The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Parrying Churchill’s hopes of a promise to enter the war against Hitler, the President insists first on a declaration of anti-imperialist principles, or the Atlantic Charter.

  Pearl Harbor

  In his Oval Study at the White House at lunchtime, December 7, 1941, FDR and his assistant Harry Hopkins await the termination of Japanese diplomatic negotiations—unaware that five thousand miles away Japanese carrier-borne bombers are swooping over Pearl Harbor and will destroy the entire Pacific Fleet moored in Battleship Row.

  A Date Which Will Live in Infamy

  As crowds anxiously gather, the world waits for a reaction from the White House. On December 8, 1941, the President asks Congress for a declaration of war against Japan. Believing that the United States will be preoccupied by war in the Pacific, Hitler declares war on America on December 11, 1942.

  Coalition War

  At Christmas 1941, Churchill arrives at the White House to help concert direction of the war. In the Oval Office he is thrown to the wolves—the U.S. press. As the British Empire in the Far East collapses, FDR takes supreme command, broadcasting to the nation on February 23, 1942.

  Spring of ’42

  Modeled on Churchill’s portable map and filing system, FDR’s White House Map Room allows him to cable directly to commanders across the globe, including MacArthur and President Quezon in the Philippines—instructing them not to negotiate with the Japanese.

  The Raid on Tokyo

  On April 19, 1942, Colonel James Doolittle leads a flight of B-25 bombers off the deck of the USS Hornet to attack Tokyo, six hundred miles away—the first time in history such a carrier takeoff had been effected—with no possibility of return. For his valor, President Roosevelt personally awards him the Congressional Medal of Honor on his return from China.

  PART FOUR

  TROUBLE WITH MACARTHUR

  7

  The Fighting General

  THE PRESIDENT WOKE, as usual, around 8:30 A.M., and was served breakfast in bed.

  “The President always had a tray in his room,” recalled Alonzo Fields, the White House chief butler. “The coffee for the President was a deep black French roast, prepared in the kitchen. We roasted the green coffee beans to any degree we wanted. The President’s coffee, however, was a much deeper roast than we used for the family, and it was freshly ground. A coffeemaker was placed on the tray so the President could control the brewing.”1

  As he drank his coffee Roosevelt read through the morning’s newspapers, looking to see what new inanities were being published about his commanding general in the Far East, Douglas MacArthur, whose brave Army of the Philippines was fighting a doomed, rearguard battle against the Japanese. Among the absurdities: growing calls to have MacArthur brought back to Washington in order to make him U.S. commander in chief.

  The President could only wince at such media madness, trumpeted by an increasing number of Republicans. Among them was the defeated contender for the 1940 presidential election, Wendell Willkie—who had the backing of newspaper magnates such as Ogden Reid of the New York Herald Tribune, Roy Howard of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, and John and Gardner Cowles, publishers of Look magazine, the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, and the Des Moines Register.

  Some of the adulation being showered on the Far Eastern general took the President’s breath away. The Baltimore Sun, for example, had recently proclaimed MacArthur a “military genius”—a general whose skills rose high above the “single field” of battle. “He has some conception of that high romance which lifts the soldiers’ calling to a level where on occasions ethereal lights play upon it,” the newspaper waxed lyrical.2 The New York Herald Tribune, meanwhile, had run fully half a page of photographs of the general,3 while towns across the United States were considering renaming their roads, even themselves, in his honor. The TVA’s Douglas Dam should be called “Douglas MacArthur Dam,” it was proposed in Congress; another congressman had called for MacArthur to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for bravery in battle.4 The U.S. Senate was equally, if not more, adulatory than the House of Representatives. Senator Elbert D. Thomas of Utah, a Democrat and former professor of history, had declared: “Seldom in all history has a military leader faced such insuperable odds. Never has a commander of his troops met such a situation with greater and cooler courage, never with more resourcefulness of brilliant action.”5

  The Washington Post, for its part, had declared that MacArthur, by his “last-ditch fight in the bamboo jungles of Bataan,” had now shamed the ignorant “prophets of disaster” who had written off the Philippines as a hopeless cause.6 The Philadelphia Record considered Bataan had proved “anew” that MacArthur “is one of the greatest fighting generals of this war or other war. This is the kind of history which your children will tell your grandchildren.” Thanks to General MacArthur, Bataan “will go down in the schoolbooks alongside Valley Forge,” the newspaper predicted, “Yorktown, Gettysburg and Chateau Thierry.”7

  The President could but shake his head. If the press only knew what a mess General MacArthur had made of the war thus far!

  The President had known Douglas MacArthur since before the First World War—a war in which MacArthur had been awarded an unparalleled seven Silver Stars for courage and exemplary combat leadership, becoming the youngest brigadier general in the United States Army.

  The relationship between the two men had been cordial, but never easy. Both came from somewhat “aristocratic” backgrounds: Roosevelt’s “Dutch” lineage stretching back to the first settlers in America, while MacArthur’s father had won fame and the Medal of Honor in the Civil War at age nineteen, and later, as a distinguished major general.

  Both men were only-surviving sons born of strong, domineering mothers—mothers who had moved into nearby accommodation, for example, when their sons went to college. Both men were tall, handsome—and charismatic. Where Douglas MacArthur was a traditional Republican, however, Franklin Roosevelt was a compassionate Democrat—a difference that had come to a head in 1932, during the Great Depression.

  As chief of staff of the U.S. Army in Washington at the time, General MacArthur had been charged by the president, Herbert Hoover, with the eviction of veterans who had marched on the capital to demand early payment of their promised war bonuses that summer. Despite President Hoover’s express order to halt his thousand troops at the Anacostia River, MacArthur had insisted on taking personal charge of the brutal operation, involving tanks, cavalry, gas, and infantry with bayonets. The general had claimed the war veterans had no cause to claim their promised bonus early, indeed that the protest had been planned by the Communist Party, hoping to incite “revolutionary action” in America.8 Casualties had reached three figures, and there were a number of deaths.

  “You saw how he strutted down Pennsylvania Avenue,” Governor Roosevelt had commented to Dr. Rexford Tugwell, a member of his famous Brain Trust. “You saw that picture of him in the Times after the troops chased all those vets out with tear gas and burned their shelters. Did you ever see anyone more self-satisfied? There’s a potential Mussolini for you. Right here at home.” And the presidential candidate had gone on to say: “I’ve known Doug for years. You’ve never heard him talk, but I have. He has the most pretentious style of anyone I know. He talks in a voice that might come from an oracle’s cave. He never doubts and never argues or suggests; he makes pronouncements. What he thinks is final.”9

  Once Roosevelt was inaugurated as the thirty-second president of the United States, in March 1933, a confrontation between two such ambitious men had become inevitable. At a time of deteriorating international relations, MacArthur objected—with good reason—to proposed budget cuts involving more than 50 percent of the U.S. Army’s budget appropriation for 1934. Summoning Major General MacArthur to the White House, the President—facing the worst economic crisis in American history—had “turned the full vials of his sarcasm” on the army chief of staff, who in “emotional exhaustion” had ret
orted “recklessly,” as MacArthur himself later admitted, with “something to the effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, dying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt.”10

  “You must not talk that way,” Roosevelt had responded, “to the President.”

  “He was of course, right, and I knew it almost before the words had left my mouth,” MacArthur recalled. The President was clearly furious. “I said that I was sorry and apologized. But I felt my Army career was at an end. I told him that he had my resignation as Chief of Staff. As I reached the door his voice came with that cool detachment which so reflected his extraordinary self-control, ‘Don’t be foolish, Douglas; you and the budget must get together on this.’”11

  The bitter confrontation over army funding had in fact cleared the air between the two men: MacArthur respecting the President’s amazing way with people, while the President respected MacArthur as a “brilliant soldier,” as well as for his “intelligence” and leadership.

  “We must tame these fellows and make them useful to us,” Roosevelt had said of MacArthur and other prominent right-wing individuals—and he had.12 Extending MacArthur’s term of duty by a year—the first time ever in the history of the U.S. Army chief of staff’s position—he had asked General MacArthur to implement his new Conservation Corps, which duly trained over a quarter million recruits, veterans and foresters, for civilian duties, putting them to work in some forty-seven states, at nominal federal expense.13 When MacArthur’s term was finally coming to a close in 1935, however, the President and MacArthur had had yet another falling-out—this time over the Philippines.

  MacArthur had a long connection with the Philippine Islands, which in 1902 had become an American “insular area,” or territory, at the conclusion of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. MacArthur’s father, Brigadier General Arthur MacArthur, had fought as a brigade commander in the Philippine-American War; he had then become the first American military governor of the Philippines.

  First as an army engineer, then in command of the Philippine Military District, then of the Philippine Division, and finally of the Philippine Department of the U.S. Army in the 1920s, Douglas MacArthur had followed in his father’s footsteps. He had gotten to know not only the islands and their political leaders intimately, but a number of women—including a certain Isabel Rosario Cooper, half-Scottish, half-Filipino, who became his mistress in Washington, and unfortunate pawn in a failed high-profile libel lawsuit brought by General MacArthur for criticism of his egregious Bonus March operation.14

  In spite of being humiliated by the Isabel Cooper scandal, Lieutenant General MacArthur had hoped that, on his mandatory retirement as U.S. Army chief of staff in 1935, President Roosevelt would appoint him U.S. high commissioner to the Philippines—the islands having been granted interim semi-independence in 1935, and by an act of Congress assured full independence, to take place in 1946.

  Roosevelt, however, had failed to give MacArthur the political appointment.

  “Douglas, I think you are our best general,” the President had said to the distraught soldier, “but I believe you would be our worst politician.”15 Instead, MacArthur had had to settle for a reduction in rank to brigadier general, and a posting to the Philippines as head of the small U.S. military mission in Manila.

  MacArthur’s exile had certainly been to President Roosevelt’s political advantage.

  Roosevelt had been well aware of the much-decorated general’s appeal in the eyes of Republican political kingmakers at home. Although as an orator he required a prepared text, the general shone on paper and in one-on-one conversation, where he conveyed passion as well as incisive analysis. His World War I bravery was legendary; his reforms as commandant of West Point in the 1920s had demonstrated great military and educational vision. Like Roosevelt himself he had an astonishing ability to absorb complex information and pick out essentials. When MacArthur yet again applied for the job of U.S. high commissioner to the Philippines in 1937, the President had been torn. He did not trust, nor could he quite forgive, MacArthur, who was widely known to have backed the candidacy of Republican nominee Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential election, telling all who would listen—including President Manuel Quezon of the Philippines—that Landon would win by a landslide. Landon had lost by a landslide, however.

  The President thus turned down MacArthur for a second time for the post of high commissioner. MacArthur’s career seemed over.

  In retrospect the President wondered if he had made the right decision. But at a time when the Japanese had invaded Manchukuo and were waging a major war of conquest in southern China, elevating Brigadier General MacArthur to the political post of high commissioner would have offered his potential Republican rival a free steppingstone to the Republican presidential nomination in 1940. On the other hand, however, blocking the career of such an outstanding American leadership-figure was, Roosevelt knew in his heart of hearts, unworthy. The political and diplomatic experience MacArthur would have gained as a U.S. high commissioner might well have tempered the general’s somewhat lonely, introverted personality and broadened his mind.

  Instead, the President had allowed MacArthur to “rot” in the Far East—permitting him to retire from the active list of the U.S. Army in 1937 and to become (at MacArthur’s own quirky request) a Filipino “field marshal,” replete with his own special uniform and gold braid–splattered hat, taking on the role of “civilian adviser” to the Philippine president on military matters in Manila. There, for four years, MacArthur—who remarried in 1937—had drawn his U.S. military pension and his Philippine government salary, to become the highest-earning military officer in the world, with a generous expense account and magnificent penthouse apartment in the Manila Hotel.16 If the war had not come, the President reflected, MacArthur might simply have remained there, in luxurious semiretirement.

  But the war had come. In the spring of 1941 President Roosevelt had turned down the general for a third time as possible U.S. high commissioner—in spite of a fawning letter from MacArthur to the President’s press secretary, lauding the President as “not only our greatest statesman,” but “our greatest military strategist.”17 This time the President’s rejection was no longer out of pique or political rivalry. As the war clouds over the Pacific darkened, Roosevelt had indicated via his military aide, General “Pa” Watson, that he wanted to use MacArthur in a “military capacity rather than any other.” And sure enough, on July 28, 1941, having federalized the Army of the Philippines, Roosevelt had restored MacArthur to the U.S. Army’s active list as a brigadier general and then lieutenant general. MacArthur had thus become commanding general of the United States Army Forces in the Far East—USAFFE.

  Given their vast distance from the United States (ten thousand miles from Washington), the Philippine Islands could never be successfully defended against a Japanese invasion, the President knew. Nonetheless, the Army of the Philippines could be used as a lever: an interim threat in a last-ditch attempt to dissuade the Japanese from going to war with the colonial powers in the Far East. It was with this strategy in mind that the President embarked on a crash program of reinforcement of all U.S. bases in the Pacific. Assured of major shipments of weapons and airplanes, Lieutenant General MacArthur had mocked his naval counterpart, Admiral Tommy Hart. “Get yourself a real Fleet, Tommy, then you will belong!” he’d sneered—boasting that the War Department would be sending the bulk of its latest B-17 bombers to the Philippines under MacArthur’s army command.18 Moreover, MacArthur had unwisely assured President Quezon: “I don’t think that the Philippines can defend themselves, I know they can.”19

  Roosevelt’s diplomatic gamble—backed by a show of belated but growing American air power—had failed. Japan’s military government, or junta, had simply made a careful assessment of the production, supply, and installation rate of proposed American rei
nforcements, and concluded that the United States would reach naval and air force parity by the spring of 1942, after which it would steadily surpass Japan’s military production capacity. It was now or never, if the Empire of the Sun wished to expand its stalled war of conquest in the Far East, while the Western powers were so weak. Japan, their admirals reasoned, had but one sole chance of success if they wished to achieve their aims by force. And on December 7, 1941, they had taken it.

  MacArthur’s performance in the Philippines, beginning that same day, had been execrable, as President Roosevelt knew better than anyone in America, the decorated general having lost virtually his entire air force on the ground—despite nine hours of warning, both from Hawaii and from General Marshall himself in Washington.20

  “MacArthur seems to have forgotten his losses in the Japanese surprise attack on Manila,” the President would later tell his private secretary, Bill Hassett—“despite the fact that Admiral Kimmel and General Short face court-martial on charges of laxity at Pearl Harbor.”21

  Even after losing his air force on day one, MacArthur had performed miserably. As he had earlier told Admiral Hart, the commander of the U.S. Far Eastern Fleet, he refused “to follow, or be in any way bound by whatever war plans have been evolved, agreed upon and approved” by Washington22—and he didn’t, simply failing to put into effect the plan that the War Department had laid down in the event of war. Instead, he’d ordered his Army of the Philippines to carry out an ill-rehearsed plan of “Beach Defense” without naval or air support—a scheme that failed to stop any of the Japanese landings that began at Lingayen (without Japanese air cover)23 on December 22, 1941. All too quickly MacArthur’s hastily assembled, ill-trained, and poorly armed Philippine troops had run, and within hours Manila, the capital, was threatened.