He wanted to teach them a lesson, an aide remembered, “[about] the unpreparedness of two great democracies” at the start of the war. No one represented the cost of that failure better than Percival and Wainwright. MacArthur started to sign his name with the first pen. “When halfway through it, he stopped, turned to me, and asked me to step forward,” Wainwright remembered. “He gave me the pen, a wholly unexpected and very great gift.” Percival received one, too. So eventually would Jean.
