At least they were able to let some of the men rest and doze while the others watched and waited through the night. He wished he could have a cigarette, but orders were to keep everything as dark as possible.
Jardine caught the shadow of motion behind him and froze. At the last possible second he recognized the famous silhouette and snapped to attention. He was about to salute when Gen. Douglas MacArthur swept by him, unseeing and apparently deep in thought.
Jardine turned to his mates and hissed, "Hey! You guys see that? It was MacArthur, his royal self."
"You mean Dugout Doug in the flesh?" chuckled Carl Haverman, one of Jardine's buddies in the gun mount. A couple of the others laughed softly as well.
Jardine looked at the disappearing figure as MacArthur headed toward the bow of the cruiser. "Shit, I hope he didn't hear you. I got this thing about not insulting five-star generals. Piss one of them off and he can really make your life miserable."
Haverman snorted. "I don't care if he hears us or not. What the hell can he do to us, huh? Hell, he's the reason we're here, ain't he? If it weren't for him flicking up so badly in the Philippines and all over the ocean, we'd all be home by now."
Jardine looked to see if anyone else had heard Haverman's comments. He was particularly concerned that the ensign on duty didn't take offense, but that young man was hunched over in his chair and snoring deeply.
MacArthur was considered a hero by some for his actions, and a bum by others. There was little middle ground. Either you admired the man or you thought he was scum. Jardine tended to admire him, feeling that people didn't get to five-star rank on charm alone. He rubbed his eyes again and tried to rest. In a little while it would be his turn to look into the night and try to differentiate between twinkling stars and a Jap fighter.
Alone on the bow of the Augusta, Douglas MacArthur gripped the rail and tried to peer through the night toward Japan. Only the slight glint of starlight off his West Point ring of the class of 1903 was visible.
Although an older man who needed glasses to read, his hearing was excellent and he had heard Haverman's comment calling him Dugout Doug. He had heard it a thousand times before and even seen it in print. It wasn't fair. None of the disasters of late 1941 and early '42 were his fault.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had put him in an impossible position, then blamed him when the Japanese had swarmed over the Philippines and caused the surrenders of Bataan and Corregidor along with tens of thousands of American and Philippine troops. Gen. Douglas MacArthur also held the rank of field marshal in the Philippine army. He had wanted to stay with his men of both nations and fight alongside them, perhaps die with them.
Roosevelt would have none of it. There had been too great a risk that MacArthur would have been captured instead of killed, then displayed as a trophy by the Japs. Instead, Roosevelt had ordered MacArthur to escape to Australia. MacArthur had reluctantly complied and, along with his wife and young son, taken the danger-filled trek across the southern Pacific.
Only when he arrived at Australia did he understand Roosevelt's treachery as augmented by his other enemy, General Marshall. MacArthur's understanding was that he would retain control over the army in the Philippines, but Marshall placed Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright in command. Wainwright had surrendered, not MacArthur. MacArthur had wanted Wainwright to fight on, but Wainwright had received permission from Marshall to surrender not only Bataan and Corregidor, but all of the Philippines. It was outrageous. Some of the land and soldiers surrendered hadn't been threatened and could have held out as armed enclaves for quite some time, perhaps until being reinforced.
Of course, as he later found out, there were to be no reinforcements. Roosevelt had decreed that Nazi Germany was the primary threat to America and that the Pacific war could wait. Instead of an army, MacArthur had been given only handftils of units and dribbles of reinforcements with which to launch limited and bloody offensives. Even so, he had persevered and won island after island and battle after battle, culminating in the liberation of the Philippines in 1944 and now, the ultimate, the invasion of Japan herself.
For that he was still castigated by some in his army, and by members of the press as Dugout Doug. Worse, what should have been his hour of triumph was rapidly becoming very, very hollow. Vital information had been withheld from him regarding true Japanese numbers and strength on Kyushu. He and his staff hadn't gotten true figures until far too late to change their plans. Thus, his army was now slogging and clawing its way inch by bloody inch into Japan instead of advancing triumphantly through its cities.
