Promise Fulfilled

BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC (See Cover)

In the captain's cabin of the 77-ft. PT-41 he lay on the tiny bunk, beaten, burning with defeat. Corregidor was doomed and with it the Philippines, but one leading actor in the most poignant tragedy in U.S. military history would be missing when the curtain fell. Douglas MacArthur, Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, four-star General in the U.S. Army, had left the stage. It was the order of his Commander in Chief.

As he lay on the bunk, General MacArthur was already trying to plan for a swift and overwhelming return. The cockle shell craft pounded noisily south through the swells of the Sulu Sea. The General was seasick; his wife chafed his hands to help the circulation. Douglas MacArthur brooded about his old command, and waited for the interminable journey to end.

They could travel only by night; by day Jap aircraft ruled the skies and they had to skulk in coves. At last the PT put in at Mindanao; a battered Flying Fortress took the MacArthurs on to Australia.

That was in mid-March 1942. The MacArthur who flew into Australia then was the picture of what had happened to the U.S. in the Pacific. He had been West Point's First Captain, and one of its greatest students. He had been the Rain bow Division's commander in World War I, later the Army's youngest Chief of Staff, and always the professional soldier's notion of what a professional soldier should look like. Now he was rumpled and untidy and probably for the first time in his life he looked his age. He was 62.

But he was not really beaten. In Adelaide he made the promise that the U.S., bewildered and shaken by the Japs' victorious campaign, heard with renewed hope.

"I came through -- and I shall return."

A Soldier's Return. Last week, on the flag bridge of the 10,000-ton, 614-ft. light cruiser Nashville, stood a proud, erect figure in freshly pressed khaki. Douglas MacArthur had come back to the Philip pines, as he had promised.

He had slept well, eaten a hearty breakfast. Now with his corncob pipe he pointed over the glassy, green waters of Leyte (rhymes with 8-A) Gulf, where rode the greatest fleet ever assembled in the South west Pacific. Around him were hundreds of transports, shepherded by an Australian squadron and MacArthur's own Seventh Fleet, reinforced with jeep carriers from Admiral Chester Nimitz' vast armada of seagoing airdromes. On the horizon loomed the majestic battleships of Admiral Wil liam F. Halsey's Third Fleet -- some of them ghosts from the graveyard of Pearl Harbor. Beyond the horizon steamed the greatest concentration of water-borne air power in war's history--Vice Admiral Mitscher's fast carrier task groups.

American Lake. There was not a Japanese surface craft in sight. Only one enemy plane ventured out to attack. It dropped one bomb harmlessly into the sea.

The Nashville bore shoreward. The first land sighted by General MacArthur was the islet of Suluan, the first seen by Magellan when he discovered the Philippines in 1521. The first landings, on Homonhon, where Magellan had made his first landing, and on nearby Dinagat (see below), were only the preliminaries in MacArthur's vast and meticulously planned schedule of operations. His first major goal was Leyte, in the heart of the islands, where devoted Visayan guerrillas had been heard calling by secret radio for help a year ago.

The Deceptive Blow. This was what Douglas MacArthur had long advocated, with an intensity which seemed wholly justified because he believed he had been ordered out of Corregidor only in order to lead a counterinvasion soon. Now at last he was striking his massive blow, far behind the enemy's main positions, where the enemy neither expected it nor had organized himself to resist it effectively.

Five hours after the first wave of Army infantrymen dashed across the shell-pocked beaches, General MacArthur and his party filed down a ladder from the Nashville's deck into a landing barge. With him were men who had left Corregidor with him 31 months ago, like his Chief of Staff, Lieut. General Richard K. Sutherland; men who had been sent out later to hib command, like his air chief, Lieut. General George C. Kenney; men who were going back to their homeland, like President Sergio Osmena of the Philippine Commonwealth. There was-one notable absentee: Manuel Quezon, first President of the Commonwealth, who had died in the U.S.

Voice of Freedom. MacArthur sat upright in the stern of the barge. When it grounded in shoal water, he walked down the ramp and waded ashore. He was wet to the midriff, but the sun glinted on the golden "scrambled eggs" on his strictly individualistic cap as he faced a microphone. To Filipinos his first words were the fulfillment of a promise: "This is the Voice of Freedom." That was how the last Corregidor radio programs began. Said Douglas MacArthur:

"People of the Philippines, I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil. ... At my side is your president, Sergio Osmena, worthy successor to that great patriot, Manuel Quezon, with members of his cabinet. The seat of your government is therefore now firmly re-established on Philippine soil. . . . Rally to me. . . . Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of Divine God points the way. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory."

To Dick Sutherland MacArthur said the same thing in homelier language: "Believe it or not, we're here."

The Hard Road. There was a great difference between the Douglas MacArthur who had said goodbye to Lieut. General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright at Corregidor and the man who now returned to the Philippines. He had been a good general then; now he was one of the great. Outwardly he was the same colorful, often theatrical soldier, visibly aged since December 1941, a little flabbier around the jowls and beltline, half bald, with a brushed-over lock of hair which he selfconsciously stroked when his cap was off. But his military stature had grown vastly. He still spoke sound military theory in rounded periods, full of historical allusions. But theory had now been backed by experience in a new kind of war.

The Pitiful Best. The lessons that had gone into the making of a great captain were first learned in an ignorance shared by most of the U.S.'s professional soldiers. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Douglas MacArthur had 35 Flying Fortresses (early models without tail guns) and 90 fighters, mostly of indifferent capabilities. At the time, this air force seemed of some value, just as the eight battleships moored at Pearl Harbor seemed a powerful battle line. But almost half of that air force was destroyed on the ground on the first day, the rest swiftly whittled away by the more experienced Japs. In Australia, MacArthur got a new air commander, Lieut. General George H. Brett. But when Brett's airmen failed to stop a landing at Buna and Gona in New Guinea, Brett was relieved; MacArthur asked Washington for someone else.

General "Hap" Arnold picked George Kenney from behind a desk and sent him to Australia. "Sir, I am your airman here," said brisk, bantam-sized Kenney when he reported for duty.

MacArthur liked Kenney's drive and cocksureness, was soon calling him "George." Kenney, an airman's airman who was getting his first chance to prove it, liked MacArthur, especially when the General turned him loose to run his own air show without interference from groundlings. Like most ground generals of his day, Douglas MacArthur was not notably appreciative of the potentialities of air power. But he had flexibility of mind, and he learned.

Kenney fitted his new team swiftly into MacArthur's strategic plans. His first achievement was to fly a regiment of U.S. troops from Australia to Port Moresby, when the Japs were within 28 miles of pushing the Allies out of New Guinea. These troops helped the Australians to drive the enemy back across the Owen Stanleys. Then Kenney told the Chief he could fly soldiers in greater numbers across the mountains to Buna and Gona, land them there on strips cut out of the bristling kunai grass.

"But damn it, George, you'll kill them all," protested the General. Kenney said he was damned if he would; MacArthur was convinced. The bantam moved in men, ammunition, food, vehicles. MacArthur's coastal campaign (see map) was set.

West along the Coast. Kenney's combat airmen grew at their jobs. Their greatest victory was the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, where they sank every one of 2 2 ships in a Jap convoy headed south to reinforce the dug-in forces in the bitter fighting around Buna and Gona. In this technique Douglas MacArthur recognized one of the oldest principles of war--isolation of the battlefield--achieved with war's newest weapon. It was final proof that if he could control the sea north of New Guinea with air power and the help of the U.S. navy, he need not plow the 1,500 miles through New Guinea's jungle to the tip and the jump-off for the Philippines.

For the complicated deceptive tactics of the coastal campaign he needed more good soldiers than George Kenney and his airmen, and he had them. Most important of all was Dick Sutherland, a lean, bronzed, cool precisionist and a laboratory technician in the science of war. Sutherland knew how to translate MacArthur's sweeping plans into detailed operations schedules. For some of the moves in the campaign they made a six-inch-thick volume. In many an advance they refuted Moltke's dictum that no battle can be fought according to plan after the first few minutes. MacArthur-Sutherland battles were fought by plan for days after the first brush with the enemy.

Man with a Purpose. The coastal campaign began slowly. Fighting at the end of one of the war's longest supply lines, MacArthur was often short of supplies, never (until a few months ago) had all the fighting strength he needed. With the single-minded purpose that meant "the Philippines" to the exclusion of every other war objective, he wheedled and and needled Washington to get what he had to have. Soldiers in other theaters said he had "the worst case of localitis" of any theater commander.

This single-mindedness, until he became a success again, made him enemies. The Navy gave him a U.S. fleet (the Seventh) and the Australian Squadron. Once he spoke unguardedly of ''my Navy" and the proud Navy found it hard to forgive him. There was a time, especially while the MacArthur-for-President boom was being drummed up in the States, when the name of Douglas MacArthur was not always cheered in Navy wardrooms.

But as the tide of war surged back across the Pacific and the Navy's theater overlapped into MacArthur's domain, there came the inevitable discovery: MacArthur and the Navy (as wags liked to put it) were really allies. "Bull" Halsey met MacArthur; they found there was no reason for friction -- at least, not any more. Chester Nimitz flew down to New Guinea; he and MacArthur conferred. While the Navy struck across the Pacific, through the Gilberts and Marshalls, past Truk and into the Marianas and western Carolines, MacArthur's men got stout naval support.

He also got heavy increases in his fighting manpower. By the time he was ready to invade the Philippines, he had already written military history: he had saved Australia, recovered New Guinea; his coastal campaign, fought by a series of leapfrog attacks with gathering momentum and a rare economy of men, had become one of the most successful of the TIME, OCTOBER 30, 1944 The Douglas MacArthur who landed at Leyte last week had written an extraordinary chapter n personal experience as well as in public service. Past 60, with a crack record behind him, he had had to prove himself all over again. He had done it.

Now, beyond the retirement age (64), he was still learning his art, still finding new plays for his battle-tried team in which Sutherland and the three Ks (Krueger, Kinkaid and Kenney -- see below) functioned as smoothly as the Naval Observatory clock in Washington. It was a winning team, and Douglas MacArthur had made it so.

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