The Story Behind the Photo- An Excerpt form MacArthur at War
“We came to Leyte just before midnight of a dark and moonless night,” MacArthur later wrote in his memoirs. “The stygian waters below and the black sky above seemed to conspire in wrapping us in an invisible cloak, as we lay to and waited for dawn before entering Leyte Gulf.” It was the wee hours of October 20, 1944 — what MacArthur had chosen to call A-day because the generic designation D-day had quickly come to refer almost exclusively to the Normandy landings.
Three days before, rangers had seized the islands dotting the wide entrance to Leyte Gulf and installed navigation lights on them. At dawn on the twentieth, the Nashville joined an array of ships entering the gulf, and as the transports took up positions in preparation for disgorging their cargoes of men and munitions, the battleships and cruisers began a ferocious barrage. The Nashville anchored around two miles off the beaches of the X Corps sector, and MacArthur took a front-row seat on its bridge.
It was a decidedly American show. MacArthur seems to have gone out of his way, both politically and operationally, to exclude his Australian allies. “Without Australian political, logistic and military support it is hard to see how MacArthur could have made this grand return,” Australian historian John Robertson wrote after the war, “but no Australian land or air-force unit, and no Australian notables, were there to share the glory.”
Midmorning, the assault waves of four divisions poured ashore as planned. The heavy naval bombardment had driven most defenders inland, and initial resistance was light. According to Kinkaid, “The execution of the plan was as nearly perfect as any commander could desire.” By 1:00 p.m., MacArthur decided that it was time to head for shore himself along with Philippine president Sergio Osmeña, Quezon having finally succumbed to tuberculosis that summer. Mortar and small-arms fire could still be heard coming from the direction of the highway leading to Tacloban and the nearby hills.
MacArthur was dressed in a crisply pressed set of fresh khakis beneath his ever-present field marshal’s cap and did not intend to wade through knee-deep water, although he appears to have gone through that and more in the Admiralties and on Morotai. Still, as the Nashville’s launch neared the beach south of Tacloban with a contingent that included Sutherland, Kenney, Egeberg, Rhoades, and Lehrbas, the sandy bottom sloped too gently for the launch to get close enough to shore to permit a dry landing.
One of MacArthur’s aides radioed the beachmaster, who was preoc- cupied with the confusion of hundreds of landing craft unloading amid incoming sniper fire, and requested an amphibious craft to take MacArthur’s party the remaining distance to dry ground. Supposedly the otherwise occupied beachmaster angrily replied, “Let ’em walk.”
They did just that — pressed khakis or not — and MacArthur’s grim expression, recorded in photographs, may have been partly attributable to his disgruntlement over the gruff treatment. Subsequently, of course, MacArthur recognized the huge public relations value of the photographs, and splashing ashore became standard operating procedure. Hints of disgruntlement were considered to be determined looks of destiny and the absolute antithesis of Dugout Doug’s image.
As MacArthur and his entourage made one of his by-then-patented beachhead strolls, a gentle afternoon rain began to fall. Then signal corps troops drove up in a weapons carrier at an appointed place in a little clearing carrying a portable transmitter. It would relay MacArthur’s soon-to-be-historic words to a larger transmitter on the Nashville, which in turn would broadcast them to the world.
“People of the Philippines,” MacArthur began, his voice as well as his hands uncharacteristically shaking with emotion, “I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil.” Rally to me, he went on to admonish. “Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on.” Shrewdly recognizing that in such situations shorter was definitely better than longer, he finished in just two minutes. Osmeña then spoke for ten minutes about restoring civil government in the islands, a task that would prove both complicated and controversial.
After the addresses, MacArthur and his party returned to the Nashville. By then, the Japanese defenders had recovered from their initial shock and were counterattacking. According to Kenney, shortly after MacArthur departed, Japanese troops broke through to the beach and got within yards of the spot where MacArthur had stood. “It was a good thing we left when we did,” Kenney recalled.
As with so many of the dramatic moments of MacArthur’s life, much would be written — both approvingly and critically — of MacArthur’s splashing ashore and subsequent words at Leyte. Even the indisputable fact that he had landed on A-day would be questioned, in part because he made landings in other sectors in the days that followed, starting with the First Cavalry Division’s sector, near Tacloban, on October 21. That same day, Krueger, Sibert, and Hodge established their headquarters ashore, and Kinkaid turned over command of the beachheads to them.
As the troops fought their way forward, MacArthur’s press machine unleashed its own salvos. A special communiqué on October 20 — released even as the first waves of Americans went ashore — noted the northward leap of six hundred miles from Morotai and 2,500 miles from Milne Bay almost sixteen months before and said that this landing midway between Luzon and Mindanao “at one stroke splits in two [the] Japanese forces in the Philippines.” It caused the enemy “to be caught unawares in Leyte” because of the expectation of an attack in Mindanao. MacArthur was said to be “in personal command of the operation.”
While MacArthur’s press release the next day again noted that he was “in personal command of the invasion of the Philippines,” this release was effusive in naming the supporting cast. It mentioned Krueger and each of his corps and division commanders; Kinkaid and the commander of the Australian naval squadron, John Collins; Halsey and his carrier task force commander, Marc Mitscher; and amphibious commanders Dan Barbey and Theodore Wilkinson. This listing was more strong evidence that MacArthur’s public relations efforts had evolved toward the collective rather than the “MacArthur, MacArthur, MacArthur” that was the subject of jokes in 1942.
Of course the accolades that flowed in to the Southwest Pacific Area in return came first and foremost to MacArthur. “The whole American Nation today exults at the news that the gallant men under your command have landed on Philippine soil,” President Roosevelt cabled him. “I know well what this means to you. I know what it cost you to obey my order that you leave Corregidor in February 1942, and proceed to Australia. Ever since then you have planned and worked and fought with whole-souled devotion for the day when you would return.” That day had come.
Bill Halsey, whose fast carriers of the Third Fleet had pounded Jap- anese bases from Mindanao to Formosa in anticipation of the Leyte landings, led the cheers from the navy side. “It was a great day for your fleet team-mates when the successful landing of the 6th Army was announced,” Halsey signaled MacArthur the day after the initial landings. “It was a beautifully conceived and executed plan — and now that you have a foothold we are all primed to assist in every way in the succeeding steps which will finally wipe out the enemy garrison in the Philippines.”
As it turned out, Halsey’s words were about to be put to the test. Japan had long ago decided that both its army and navy must make a do-or-die stand in the Philippines. On land, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, Japan’s celebrated “Tiger of Malaya,” had been recalled from Manchuria to assume command of the Fourteenth Area Army and confront Krueger’s advance. But in the short term, MacArthur faced a far more ominous threat from the sea. The Imperial Japanese Navy was finally sortieing in full strength.
Excerpted from MacArthur at War: World War II in the Pacific by Walter R. Borneman.
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