MacArthur's Spies

March 27, 2017
Veteran foreign correspondent Eisner (The Pope’s Last Crusade) describes how an American woman, Claire Phillips, supported U.S. prisoners of war and anti-Japanese guerrillas during the WWII occupation of the Philippines. In spite of its subtitle, this fast-moving history of the Manila resistance to the Japanese focuses on the role played by Phillips, a failed entertainer who was trapped in the occupied city for the duration of the war while her Filipino husband was in the U.S. Eisner highlights the very real contributions Phillips made to the resistance to Japanese occupation while revealing the numerous flaws in Phillips’s character (she romanced and married an American soldier in the Philippines without divorcing her husband). Phillips worked against the Japanese occupation in several different ways, including funneling money, medicine, and supplies to American prisoners of the Japanese and to American and Philippine guerrillas as she ran a high-end nightclub, the Tsubaki Club, for the Japanese elite. She used the club to make money for the guerrillas and to glean military information from inebriated Japanese officers. The guerrilla network then passed the information to Gen. MacArthur’s headquarters. Eisner’s history is a well-researched, entertaining, and informative look at the resistance to the Japanese occupation.

March 1, 2017
Bringing to light a little-known facet of the Pacific theater in World War II.Veteran foreign correspondent Eisner (The Pope's Last Crusade: How an American Jesuit Helped Pope Pius XI's Campaign to Stop Hitler, 2013, etc.) tracks three complicated stories of Allied heroics that took place when the Japanese attacked and invaded the Philippines just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese overran the American-held archipelago, driving the Americans to the Bataan peninsula and to the fortress of Corregidor before eventually forcing Gen. Douglas MacArthur to flee to Australia with his family and staff in March 1942 and the rest of the Americans and Filipinos to surrender ignominiously in April. Moving chronologically, Eisner alternates among the characters while concentrating on the actions of an enigmatic American woman from Michigan, born Claire Phillips, who had so many aliases and secrets after she left home as a teenager that it was hard for the biographer to ascertain the truth. Nonetheless, after three marriages, she wound up in Manila, braving the Japanese occupation with a foster child. After wooing a younger American soldier, with whom she went to Bataan, she eventually opened a nightclub for the Japanese officers in Manila, the Tsubaki Club, in order to finance her covert activities to aid the American POWs. Meanwhile, above the hills of Bataan, John Boone, a 29-year-old colonel, had lost contact with his army after the Japanese invasion and, recognizing the desperation of the surrender, began to organize a guerrilla army made up of other stragglers and deserters, supported materially by Phillips, known as "High Pockets," and others. Eisner's third link is slippery U.S.-born Navy reserve officer Charles "Chick" Parsons, who, masquerading as a Spanish- and Tagalog-speaking businessman, was able to relay supplies and information to the guerrillas. Though the individual stories are gripping, the writing is workmanlike and Eisner struggles to organize these detailed threads into a cohesive narrative. An uneven war story that will appeal to aficionados of the Pacific theater and wartime espionage.

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December 1, 2016
As the Japanese descended on Manila on January 2, 1942, some resisters hid in the hills. Among them were Col. John Boone, torch singer Claire Phillips, and "Chick" Parsons, a naval intelligence officer who became Gen. Douglas MacArthur's spymaster in the Philippines. From veteran foreign correspondent Eisner (The Freedom Line).

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