CHAPTER 1
LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO
November 1942
BRIGADIER GENERAL LESLIE GROVES and a world-renowned physicist named Robert Oppenheimer are in the high country thirty-five miles northwest of Santa Fe. They are in the market for real estate and have found a spot that interests them. It is a twenty-five-year-old boys’ school with log dormitories and a stunning view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It will be purchased to build Oppenheimer’s new lab. In addition to the school, the government will also buy 8,900 acres of surrounding land.
The general has tasked Oppenheimer with not only building a state-of-the-art laboratory in the middle of nowhere but also convincing some of the world’s sharpest minds to put their lives on hold and spend the rest of the war here.
Oppenheimer was not the obvious choice to be in charge of this top secret endeavor to build the bomb, the Manhattan Project. His past indicated some trouble: The professor from the University of California, Berkeley had a history of depression and eccentric behavior. He also admitted to having been a member of several communist groups. Also, Oppenheimer had no experience managing a large group of people. Many doubted that he had the experience required to build the world’s first weapon of mass destruction.
Yet the outspoken Brigadier General Leslie Groves was determined to hire him. “Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly.… He doesn’t know anything about sports,” Groves would later tell an interviewer, referring to Oppenheimer as “a genius.”
The Los Alamos Ranch School is soon ringed with security fences topped with coils of razor wire and guarded by soldiers and attack dogs. Oppenheimer’s scientists come to feel so secure that many stop locking their front doors when they leave for work in the morning. That safety, however, comes at a cost: the personal life of each employee at Los Alamos is subject to constant monitoring by security personnel. News of the atomic bomb research must be kept from Germany and the Soviet Union.
What begins as a theoretical laboratory soon becomes a small town. A theater group is formed, with Oppenheimer himself making a cameo appearance as a corpse in the play Arsenic and Old Lace. A town council is elected. Parties are common and last late into the night, sometimes featuring the world’s most learned minds playing piano or violin to entertain their friends.
On this high plateau, scientists work feverishly on a device designed to cause mass death and destruction. Utilizing a revolutionary new technology, the team is locking down the final design of a brand-new bomb. Shortly before World War II began, scientists discovered how to split the nucleus of an atom; the fission that occurs results in an enormous release of energy. Once news of this development leaked, weapons designers from around the world rushed to find a way to translate the research into a devastating implement of war.
The people in Los Alamos are not alone. Since September 1939, the Nazis have also tried to build what scientists are calling an “atom bomb.” The Japanese, too, have been seeking such a weapon. So far, both have had no luck.
CHAPTER 2
LEYTE, VISAYAN ISLANDS PHILIPPINES
October 20, 1944 • 1:00 P.M.
GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR is grinning.
Seven hundred miles west of the island of Peleliu, where marines are now mired in their fifth bloody week of combat, the sixty-four-year-old commander of Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific leans over the rail of the USS Nashville. He gazes into the distance at the island of Leyte in his beloved Philippines, which was invaded by more than a hundred thousand U.S. Army troops under his command three hours ago. His counterpart in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, became famous for the D-Day invasion of France this past June. So MacArthur, well known for his ego, has chosen to call the date of this invasion A-Day, for Attack Day. The invasion of Leyte is the second-largest amphibious landing of World War II, behind that of Normandy.
As on Peleliu, intelligence reports predicting minimal enemy resistance have proven very wrong. The Japanese are putting up a fierce fight for the Philippines. Even miles out to sea, MacArthur can hear the chatter of automatic-weapons fire coming from groves of palm trees and see billowing plumes of black smoke from the jungle. Just overhead, American fighter-bombers buzz toward entrenched enemy positions, keeping a sharp eye out for Japanese fighter planes.
Two years ago, after the fall of the Philippines to the Japanese, the most humiliating defeat of his storied career, General MacArthur promised the world that he would one day come back in glory to retake the islands. Now he is setting out to make good on that vow.
Douglas MacArthur, who likes to refer to himself in the third person as simply MacArthur, is a shade over six feet tall, the son of a Medal of Honor–winning general through whom he has a lifelong connection to the Philippines. Arthur MacArthur Jr. fought in the American Civil War as a teenager and, after the Spanish-American War, served as military governor of the Philippines.
MacArthur clambers down a ladder hanging over the Nashville’s side and into a waiting landing craft. As he does every day, the general wears a freshly pressed khaki uniform that bears no ribbons. He carefully maintains the creases on his shirtsleeves and trousers by changing clothes frequently, and he has just donned a fresh uniform for the landing. In case the landing goes horribly wrong and MacArthur is at risk of being taken prisoner, a loaded gun that once belonged to his father rests in his hip pocket.
Sweat stains seep into MacArthur’s weathered field marshal’s cap; his dark brown eyes are shielded from the ocean’s glare by his Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses, completing his trademark appearance.
Lieutenant General Richard Sutherland, his chief of staff, follows MacArthur down the ladder. After the remainder of MacArthur’s group descend into the landing craft, several war correspondents join them. Douglas MacArthur knows the value of good publicity and has carefully choreographed his landing so that images of this great moment will soon be splashed across front pages around the world. The plan is to land not on the beach but at a dock. The photographers will step out of the boat first, then turn around to capture the immaculately starched and pressed general once again setting foot on Philippine soil.
Like many a scripted moment, however, the actual event will unfold in quite a different fashion.
Nine hundred and fifty-four days after fleeing the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur orders the landing craft to sail for shore. It has taken MacArthur almost three years, but he has returned.
His landing craft arrives at Red Beach on Leyte. The general’s face hardens as he steps off the boat into knee-deep ocean water, the razor-sharp creases in his pants disappearing in an instant.
“Let ’em walk,” barked the navy officer in charge of directing the traffic moving on and off Red Beach when he heard that MacArthur wanted to land on a special dock. As “beachmaster,” the officer has supreme authority over the landing zone; not even the great Douglas MacArthur receives special treatment.
It is forty paces from the landing craft to shore. MacArthur glares at the impertinent young officer as he wades through the water. His personal photographer, Captain Gaetano Faillace, captures the moment for posterity, even as Japanese snipers high up in the palm trees could very well be taking aim at the general standing tall in the surf.
Once on land, MacArthur is handed a microphone. His words will broadcast throughout the country.
“People of the Philippines,” he proclaims, “I have returned!”
In his excitement, the normally imperturbable general’s hands shake.
Soon after, General Douglas MacArthur turns around and wades back to his landing craft, which quickly returns him to the shelter and safety of the USS Nashville.
* * *
Douglas MacArthur well knows that this landing in the Philippines is a vital step toward the eventual invasion of Japan. Though plans are still in the conceptual phase, and such an assault is at least a year away, it promises to be the greatest amphibious landing in history. It is expected that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, marines, pilots, and sailors will take part, on a scale dwarfing the D-Day landing in Normandy. The cost will be extreme—the combined loss of life is expected to approach one million people. As the most revered general in the Pacific, MacArthur will most assuredly be called upon to lead this devastating invasion.
General Douglas MacArthur’s hopes for easy victories on the way to the invasion of Japan will be dashed by a determined enemy, poor strategic planning, and something new: the kamikaze—Japanese suicide pilots dropping out of the sky to sink American ships by deliberately crashing their planes into them.
Copyright © 2017 by Bill O’Reilly
