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Are you sitting down?
In late December 1941, Douglas MacArthur's back was against an ocean wall. Over the previous weeks the Japanese army had driven him and his officers and troops out of Manila, down through the Philippine jungles to the precipice of disaster.
The Japanese destroyed three American/Filipino divisions in just five days. What little air force the Americans had in the Philippines was gone and their paltry Navy at the bottom of the sea.
MacArthur was making his last stand at the Bataan peninsula surrounded by hundreds of thousands of war-hardened, ruthless Japanese soldiers in front of him and the vast and Japanese controlled South China Sea behind him.
He was holding out for reinforcements. But with the war raging against Germany and America's primary focus there, they were reinforcements that would never come.
MacArthur was left to make a stand alone...alone with what was left of his courageous, but beleaguered American and Filipino army. Exhausted they were, hungry with little food, stressed at the prospect of annihilation.
And then, at one point, according to Mark Perry in his excellent book (though the title is a misnomer) The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur, MacArthur was in discussion with his aides when he abruptly asked for a telephone.
He rang Jorge Vargas, his lawyer who was still in occupied Manila. He inquired about his investments.
Ears around him perked up.
"Can you buy me $35,000 worth of Lepanto mining stocks?" the general asked.
Faces puzzled.
"We will try, General, we will try," Vargas responded.
And then the General hung up and went right back to his work.
Do you get the impact of what happened here?
Here's the General, on the verge of destruction, on the verge of being overrun by the Japanese and pushed off the Philippine islands for good, upping his investments in a Filipino mining operation!
His aides were flabbergasted.
As Perry writes, his message could not have been clearer. "While key Filipino officials were scrambling to get their assets out of the country, MacArthur was very publicly moving to keep his in."
The audacity of his actions...the nervy confidence of his communication; investing in the very land he was losing and in a victory no one else yet saw.
As dire as things were, his actions proclaimed as if through a megaphone, that he had no question who, in the end, would prevail in the Philippines. And he wanted his men to know it too.
In the end, MacArthur was ordered by Washington to escape. He made a treacherous journey by boat and then plane to Australia where he took up command of the allied cause in the Southwest Pacific.
The remaining officers and troops were eventually overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the Japanese army.
It must be noted that the months-long stand made by the American and Filipino armies, giving ground slowly through the Philippines and standing fast at Bataan until their removal, bought the Unites States precious time to locate its compass after being staggered by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Heroes we needed and heroes they were.
Three years later, with the tide of the war turned, MacArthur, indeed returned to the Philippines, dispatched the Japanese, and never let the islands go again.
His investment was made good.
No word on what happened to his $35,000.
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