“I shall return.” The phrase promised brave times ahead, when the galling need to retreat would end and America would begin the journey back to Bataan.
A stirring prospect, but what a long journey it was going to be. The most ignorant could look at a map and see that MacArthur’s return trip was going to take years. And yet his trip out had taken only days. A few of the curious wondered how his escape had been engineered. News stories said that MacArthur had flown into Australia. But where had he found a plane? For days America had been told that on the shrinking Luzon beachhead no airstrips remained in American hands. Where had MacArthur gone to find a friendly airfield, and how had he gone there through the swarming patrols of the Japanese naval blockade?
The full story of MacArthur’s escape, when it was told, became one of the top adventure stories of World War II.
First came the bare announcement that it was on a motor torpedo boat—a PT boat in Navy parlance, and a mosquito boat in journalese—that the general had made the first leg of his flight across enemy-infested seas. Then a crack journalist named William L. White interviewed the officers of the PT rescue squadron and wrote a book about the escape and about the days when the entire American naval striking force in the Philippines had shrunk to six, then four, then three, then one of the barnacle-encrusted plywood motorboats hardly bigger than a stockbroker’s cabin cruiser.
The book was called They Were Expendable, and it became a runaway best-seller. It was condensed for Reader’s Digest and featured in Life Magazine, and it made the PT sailor the glamour boy of America’s surface fleet. They Were Expendable makes exciting reading today, but the book’s success spawned a swarm of magazine and newspaper articles about the PT navy, and some of them were distressingly irresponsible. Quite innocently, William White himself added to the PT’s exaggerated reputation for being able to lick all comers, regardless of size. He wrote his book in wartime and so had no way of checking the squadron’s claims of torpedo successes. Naturally, as any generous reporter would have done, he gave full credit to its claims of an amazing bag—two light cruisers, two transports and an oil tanker, besides enemy barges, landing craft and planes.
Postwar study of Japanese naval archives shows no evidence that any Japanese ships were torpedoed at the times and places the Squadron Three sailors claim to have hit them. Of course, airplane and PT pilots are notoriously overoptimistic—they have to be optimistic by nature even to get into the cockpits of their frail craft and set out for combat. And yet any realistic person who has worked in government archives hesitates to give full weight to a damage assessment by an office research clerk as opposed to the evidence of combat eyewitnesses.
Postwar evaluation specialists would not confirm the sinking of a 5,000-ton armed merchant vessel at Binanga on January 19, 1942, but Army observers on Mount Mariveles watched through 20-power glasses as a ship sank, and they reported even the number and caliber of the guns in its armament.
On February 2, 1942, Army lookouts reported that a badly crippled cruiser was run aground (and later cut up for scrap) at the right time and place to be the cruiser claimed by PT 32. Evaluation clerks could not find a record of this ship sinking either, so the PT claim is denied.
Unfortunately, the most elaborately detailed claim of all, the sinking of a Kuma class cruiser off Cebu Island by PTs 34 and 41, most certainly is not valid, because the cruiser itself sent a full report of the battle to Japanese Navy headquarters and admitted being struck by one dud torpedo (so much at least of the PT claim is true), but the cruiser, which happened to be the Kuma itself, was undamaged and survived to be sunk by a British submarine late in the war.
The undeniable triumph of Squadron Three was the flight of MacArthur. On March 11, 1942, at Corregidor, the four surviving boats of the squadron picked up the general, his staff and selected officers and technicians, the general’s wife and son and—most astonishingly—a Chinese nurse for the four-year-old boy. In a series of night dashes from island to island through Japanese-infested seas, the little flotilla carried the escaping brass to the island of Mindanao, where the generals and admirals caught a B 17 Flying Fortress bomber flight for Australia.