Free Pearl Harbor Christmas by Stanley Weintraub Page B

March 4, with much of its trapped Dutch and mixed-race population destined at best for bleak prison camps and near-starvation.

    CHRISTMAS EVE IN THE PHILIPPINES, to the southeast and an hour before Tokyo time, came more than half a day earlier than in the United States, across the International Date Line. The nearly unopposed Japanese landing at Lamon Bay, southeast of Manila, that morning had left the capital defenseless from every direction. Based on MacArthur’s communiqués, largely fiction, the New York Times headlined, “OUR TANKS AND ARTILLERY POUND INVADERS.” Landing at Lingayen Gulf and quickly moving south, General Homma set up his headquarters north of San Fernando, above Manila Bay. Not far below, defenders were protecting the Calumpit Bridges, over which they funneled retreating troops, and failed to prevent refugees from fleeing, into the Bataan Peninsula, a two hundred–square mile thumb of hills and jungle thrusting south into Manila Bay. Much of Luzon’s stored food supplies for defending troops were now beyond reach. Major General Jonathan Wainwright put soldiers on two-thirds rations. His forces were already backing into Bataan where, according to MacArthur’s Plan Orange 3, they were to hold on for six months until relief would come from the American mainland. But by every measure Orange had become instantly obsolete on the first day of the war. His radioed proposal that such fleet units from Hawaii as were left should risk an attack on the Japanese Home Islands in order to draw enemy strength away from the Southwest Pacific was considered fantasy by Washington, as was his proposal that the only two big carriers in the Pacific could fly aircraft to the Philippines.
    That afternoon MacArthur’s deputy, Brigadier General Richard Sutherland, summoned key officers to headquarters in Intramuros to inform them that they would be leaving Manila for Corregidor at dusk. MacArthur took a last glance at his flag-bedecked office and asked Sergeant Paul Rogers to “cut off” the red banner with the four white stars of a full general which flew from the limousine he would have to abandon. Rogers untied the thongs from the post and rolled up the flag. MacArthur thanked him, tucked it under his arm, and crossed palm-lined Dewey (now Roxas) Boulevard to the Manila Hotel.
    Each staff member would be permitted field equipment and one suitcase or bedroll. Jean MacArthur again unwrapped her presents and filled her suitcase (labeled New Grand Hotel, Yokohama) and that of her son and his amah, Ah Cheu, with clothes, canned food, her jewelry, some family pictures, her husband’s medals wrapped in a towel monogrammed Manila Hotel, and his gold Philippines army field marshal’s baton. Sid Huff carried Arthur’s new tricycle, and Ah Cheu his stuffed rabbit, Old Friend. Before departing Intramuros, MacArthur had sent for Japanese Consul-General Nihro Katsumi, then in mild detention, to ask him to confirm to the Japanese command that defenseless Manila was to be declared an Open City.
    “Ready to go to Corregidor, Arthur?” Jean MacArthur asked the bewildered boy. He nodded and took Ah Cheu’s hand as she opened the door to the wail of air-raid sirens. The MacArthurs, with Huff, left for the Cavite docks in the general’s black Packard. The extensive military history library, and everything else in the flat, would be at the pleasure of General Homma.
    At 7:00 P.M. the interisland steamer Don Esteban weighed anchor for Corregidor with the MacArthur party aboard. After dark it was still a warm eighty degrees, and some of those who had gone below crowded onto the forward deck for the breezes stirred by the passage. In the quiet of evening, with enemy aircraft gone and the glow of the fires on the Cavite docks receding, a few, unwilling to miss Christmas altogether, began singing “Silent Night”—and others joined in with further carols until they felt too depressed to continue. (Biographer William Manchester wrote,