BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC (See Cover)
In the captain's cabin of the 77-ft. PT-41 he lay on the tiny bunk, beaten, burning with defeat. Corregidor was doomed and with it the Philippines, but one leading actor in the most poignant tragedy in U.S. military history would be missing when the curtain fell. Douglas MacArthur, Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, four-star General in the U.S. Army, had left the stage. It was the order of his Commander in Chief.
As he lay on the bunk, General MacArthur was already trying to plan for a swift and overwhelming return. The cockle shell craft pounded noisily south through the swells of the Sulu Sea. The General was seasick; his wife chafed his hands to help the circulation. Douglas MacArthur brooded about his old command, and waited for the interminable journey to end.
They could travel only by night; by day Jap aircraft ruled the skies and they had to skulk in coves. At last the PT put in at Mindanao; a battered Flying Fortress took the MacArthurs on to Australia.
That was in mid-March 1942. The MacArthur who flew into Australia then was the picture of what had happened to the U.S. in the Pacific. He had been West Point's First Captain, and one of its greatest students. He had been the Rain bow Division's commander in World War I, later the Army's youngest Chief of Staff, and always the professional soldier's notion of what a professional soldier should look like. Now he was rumpled and untidy and probably for the first time in his life he looked his age. He was 62.
But he was not really beaten. In Adelaide he made the promise that the U.S., bewildered and shaken by the Japs' victorious campaign, heard with renewed hope.
"I came through — and I shall return."
A Soldier's Return. Last week, on the flag bridge of the 10,000-ton, 614-ft. light cruiser Nashville, stood a proud, erect figure in freshly pressed khaki. Douglas MacArthur had come back to the Philip pines, as he had promised.
He had slept well, eaten a hearty breakfast. Now with his corncob pipe he pointed over the glassy, green waters of Leyte (rhymes with 8-A) Gulf, where rode the greatest fleet ever assembled in the South west Pacific. Around him were hundreds of transports, shepherded by an Australian squadron and MacArthur's own Seventh Fleet, reinforced with jeep carriers from Admiral Chester Nimitz' vast armada of seagoing airdromes. On the horizon loomed the majestic battleships of Admiral Wil liam F. Halsey's Third Fleet — some of them ghosts from the graveyard of Pearl Harbor. Beyond the horizon steamed the greatest concentration of water-borne air power in war's history—Vice Admiral Mitscher's fast carrier task groups.
American Lake. There was not a Japanese surface craft in sight. Only one enemy plane ventured out to attack. It dropped one bomb harmlessly into the sea.