General Douglas MacArthur and Failures to Command
The destruction of the B-17s and the capacity to attack Japanese bases was the greatest loss of December 8, 1941, in the Philippines. Had the bombers been readied for daybreak attacks as General Brereton requested, the B-17s would have arrived over Formosa while the Japanese airplanes were socked-in under a heavy fog or as the Japanese airplanes were taking off. In either case, the B-17s could have significantly disrupted the Japanese attacks that so devastated the FEAF.
General MacArthur is the culprit for the failure to launch the B-17s in the early morning,[52] but he and his staff tried to make the failure appear unavoidable or to pass it off onto subordinates, especially onto General Brereton. In his Diaries,[53] published in 1946, Brereton described his efforts to secure permission to attack Formosa. In response, MacArthur issued a statement to the New York Times, in which, among other things, he claimed that he did not know that General Brereton had requested permission for the early morning attack. Moreover, MacArthur said that he had known that any such attack was doomed to failure, and that his responsibility had been to defend the Philippines, not to initiate attacks.[54]
It is indeed possible that MacArthur did not know of Brereton's 5:00 and 7:00 A.M. attempts to see him. Sutherland may not have informed him.[55] On the other hand, he became aware of Brereton's requests at sometime during the morning because he called Brereton at 10:15 A.M. to authorize attacks later in the day.
Overall, MacArthur was most noticeable by his absence in the early morning of the 8th. He issued no orders to the Army until late morning, but busied himself with writing out orders in the name of President Quezon that affected civilians in the Philippine Islands.[56]
There is general agreement that MacArthur's nerve failed. William Manchester says MacArthur was "Numbed,"[57] and reports that those around MacArthur described him as "gray, ill, and exhausted"[58] that morning. In discussing MacArthur's response to the Japanese attack on the Philippines, the first episode of the September 2007 broadcast of The War on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) states that the general froze.[59]
The author of the Air Force history writes,
Considering other events, and MacArthur's non-appearance throughout the morning of that critical day, this student believes that a plausible explanation is the ["the" in text, probably meant to be "that"] MacArthur suffered at least a mild nervous breakdown upon receiving the news of Pearl Harbor--and realizing his inevitable defeat in the Philippines--and that Sutherland's primary task that morning was to get the "boss" to pull himself together and assume effective command. After the efforts that MacArthur had initiated to repudiate the long-standing strategy of 'delay-and-defend until the fleet could arrive to reinforce', in favor of an aggressive forward defense relying largely on the striking power of the B-17s he demanded, it boggles the mind to discover another believable explanation for his failure to even meet face-to-face with his air force chief that morning. Further evidence of his tenuous response to events is the continued commitment to a forward defense of the beaches, until precipitously abandoning those plans in favor of the retreat to Bataan immediately after the Japanese landing at Lingayen Gulf--too late to move the mountains of material needed to feed and support his army.[60]
Weintraub is more scathing. Writing about that morning, he says,
Nothing of the danger to the Philippines seemed to disturb MacArthur on the first day of the war; afterwards he and his senior staff carried on a public relations campaign to shift the blame elsewhere... Through Sutherland he had prevented American B-17s from interdicting attack sites on Formosa....
.... Had he [Sutherland] been making decisions by reading MacArthur's mind rather than consulting him? Nothing of the sort fits MacArthur's own inglorious know-nothing account. One must return to the image of a stunned, pajama-clad figure, more proconsul than general, sitting on his bed in the predawn darkness and reaching for his Bible rather that rushing to action. A paralysis of will, in part concealed by loyal lieutenants.[61]
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