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Since General Douglas MacArthur’s departure for Australia from the Fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay was in compliance with a direct order from President and Commander-in-Chief Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it was the General’s belief that the move was nothing more than a transfer of his headquarters. He believed, in other words, that the battered, outnumbered, starving U.S. and Philippine troops in the Philippine Islands would remain under his command.
He believed specifically that Lieutenant General Jonathan M.
Wainwright, a tall, skinny cavalryman who had been his deputy, would, as regulations and custom prescribed, remain under his orders.
General MacArthur’s last order to Wainwright–on the small wooden wharf at Corregidor just before MacArthur, his wife, his son, and a small staff boarded the boats that would take them away–was verbal: He told Wainwright to “hold on.” Wainwright understood this to mean that he was forbidden to surrender.
Since he had been promised reinforcement and resupply of his beleaguered forces by Roosevelt himself, MacArthur believed that as long as the Fortress of Corregidor held out, Roosevelt would be forced to make good on his promise of reinforcement. The island of Luzon, including the capital city of Manila, had fallen to the Japanese. But there were upward of twenty thousand reasonably healthy, reasonably well-supplied troops under Major General William Sharp on the island of Mindanao. That force, MacArthur believed, could serve as the nucleus for the recapture of Luzon, once reinforcements came.
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