MacArthur’s patchwork army had harried the Japanese advance and had stubbornly fought a long retreat down the Island of Luzon. It was bottled up on the Bataan Peninsula and on the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay, and it was already doomed, everybody knew that. The flight of its commanding general only emphasized that it had been written off, but the tremendous fight it was putting up had salved every American’s wounded national pride. Besides, the very fact that MacArthur had been ordered out of the islands clearly meant that America was going back, once the nation had caught its breath and recovered from Pearl Harbor. General MacArthur, with a talent for flamboyant leadership that amounted to genius of a sort, emitted the sonorous phrase: “I shall return.” A few sour critics, immune to the MacArthur charm, deplored his use of the first person singular when the first person plural would have been more graceful—and more accurate—but the phrase caught on in the free world. “I shall return.” The phrase promised brave times ahead, when the galling need to retreat would end and America would begin the journey back to Bataan. A stirring prospect, but what a long journey it was going to be. The most ignorant could look at a map and see that MacArthur’s return trip was going to take years. And yet his trip out had taken only days. A few of the curious wondered how his escape had been engineered. News stories said that MacArthur had flown into Australia. But where had he found a plane? For days America had been told that on the shrinking Luzon beachhead no airstrips remained in American hands. Where had MacArthur gone to find a friendly airfield, and how had he gone there through the swarming patrols of the Japanese naval blockade? The full story of MacArthur’s escape, when it was told, became one of the top adventure stories of World War II. First came the bare announcement that it was on a motor torpedo boat—a PT boat in Navy parlance, and a mosquito boat in journalese—that the general had made the first leg of his flight across enemy-infested seas. Then a crack journalist named William L. White interviewed the officers of the PT rescue squadron and wrote a book about the escape and about the days when the entire American naval striking force in the Philippines had shrunk to six, then four, then three, then one of the barnacle-encrusted plywood motorboats hardly bigger than a stockbroker’s cabin cruiser.