decided he had been intentionally snubbed, and had never gotten over it.
Pickering had written his wife from Australia, in early 1942, that his relations with MacArthur’s staff ranged from frigid to frozen, and that had been when he had been a temporarily commissioned Navy captain sent to the Pacific by Navy Secretary Frank Knox. The temperature had dropped even lower when he had been sent to the Pacific as a Marine brigadier general and with the title of Deputy Director of the OSS for Asia.
MacArthur—with the encouragement of Willoughby and Whitney, Pickering had come to understand—had not wanted the OSS in his theater of operations. Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence officer, and Whitney, who had been commissioned a major in the Philippines just before the war, and was serving as sort of an adviser, were agreed that intelligence activities should be under MacArthur’s intelligence officer. Whitney, moreover, had decided he had the background to become spymaster under Willoughby.
MacArthur had not refused to accept the OSS in his theater, he had simply been not able to find time in his busy schedule to receive the OSS officer sent to his headquarters by Wild Bill Donovan, the head of the OSS.
Donovan, who was a close personal friend of Roosevelt, had complained to him about MacArthur’s behavior, and Roosevelt had solved the problem by commissioning Pickering into the Marine Corps, assigning him to the OSS, and sending him to deal with MacArthur.
Pickering had a dozen clashes with the Bataan Gang during World War II, the most galling to Willoughby and Whitney his making contact with an officer fighting as a guerrilla on Mindanao after MacArthur—acting on Willoughby’s advice—had informed the President there “was absolutely no possibility of U.S. guerrilla activity in the Philippines at this time.”
Pickering had sent a team commanded by a young Marine intelligence officer—Lieutenant K. R. McCoy—to Japanese-occupied Mindanao on a Navy submarine. McCoy had established contact with a reserve lieutenant colonel named Wendell Fertig, who had refused to surrender, promoted himself to brigadier general, announced he was “Commanding General of United States Forces in the Philippines,” and begun guerrilla warfare against the Japanese occupiers.
When, late in the war, MacArthur’s troops landed on Mindanao, they found Brigadier General Fertig waiting for them with 30,000 armed and uniformed troops, including a band. Pickering had had Fertig’s forces supplied by Navy submarines all through the war.
Every report of Fertig’s successes—even of a successful completion of a submarine supply mission to him— during the war had been a galling reminder to the Bataan Gang that Pickering had done what MacArthur had said— on their advice—was impossible to do.
Pickering had learned that MacArthur had a petty side to his character. The one manifestation of this that annoyed Pickering the most—even more than MacArthur’s refusal to award the 4th Marines on Corregidor the Presidential Unit Citation because “the Marines already have enough medals”—was MacArthur’s refusal to promote Fertig above his actual rank of lieutenant colonel even though Fertig had successfully commanded 30,000 troops in combat. An Army corps has that many troops and is commanded by a three-star general.
Whitney had risen steadily upward in rank—he ended World War II as a colonel and was now a brigadier general—and this added to Pickering’s annoyance and even contempt.
Aware that he was being a little childish himself, Pickering took pleasure in knowing that Brigadier General Whitney’s pleasure with himself for being at El Supremo’s elbow when he met with the President would be pretty well soured when he saw Pickering get off the Presidential aircraft.
There turned out to be less of an arrival ceremony for the President than there had been at K-16 when MacArthur had landed there to turn the seat of the South Korean government back to Syngman Rhee.
The door of the Independence opened, and two Secret Service men and a still cameraman and a motion picture cameraman went down the stairs. Then Truman came out of his compartment and went down the stairs.
MacArthur saluted. Truman smiled and put out his hand, then started shaking hands with the others of MacArthur’s party.
The first man off the Independence after Truman was a stocky Army chief warrant officer in his mid-thirties. He carried a leather briefcase in one hand and a heavy canvas equipment bag in the other. He wore a web pistol belt with a holstered .45 around his waist. A jeep was waiting for him. He got in it and drove off before General of the Army Omar Bradley came down the stairs.