Leyte landing: It nearly didn't happen

This Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's return to the Philippines, two and a half years after U.S. forces had been forced to surrender at Bataan and Corregidor - and after MacArthur had arrived in Australia pledging to Filipinos that "I shall return". The Jakarta Post Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin recounts how MacArthur came close to failing to keep his promise, as top U.S. military planners argued that MacArthur should wade ashore on a Taiwan beach instead.

HONG KONG (JP): When Gen. Douglas MacArthur waded ashore on a Leyte beach on Oct. 20, 1944, one of his toughest battles lay behind him. He had kept his famous "I shall return" promise which he made at Adelaide railway station in the dark days of 1942.

But it had been touch and go. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the leaders of the U.S. Navy favored bypassing the Philippines, and invading Taiwan, or Formosa as it was then called.

This Thursday, Oct. 20, as an actor re-enacts MacArthur's landing at Leyte, under the control of a Philippine film director, Filipinos will pay homage one last time to a myth: that the United States was fully committed to honoring its pledge, and that there was a straight line of cause and effect between MacArthur's promise to return and the reappearance of the Americans in their Southeast Asian colony.

For a start, MacArthur never said "We shall return" or "The U.S. will return" - a fact that his numerous critics have constantly noted.

It was "I shall return", and for good reason. When President Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to escape from Corregidor and make his way to Australia, MacArthur was a Field Marshal in the Philippine Army as well as commander of U.S. Army forces in the Far East.

More than that, he had had several tours of duty in the Philippines. Go to Guimaras island in the central Philippines today and a small bridge over a stream, as you walk inland, bears the inscription testifying that it was built by Lt. MacArthur when he was first posted to the Philippine Islands. His father Gen. Arthur MacArthur had helped wrest the Philippines from Spain, and had been a military governor there.

The story of American colonialism in the Philippines was the story of the MacArthur family. Beyond that, MacArthur undoubtedly had a deep emotional attachment to the Philippines, amounting to almost a mystical bond. He felt the U.S. defeat in the Philippines in 1942 as a personal failure. It was equally natural for him to give a personal pledge to make up for it.

But his personal promise to return could not and did not commit U.S. strategy, as World War II unfolded. The prior aim was to defeat Japan as quickly as possible rather than to reconquer the Philippines. The fact that the "I shall return" promise had electrified the Philippines and helped set in motion the most dynamic guerrilla warfare in Southeast Asia against Japanese rule was important. But once Japan was defeated the Philippines would be free again.

By the middle of 1944, it seemed to many that to conquer Taiwan was the better strategic bet. Once Taiwan was taken, it would place Japanese cities within easy range of U.S. B-29 bombers. From Taiwan airfields, the U.S. could also better defend its air bases in China itself, from which planes would be able to cover the looming necessity to invade the Japanese islands.

Possession of Taiwan would help the U.S. to interdict the crucial supply chain between Japan and Southeast Asia. Theoretically, the capture of Taiwan would enable the Americans to bypass Okinawa and head their invasion fleets straight for Kyushu and Honshu.

None of these arguments seem particularly compelling today, but they counted for a great deal in 1944, coming as they did from the head of the U.S. Navy Admiral Ernest King, and. to a lesser extent, Admiral Chester Nimitz, who was MacArthur's rival in active command of the Pacific theater. Nimitz was commander of the Pacific Ocean Areas, while MacArthur was commander in the southwest Pacific.

With the Navy clearly the dominant force in the Pacific, King's arguments carried a lot of weight. His forceful personality was well illustrated by an incident in 1944. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered King to stop using the title commander-in-chief, U.S. Navy, on the grounds that the President was the only C-in-C. But King still continued to use the title.

Under King's influence, in June 1944 the Joint Chiefs asked Nimitz and MacArthur for their views on either attacking Taiwan or going straight to Japan. MacArthur did not hesitate to attack these ideas as militarily questionable and politically dubious. Above all, he argued, "we have a great national obligation to discharge ...If the U.S. should deliberately bypass the Philippines ...we would admit the truth of Japanese propaganda to the effect that we had abandoned the Filipinos and would not shed American blood to redeem them. We would undoubtedly incur the open hostility of (Filipinos) and we would probably suffer such loss of prestige among all the peoples of the Far East that it would adversely affect the U.S. for many years".

This only earned MacArthur a rebuke from his superior, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, who asserted that bypassing the Philippines was not synonymous with abandonment, and reminding MacArthur that "we must be careful not to allow our personal feelings and Philippine political considerations to override our great objective, which is the early conclusion of the war with Japan". The quicker Japan was defeated, the sooner the Philippines would be liberated.

The arguments in favor of attacking Taiwan might have carried the day - with incalculable consequences for the postwar world - but for three factors. In 1944, Roosevelt was running for re- election. MacArthur both possessed some strong political arguments and the ability to put them across. The Japanese were successful in making the Taiwan alternative appear less attractive to the Americans.

Roosevelt did not appear at the Democratic Convention in July 1944 which renominated him for a fourth term and approved Senator Harry Truman as his running-mate. Perhaps his increasingly gaunt appearance would have made many delegates wonder about the wisdom of electing him for a fourth term, had he gone there.

Instead, the President delivered his acceptance speech by radio from San Diego before boarding a naval ship for Pearl Harbor. The first Battle for Leyte was fought in Hawaii as Roosevelt summoned Nimitz and MacArthur to meet him there to discuss the future of the war in the Pacific.

Legend has it that MacArthur won the battle there and then, but it was not so. What did happen was that MacArthur won over Roosevelt with his political arguments, not least of which was his suggestion that a failure to liberate the Philippines could have an adverse impact on the presidential election.

Still, the debate continued, with Roosevelt tilting the controversy towards retaking the Philippines. But even after MacArthur landed at Leyte, there were more debates about the respective merits of Luzon or Taiwan for the next attack.

The successful Japanese offensive within southern China late in 1944 finally ended high-level preference for the Taiwan alternative. Several U.S. airfields in China were either overrun or became insecure during it. Talk of using China as a base for attacking Japan faded away as the Americans noted the increasing willingness of the Chinese nationalists and the communists to fight each other rather than the Japanese. Additionally, the capture of the Mariana Islands soon provided the necessary bases from which the B-29s could bomb Japan.

To this day few Filipinos knew how close they came to being bypassed. From early in 1944 on, American planes were dropping match boxes and cigarette packs on the Philippines, all printed with the fateful promise "I shall return" plus MacArthur's signature. Philippine guerrillas were hard at work providing MacArthur with the intelligence he needed.

The Leyte landing and the reconquest of the Philippines thus assumed an air of inevitability which they did not deserve. Far removed from the strategic debates in Washington D.C., MacArthur himself, according to his biographer D. Clayton James, "did not fully realize that his unauthorized 'I shall return' narrowly escaped becoming a humiliating mockery".

We can never know what MacArthur would have done had he been denied the chance to redeem his promise. We do know how he repaid Roosevelt for making it possible. Within a week of the landing MacArthur was issuing press statements that Leyte had been liberated - just in time for Roosevelt's re-election. But for MacArthur's troops, another month's hard slogging in the Leyte mud still lay ahead.

It goes without saying that the cause of Taiwan independence, about which China endlessly worries today, might have been much further advanced by now, perhaps even an established fact, if MacArthur's opponents had had their way, and the Americans had wrested Formosa from Japanese control.

Equally, the conquest of Taiwan in 1944 could have further increased U.S. involvement in the Chinese civil war in the immediate postwar years.

Ironically, 50 years on, the debate on whether to go to Taiwan or the Philippines has resurfaced in one major American outfit. The leading air freight movers, Federal Express, has been torn between making either Taiwan or the Philippines its major regional base. A few months ago, Taiwan appeared to be the preferred choice.

Now informed sources say Fedex has finally opted for the Philippines - and will be using the Cubi Point airfield at the former Subic Naval Base.

Subic, of course, was vacated by the U.S. Navy in 1991 when the emotional aura of mutual trust in Philamerican relations, reinstated by Douglas MacArthur in 1944, finally ran out.

Window A: The story of American colonialism in the Philippines was the story of the MacArthur family.

Window B: Fifty years on, the debate on whether to go to Taiwan or the Philippines has resurfaced in one major American outfit.