The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  THE AUSTRALIAN CULTURE OF “MATESHIP” was a conscious rejection of English class hierarchies. Instinctive distrust of authority was paired with a fondness for the underdog. The country was royalist only in the sense that it was faithful to its British heritage. In Australia, a rich man might be better off than his neighbors, but that did not make him better and he had better not forget it. Power, privilege, and individual achievement were tolerable only if conjoined to an attitude of genuine humility. According to a local maxim, the “tall poppy” was the first to be cut down. Probably there was not another society in the world less inclined to elevate an individual to the status of idol or messiah.

  Douglas MacArthur was the first and probably the last man in Australian history to put that proposition to the test. In the national emergency of 1942, Australians opened their arms and embraced him as a savior. Enormous crowds gathered each day outside the Menzies Hotel in Melbourne, where he and his family lived for four months after their arrival in the country. The day of his arrival was declared “MacArthur Day.” Newspapers serialized one of the many instant hagiographies that had been published in the United States. “Douglas” was one of the most popular names for Australian boys born between 1942 and 1945. Photographs of him appeared in shop windows. They were often autographed, as his headquarters always accommodated requests for signed portraits. The Truth, a Brisbane paper, told its readers that “MacArthur is the man to whom the civilized world looks to sweep the Japs back into their slime.”12 When he visited Canberra in May 1942, the House of Representatives gave him the privileges of its floor. Without delay and apparently without dissent, Prime Minister John Curtin acted to abolish the military board and invest its powers in MacArthur as supreme commander of Australian forces. MacArthur placed his thumb on the scale of Australian politics when he said that Curtin, whose Labour government held a knife’s-edge majority in Parliament, was the “heart and soul of Australia.”13

  MacArthur did not add a single Australian officer to his personal headquarters staff, and he refused requests from Washington to do so. His staff would be dominated by his chief of staff, the high-handed and mercurial General Richard K. Sutherland, and other members of the “Bataan Gang” who had joined his audacious cover-of-darkness escape from Corregidor by PT boat. The blow was softened a bit by his nomination of an Australian officer, General Sir Thomas Blamey, as commander of Allied land forces in the theater. He and Curtin together lobbied Churchill to send British naval forces to the theater, and were refused.

  In time, many Australians would come to resent MacArthur’s aversion to crediting Australian troops in his portentous press communiqués, and they could not have overlooked the fact that the general was broadly unpopular among the hundreds of thousands of American servicemen pouring into the country. According to the anti-MacArthur chatter heard among American servicemen of all branches, he was “Dugout Doug,” an arrogant potentate who had remained cosseted with his wife and young son in an opulent Corregidor bunker while his army starved on Bataan; who had fled the scene with suitcases of clothing, furniture, and valuables, leaving sick nurses behind to be defiled by the Japanese; who had run all the way down to Melbourne, as far from the enemy as he could go without continuing south to Tasmania or Antarctica; and who insisted on monopolizing all glory and honor while denying it to the men actually doing the fighting and the dying. When American servicemen in Australia tired of eating so much mutton, a rumor circulated that MacArthur owned a sheep ranch and was being enriched at their expense.

  Most of these charges were false, and some were perverse. Whatever MacArthur was, he was no coward. His service in the Great War had left no doubt of his exceptional personal courage, but he proved it again on Corregidor, where he stood erect and unflinching at an observation post while Japanese planes flew low overhead, bombs burst nearby, and his staff dived for cover. He left Corregidor with his family and a core of his staff only after FDR ordered him to do so. He and his party took one suitcase each. MacArthur was a deeply flawed man whose Olympian ego and garish vanity warped his perceptions and even stained his personal integrity. As a commander of armies, he would have been more at home in the eighteenth century. But he was also an officer of rare and brilliant ability, who combined an expansive perspective with an exceptional memory and a quick grasp of detail.

  More than any other Allied military leader, MacArthur instinctively perceived the larger context of the Pacific War. The Japanese had vowed to drive the Western interloper from Asia, and Asian peoples must inevitably be enticed by that proposition. It was not enough to reverse Japanese conquests. Japan’s imperial pan-Asian ideology had to be smashed and replaced with something better. MacArthur’s greatness—and his greatness is indisputable—would

  not be fully revealed until after the war, when he would rule as a latter-day shogun over the reconstruction of a democratic Japan.

  In July 1942, MacArthur moved his family and his headquarters north to Brisbane, to be closer to the combat theater. His headquarters staff moved into the abandoned offices of the AMP Society, an insurance company that had evacuated to the south. For his personal office, MacArthur claimed a grand boardroom on the ninth floor. Here he had a secure telephone that connected directly with the War Department in Washington. The MacArthur family lodged in three adjoining suites on the top floor of the graceful Lennons Hotel on George Street. Crowds gathered outside each morning, hoping for a glimpse of the supreme commander as he walked from the lobby to his black Wolseley limousine with the license plate “USA-1.” At eleven each morning, a phalanx of policemen cleared the street, and the four-year-old Arthur, accompanied by his Filipina Chinese governess, crossed to the state’s Parliament House. The tall wrought-iron gate was solemnly unlocked, the boy and his nurse entered, the gate was locked behind them, and the police stood by while the boy played in the grounds.

  MacArthur liked to work while on his feet. He paced his office tirelessly, and would not talk to an officer on the telephone if he could walk to the man’s office and lean on his desk. His standard opener was, “Take a note.” General George C. Kenney, who relieved George Brett as commander of Allied Air Forces in the theater in August 1942, resolved to confront MacArthur’s despotic chief of staff, General Sutherland, directly early in his tenure. When Sutherland began issuing orders to the air groups, infringing on what Kenney believed to be his rightful purview, he drew a dot on a blank sheet of paper and told Sutherland, “The dot represents what you know about air operations, the entire rest of the paper what I know.”14 Kenney demanded that they ask MacArthur to clarify their respective spheres of authority. Sutherland, according to Kenney, capitulated and gave him no more trouble.

  Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, who replaced Arthur S. Carpender as commander of Allied Naval Forces, Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) in November 1943, likewise contrived to circumvent Sutherland. MacArthur was not as isolated and remote as his reputation suggested. Senior officers whom he respected felt free to walk into his office whenever they wanted a word with him. In Kinkaid’s telling, he would often walk in and say, “General, I just came up to smoke a cigarette.”

  He’d say, “Fine,” and hand me the cigarette box and I’d take a cigarette. “Won’t you have a seat?” And then, “You don’t mind if I walk?” So he’d walk up and down the room, which was his habit, while we talked.

  Sometimes I would have things that I knew the General didn’t approve of and might object to, and then I would say, “Well, General, I’ve got something this morning that I don’t think you approve of.”

  “All right, what is it?”

  So I’d tell him, while he walked up and down. He never interrupted. And when I finished, then he’d start to talk. I knew that the General would eventually get off base. If I had a good case, I’d just let him talk until he did and then I’d say, “General, you know damned well what you said isn’t so.”

  He’d look around at me over his shoulder and say, “Well, maybe not,” and go on walking and puffing his pip
e.15

  As commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet—“MacArthur’s Navy”—Kinkaid had to straddle the awkward command setup that made him simultaneously answerable to MacArthur and Admiral King. That he succeeded in the job was a credit to his tact and diplomatic talents. Much like Kenney, Kinkaid was an outsider who stood apart from MacArthur’s intensely loyal staff, a coterie of army officers who shared and amplified the boss’s paranoia and prejudices and were loath to challenge his views when he was wrong on the merits. Both Kenney and Kinkaid discovered to their surprise that MacArthur was more amenable to dissent than his overawed staff seemed to realize. “Nobody could take MacArthur as an average man,” Kinkaid observed. “They either put him up on a pedestal, or else they damned him, and neither is correct.”16

  No military leader ever took a greater interest in the press. For both Australians and Americans, MacArthur’s resounding communiqués provided the essential narrative of the war in the South Pacific. Colonel LeGrande “Pick” Diller, recruited by Sutherland to run MacArthur’s publicity department, was armed with the powers of wartime press censorship. He scrubbed all press copy of any implied or actual criticism directed against the SWPA command, whether or not legitimate issues of military secrecy were at stake. Reporters who laid the praise on thick were rewarded with favored treatment and access. Kenney acerbically noted that news did not see the light of day unless it “painted the General with a halo and seated him on the highest pedestal in the universe.”17

  MacArthur managed to transfix and overawe a room filled with veteran reporters—pacing the room, entertaining no questions, and speaking off the cuff for an hour or more without repeating himself. He had the facility to “write on his feet”—to communicate in polished, well-constructed, multi-clause sentences. Reporters came away with a sense of having been enlightened, even if they were not free to write what they wished. When MacArthur was emotional, his rhetoric was prone to careen from the gallant to the purple, as when he eulogized the American soldiers fallen on Bataan: “To the weeping mothers of its dead, I only say that the sacrifice and halo of Jesus of Nazareth has descended upon their sons and that God will take them unto himself.”18

  Seeing the name of a subordinate officer in print put MacArthur in a foul temper. He favored the antique rhetorical device of substituting the singular pronoun “I” for the forces under his command. Arriving in Australia from Bataan, he insisted on the formulation “I came through and I shall return.” Asked by the Office of War Information to amend that to “We shall return,” MacArthur refused. “I shall return” had a Caesarian ring, and was the most memorable phrase of the entire Pacific War. To the Filipino people, suffering under an atrocious occupation, the first-person declaration was a thunderbolt of hope and inspiration. But the singular pronoun was unpopular among the troops, who found it bombastic and ungenerous. As the war moved north, men in the line of fire were chagrined to learn that “MacArthur,” from his headquarters in Brisbane, had bombarded an enemy airfield or secured a new beachhead. In May 1942, the general deftly seized credit for the Battle of the Coral Sea, a naval victory won in Nimitz’s theater by forces under Nimitz’s command. General Robert L. Eichelberger, who led a grueling and bloody campaign against Japanese forces at Buna on southeastern New Guinea, believed MacArthur conspired to convince the press and public that he was personally at the head of the Allied fighting forces. Eichelberger vented his resentment in private letters to his wife. Following MacArthur’s brief trip to Port Moresby, wrote Eichelberger, “the great hero went home without seeing Buna before, during, or after the fight while permitting press articles from his GHQ to say he was leading his troops in battle. MacArthur . . . just stayed over at Moresby 40 minutes away and walked the floor. I know this to be a fact.”19

  The close of the Guadalcanal campaign would take the fight west of the 159th parallel—into Douglas MacArthur’s domain. Based on the division of command responsibilities negotiated by the Joint Chiefs a year earlier, Halsey remained in Nimitz’s chain of command, and his forces would continue to “belong” to Nimitz. But as SOPAC ships, aircraft, and troops were deployed into the central and upper Solomons, they would fall under MacArthur’s strategic authority. The navy had often avoided sending its ships to Australia for fear of losing them to MacArthur. In March 1942, for example, King had stipulated that Admiral Fletcher’s task force should avoid Sydney because the appearance of American aircraft carriers in that harbor might “inspire political demands to keep him in Australian waters.”20 Worse, the awkward arrangement ruled out direct discussions of strategy between Halsey and MacArthur. If protocol was to be strictly observed, any major operation Halsey wished to undertake west of the 159th must be proposed to Nimitz, who would pass it to King, who would consult with Marshall, who would forward it down the chain to MacArthur. The reply would take the absurdly roundabout path back through Washington and Pearl Harbor to Noumea.

  The command setup, as Halsey shrewdly put it, had been intended “to maintain equilibrium between the services.” But it was plainly ineffective and fraught with risks. On February 21, 1943, Halsey had landed 10,000 soldiers and marines in the Russell Islands. As soon as they were secure, Halsey poured Seabees into the islands and supplied their two new fighter strips with lavish amounts of ammunition and aviation fuel, in anticipation of an expanded air offensive against the central Solomons. But the Russells were at the absolute limit of his demarcated border (slightly over it, in fact), and no more westward progress could occur without MacArthur’s blessing. Halsey had his eye on Munda Point, a new Japanese fighter strip in the New Georgia group 120 miles farther west, as a site that offered terrain suitable for a large bomber field. The COMSOPAC wisely decided to see if the issue could be resolved in a face-to-face summit. In early April 1943, he crossed the Coral Sea and presented himself at the AMP building in Brisbane.

  There was no reason to expect the two to establish a warm personal rapport. Halsey had not appreciated MacArthur’s credit-snatching communiqués, and an aide remembered him referring to the general as a “self-advertising son of a bitch.” MacArthur had imperiously declined Nimitz’s invitation to attend the command conference in Noumea in September 1942, sending Sutherland and Kenney in his place. (The minutes of the conference, prepared by one of Nimitz’s staff officers, began with a sarcastic comment: “MacArthur found himself unable to be present.”21) To his surprise, however, Halsey took an instant liking to the general. Within five minutes, Halsey later wrote, “I felt as if we were lifelong friends. I have seldom seen a man who makes a quicker, stronger, more favorable impression. He was then sixty-three years old, but he could have passed as fifty. His hair was jet black; his eyes were clear; his carriage was erect. If he had been wearing civilian clothes, I still would have known at once that he was a soldier.”22 MacArthur, for his part, was equally impressed with Halsey: “He was of the same aggressive type as John Paul Jones, David Farragut, and George Dewey. His one thought was to close with the enemy and fight him to the death. . . . I liked him from the moment we met, and my respect and admiration increased with time.”23

  Even making allowances for interservice and inter-theater diplomacy, there is no reason to suppose that these opinions were less than sincere. In the year that followed, the admiral and the general would effectively coordinate their operations in the South Pacific. As Kenney and Kinkaid had learned, and as Halsey found in turn, MacArthur was accustomed to deference but did not bristle at well-reasoned opposition. He would yield to sound arguments. Army-navy frictions were more often attributed to his subordinates, and could be resolved in direct communications between the two theater commanders, whose mutual respect and affection did not fade away even when they were at odds. Halsey’s long-term chief of staff, Robert Carney, was witness to a heated argument between the two theater commanders later in 1943. The admiral, with his “chin sticking out a foot,” told MacArthur that he was placing his “personal honor . . . before the security of the United States and the outcome of the war!�
� In Carney’s recollection, the accusation brought MacArthur up short. “Bull,” he said. “That’s a terrible indictment. That’s a terrible thing to say. But, I think in my preoccupation, I’ve forgotten some things. . . . You can go on back now. The commitment will be met.”24

  As it turned out, Halsey’s proposed attack on the New Georgia group was exactly in line with MacArthur’s thinking, and he approved the operation on the spot. It would intersect admirably with MacArthur’s existing plans for an offensive up the north coast of New Guinea and the occupation of Woodlark Island and the Trobriand Islands. ELKTON, the Maryland town famous as a destination for quick marriages, was the code name given to the two-front offensive. D-Day on New Georgia was originally set for May 15, subsequently postponed to June 30.

  THE 1943 CAMPAIGN BEGAN with a perceptible lull. For the first time since December 1941, the Allies were entirely on the offensive, but they were not yet strong enough to mount an all-out assault on the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul, on New Britain. The campaign would require “climbing the ladder” formed by the Solomons chain. Japan shortened and fortified its new defensive line, running from Munda on New Georgia to Salamaua in New Guinea. Above all, it was an air war. New beachheads and rapid airbase construction extended the ranges of bombers and fighters northwest toward the great enemy bastion at Rabaul.

  The Cactus Air Force was reorganized and expanded into Air Command Solomons (abbreviated as AIRSOLS), an amalgamation of army, navy, and marine air groups, combined with bombers and fighters of the Royal New Zealand Air Force. The first commander of AIRSOLS (COMAIRSOLS) was Rear Admiral Charles P. Mason, whose multiservice and international staff was based at Henderson Field. The effective radius of most strikes was about 200 to 300 miles, and Rabaul lay more than 600 miles away. New airfields were needed farther up the Solomons, and they would be won by the same sort of naval and amphibious operations that had won Guadalcanal. AIRSOLS could put about 300 planes into action in March 1943; by midyear, the total would exceed 450. The venerable F4F Wildcat, SBD Dauntless, TBF Avenger, B-17, and P-38 Lightning—more of those long-legged army fighters were gradually pried from Hap Arnold’s reluctant grasp—would continue to do the arduous and deadly work of reducing Japanese airpower in the South Pacific. They were reinforced by new, fast, powerful arrivals, including the F6F Hellcat, Grumman’s next-generation carrier fighter, and the Vought F4U Corsair, a gull-winged fighter-bomber issued to marine fighter squadrons on Guadalcanal. AIRSOLS operations were supported by the heavy bombers of General Kenney’s Fifth Air Force, staging from airfields on southeastern New Guinea. Kenney received ample USAAF reinforcements, including the 475th Fighter Group (all P-38s, with elite and highly trained pilots), and a new medium-bomber group, the 345th. Old, dilapidated, and combat-weary B-17s were replaced with newly commissioned B-24 Liberators.