The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines

by Jonathan Horn

In truth, the leaders of America’s military had their own concerns over how to defend the Philippines. In the wake of Japan’s rout of Russia, American strategists had begun imagining their own future war with the Pacific’s new powerhouse.

Japanese could land hundreds of thousands of troops in the Philippines while American reinforcements, even if they set off from the new naval base being developed at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, would take months. Between these reinforcements and the Philippines lay five thousand miles of ocean, as well as several Japanese-controlled island chains: the Marshalls, the Marianas (save for Guam, which the United States had taken from Spain), and the Carolines.

Faced with these realities, a joint board representing the United States Army and Navy formulated War Plan Orange.

War Plan Orange called for American forces to defend only the area around Manila Bay. In later iterations of the plan, the defensive zone would shrink to just the two places commanding the bay’s entrance: Corregidor and Bataan. If American forces could withdraw into those two spots—and somehow hold out as long as half a year—the navy could steam into the bay to their rescue.

Nevertheless, when he returned to America in 1925, the question of how American and Filipino soldiers could hold out on Bataan for so long with so little still defied any realistic answer—and always would.

When later that same year he set off for the Philippines as America’s newly appointed top army commander on the islands, she set off for Reno, Nevada, for a divorce. And when orders brought him back from the Philippines in September 1930, he arranged for a new and younger lover, a Filipina actress named Isabel Rosario Cooper, to follow him to his new posting in Washington. Once in the capital, he put her up in a secret apartment.

President Herbert Hoover had made Douglas the army chief of staff.

No idea could have incensed MacArthur more. “No one takes seriously the equally illogical plan of disbanding our fire department to stop fires or disbanding our police departments to stop crime,” he said.

The police, however, seemed inadequate to the threat MacArthur saw cresting in 1932: World War I veterans coming by the hundreds and then thousands and camping on the banks of Washington, DC, as part of a campaign to persuade Congress to advance payment of a bonus they had been promised.

MacArthur no longer saw the faces of the men who had followed him in France. He saw Communists bent on revolution. They, in turn, would see the chief of staff, with his medals and decorations gleaming, take to the streets with his troops when orders came to clear the protesters...

MacArthur sued a pair of columnists for depicting him as a dictator, even though Governor Franklin Roosevelt of New York had done no less in private. He said MacArthur ranked among the “most dangerous men in the country.”

“When we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt,” MacArthur remembered saying.

The army’s budget also lay in the crosshairs of a new force: the acolytes of Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, who had fought in the skies over France during the Great War and spent the years afterward accusing superiors in the military of failing to develop the airpower capabilities needed to win the next war. A court-marital conviction in 1925 led to Mitchell’s resignation but not before he predicted that Americans stationed at military facilities on the Hawaiian island of Oahu would wake up one morning to find Japanese planes overhead.

In 1934, one of those congressmen tipped off the columnists whom MacArthur had sued for libel to the secret apartment he kept for his lover, Isabel Cooper. That MacArthur had already broken up with her made matters worse. She had saved the racy letters he had sent her under the name “Daddy,” and shared them with the reporters, who, in turn, would share them with the world, he knew, unless he ended his lawsuit.

With his days as chief of staff numbered, MacArthur needed a way out of Washington. The Philippines offered one.

In 1934, Congress passed legislation putting the Philippines on track for independence in ten years’ time. In the meantime, the islands would enjoy self-government as a commonwealth under the protection of the United States military. Little suspense surrounded who the Filipinos would choose as their commonwealth’s first president, Manuel Quezon.

Its defense, he argued, should draw instead on what the islands did have in abundance: the courage that his father had seen all those years ago in the eyes of the Philippine people. To Quezon, the younger MacArthur proposed a Philippine army modeled after Switzerland’s: a small standing force of about a thousand officers and ten times as many enlisted men who would see their ranks swell in time of war thanks to the compulsory military training civilians would receive at camps established across the archipelago. If forty thousand men passed through these camps each year, the Philippines would reach its full independence in ten years’ time with four hundred thousand men ready to bear arms.

Quezon had one more question: Would MacArthur himself agree to oversee the creation and command of this army? He would. In exchange, he would receive $33,000 a year from the commonwealth, not to mention the $7,500 he would continue to collect for his service in the United States Army.

All of this would have made MacArthur perhaps the best-compensated army officer in American history, and it did not even include the bonus he had negotiated with the Philippine government. For every year the Philippines followed his military advice, he would receive a commission of nearly half a percent of whatever the commonwealth spent on defense. Only later would the full benefit of this unusual arrangement become clear.

For his chief of staff, MacArthur had insisted on the service of a major ten years his junior named Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Others noticed, too. More and more, Quezon began turning to Eisenhower instead of MacArthur for advice. Maybe it was because MacArthur, after seeing some poll numbers, had told Quezon that Roosevelt would lose the 1936 election instead of winning, as he did, in a landslide.

Maybe it was because MacArthur, who had assumed the distinctly un-American and much-mocked title of field marshal, had begun dreaming up a military parade where he could sport his custom black-and-white sharkskin uniform as well as the cap he had richly embroidered with gold, even though Eisenhower argued the Philippines could not afford such pomp when its training camps had fallen short of supplies, to say nothing of enrollees. Maybe it was because MacArthur had forfeited his real power on the last day of 1937, when he retired from the United States Army. No longer did MacArthur represent a connection to Washington.

That day would come sooner than even MacArthur knew. In July 1937, an exchange of fire between Japanese and Chinese forces at the Marco Polo Bridge outside the city of Peking sparked war.

In May 1940, the Netherlands, whose colonies still included the Dutch East Indies, fell to the German war machine. France, still in charge of Indochina, fell soon afterward, as the British, still colonial masters of India, Burma, Hong Kong, and Singapore, evacuated troops from the European continent.

As the battle in Western Europe moved to the skies over Britain, Japanese leaders speaking of a “new order in Greater East Asia” eyed the semi-orphaned, resource-rich colonies to their south. When the United States tried its hand at deterrence by placing its Pacific fleet at the naval base it had built at Pearl Harbor and by issuing an embargo on some of the raw materials essential to the Japanese military, Japan tried its own policy of deterrence by signing a defensive pact with Germany and Italy.

When the Japanese occupied French Indochina in July 1941, the United States made it impossible for the Japanese to buy the one commodity their military needed most: oil. Both powers now felt under siege: the Japanese economically, the United States geographically with hostile forces on the verge of encircling the Philippines. It wa...

In private, however, the situation appeared otherwise. During MacArthur’s retirement, army and navy strategists faced with the reality that Congress had not given them enough resources to prevail in a one-front war coalesced around a plan called Rainbow Five for the dreaded but increasingly likely prospect of a two-front war. Under the plan, American forces would assume the defensive against Japan while focusing first on the more feared German adversary. As one of the colors in the “rainbow,” War Plan Orange still set the strategy against Japan but with a change: The reinforcements supposed to sail to the rescue of the Philippines would now have other places to go. The men withdrawing into Bataan and Corregidor would have to do so with no timetable for their relief. Rather than months, it might take years.

But now there was a new chief of staff, George C. Marshall, and a new secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, and it was to them that MacArthur protested. True, American forces in the Philippines had totaled little more than twenty thousand men, including Philippine Scouts, when MacArthur had taken command in July. But he would have more than one hundred thousand once he fully mobilized the Philippine Army reserves who had passed through his training camps. And by the spring of 1942, he said that number would be two hundred thousand. No wonder Marshall and Stimson came down with what the latter would later diagnose as a case of “contagious optimism.” They found another reason for optimism in the new bomber that Boeing had developed. Designed to fly at high speeds in excess of 250 miles per hour and at high altitudes above

the four-engine B-17 boasted a range that would allow it to strike targets hundreds of miles away. The Flying Fortress, as the plane became known, appeared able to fulfill the old prophecy Billy Mitchell had made of dominating the seas from the skies and sending an invading force to the watery depths before it could near the shore. By stockpiling Flying Fortresses, the Philippines could become what Stimson called a “self-sustaining fortress.” By November 1941, he would see to it that the Philippines had thirty-five of these planes, more than double the number in Hawaii.

With these bombers came Lewis Brereton, the general whom MacArthur had handpicked to lead his air force. Brereton would have to wait until the night of December 7 for the rowdy reception thrown in his honor at the Manila Hotel’s pavilion, but he...

Marshall had agreed to dispense with the decades of thinking that had gone into War Plan Orange. MacArthur’s plan was now America’s. “They are going to give us everything we have asked for,” MacArthur exclaimed to his chief of staff, Richard Sutherland, the successor to Eisenhower, who had happily accepted orders taking him back to the United States.

Whether these supplies would arrive on time depended on how one interpreted the signs that began appearing in the sky in early December. There was the mysterious aircraft spotted around the same time each morning north of Manila, in the vicinity of Clark Airfield, the only place in Luzon capable of housing the B-17.

To the west at the smaller Iba airstrip, technicians staring at the screen of a newly installed radar system in an otherwise dark hut began following strange blips. B-17 crews conducting reconnaissance over the waters north of Luzon, meanwhile, encountered unidentified bombers flying south from Formosa, as Taiwan was then called, only to see them reverse direction and head back toward the island, said to be a Japanese staging ground.

“Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment,” the War Department had warned him on November 27. He still said that the conflict would not begin until the spring of 1942, but newsmen on December 5 heard him concede it could come at any time after the new year.

Part of MacArthur must have pondered that possibility, because he ordered the B-17s sent to the bottom of the archipelago, to a field on the island of Mindanao, where they would be beyond the range of any Japanese attack from Formosa.

to expect that the planes would make their scheduled stop by the shores of Pearl Harbor while he slept.

Several minutes after seven in the morning Hawaii time, radar operators stationed on the northern edge of the island of Oahu reported “a large number of planes coming in from the north.” They were told not to fret; it was the B-17s bound for the Philippines.

MacArthur could not believe it when he picked up the phone in the predawn darkness of Manila on December 8. “Pearl Harbor?” he exclaimed. “Why, that should be our strongest point!”

Brereton had not yet fully carried out MacArthur’s earlier orders to move all thirty-five of the B-17s to Mindanao. More than half remained at Clark in range of the Japanese bombers on Formosa. In this peril lay opportunity. If the B-17s took off at daylight, they could strike the Japanese on Formosa. If the B-17s tarried on the ground, however, the opposite might happen: a repeat of Pearl Harbor, where the Japanese had found hundreds of American planes parked in perfect rows as if arranged to facilitate their destruction.

The best way to prevent another such disaster was to go on the offense. The pilots just needed targets on Formosa, but Sutherland remembered Brereton being unable to provide any specific ones and admitting the need for additional reconnaissance, which MacArthur had refused permission to conduct days earlier.

By sunrise, no word had come. Time was running out. At 7:15 in the morning, Brereton once again showed up outside MacArthur’s office and once again asked Sutherland for a definitive answer. MacArthur would later claim the proposal never reached his desk. But a witness saw Sutherland go into MacArthur’s office and come back with an answer. “The general says no. Don’t make the first overt act.”

from Washington on November 27. “If hostilities cannot, repeat cannot, be avoided the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.” Surely, by any standard, the attack on Pearl Harbor classified as an “overt act.” How could MacArthur think otherwise? The question confounded Brereton and his airmen. Historians trying to piece together the many conflicting accounts of that morning have struggled, too.

MacArthur explained years later. The Japanese had attacked the United States. As far as he knew, they had not yet attacked the Philippines.II He had “not the slightest doubt” they soon would. But he also knew, as he later put it, “[that] great local hope existed that this would not be the case.” If it appeared that American rather than Japanese forces had taken the first step toward involving the Philippines in a war that MacArthur recognized would inflict a fearful toll upon the islands, he would risk what he had always considered the centerpiece of his defense strategy: the support of the Filipino people themselves.

He had never really believed that thirty-five bombers could defeat Japan. Had he thought so, he would never have ordered the planes to Mindanao, where they would be out of range of the Japanese planes on Formosa but also unable to carry out an immediate strike against them.

To prevail in what he had come to believe would be a “glorious land war,” he would need hundreds of thousands of Filipinos willing to meet the enemy on the beaches and plains—and to wage “a people’s contest” like the one Abraham Lincoln had declared after h...

When MacArthur had held the title of chief of staff, there had been those who believed he had tried to sabotage Marshall’s career by assigning him to a post with the Illinois National Guard.

Marshall summoned an expert: MacArthur’s former chief of staff, Dwight D. Eisenhower, now a general himself. Asked how the army could best support MacArthur, Eisenhower responded, “It will be a long time before major reinforcements can go to the Philippines, longer than the garrison can hold out with any driblet of assistance, if the enemy commits major forces to their reduction. The people of China, of the Philippines, of the Dutch East Indies will be watching us. They may excuse failure but they will not excuse abandonment. We must do what we can.”

Nevertheless, Marshall assured MacArthur that “every day” he could hold out brought the army closer to an answer. In the meantime, MacArthur could take pride that his defense of the Philippines had become, as Marshall put it, “an epic of this war.” Still astonished at how fast the fight-them-on-the-beaches strategy had collapsed, Eisenhower found the praise sickening but saw its purpose. “MacArthur is as big a baby as ever,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary. “But we’ve got to keep him fighting.”

MacArthur had already tried. In a message to the troops on Bataan two days earlier, he had doubled down on what he had told their general officers during his visit. “Help is on the way from the United States, thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched. The exact time of arrival of reinforcements is unknown as they will have to fight their way through Japanese attempts against them. It is imperative that our troops hold until these reinforcements arrive,” he wrote. “If we fight we will win; if we retreat we will be destroyed.”

Barely a week after promising that help was on the way, he ordered subordinates not to increase Bataan’s food supply but rather to ship some of it to Corregidor in preparation for the eventual loss of the peninsula.