MacArthur leaves Corregidor

On the evening of 11 March 1942, at about 7.45 p.m., the motor torpedo boat PT-41 cast off from the north dock of the island of Corregidor. On board was General Douglas MacArthur, commander of US Army Forces in the Far East, with his wife Jean, his four-year-old son Arthur and the boy’s Chinese amah. A quarter of an hour later three other boats carrying staff officers joined him. Ahead of them lay a voyage of some 900 kilometres through waters controlled by the Japanese fleet, and then a flight to Australia. Behind them they left more than 70,000 American and Filipino soldiers on the Bataan Peninsula and in the forts at the entrance to Manila Bay, for whom there was no longer any hope of rescue.

Some chronologies state under 11 March that the Japanese landed on Mindanao, and under 14 March that the retreat to Corregidor began. Neither is accurate. The Japanese had been on Mindanao since 20 December 1941, when they took Davao, and their second landing, at Zamboanga at the western tip of the island, took place on 2 March 1942 (some sources give the night of 1–2 March). On 11 March it was MacArthur himself who was heading for Mindanao. Nor did any retreat to Corregidor begin in mid-March: the front on Bataan held until April, and the troops defending the peninsula did not withdraw to the island. What did indeed intensify in mid-March was the Japanese shelling of the Manila Bay forts from the shore of Cavite province.

The order and the delay

On 22 February President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to leave the Philippines and take command in Australia. The general accepted the order but secured permission to choose the “psychological moment” for his departure, which he said would come around 15 March. At the beginning of March the moment seemed right. Bataan was relatively quiet: in February the defenders had destroyed the Japanese landings and pockets, and Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma’s Fourteenth Army had pulled back to wait for reinforcements. At the same time, however, the Japanese blockade was tightening week by week. At the end of February the Japanese occupied the island of Mindoro, and more and more of their warships were appearing in the waters south of Luzon. The submarine that was to take MacArthur off could not arrive for several days, so the general decided not to wait and to go by PT boat.

He chose them himself. Lieutenant John Bulkeley’s Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3 had by March only four of its six PT boats left, all worn out by three months of fighting, their engines running on contaminated fuel. Bulkeley, whose January attacks on Japanese shipping in Subic Bay had been given great publicity by the American press (their actual results were more modest than was claimed at the time), was already a hero at home. His men’s task now was to carry a party of twenty-one across the Sulu Sea to Mindanao: MacArthur and his family, Rear Admiral Francis Rockwell, the chief of staff, General Richard Sutherland, and more than a dozen staff officers, from the quartermaster and signals officer to intelligence and air. The choice of these men showed that MacArthur was not going to Australia to retire: he was taking with him the nucleus of a new headquarters. These officers, later known as the “Bataan Gang”, stayed with him until the end of the war.

Before the departure

Before he sailed, MacArthur arranged the command in the Philippines in his own way. He did not appoint a single successor. He divided the forces into four independent commands: the Luzon Force on Bataan under Major General Jonathan Wainwright, the harbour defences of Manila and Subic Bays under Major General George Moore, the forces on Mindanao under Brigadier General William Sharp, and the forces in the Visayas under Brigadier General Bradford Chynoweth. He himself was to remain in command of them all from Australia, through his deputy chief of staff on Corregidor, Colonel Lewis Beebe. He justified this on the grounds that if one command capitulated, the others could fight on. He did not, however, inform Washington of the arrangement.

On his last day he talked with Wainwright, who had come over from Bataan. According to the accounts of both generals, MacArthur assured him that he was leaving only because the President had ordered him to, and that if Wainwright held out on Bataan until his return, he would be made a lieutenant general. He instructed General Moore to hold Corregidor and to keep food reserves at half rations for 20,000 men until 30 June. He took leave of him with the words: “Keep the flag flying. I’m coming back.”

The voyage across the Sulu Sea

The boats left Manila Bay through a channel in the minefield and headed south. The seas were high, the boats became separated in the darkness, and the passengers, soaked and seasick, spent the night on deck. On the morning of 12 March the boats met at the uninhabited islet of Tagauayan in the Cuyo Islands. On PT-32 there was a dangerous mistake: its crew took MacArthur’s boat, approaching in the half-light, for a Japanese warship and came close to opening fire, having earlier, while preparing to flee, thrown their spare fuel drums overboard. The damaged PT-32 could go no further. Its passengers were distributed among the other boats, and the next day the boat itself was scuttled by the American submarine Permit, which also took off its crew.

At 6 p.m. on 12 March, still in daylight, the boats set off again so as to make their rendezvous with the aircraft. An hour later their crews sighted a Japanese cruiser. Bulkeley turned sharply west, into the setting sun, and was not spotted. During the night, in heavy seas, the boats crossed the Sulu Sea. Shortly after 6.30 a.m. on 13 March PT-41 tied up at the wharf at Cagayan de Oro on the north coast of Mindanao. MacArthur reportedly told Bulkeley that he had taken him “out of the jaws of death” and that he would not forget it of anyone in the crew. Bulkeley was later awarded the Medal of Honor for the fighting in the Philippines and for this voyage. Louis Morton’s US official history gives the dates of the voyage shifted by one day (departure on 12 March, Mindanao on 14 March), but most participants’ accounts and studies give the evening of 11 March.

Four days on Mindanao

From Cagayan the party drove to Del Monte airfield on a pineapple plantation owned by an American canning company. There a disappointment awaited them. Of the four B-17 bombers that the commander of US forces in Australia, General George Brett, had sent for MacArthur, two had turned back with mechanical trouble, one had crashed into the sea, and the only one to arrive was in such poor condition that General Sharp sent it back without waiting for MacArthur. Angered, MacArthur demanded from General George Marshall “the three best planes in the United States or Hawaii” and crews who knew their business. Brett, who had few serviceable aircraft in Australia, eventually prevailed on the navy to lend him new B-17s.

MacArthur waited three days on Mindanao, within reach of the Japanese troops at Davao. On the evening of 16 March two of the three bombers sent landed on the flare-lit airfield. The pilots judged that they could take the whole party if it left its baggage behind. At 1.30 a.m. on 17 March the aircraft took off and, after several hours’ flying over Japanese-occupied territory, landed in Australia. MacArthur’s onward journey, from the airfield near Darwin to Melbourne, is another story.

Wainwright takes command

The arrangement of four commands that MacArthur had left in the Philippines did not last a week. In Washington it had been assumed from the outset that after his departure command would pass to the senior general in the archipelago, namely Wainwright, and signals were being addressed to him. Colonel Beebe, embarrassed by the contradiction, held one of them back and informed MacArthur. On 19 March Roosevelt submitted Wainwright’s nomination for the rank of lieutenant general to the Senate, and on 20 March Marshall wrote to him plainly: “Upon General MacArthur’s departure you became commander of the American forces in the Philippines. You are to communicate directly with the War Department.” That evening Beebe telephoned the news to Wainwright’s headquarters on Bataan.

On 21 March Wainwright moved to Corregidor and took command of the newly created United States Forces in the Philippines (USFIP), with Beebe as his chief of staff. The Luzon Force on Bataan was taken over by Major General Edward King, an artilleryman, and I Corps by Brigadier General Albert Jones. Marshall and Roosevelt had concluded that command from several thousand kilometres away, with two commanders of equal standing over one bay, made no sense. On 24 March MacArthur replied that he “fully concurred” in Wainwright’s promotion and appointment.

The forts under fire

The Japanese used the weeks of quiet on Bataan to prepare their final offensive. In March the promised reinforcements began reaching Homma: the 4th Division from Shanghai, a detachment from the 21st Division, a heavy artillery regiment and bombers. At the same time they stepped up the shelling of the forts guarding the entrance to Manila Bay. Since 6 February a detachment under Major Toshinori Kondo, emplaced on the Cavite shore near Ternate, had been shelling Forts Drum and Frank and Corregidor. In mid-March it was expanded into a stronger force under Colonel Masayoshi Hayakawa, equipped among other things with 240-millimetre howitzers. The heaviest shelling fell on the forts on 15 and 16 March: according to the US official history, about 500 shells hit Fort Frank on 15 March and about a hundred hit Fort Drum. On 21 March a 240 mm shell pierced the roof of a tunnel at Fort Frank, killing 28 men and wounding 46. The heavy guns of Fort Drum, enclosed in a concrete hull resembling a ship, were never put out of action, however.

On 24 March Japanese aircraft returned over Corregidor. That day army and navy bombers dropped more than 70 tons of bombs on the island, and in the last week of March air-raid alerts were sounded some sixty times. The life of the garrison and the refugees moved more and more into the underground galleries of the Malinta Tunnel, which housed the hospital, the headquarters and the stores. Soldiers who had to stay at their posts by the guns mocked those who never left the tunnel as suffering from “tunnelitis”.

The bitterness of Bataan

News of MacArthur’s departure reached the men on Bataan within a few days. Wainwright recalled that his generals received it with dejection but soon understood the reasons for the decision. Among the rank and file it was different: many felt abandoned and betrayed. The nickname “Dugout Doug”, which had stuck to MacArthur back in January because he had visited Bataan only once, was now repeated with even greater bitterness. Axis propaganda seized on the subject: to Joseph Goebbels MacArthur was a “fleeing general”, and Benito Mussolini called him a coward. In the United States, however, admiration for the daring escape prevailed, and the route of the voyage and the flight over Japanese-held islands quickly became the stuff of legend. On 17 March Roosevelt declared that all Americans admired the determination with which the general had wanted to fight to the end alongside his men, but that all also understood that important decisions must serve the victorious conclusion of the war.

Its place in the war

MacArthur’s departure was in practice an admission that the Philippines could not be held, although officially it was presented as the first step towards their relief. In the archipelago itself nothing improved. Rations on Bataan fell to about a thousand calories a day, and malaria and beriberi decimated the units. On 3 April Homma launched his final offensive; on 9 April King surrendered the Bataan forces, and tens of thousands of prisoners were driven on a death march to Camp O’Donnell. On 6 May Corregidor surrendered, and Wainwright, to avoid a massacre of the wounded in the Malinta Tunnel, agreed to Homma’s demand that the capitulation cover all forces in the Philippines. In May Sharp on Mindanao also surrendered, although some of his men escaped into the mountains and became the nucleus of a guerrilla movement. Wainwright spent the rest of the war in Japanese captivity, and in 1945 MacArthur made sure he was present at the Japanese surrender on board the battleship Missouri.

Within a few weeks MacArthur himself became Supreme Allied Commander in the South West Pacific, and for the next two and a half years he prepared the return he had promised. In March 1945, after Corregidor had been retaken, he came back to the island in four PT boats together with the officers who had sailed with him from the same dock three years earlier.