese were well-trained fighters and absolutely tenacious on the offensive, but they lacked the ability to adapt their tactics to uncertain conditions and were poor defensive fighters. Their willingness to follow orders without question was the Japanese army’s great strength—and its most fundamental weakness. Their commanders were inflexible, viewing even a minor withdrawal as a personal humiliation. Because the Japanese were meticulous planners, they believed that failure resulted from a lack of initiative. American officers were quite different: If a plan didn’t work, they abandoned it and tried something else. MacArthur, who had been studying the Japanese military his entire life, understood this better than any American commander. “Never let the Jap attack you,” MacArthur told his subordinates at the war’s outset. “When the Japanese soldier has a coordinated plan of attack he works smoothly. [But] when he is attacked—when he doesn’t know what is coming—it isn’t the same.”

The Battle of the Pockets reflected this shortcoming in the Japanese defensive strategy, for when American commanders isolated and then reduced the bulges in Homma’s surge, the Americans were met not with innovative tactics or creative responses, but by relentless effusions of blood. It was as if the Japanese believed that somewhere in the universe, fate itself was throwing sacrifice onto the scales of battle, balancing out the edge in firepower their enemies could bring against them. This was the delusion of sacrifice that so animated the Japanese spirit. But this idea of personal sacrifice, while fundamental to any military’s ethic, was such an obsession for the Japanese—and a central tenet of their military training—that during a conflict, it resulted in a relentless orgy of personal savagery. The savagery resulted from the way that Japan trained
its military recruits, providing a program that obliterated individual will and eliminated any human empathy. One Japanese soldier remembered his first year in the army:

    
Personality ceased to exist, there was only rank. You became the lowest of the low, condemned to cook, clean, drill and run from dawn to dusk. You could be beaten for anything—being too short or too tall, even because somebody didn’t like the way you drank coffee. This was done to make each man respond instantly to orders, and it produced results. If you want soldiers to fight hard, they must train hard. This was the system which made the Japanese army so formidable—each man was schooled to accept unquestioningly the order of his group leader—and then took over a new recruit intake to boss around himself. Isn’t that the way it is in every army?

Not surprisingly, this sadistic training hardened the individual Japanese soldier, whose common trait during the conflict was an utter lack of compassion for the defeated. Historians commonly describe Germany’s infantry as the most efficient and well trained in history, but no nation’s soldiers could match the Japanese for sheer ferocity. What the Japanese soldier learned in his training, where uncompromising violence was a minute-to-minute reality, was passed on to prisoners and captive populations. Following the capture of Nanking, in December 1937, the Japanese Army murdered over two hundred thousand innocent Chinese men, women, and children, and Japanese soldiers raped thousands of Chinese women. The fate of Nanking was horrific: Civilians were used for bayonet practice, children were decapitated for refusing to remove their caps, and Japanese officers engaged in contests to see who could kill the most and do so the most creatively. The Rape of Nanking lasted six weeks and was well known in the West, where it became the subject of newsreels that horrified American audiences. While Japan’s political leadership talked of “the war against the Anglo-Saxons” and urged Asians to join them in the fight against white colonialism, the atrocities visited on Nanking were repeated across the conquered territories, alienating millions and transforming potential allies into enemies.

It is little wonder, then, that Americans rarely viewed the Japanese military as a worthy battlefield opponent, in stark contrast with their view of the German Wehrmacht. During the war, Americans followed with admiration the exploits of Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” and were familiar with the genius of Gerd von Rundstedt, Heinz Guderian, and Albert Kesselring, who were hailed even then as military geniuses. No such quality was attributed to Japanese commanders, though Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (Japan’s foremost strategist), Admiral Chuichi Nagumo (who commanded the task force that attacked Pearl Harbor), and General Tomoyuki Yamashita (“the Tiger of Malaya”) proved as capable and creative as any German commander.

The Japanese foot soldier was accorded even less respect. Wartime cartoons showed Japanese soldiers swinging like monkeys down the Malay Peninsula on their way to attack Singapore. Others showed them as “Louseous Japanicas,” a “type of pestilence” that “inhabits coral atolls in the South Pacific, particularly pill boxes, caves, swamps and jungles.” As the war rolled on and the defeats mounted, the Japanese soldier became, in the words of a navy booklet, “a blood-soaked beast—half man and half monkey.” The army put it differently, particularly after the string of Japanese victories that marked the eighteen months following Pearl Harbor, warning its soldiers that the enemy should
not
be seen as a “buck-toothed, near-sighted, pint-sized monkey.” But the solution was hardly better: In its own training manuals, the U.S. military urged its soldiers to view the Japanese soldier as “a robot-like creature.” For the historian, the difference in American viewpoints on the German and Japanese soldier is illuminating; after the first American battles against the Germans in North Africa in 1942, Dwight Eisenhower told his commanders that they needed to teach their men to
hate
the Germans. No such directive was ever required of MacArthur.

Still, although Japan was ill-equipped to match America’s industrial might, and Japanese commanders and soldiers were ill-prepared to match the battlefield flexibility of American thinking, the Japanese military had, since December 7, conquered more territory in less time than any other military in human history. The captured geographic area dwarfed that conquered by Alexander’s Greek phalanxes or Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. By the time that MacArthur’s soldiers were in Bataan, the
Japanese controlled one-quarter of the surface of the earth. The Japanese had achieved this by adopting strategies that puzzled and embarrassed their foes and that relied on the willingness of the individual Japanese soldier to march enormous distances under daunting circumstances and across some of the world’s most difficult terrain. Those same “monkey men” who swung through the Malay jungles forced the capitulation of Singapore as their brilliant campaign overwhelmed a superior force that moved sluggishly and fought indifferently.

So while American soldiers, and the American people, might disparage the Japanese soldier as a primitive animal (descriptions that were rare in literature about the Germans), MacArthur and his commander knew the truth. The soldiers facing MacArthur’s forces on Bataan in early 1942 represented what was then, and with the possible exception of the German Wehrmacht, the best light infantry in the history of the world. They were disciplined, highly motivated, and capable of enormous sacrifice.

None of this was a surprise to Jonathan Wainwright, who had seen the Japanese penchant for sacrifice during their drive for Luzon. And now on Bataan, Japanese commanders were willing to throw their soldiers relentlessly at his threadbare entrenchments. Under normal circumstances, Wainwright and his men might have welcomed such a battle, but the shortage of food and ballooning sick rolls weakened his formations and undermined unit morale. Increasingly, Wainwright and Parker’s soldiers were growing disenchanted with Washington’s praise, suspicious of reports of imminent rescue, and dismissive of MacArthur’s triumphant missives. The Japanese played on these fears, bombarding Wainwright’s trenches with propaganda leaflets, one of which showed a map of Bataan surrounded by heaping platefuls of meat, fruit, and cake. At night, a Japanese radio broadcast from Manila featured a theme song titled “Ships That Never Come In.”