The Hero As An Army

MEN ON BATAAN-John Hersey-Knopf ($2.50).

For a hero-hungry U.S., TIME Editor John Hersey has written the first important life of General Douglas MacArthur. It is seldom easy to write the life of a hero, especially when that hero is also an army. Who was the hero of the Battle of Bataan? Author Hersey answers this biographical question by writing two books in one.

Book No. 1 is the biography of Douglas MacArthur. There are flashes of MacArthur's father, Arthur MacArthur, who fought for the Union at Missionary Ridge, who was the last military governor of the Philippines. There are flashes of young Douglas hurrying every day to meet his mother on West Point's Flirtation Walk or being helped by her to escape from the West Point hotel through a coal chute when he was caught out of bounds. There is MacArthur commanding the Rainbow Division in 1917, leading attacks in person. There is MacArthur in Washington obeying orders by clearing out the Bonus Marchers, but dropping in on their camp of an evening to swap talk with his old Rainbow men and give them money.

There is MacArthur quietly picking Bataan as the ground on which to halt the Japanese, then calmly leading the struggle, calmly refusing to move for Japanese bombs, calmly leaving with his wife and four-year-old son in the high-powered speed boat (which had been his idea for Philippine naval defense), calmly waiting at the rendezvous for the planes from Australia, which were too few and almost too late. It is the picture of a hero who is brilliant, courageous, a great leader of soldiers, but also a little overambitious, a little garish, a little rhetorical.

This is how Author Hersey introduces General MacArthur when Manila had reached the incredible brink of war: "He had been first in his class at West Point and First Captain of the class, too. He had been the first member of the Rainbow Division. He had been the first American Army officer ever to become a Field Marshal. He had been the first American to be a four-star General twice. . . . He had always done his job with a flourish and well. . . . He had been handsome, and divorced, and sometimes rather colorfully dressed, and always full of splendid rhetoric. He had said the Philippines could be held and he had considered himself the man to do it. 'By God,' he had said in Manila, 'it was Destiny that sent me here!' He was the only one who had been so brilliant. He had better be good, they said; he had better be better than the enemy."

Book No. 2 is about MacArthur's men, the men of Bataan, "unafraid in their foxholes, good young men who loved their mothers and had all the usual hobbies, hunters, men who liked flowers, men who were good to their little sisters, men who could do the muscle grind and who were very active around their vicinity, never letting no one put nothing over on them."

This is how Hersey introduces the men who went through the first Japanese air attack: "The men, who had instinctively thrown themselves on the ground, stood up and dusted off. The Sergeant who had started a letter carefully folded the piece of paper, which had only 'Dear Mom' on it, and put it in his pocket. They all talked about the wind that bombs make, and how they felt. . . . They started loading their guns. They had never actually fired their guns before and they wished they could let a couple of rounds go just to get over the tenseness. But they held their fire until pursuits suddenly started swooping in. In the absence of the battery's Lieutenant, who was having lunch in the officers' mess, the Sergeant who had been running the radio shouted to the crew to stay low, keep calm and keep firing. . . . His sensations, by his own account later, took in everything from hot flashes to the calm a man feels only on the toilet seat. First he was scared. Then, when he had fired his gun for the first time, he felt very good, very sure of himself. . . .

"The Sergeant who worked the radio . .. was Joe Stanley Smith, and he was a New Mexican. Joe Stanley got his nose broken playing soldier with his older brother at the age of four. He grew up muscular, and he was all the neighbors' friend. The people of Carlsbad used to send for Joe Stanley when there was a drowning in the Pecos River, and Joe Stanley would go and swim strongly and take out the body. He had a big black dog, he liked to dance and he would box with anyone just for fun. He married a girl whose name was also Smith, and they had a baby, and the baby had three grandmothers all named Smith. 'He has a very pleasing personality,' his mother says. 'Clean, neat and good looking and everybody likes him very much, there's not a more popular boy anywhere.' "

The difference between these two pieces of writing is the difference between the two parts of the book. The biography of MacArthur is shrewdly and competently done. But when Author Hersey describes the men of Bataan and their battles, feeling and words blend in the unforced flow that is the pulse of music and writing.

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