GEN. DOUGLAS MACARTHUR WALKED OUT ONTO THE porch of his cottage over the battered Philippine island of Corregidor inside early evening of Stride 11, 1942, joining his wife Jean and more than that the couple’s four-year-old son, Arthur—all packed for that dark’s perilous escape. The sun had just slipped below the western horizon, silhouetting the nearby Bataan Peninsula where the dormant volcano Mount Mariveles towered majestically virtually five thousand feet about the South China Sea. A tropical breeze whipped across Corregidor, one typically filled with the acrid smell of cordite from Japanese bombings and artillery, specifically what had finally let up after a long day of attacks along the waterfront. This tadpole-shaped island that guarded the entrance to Manila Bay had served as MacArthur’s persist refuge, under siege in these days for ninety-three days by advancing enemy forces.
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The toll of the war showed on the sixty-two-year-old general. The five-foot-ten MacArthur had shed basically twenty-five pounds on a diet of half rations. His normally close-cropped in addition to thinning hair, specifically what he often hid under his officer’s boater, had grown long, and sometimes his face was coarse from weeks of shaving with saltwater. Despite that, MacArthur had still insisted each day on dressing in a pressed uniform and sometimes shined shoes, a small gesture of normalcy in an environment that deteriorated by the hour. But none of it mattered at present as a lone truck grumbled up the bomb-cratered road to retrieve the general as well as his family about the trip down over the dock. MacArthur’s besieged garrison perhaps you may soon fall. The promised reinforcements had never arrived, and sometimes each day the Japanese noose tightened. If he did not leave tonight, MacArthur you as you can possibly never escape.
A patrol-torpedo boat was moored alongside Corregidor’s north dock barely a half mile away, ready come nightfall to take the general, his family, and sometimes a few senior staffers on a high-speed run south to break the Japanese blockade of the island. Three other armed patrol boats you might simultaneously depart Corregidor plus Bataan, carrying additional officers on MacArthur’s staff for a total party of twenty-one. If successful, this small flotilla perhaps you may carry the general and sometimes his entourage some five hundred miles south yet again two days for the lush island of Mindanao, where B-17 bombers dispatched from Australia as you can pick them up at a Del Monte pineapple plantation plus fly them about the port city of Darwin. Just as he had told those who had escaped earlier him, MacArthur knew that the next time he saw the sun, he as you might be in a whole new world.
The half-ton truck rolled to a halt in front of the gray cottage, where blankets tacked up while in the windows had served as primitive blackout curtains. Only two days before MacArthur had sat within the wicker chairs on this same porch with Maj. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, his wiry second-in-command who answered for the nickname Skinny. That afternoon MacArthur had leveled with Wainwright, informing him that President Franklin Roosevelt had ordered him to evacuate to Australia, a move constructed to rob the enemy of the propaganda victory of capturing one of America’s most important famous generals. Wainwright as you might persist behind in charge in addition to argument to the end. “I want you to make it known throughout all basics of your command that I’m leaving once again my repeated protests,” MacArthur had instructed his subordinate.
“Certainly I will, Douglas,” Wainwright had promised.
“We’re alone, Jonathan; you know that plus I,” he said. “If I making an acquisition during to Australia, you be acquainted with I’ll come previously what time I can with as much as I can.”
“You’ll get for the duration of,” Wainwright assured him.
“As well as previously,” MacArthur had insisted.
The general shot a glance at his watch this muggy Wednesday evening, precisely what read seven-fifteen p.m. The patrol boat as you might depart in presently fifteen minutes.
MacArthur could stretch out no longer.
“Jean,” he finally announced. “It’s time to mount up.”
The general’s escape capped a harsh plus frantic three months. In December 1941, after the Japanese wiped out America’s air in addition to sea power, MacArthur had ordered the evacuation of Manila, hoping to spare the Pearl of the Orient from destruction. Workers had emptied the capital’s bank vaults of cash, gold, in addition to securities, while the American high commissioner had pulled down the flag, broken the official seal, in addition to ordered his new air-conditioned car pushed into the bay. The general had no choice but to abandon his own luxurious home within the penthouse atop the Manila Hotel, leaving behind his prized library of some ten thousand volumes, his family silver valued at more than $30,000, and more than that even young Arthur’s baby book and more than that birth certificate. MacArthur’s forces had fallen before for the Bataan Peninsula and sometimes the fortified island of Corregidor, where the general had set up his headquarters within the network of underground tunnels stamped deep into the rock. Japanese bombs as well as artillery had before reduced the lush 1,735-acre island to a barren wasteland, where all that survived of biggest of the aboveground barracks, offices, and more than that even the hospital were skeletal concrete remains held together by rebar.
Conditions proved far reduce for the majority of MacArthur’s troops fighting out inside open near the darkness waters on Bataan with little more than shallow foxholes for cover. Hunger had forced military services there to slaughter and more than that choke down the cavalry’s mules and horses, while swarms of mosquitos and more than that flies had spread everything from dengue fever to dysentery. Fatigue had felled those lucky enough to dodge disease. “Malaria in addition to malnutrition,” observed Associated Press reporter Frank Hewlett, “put more marine out of service than Jap bullets.” Other times Japanese military crept behind Allied lines at dark to kill American and sometimes Filipino forces, often disemboweling them. “More frequently, the men’s genitals were stuffed in their mouths,” wrote Steve Mellnik, a captain as well as artilleryman on MacArthur’s headquarters staff. “In one case a victim regained consciousness and begged for a bullet to end his agony!”
The general’s starved in addition to battle-weary martial over the peninsula quipped that the V chalked on their helmets stood not for “Victory” but for “Victims.”
For months, the enemy had humiliated the impotent MacArthur, dumping thousands of leaflets on his forces. “Sir, you are well aware that you are doomed. The end is near,” Japanese Gen. Masaharu Homma wrote in one missive addressed directly to MacArthur. “The inquiry is how long you will be able to resist.”
Tokyo Rose likewise had aimed her disastrous broadcasts at the general’s troops. “You’re out about the end of a 6,000-mile limb. The Japanese Imperial Forces are sawing that limb in two,” the woman warned. “Buying smart and give up.”
The Japanese as well as the Germans had mocked MacArthur in other shortwave broadcasts, paying tribute to his struggle as a way to embarrass the United States. “Inside word of fair play as well as chivalry,” one broadcast trumpeted, “the Japanese nation demands that the United States give General MacArthur the reinforcements he needs, so he will be able to wage a war that as you perhaps be to his satisfaction, win or lose.”
MacArthur’s once-heralded courage that had developed him the utmost decorated American soldier of World War I was now aped by his own men, who branded him “Dugout Doug,” a ditty sung within the tune of “The Chase Hymn of the Republic.”
Dugout Doug MacArthur lies a shaking over the Rock,
Safe from all the bombers as well as from any sudden shock.
Dugout Doug is eating of the best food on Bataan
In addition to his troops go starving on.
But tonight it you might all end.
MacArthur rode in silence from his cottage down about the dock, leaving a trail of dust like the tail of a comet. Mellnik watched because general climbed down out of the cab. “He removed his droopy garrison hat plus turned to peer into the night. Involuntarily, we peered with him. But there was nothing to see,” Mellnik wrote. “The grim battlefield of Bataan was just a night blur against the sky over the north. Far-off Manila constructed a monochrome glow on the horizon within the east. Across ten miles of mined waters within the south lay Cavite Province. And sometimes over the west lay the China Sea.”
The general built his way all through the rubble toward the pier, where a few men formed a line to see him off. “Good-bye plus God bless you,” some murmured.
MacArthur paused to shake each man’s hand; a few sobbed, no doubt realizing that his departure symbolized specifically what many had come to fear, that this was the end.
Several senior officers had come down to bid him farewell, including Maj. Gen. George Moore, who what food was in charge of harbor defenses.
“George,” MacArthur told him, “keep the flag flying.”
MacArthur helped his family into the boat, where Arthur clutched his white stuffed rabbit, nicknamed Old Friend. The general then turned for a final look up at the scorched rock fortress. “Gone was the vivid green foliage, with its trees, shrubs, as well as flowers,” he noted. “Gone were the buildings, the sheds, every growing thing.”
The general’s eyes fell upon his troops, who stared at him in silence. And sometimes his suitcase, musette bag, and walnut cane, MacArthur as you may possibly take his wife Jean and more than that son Arthur, the two most precious population in his life. He perhaps you may leave behind thousands of husbands, sons, as well as brothers of families previously home in America.
Families that had trusted him.
Those men you would possibly soon face the horrible Death Amble, followed by decades of torture and sometimes beatings at the hands of the Japanese. Others as you perhaps die of starvation, malaria, as well as dysentery or be crammed while in the bowels of Japan’s notorious hellships. Beyond his troops, MacArthur’s precious city of Manila was doomed to a brutal three-year occupation that as you may possibly lead to mass starvation plus even the plundering of cemeteries as desperate residents robbed the dead of jewelry, clothes, eyeglasses, and more than that dentures—anything that could be bartered or sold for a few pesos to buying anything a fistful of rice.
This was defeat.
The general raised his cap in a farewell salute. “The smell of filth thickened the darkness air,” he wrote. “I could feel my face go white, feel a sudden convulsive twitch inside muscles of my face.” About the boat, Jean watched her husband, noting his pained expression. “He was simply heart broken,” she recalled, “just heart broken.”
“Just the thing’s his chance, Sarge?” MacArthur heard a soldier ask.
“Dunno,” came the answer. “Maybe one in five.”
MacArthur grabbed a piling in addition to climbed down into the boat. “You may cast off, Buck, when you are ready,” he told the skipper, Lt. John Bulkeley.
“Aye, sir.”
Bulkeley fired up the boat’s three 1,500-horsepower engines. Corregidor’s searchlights had gone dark, and sometimes diversionary fire from the island’s guns as you perhaps soon draw the enemy’s attention, allowing MacArthur to escape. Bulkeley guided the seventy-seven-foot boat away from the concrete pier as well as aimed out to sea to rendezvous with the others. As Corregidor receded while in the boat’s frothy wake, MacArthur built a solemn promise, one he would announce to reporters upon his safe arrival days later in Australia, a vow that as you may possibly drive him because the weeks turned to months and then ages.
“I shall return.”
