There is the Man

(See Cover)

I have every confidence in the ultimate success of our joint cause, but success in modern war requires something more than courage and willingness to die. It requires careful preparation. . . . No general can make something from nothing. My success or failure will depend primarily upon the resources which our respective Governments place at my disposal. My faith in them is complete. In any event I shall do my best. I shall keep the soldier's faith.

A scribbling newsman missed the last sentence, and General Douglas MacArthur repeated into the microphone: I shall keep the soldier's faith.

Then he stepped into a U.S. Army car and rode to the Menzies Hotel in Melbourne, there to assume his supreme command of all United Nations forces in the far Pacific.

Hero on the Spot. General MacArthurs words were hard and healthy, and it was high time that they were spoken. Douglas MacArthur had the appetite for glory, but none knew better than he the great difference between the battle he had fought on Bataan and the war he now faced in Australia. None perceived more clearly the great gaps in preparation, manpower and weapons which had to be filled. His soldierly cynicism told him that unless the gaps were quickly filled they could engulf him and all the glory of Bataan.

MacArthur on Bataan fought a limited battle of position, long foreseen and long planned, in an area about as big as Los Angeles. He and his staff knew their battleground's every hill, defile and coastal inlet. In Australia last week he prepared to defend an area (3,000,000 sq. mi.) nearly as big as the U.S., a coastline as long (12,000 miles). He would have to wage a war of sweeping maneuver over a huge terrain of cities, mountains, mines and farmlands in the south, over wild coasts and deserts and broken plateaus in the north and west. And he had to learn the land's military meanings in the heat of battle. MacArthur in Melbourne was like a stranger in New Orleans suddenly called upon to repel looming attacks on the Canadian border, on the Atlantic coast, on the Pacific shore anywhere from Washington to California.

"Primary Purpose." Five days earlier newsmen had found General MacArthur near Alice Springs, where airways and an off-size railroad connect Australia's northern desert and the southern cities (see map). An old friend had joined him: grey Brigadier General Pat Hurley, now U.S. Minister to New Zealand. Hurley told MacArthur that the newsmen wanted a statement. Still tired by his trip from the Philippines, resting in a special car, General MacArthur wrote:

"The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan. A primary purpose of this is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return."

Douglas MacArthur once said in the Philippines: "The United States has ordered me to defend these islands. I propose to defend them." Having defended them to the utmost, he spoke in candor and earnestness when he now proposed to relieve them. On his way southward he spoke incessantly of retaking the Philippines. If it was an obsession--perhaps a little out of focus with his new and larger task in Australia--it was natural for a man who had been through what he had in 94 days of fierce fighting and brilliant resistance.

"I Came Through." On Corregidor, where the great guns leered at the Japs across Manila Bay, it was night when MacArthur left. It was night in Bataan, where the soldiers slept or watched and the P-40s rested under the trees. It was the time for General MacArthur to leave the Philippines, his men, his second home, his assured place in history.

He stepped aboard a boat. With him were slim, brunette Jean Faircloth MacArthur; their son, Arthur, clothed in the dignity of his four years, a blue zipper jacket, khaki trousers and a khaki forage cap; the boy's hovering Chinese nurse, Ah Ju, who among other things had taught him to speak with an English accent. With them, on this and a second boat, were some of the staff officers who were to accompany General MacArthur to Australia. In a hidden inlet on Bataan, behind the U.S. lines, Major General Hugh Casey of the Engineers led the rest of the departing staff aboard two other boats.

The craft were Philippine "Q-boats," 65-foot torpedo carriers which Douglas MacArthur had ordered years before, when he first became the Commonwealth's Field Marshal. The four boats should have met before dawn, then hidden near the shore until the next night. But the Q-boats had taken a beating since Dec. 7 and their tired engines could not do their rated 39 knots. The two parties had to risk a daylight voyage and did not meet until nearly noon.

At dusk, a Japanese warship appeared on the horizon. The men in the boats were uncertain whether it was a destroyer or a cruiser. Instantly, the small boats' engines were stilled: the four boats lay low. The warship passed MacArthur by. No more patrolling Japs appeared. No Japs spotted the boats from the air.

The little boats pitched and shivered in the high swells; the hardiest officers aboard thought that their necks were snapping off. They sympathized with Mrs. MacArthur, the boy and Ah Ju. Toward dawn, three hours behind schedule, the little fleet made its intended landfall--on or near the Island of Mindoro, no more than 100 miles from the nearest Japanese lines, no farther from Manila. Awaiting General MacArthur were two Flying Fortresses. Exactly how and where they found concealment and landing space, was something the Japs may never know.

"I Shall Return." From the take-off point to northern Australia was an eleven-hour flight for the Fortresses. Below them, or very near their course as air space is measured, lay the conquered Indies, the Japanese airdromes and troop centers on Timor, the New Guinea airfields and harbors where the Japs were massing and Allied bombs were dropping. It was a course straight across Japan's new Pacific barriers, and it was a course for Douglas MacArthur to remember on the southward flight. He expected to retrace it some day.

Just where the Fortresses landed in northern Australia was a secret last week. Fourteen of General MacArthur's staff proceeded forthwith to Melbourne, but he stayed behind with his family to rest for a day. The sea and air voyage had worn Mrs. MacArthur, her son and Ah Ju.

The long journey from Darwin to Melbourne is about as far as from Winnipeg to Miami. Aside from his air-sick family, General MacArthur had a good reason for making it by train and highway; this route from Australia's desolate northern deserts to the populous south was the most important, the most difficult military and supply route in his new command area.

General MacArthur traveled the narrow gauge, single-track railway which hooks bombarded Darwin to Birdum, 250 miles southward, in the heart of the continent's desert. Thence he had to drive 500 miles farther south on a new military highway, through lands so desolate that a U.S. pilot had said: "If I ever got forced down there, I would shoot myself."

In a Plain Jacket. The world had learned of his arrival in Australia. From sick Allied hearts, a wave of hope rose. The wave became a flood, a kind of prayerful madness. Army censors in Australia, before announcement of his presence was permitted, admonished those in the know not to speak the name MacArthur aloud, to say he if they must refer to him. Statesmen, the press, plain men everywhere cried that MacArthur would put an end to retreats; MacArthur would take the offensive; MacArthur was the man who could win the war.

Tokyo and Berlin, in their peculiar fashions, caught the hysteria: they yowled that MacArthur in Australia was just one more Allied commander in flight. The New York Sun's London correspondent attained a height of adulation. Not since Valentino, the correspondent reported, had Londoners succumbed to any man as they had succumbed to MacArthur's "looks and personality." Unmuzzled at last, the Australian press headlined: THE MAN OF THE MOMENT.

March is early autumn in Australia, and the sun was warming a crisp morning when General MacArthur's train approached Melbourne. Australians had just got the news from their late morning papers, and 4,000 had gathered to greet him outside the station's high, iron fence. They saw assorted generals in standard khaki and medals, an admiral or two in white and gold, a U.S. Army battalion drawn up as guard of honor. They saw seven white-legginged, strangely brown soldiers in a special detail: Filipinos from Field Marshal MacArthur's Commonwealth Army, wounded in the early days of the fighting and evacuated to Australia by hospital ship. Then the people saw MacArthur.

He was in a plain, washed-khaki jacket. The jacket was open at the neck. It was bare of stars (he could have worn four). It matched his plain, khaki trousers. The only gold was on his garrison cap. But the trousers were rigorously pressed. A bamboo swagger stick swung in his right hand. The jacket, trousers, cap and stick, for that place and that day, were the perfect dress. They were in the MacArthur tradition. Among the dressier uniforms of the generals around him, they made him as conspicuous as had the Russian boots, the resplendent tunics, the stars and the medals which he knew how to wear in their time and place.

Ah Ju blinked, ducked in terror when photographers' flashlights blazed in her face. With imperial MacArthurian self-possession, Arthur marched with his mother through the generals and the crowd to a car where 6-ft. 3-in. Sergeant Donald Broe, of Waterloo, Ia., proudly waited to drive the General behind the four-starred flag on the hood. But the General stayed behind, followed later in a car with the two-starred flag of a major general. In the crowd, General MacArthur spotted Press Officer Lloyd Lehrbas, who covered Washington affairs for the Associated Press when MacArthur was Chief of Staff. The General waved and shouted: "Hello, Larry, you old rogue, what are you doing here? I'll see you later." Then he stepped to the microphone to pledge his soldier's faith in the defense of Australia.

Japs to the North? When & where the Japanese would strike, only the Japanese knew. They still had the aggressor's supreme advantage. Not for many months would General MacArthur have the force to seize the full offensive advantage for himself. Meantime he had to judge where the Japanese might strike, and prepare accordingly, lest he lose in southern Australia the continent's main ports, population and production centers, the place where he could assemble his forces for offense.

First Australian town to be hit by Japanese bombs was the northern port of Darwin (pop. about 5,000). It may well be the first to meet invasion forces from the sea. Darwin, its adjoining coasts and the open desert in its rear are valuable to Australia because: 1) they lie within bomber reach of the Japanese in Java, Timor and New Guinea; 2) they form a front against overland penetration from the north. Darwin would be valuable to the Japs for its harbor and its airdromes, but mainly because, when conquered, it would no longer be a U.S.-Australian base for attack on Japan's southern line.

Japs to the West? Western Australia is a semi-desert land of vast sheep and cattle ranges, a few tiny seaports like Broome and Wyndham (where Jap planes have also attacked). For the present the Japs can probably win bridgeheads at such places if they want to take the trouble. Based there, they would still be 1,450 miles from the one worthwhile western objective, the southwestern port of Perth, and its surrounding farm, cattle and mineral lands.

Japs to the East? Since the Japs moved on New Guinea's Port Moresby by air and land, they have seemed to be reaching for Australia's long (2,900 mi.), vulnerable eastern coast. But even if they win Port Moresby's excellent harbor as a concentration point for their convoys, then leap to Cape York and southward toward Brisbane, they will have a hazardous and costly job. They will have to penetrate the long, jagged Great Barrier Reef, whose entrances have been well mined. Their transports and warships should be under continuous air assault from land-based planes. One consideration can make the Japs risk such a venture: if they succeed, they will then be within bomber range of Australia's southern heart.

Japs in the South? Only when southern Australia is conquered will Australia be conquered. In the south live 5,000,000 of Australia's 7,000,000 people. There are its main ports, cities, mining towns: Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Broken Hill (lead, silver, zinc, iron). In Sydney harbor, Australia's one important naval base, a new graving dock will soon be able to repair the largest battleships.

With their jugular instinct, the Japs may therefore risk everything on a seaborne blow at southern Australia. Douglas MacArthur's first and perhaps his main defense must be from the air. If bombing and fighter-strafing fail to break up Jap convoys and carrier-based air forces, he may have to retire inland from the coastal cities, which were built when Australians could not envision attack on their remote mainland. One example of their vulnerability: Sydney's big power station is perched atop Bunnerong Hill, as though placed to invite enemy bombs.

Japs All About? Any all-out assault, aimed initially or eventually at southern Australia, would be risky, costly--despite the Japs' seeming advantages. Moreover, the Japanese do not need Australia for itself. They need only to eliminate or neutralize the threat that Australia holds for them and their Pacific conquests.

The Japanese, therefore, may try to choke Australia to death. Already they have cut some of Australia's sea lanes and threatened others. If they can capture the Solomons, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia on the east, they can constantly harass, if not sever, the long sea route from the U.S. via New Zealand. Assault on those islands would be far less costly than assault on Australia.

The Japanese might also try to seize Darwin, Wyndham and Broome in the north and west--not so much for the places themselves as to harass and divert General MacArthur's main forces, and to base raids on shipping through the Indian Ocean to Australia. Many Allied strategists, trying to put themselves in Japanese shoes, think that these tactics of blockade make more sense for the Jap than outright invasion. One enormous advantage: they would leave the Japanese free to turn against India or Russia, or both--or against the U.S. in Hawaii and Alaska's outlying islands.

A Swap With Destiny. MacArthur brought with him to Australia all his sense of Destiny, of history and a name to be made--or unmade. He could ask no more of Destiny than this challenge. Nor could Destiny and the U.S. ask more of Douglas MacArthur.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.