The result was that Manila had been a charming, almost old-world city that could have been placed in Spain or Portugal. But now, at the cruel hands of war and the Japanese who sought to leave destruction in their wake, he feared that Manila and all its lovely avenues and historic buildings would be reduced to rubble and ruin.
There was always a price in war, MacArthur thought. Lives would be lost. Farmland burned, cities ruined, towns and villages destroyed. He never forgot that reality.
Also, MacArthur never lost sight of the fact that a victory in the Philippines would make good on his promise to return to the islands.
After defeat had been handed to him by the Japanese in 1942, he had managed to slip away and avoid capture. He would have preferred to remain behind and go down fighting, but orders had come directly from FDR, who had ordered MacArthur to leave the Philippines. The president of the United States did not need the added complication of such a high-ranking general falling into the hands of the enemy as a prisoner of war. Losing the Philippines itself was bad enough. And so MacArthur had left like a dog with his tail between his legs, leaving thousands of US soldiers behind to suffer through the Bataan Death March and the cruel POW camps.
Leading up to the invasion of Leyte, MacArthur had ordered the location of any of these camps to be marked on the map. He was going to make liberating the soldiers a priority as his forces swept across the Philippines.
However, it would be a difficult battle. The Japanese were expecting them. They were still thought to have hundreds of aircraft with which to attack and harass the American invasion fleet.
MacArthur feared that the cost on the beaches of Leyte would be terrible. The marines had certainly paid dearly for Guadalcanal. Now it might just be the army’s turn to pay a similar price. And yet MacArthur remained optimistic. He believed in his troops. He believed in his strategy. Most of all, General Douglas MacArthur believed in himself.
In the outer office, Captain Jim Oatmire could barely believe that the great MacArthur himself had actually remembered his name.
“I’ll be damned,” he muttered, just loud enough to be heard by Andy Tatum, who occupied the desk next to his — when either man had time to sit.
“What is it?”
“The Old Man actually knew my name when I dropped off his reports this morning.”
“Huh. You know, that could be a good thing, or a bad thing — a very bad thing. As in, ‘Captain Oatmire, why the hell didn’t you get those reports on my desk sooner? Captain Oatmire, you are personally going to lead the next beach landing.’”
“You know what? I wouldn’t mind seeing some action.”
“You must be a fool, Captain Oatmire,” Tatum intoned, imitating the general’s commanding voice. “Do you want to get shot at by the Japanese, Captain Oatmire?”
“Actually, he called me Jim.”
Tatum shuddered. “Good God, that’s even worse. Just don’t slip up and call him Doug.”
“No worries there. The Old Man isn’t exactly all that familiar, now is he?”
“I don’t know what you mean by that. Heck, the two of us were just chatting about baseball scores.” Although the war had gutted the ranks of baseball leagues back home, the games still went on, and the scores and accounts of the games were a welcome relief that at least something normal was still happening back home. Tatum never missed a chance to crow when news trickled in that his beloved Yankees had won a string of games.
“I call bullshit on that, because I am pretty sure that the general has never been to a baseball game.”
“What do you mean? I heard the Old Man was in charge of our Olympics teams back in 1928.”
“Sure, that makes sense. The Olympics are all about classic sports like running, the javelin, that disc thing that they throw—”
“The discus.”
“Exactly. Not bats and balls and peanuts in the stands.”
“You can’t get any more American than baseball.”
“If you say so.”
“Shh, don’t look now, but here comes that ballbuster Major Lundholm.”
Beside him, Tatum ducked his head and went back to work, studying several documents at once in an effort to look busy. Sometimes it seemed as if the war were being fought with paperwork, as if mountains of paper could somehow replace bullets and bombs, ships and planes.
Around them, the large office hummed with activity — shouts, ringing phones, hurrying men, and a few women. The place was semiaffectionately known as “the bullpen”—a term taken straight from Wall Street.
Captain Oatmire decided to go down to the street and get some fresh air. The brief interaction with the general, however small, had left him dazed.
Out on the street, he lit a cigarette and surveyed the traffic passing on Queen Street. Many of the vehicles were of British origin, with the exception of the US jeeps and trucks that went rushing past. Though the people in the street spoke English, their accents sounded jarring to his American ears.
It was hard to pinpoint what Australia was like — he had struggled to describe it in his letters home. It wasn’t quite British, and it definitely wasn’t American. I guess Australia is Australian. He hadn’t had time to explore much of the country. He worked long hours at headquarters. There wasn’t much sightseeing taking place, considering that there was a war on. Some of his fellow junior officers — and some not so junior — seemed determined to meet the local sheilas, but Oatmire had kept his head down in that regard, at least. There seemed to be ten eager men for every available woman, anyhow.
Even if there was tension over dating the local girls, the Australians were mostly welcoming of US forces — and for good reason. It had less to do with the money that the soldiers and officers spent at the bars throughout Brisbane than it did with the fact that there had been real fear that the Japanese might invade Australia. The Japs had bombed the city of Darwin and had even used midget submarines to raid Sydney Harbor — or Harbour, as the Brits and Australians spelled it. Not far from Australia, savage battles had been fought against the Japanese on New Guinea.
Back when fears of invasion had been at their height, there had been good reason for Australia to be worried. Japanese Imperial forces would have overwhelmed their defenses. But with the influx of US forces and recent victories against the Japanese, those invasion fears had subsided. The Japanese were far from defeated, but they had been knocked back on their heels. They were fighting a defensive war now, although nobody was ready to say they were on the ropes.
He watched a squad of hollow-eyed soldiers pass by. Their uniforms looked dirty and ragged, stained in places with what might be blood. Judging by the battered stocks of their rifles, their weapons had seen hard use.
Clearly these men had experienced the horrors of combat. Oatmire felt a twinge of guilt. He came from a wealthy and well-connected family that had made its money, ironically enough, in manufacturing military supplies during the Great War. After graduating from college, he had soon found himself in uniform as a staff officer. His war was very different from the one being fought by the veteran troops who had just marched past. More than once, he had expressed his interest in seeing action rather than shining a chair seat throughout the war.
But staff duty was not without its perils, not when you were dealing with someone like MacArthur. If Oatmire wasn’t careful, he might find himself leading the first wave going ashore in the Philippines. Sure, he had said more than once that he wouldn’t mind seeing combat, but in his mind’s eye, he saw himself observing from a safe distance. He’d always imagined himself strolling ashore once the heavy lifting had been done and the only gunfire was off in the hills.