The Other Ultra by Ronald Lewin

Author:Ronald Lewin [Lewin, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2016-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight – “You Are the Hero”

‘The prescience with which he may at times seem to have been endowed was generally the outcome of the cracking of the Japanese naval code.’

Gavin Long, MacArthur as Military Commander

One result of the Second World War was that General Mac-Arthur became the virtual Emperor of Japan. During the earliest phase of the Pacific campaign, however, his progress was far from imperial. Yet his arrival in Australia seemed at first like a sort of salvation. After he had slipped out of besieged Corregidor — on the clear instructions of the President — the general, his wife, his small son and his most trusted staff officers were transferred by motorboat and aircraft to Darwin, where he touched down on the morning of March 17, 1942. Next he entrained for Alice Springs, in the stark Australian outback. Here he was met by Patrick J. Hurley, the Republican from Oklahoma who later became Roosevelt’s personal representative with Chiang Kai-shek. Hurley cheered a defeated commander by telling him that the American people, always eager to pay homage to a knight in shining armor, had taken him to their hearts. Once it was Pershing, then Lindbergh. “Now,” said Hurley, “you are the hero.”[85]

The Australian Government, which had not known that he was on his way, felt a similar exhilaration. Those clouds of glory that surrounded MacArthur had not been darkened by his loss of the Philippines, and his presence seemed a guarantee of the American support without which a Japanese invasion appeared to be inevitable. This mood was universal. A few days later MacArthur met in Melbourne the Australian Commander-in-Chief, General Blarney, whose biographer recalls the charisma of the man from Corregidor. “Tall and graceful, lean, handsome and photogenic as a film star, he radiated belief in himself and in the sacred character of his mission. ‘We shall win or we shall die,’ he said with messianic simplicity, and a frisson of excitement ran through the continent.” On the 26th he attended a lunch in Canberra, the capital, where it was announced that Roosevelt had awarded him the Congressional Medal of Honor. “I have come,” MacArthur responded, “as a soldier in a great crusade of personal liberty.”[86]

There are many reasons why the achievements of his South West Pacific Command, SWPA, were relatively meager during the months that followed this euphoria. The maelstrom in the Slot and the savage contest for Guadalcanal sucked in the best and the most of whatever ships and troops could be spared for the Pacific, while MacArthur’s impassioned demands for reinforcements shifted neither Roosevelt nor General Marshall from their agreed priority, Bolero, the build-up of American forces in the United Kingdom for the invasion of Europe. In effect the South West Pacific Area was at the end of a limb. So long as Australia could be held securely — which soon became evident — neither heaven nor earth was going to be moved by the Washington administration, as MacArthur pleaded, to set him back on the road to the Philippines.

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