MacArthur’s heart ached as he pondered the potential devastation that would befall the Philippines in the midst of war. His love for the islands and its people ran deep, rooted in their rich history that intertwined the culture of the Filipino people with that of the Europeans who had settled there. From the Spanish arrival in the sixteenth century to the American influence since 1898, Manila had become a charming blend of old-world charm and modern flair.
But now, the forces of Imperial Japan sought to leave destruction in their wake. MacArthur feared for the future of Manila and all its beauty. The city’s lovely avenues and historic buildings could soon be reduced to rubble and ruin by the cruel hands of war.
As much as he longed for victory, MacArthur knew that there was always a price to pay in times of conflict. Lives would be lost, farmland burned, towns and villages left in ruins, perhaps Manila itself would be destroyed. It was a harsh reality that the general never forgot, even in his moments of hope for a better tomorrow.
Captain Jim Oatmire had gotten a taste of conditions on shore, and he wasn’t eager to return. As one of General MacArthur’s junior staff members, he was more than happy to remain on the ship, with its regular hot meals and relative comforts compared to sleeping in a foxhole.
He had moved with the general’s staff to the new ship from USS Nashville, which had been hit by a kamikaze attack in December that had killed nearly two hundred sailors. All too well, Oatmire remembered that terrifying attack. Despite the Nashville’s many guns, it was hard to bring down a single Japanese Zero flying hundreds of miles per hour, with no other intent than to crash into the ship.
There had been no real warning. One moment was quiet, and the next moment the gun crews had been banging away. Two planes had been targeting the ship and the antiaircraft fire brought one of them down. However, the second plane had somehow run the gauntlet of flack and machine-gun fire. In the blink of an eye, the diving plane had struck the ship, erupting in a fireball.
Oatmire recalled how a tremendous shudder had run through the ship after the plane impacted on a five-inch gun battery, the explosion killing every sailor in the vicinity. Fire had quickly spread from the blast and the burning aviation fuel, but the skilled crew had brought it under control.
The crazed determination of the Japanese to destroy the ship using a suicide pilot was hard to fathom. Had the Japanese known that MacArthur was on the ship, they would surely have sent even more of the dreaded kamikaze planes.
At that moment Oatmire was sitting in the mess hall, enjoying his dinner as he read a tattered paperback novel, trying to ignore the flies. He had seen the flies swarming on the Japanese dead ashore, and he had the thought that maybe, or rather more than likely, a batch of the same flies had made their way to the ship, carried on an offshore breeze.
With that thought in mind, he finally surrendered the last few bites of meat loaf and mashed potatoes to the winged pests, pushing his plate away to focus on lighting a cigarette and sipping a mug of coffee. The flies seemed to have the good sense to steer clear of the thick navy coffee, even if Oatmire himself didn’t. In fact, he had come to rather like it.
He looked up and saw Major Lundholm across the mess hall. Lundholm ruled the staff with an iron fist and occupied a space just a step down from MacArthur’s inner circle. As his buddy Andy Tatum liked to say, “From Lundholm’s lips to God’s ears.” Of course, in this case Major Lundholm had the ear of General MacArthur and not the Almighty, but that was close enough.
Lundholm seemed to be looking for someone. Oatmire’s heart fell when Lundholm’s gaze found him and the major began making a beeline for the table where he was sitting.
“There you are,” Lundholm said, a note of annoyance in his voice, clearly not happy about having to track him down. “It seems like every time I try to find you, you’re either in the mess hall or out on a smoke break.”
“Yes, sir,” Oatmire said, hoping it didn’t sound as if he was agreeing with the major. He started to stand up, scattering the flies and spilling some of his coffee in the process.
Looking annoyed all over again, Lundholm waved him back down. Oatmire knew that he wasn’t Lundholm’s favorite person, but he wasn’t going to cry any tears over it. He didn’t much care for Lundholm either. Lundholm had formed some kind of judgment about him and seemed to think that he didn’t fit the mold of the rest of the headquarters staff. The major likely would have been happy if Oatmire had not returned from the Leyte invasion, but he had managed to do just that despite the best efforts of the Japanese.
Oatmire should have known better, but something about Lundholm brought out the smart-ass in him. He asked, “Did you come to find out how I liked the meat loaf, sir?”
“Did I—” Lundholm scowled. “No, that’s not the reason, Oatmire. You’ve always got to be the wiseacre, don’t you? I came to tell you that you’d better get packing. The Old Man wants a liaison on Luzon, and I couldn’t think of a better candidate to march around through the mud and swat at flies.”
“Thank you, sir.” Oatmire dared to ask, “Luzon?”
“That’s where the next big show is going to be, now that things are wrapping up on Leyte,” the major said. “I’d have expected that you’d know that, Captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your launch leaves in thirty minutes,” Lundholm said. “Make sure you’re on it. It’s an awful long swim otherwise.”
“Yes, sir. But, sir, may I ask what I’m supposed to be doing once I’m back on shore?”
The major looked around, and then, to Oatmire’s surprise, dropped into the empty chair across from him. The major suddenly appeared much older and more tired than he had a moment ago. His shoulders sagged so that he resembled a turtle about to withdraw into its shell. Oatmire felt a pang of conscience, realizing that the major probably had more responsibilities on his mind than the younger officer could ever know. The major frowned at the plate, where a fly was trapped in a pool of the ketchup that Oatmire had added earlier to improve the flavor of the meat loaf. “Here’s the thing, Oatmire. The Japanese have taken many hostages in Manila, maybe thousands of hostages by some accounts, most of them American civilians, but a few British and Australians, too. We need someone to negotiate with the Japanese when the time comes.”
Oatmire couldn’t help but open his eyes wide in amazement. “Why me, sir?”
“It should be obvious by now that you are a man of many talents, Oatmire.”
“With all due respect, sir, I don’t know anything about hostage negotiation.”
“None of us do, Oatmire. It’s not a position that the United States Army usually finds itself in. Don’t worry, the worst that can happen is that all the hostages end up dead.”
The major got up and left Oatmire stewing in his own juices.
His head was spinning. Negotiating with the Japanese? What could possibly go wrong? The answer was everything, which was likely why he’d been given the job. If things didn’t work out, they’d need somebody to blame.
He glanced down at his plate, suddenly feeling more than a little sympathy for that fly trapped in the ketchup.
Over on Leyte, Ernie Pyle was continuing to chronicle what the troops were going through. Rail-thin and much older than the troops he wrote about, Pyle stood out and was easily recognized by the soldiers wherever he went. His folksy piece about Christmas dinner with the boys of the 77th Infantry Division had been read by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, back home. He didn’t sugarcoat things, a fact that had made him beloved by the troops in Europe. He had left Europe to cover the Pacific conflict and found an entirely different situation, despite it being the same war. His reporting painted a truthful picture of “island hopping,” a term that sounded breezy compared to the grim reality of it all.
He’d discovered some interesting things around the Pacific, such as the fact that one enemy encountered by the troops was the sheer boredom they faced when they weren’t being shot at. This wasn’t Europe with its friendly and grateful villagers. There were no adventures in the countryside involving wine and joyrides in jeeps, or the occasional local French girl willing to help a GI feel less lonely. In the Pacific, men might be stationed on a quiet stretch of island where there was no danger of attack, but also precious little to do and nothing to look at but the sea, sky, beach, and coconut trees. Some poor bastards were driven nearly mad by the unrelenting sameness of it all.
Then there was the enemy. Germans were easy enough to understand. They were a lot like Americans except for the fact that they had fallen under the spell of a Fascist madman. You could sit down and share a cigarette or a joke with a former German soldier. But the Japanese were an altogether different enemy.
Pyle wrote, “I’ve begun to get over that creepy feeling that fighting Japs is like fighting snakes or ghosts.” Like most, he also had the feeling that the fight would get even harder the closer that the battle came to Japan itself.
“As far as I can see, our men are no more afraid of the Japs than they are of the Germans,” he wrote in one dispatch from the front. “They are afraid of them as a modern soldier is afraid of his foe, but not because they are slippery or ratlike, but simply because they have weapons and fire them like good, tough soldiers.”
He also wrote of observing Japanese prisoners, describing the unsettled feeling they gave him even while watching them talk among themselves, even laugh.