Tears in the Darkness (21 page)

One bite from a delicate, dapple-winged female anopheles mosquito infected with the Plasmodium parasite, and six to sixteen days later a man would likely suffer an attack of “ague,” the classic term for the cycle of surging fever, soaking sweats, and fits of chills and shaking that mark the onset of an attack of malaria.

The Philippines was one of the most malaria-infested countries in Asia—some two million Filipinos a year suffered from the disease—and, as prewar topographic surveys clearly showed, Bataan with its many streams and rivers was among the most fertile breeding grounds in the world for the mosquitoes that transport the malaria parasite. Millions of anopheles minimus flavirostris were waiting in the hills of Bataan as the Filipinos and Americans dug in, and sensing fresh prey, the avaricious insects immediately began to sally forth in search of a “blood meal.”

Quinine, the drug used as both a preventative and a cure, was in short supply. By late February most of the command had been infected, and the disease was beginning to manifest itself in the ranks. By early March there were three hundred new cases of malaria a day; two weeks later, five hundred cases, then seven hundred. By the end of the month a thousand men a day were coming down with the disease.

To General Jonathan Wainwright, malaria “hung over” the army “like a black cloud, enveloping a land of men whose bones were lumping through their tightly stretched skin.”

In a handwritten note from the field, another general advised headquarters that only half his command was capable of fighting. The rest of his men, he said, were so sick, hungry, and tired they could never hold a position or launch an attack.
²⁶

He sailed at the dawning,

All day I've been blue,

Red sails in the sunset,

I'm rushing to you.

 

The optimists still sat cockeyed by the shore, scanning the horizon, but by early March, well into the lull, most men knew, or strongly suspected, that a convoy was not coming.

“Had terrible breakfast—oatmeal and rice and [weak] coffee,” Captain Thomas Dooley, aide-de-camp to General Wainwright, wrote in his diary. “Went to [headquarters] where General Wainwright discussed food situation w/General McBride . . . Very discouraging. Six out of eight of the last [local] supply boats that have tried to get thru to us have been sunk or captured. Rice supply will last 30 days. All other supplies a lot less—some items only 5 days . . . Frankly things look darker now for this force than ever before.”
²⁷

The men blamed MacArthur, of course. The general of an army is the wellspring of its spirit, the source of its soul. Men draw on his strength, his courage, his love, and when they are troubled they ask him to carry their burdens, their doubts, their dread. He is the scapegoat who accepts their censure, the colossus who shoulders their worry.

 

Dugout Doug MacArthur lies a shaking 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.
²⁸

 

That broadside, a balladic takeoff on “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” must have stung MacArthur. No quality of character is more central to a soldier's psyche than valor, and Douglas MacArthur, cited often in his early years for courage under fire, was one of the most decorated officers in the United States Army. On Bataan, however, he had refused to lead from the field.

For the most part he stayed holed up underground on the island of Corregidor, a tiny cay shaped like a tadpole sitting just off the tip of Bataan, square in the mouth of Manila Bay. Fortified with long-range cannon and huge pit mortars, Corregidor prevented the enemy from entering the bay and using the port of Manila. The island had been formed from the detritus of an old volcano, hence its nickname, “the Rock.”

Some of the rock formed a 390-foot hill, called Malinta Hill. A decade earlier army engineers had cut a tunnel through the hill—a shaft thirty feet wide and almost a mile long with dozens of smaller laterals running off
it. In this honeycomb of reinforced concrete passageways, beneath tons of solid rock and earth, the supernumeraries of the various army and navy commands worked safely at their desks. At the last desk in Lateral Number Three sat the boss, the general.

 

Dugout Doug, come out from hiding

Dugout Doug, come out from hiding

Send to Franklin the glad tidings

That his troops go starving on!

 

MacArthur, his wife, Jean, and young son, Arthur, had arrived on the island Christmas Eve. At first they stayed in a cottage topside, then when the bombing became incessant they moved into the laterals. Malinta Tunnel was the army's communications and control center, its battle hub; only from there could MacArthur speak with all the elements of his command and with the War Department in Washington. For two weeks he stuck to his desk in Lateral Number Three; then, around January 7, he got a note from a trusted staff officer on Bataan. Morale on the peninsula was “sagging,” the officer said. The general needed to come across the water, walk the battlefield, and buoy his men.
²⁹

MacArthur spent just one day on Bataan. At II Corps headquarters he stood with a gathering of staff officers and made a promise: their sorry lot, he said, would soon change. The battle for Bataan had captured the country's “imagination” and help was on the way, a convoy of men and planes “by way of Australia.” When that help arrived, he told the officers, they would win back control of the air, retake lost ground, perhaps go so far as to launch a counterattack. And with that subterfuge still fresh on his lips, the general boarded a navy patrol boat at Mariveles harbor and returned to his underground office on the Rock.
³⁰

Twice the War Department had warned MacArthur that supplies being stockpiled in Australia likely would never reach him. “Previous losses in capital ships [at Pearl Harbor] have seriously reduced the capacity of the Navy to [provide Far East] convoys,” General George Marshall, army chief of staff, cabled the Philippines. And to make sure MacArthur got his meaning, Marshall added a coda, the kind of thing a chief says to a commander he must leave to fight a lost cause. “Every day of time you gain is vital.”
³¹

Meanwhile on Bataan, hungry men were still scanning the skies and
staring out to sea, convinced that their countrymen would never abandon them. Then, on Washington's Birthday, February 23, 1942, the president of the United States, sitting before a microphone at the White House, delivered one of his Fireside Chats on war, and after listening to him on shortwave radios in their tanks and foxholes, many of the men on Bataan—the loyal sons of New York and Nebraska, Maine and Montana, Alabama and Illinois—began to wonder whether patriotism was a virtue or merely the faith of a fool.

The president said Japanese forces had surrounded the Philippines, and that “complete encirclement” had prevented America from sending the garrison “substantial reinforcement.” The United States, he went on, was in for a long fight, and to attain its “objective”—the destruction of both Germany and Japan—America would have to begin operations “in areas other than the Philippines.” That had been the strategy from the beginning, the president said, “and nothing that has occurred in the last two months has caused us to change.”
³²

So now they knew.

They were on their own. And they were expendable.

 

MOST OF THEM
, that is. For weeks the president, the secretary of war, and the army chief of staff had been talking about getting MacArthur out, effecting an escape to prevent the propaganda coup that would come from the capture of a four-star general (the army's highest-ranking officer), especially this particular four-star general.

In less than two months of war, MacArthur had become so popular with the American people, they were naming babies, buildings, flowers (the MacArthur narcissus), dances (the MacArthur glide), parks, streets, and schools after him.

The newspapers painted him a hero: “the most articulate, great general in our history,” “the greatest soldier since Grant,” “hero of the battle for the Philippines whose courage and determination against overwhelming odds have already enshrined him in the hearts of all Americans.” The popular columnist Bob Considine praised the general's “spirit-lifting, pulse-quickening, heartwarming communiqués.”
³³

The communiqués were a labor of self-love, MacArthur's war work. He left siegecraft and the oversight of the army to his chief of staff, Major General Richard K. Sutherland, and busied himself writing his own actualities. Practiced in politics and publicity from his years in Washington,
he sat at his desk in Lateral Number Three and either composed, edited, or approved every press communiqué issued from Corregidor. Anything “favorable to General MacArthur” got his initials; anything not was rewritten or redacted. And all to one standard—“their effect on the MacArthur legend.”
³⁴

His gilded name was usually the only name that appeared in the communiqués, not the young Filipino privates or American corporals, not the 91st Philippine Division or the 4th Marine Regiment or any of the other proud bands of fighting men that served under him.

 

General MacArthur and his troops in the Bataan peninsula . . .

 

General MacArthur's small air force . . .

 

General MacArthur launched a heavy counterattack . . .

 

When those communiqués landed on the desks of newspaper editors and rewrite men, they framed their stories to feature the man most mentioned. Thus it was “MacArthur's planes” and “MacArthur's guns,” “MacArthur's lines” and “MacArthur's men.” Frequently the stories flanked a front-page portrait of the general looking tall and “tight-lipped.” Bataan was an epic of survival—the story of a last stand, the Alamo of the Pacific—and it required an epic hero, Douglas MacArthur.
³⁵

He planned to die in battle, or so he said. In a cable to Marshall on January 23, he vowed “to fight it [out] to complete destruction.” He reckoned he'd be destroyed “in a bombing raid or by artillery fire” but thought for a moment of seeking his finish “in a final charge.” Whatever the end, he expected it to be “brutal and bloody.” Radio Tokyo wanted his capture and imagined him hanging from a scaffold near the Imperial Palace. Perhaps MacArthur imagined the same thing. One day in January he summoned his aide Sidney Huff and asked him to find some bullets for a small Derringer, a keepsake from his father. When Huff returned, MacArthur loaded the tiny twin-barrel handgun and slipped it back into his pocket. “They will never take
me
alive, Sid,” he said.
³⁶

For weeks Washington had been suggesting he leave, but he either ignored or rejected their entreaties. He was determined to “share the fate of the garrison,” he told them. At last, on February 22, Roosevelt ordered him out. To his aides and staff MacArthur made a great show
of protest: After huddling at length with his wife and Sutherland, he told his top officers he was going to resign his commission and “join . . . the Bataan defense force as a simple volunteer”—the general in a foxhole with the malnourished malaria-ridden men he had all but ignored in seventy-seven days of combat. His aides argued that he had been given a direct order, an official change of assignment, by his commander in chief. He had to obey, they said, or face a court-martial. He should go, go to Australia immediately and lead a rescue force back to the Philippines.

That seemed to convince him. “We'll go in the dark of the moon,” he decided, and an hour after sunset on March 11, 1942 MacArthur, Jean, young Arthur and the boy's
Amah
, or Chinese nursemaid, and seventeen members of the headquarters staff boarded four patrol torpedo boats for a dash to the southern island of Mindanao where they would wait for a B-17 from Port Darwin to fly them south to safety.

Gathered at the dock on Corregidor to say good-bye were several officers of high rank, among them General Wainwright, MacArthur's choice as the new commander in the Philippines. MacArthur had conferred with Wainwright the day before and explained why he was leaving. Now he went through it all again—his plan to marshal the forces in Australia and rush back for a rescue, his reluctance to quit his command and desire to stay with his men, the president's unambiguous order to leave. Wainwright told him again that he understood. “He was going because he was a soldier, and a soldier obeys orders from his commander regardless of his own emotions, ambitions, hopes.”
³⁷

And that was true, as far as it went. Orders, indeed, were orders, the incontestable “Word,” and obedience was an officer's obligation, the base metal in the chain of command. To disobey a direct order was to violate the first rule of army life and undermine the orthodoxy of the profession. But there was another law (more an article of faith, really) that superseded the army's established codes and catechisms, a law as old as battle itself, the law of constancy: A soldier never leaves another soldier behind.