The Realm of the Punisher by Sykes Tom;

Author:Sykes, Tom;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philippines, Duterte, Dictator, Travel, Drug Wars, Asia, Dark Tourism, Politics, Corruption
ISBN: 5836801
Publisher: Signal Books
Published: 2019-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

24. Myths of the MacArthur Suite

General Douglas MacArthur was a shrewd manager of his own public image – the “MacArthurian Legend” we might call it. He rebuilt his reputation time and again, painting over the stains of scandals and filling in the dents made by wrathful critics. So when the tour guide threw open the doors to the Douglas MacArthur Suite of the Manila Hotel, I wasn’t surprised to see that it had been impeccably restored to a supposedly Edenic moment in Philippine history, before World War II levelled Manila, before the Japanese trashed the suite just to get back at MacArthur and before the country fell under the heel of Martial Law. Although there was nothing original about the mahogany chaises longues or the twinkling brass chandeliers, the impression of 1935 was persuasive.

When as a kid I asked my elderly friends and relatives about what they did in the war, I associated their testimonies with iconic photographs. My maternal grandmother’s tales of working as a telephonist during the Blitz will, for me, always be illustrated by Herbert Mason’s photo of St Paul’s Cathedral framed by thick black bomb smoke, yet somehow undamaged and bathed in a heavenly light. Gran had an American friend called Bob. In my blurred recollections, his white, back-combed hair and icy stare make him identical to the actor Lee Marvin. Bob was one of the first GIs to meet up with the Red Army at the River Elbe at the end of the war. He found out the hard way that a new war, the Cold War, had begun when the US Army promptly court-martialled him for fraternizing with a Russian soldier. That he had, since the 1930s, been a member of the Communist Party of the USA didn’t exactly help his case. I don’t know if Bob fought in Berlin, but I still equate him with that hunched silhouette of a Red Army soldier waving the Hammer and Sickle flag from the roof of the Reichstag, the tower blocks in the background shelled down to their rafters.

In the MacArthur Suite, I spotted another classic image of that conflict: a spontaneous snap of the general himself swaggering ashore at Leyte Island in October 1944, at the start of the American liberation of the Philippines. He is fulfilling the highly quoted promise – ‘I shall return’ – he made two years before, when his spirited resistance to the Japanese floundered and he was forced to retreat to Australia.

Although the claims in the preceding paragraph are widely believed to be true, they are largely false. Mariel, my ginger-dyed tour guide, told me that the photo was far from unplanned. ‘It took them three attempts to get it right. The first time, the general believed that he did not look good. The second time, he tripped and fell in the water. The third time, it was a success.’

Moreover, by the time MacArthur arrived at Leyte on that ‘historic’ day, Filipino guerrillas had already driven the Japanese out of that locality.

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