The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur

by Perry, Mark

  When the commander of the advance packet of Japanese A6M Zeros, Japan’s highly regarded fighter aircraft, flew over Clark, he noticed that there were no American fighters in the air: “The sight which met us was unbelievable,” Saburo Sakai later wrote. “Instead of encountering a swarm of American fighters diving at us in attack, we looked down and saw some sixty enemy bombers and fighters neatly parked along the airfield runways.” Minutes later, Sakai banked his Zero to make way for the twenty-seven twin-engine G4M (“Betty”) bombers of the 21st Koku Sentai in the first attack wave. They appeared from the north, flew over Clark in a broad vee and, at twenty-two thousand feet, released their bombs. A second wave of twenty-seven bombers followed fifteen minutes later. As a desultory array of Brereton’s fighters rose to meet the attackers, American anti-aircraft cannons blazed away, but their rounds fell short, well under the altitude of the Japanese bombers. At the same moment that Clark was being set alight, fifty-four Japanese Bettys and fifty Zeros attacked Iba Airfield, further west. A third wave then descended yet again on Clark. This third attack, from fighters that skimmed a mere hundreds of feet off Clark’s tarmac, lasted for nearly an hour. The Japanese destroyed hangars, barracks, refueling trucks, supply warehouses, and communications huts. In all, Brereton lost eighteen of his thirty-five B-17s, along with fifty-three P-40s and three P-35s, more than one-half of MacArthur’s Far Eastern Air Force. Eighty Americans were killed, 150 wounded. The Japanese lost seven aircraft.

  When word of the debacle reached Washington, Hap Arnold questioned the report. Caught on the ground? It just wasn’t possible. There must be some mistake somewhere, Arnold said, and he vowed to “tell Brereton so.” He did, calling Brereton to ask him “how in the hell” the air chief could have been caught so unprepared. Brereton tried to explain but was drowned out by Arnold’s rage. “How in hell could an experienced airman like you get caught with your planes on the ground?” Arnold bellowed. “That’s what we sent you there for, to avoid just what happened.” Brereton pleaded with Arnold to withhold judgment until an investigation was conducted, but Arnold was insistent: He wanted an explanation now. But before Brereton could answer, he was interrupted as a packet of Japanese Zeros destroyed his Douglas aircraft, parked just outside his office. “What the hell is going on there?” Arnold demanded, his voice a shout. Brereton hesitated, but only for a moment: “We’re having visitors,” he said.

  Seared by Arnold’s rage and worried for his job, Brereton drove into Manila and reported to MacArthur, pleading with him to call Arnold with an explanation. “He [MacArthur] was furious,” Brereton later recounted, “it is the only time in my life that I have ever seen him mad.” Standing at his desk, MacArthur listened to Brereton’s explanation, then waved him away. This was the second time that day that one of MacArthur’s commanders had failed him. First it had been the commander of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, Thomas Hart, who worriedly pressed MacArthur to have his two cruisers and four destroyers sent south to Australia, to safety. Hart hovered and hovered, worried that his fleet would be caught at anchor, as the Pacific Fleet had been at Pearl Harbor. MacArthur was disgusted; he thought that rather than engage the Japanese, Hart wanted to sail in the other direction. Now here was Brereton, who was seemingly more worried about how he would look in his efficiency report than how to do his job. “Go back and fight the war,” MacArthur told him. When Brereton left, MacArthur sat down and picked up the telephone. He was going to have to tell George Marshall that in the space of just three hours, the American air force in the Far East had essentially been wiped out. It was the toughest telephone call he had ever made.

  The man MacArthur called hadn’t been destined to be army chief of staff, and for many years, George Marshall didn’t think he would be. The son of a Pennsylvania businessman fallen on hard times, Marshall followed his brother to the Virginia Military Institute and, to the surprise of his family, excelled. He graduated as the school’s first captain, was commissioned a second lieutenant, then served two years in the Philippines and three years in China. Marshall might have finished his career in anonymity, but he was noticed by General John Pershing during World War One and became an integral part of Pershing’s staff. But Marshall could be troublesome: He came to Pershing’s attention as a result of a confrontation Marshall had had with Pershing when the American Expeditionary Forces commander was inspecting his troops in France. Marshall angrily disagreed with the commander about their readiness. Pershing, not used to being corrected, eyed Marshall suspiciously, but admired his pluck; so instead of sidelining him, the commander brought Marshall onto his staff.

  The same thing happened in Washington, years later, when Marshall openly disagreed with Franklin Roosevelt during an Oval Office meeting on military preparedness. Roosevelt argued that the United States should focus its efforts on building aircraft, saying the increased funding for the army could wait. After he had made his point, the president asked “George” (he used his first name purposely, knowing Marshall wouldn’t like it) if he agreed. “No,” Marshall said. Roosevelt gave him a “startled look,” Marshall later recalled, while Marshall’s fellow officers shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Marshall then launched into a long explanation of why Roosevelt was wrong. When the meeting ended, a number of participants told Marshall that his “tour in Washington was over.” In fact, Roosevelt admired dissent, most especially from those who were expected to salute and agree.

  Marshall’s qualities—an ego shorn of show, an austere and disciplined mien, an ability to recognize the talent of others—would only become apparent after many years, but Roosevelt seemed to recognize them immediately and had named Marshall to head the army in 1939. For Pershing, there could have been no better appointment, for the chief had recognized in Marshall the self-discipline that Pershing demanded of himself. Marshall had had all the training a good officer could receive, but his most important experience had come at John Pershing’s side, and it had nothing to do with war. From the moment Pershing arrived in France in 1917, Pershing fought with the British and French over control of American troops, stubbornly insisting that Americans fight together and under their own commanders. Learning the fine art of coalition warfare from Pershing would serve Marshall well in the years following December 7, when the British chiefs of staff dismissed American fighting qualities and contended with the Americans for command of the war effort. Like Pershing, Marshall held the line, stubbornly exacting from the British a slow realization that the United States was the senior, and lead, partner in the great Anglo-American alliance—that the British were our allies, and not the other way around.

  But this was only one battle among many. While Marshall had impressed Roosevelt, the opposite was not the case, at least at first. The relationship was cool, in large part because Marshall thought Roosevelt opinionated, long-winded, and—when the president wanted to have his way—boorish. “I might say here that early in my association with the President, I didn’t understand that I must find a way to do the talking,” he recalled. “Because he did all the talking and [we] just had to sit and listen to the President of the United States . . . I was not sufficiently adept in dealing with a man who was as clever as Mr. Roosevelt was about holding the boards [commanding the stage] and putting over his ideas. In this situation he had all the pressures from the outside . . . and none at all of my issues. It was a very trying, maddening situation and it was very difficult to keep one’s temper.” Then too, as Marshall concluded, Roosevelt was disturbingly pro-navy. Franklin Roosevelt had grown up to the sound of the sea and was as drawn to it as he was to politics. His pro-navy stance troubled Marshall, who worked for years to change it. “All his advice was coming in from the Navy,” Marshall later recalled, “who needed the steel and matériel of that nature, and needed men, too, and he was personally, of course, intimately familiar with the Navy and naturally very responsive to its requests or I might better say, demands.”

  While Marshall’s biographers would extol their subject’s selfless approach and e
ven-tempered ability to calm interservice feuding, Marshall found that he sometimes needed more than just a calm demeanor. At key moments in the war, he was not only forced to face off against Roosevelt, but was also required to undermine the views of influential navy commanders who, because of Roosevelt’s love of their service, had ready access to his office. In time, Marshall proved as adept at pushing army prerogatives as Douglas MacArthur or any other army officer. In this respect, Marshall and MacArthur were alike, betraying common traits noticed by officers who served with them, including a certain arrogance and an overweening (if, in Marshall’s case, a well-concealed) ambition. Both men were captives of routine, obsessed with their careers, immaculate in dress, and nearly haughty in demeanor. Marshall rejected the comparison, but only because he lacked, and mistrusted, MacArthur’s flamboyance, a word that would never be used to describe him. “You have endowed me with more of a MacArthur personality than my own less colorful characteristics,” he told an artist hired to paint his portrait, which depicted him posed MacArthur-like and Napoleonic for the War Department, “and I fear you strove too hard to make good my deficiencies.”

  Yet, both men loved the army and were willing to fight for it, even in the midst of a global war. This service loyalty should not be a surprise. The army and navy were (and are) not simply separate branches, but separate cultures. From the moment a newly minted army officer stepped on a parade ground, the idea that the army came before any other service was inculcated in him. For these men, hardened by years of poor pay and thankless assignments, “duty, honor, country” was an incomplete formula that masked a truer belief in “duty, honor, country . . . Army.” Given his thirty years of training and experience, it would be naive to suppose this wasn’t true for Marshall, particularly as, on the eve of war, he was outspokenly critical of air and naval officers who assured him that any future war in Europe could be won by deploying bombers and ships. For Marshall, these were short-sighted, even dangerous views. The sixteen divisions the army had when Marshall was named chief of staff would not have been adequate to defend Fort Myer—let alone take on the Germans and Japanese. So as the Americans fought in Europe and the Pacific, George Marshall would do battle with the British, with Franklin Roosevelt, and with the U.S. Navy in Washington.

  Winning this battle would not be easy, for while the army would easily be the predominant service in Europe, where the war’s outcome would be decided on the fields of France and the rolling plains of Germany, it would be different in the Pacific, where America’s soldiers would be borne to battle on the navy’s ships. The navy certainly believed in this distinction—that Europe was the “army’s show,” while the Pacific was theirs. But Marshall had a different view of the army’s Pacific role, and he had a legendary combat commander who agreed. For while the navy had ships, Marshall had Douglas MacArthur, a commander who was not only willing to fight the Japanese, but who could serve as a formidable surrogate in Marshall’s competition with the navy.

  Nowhere in the historical record is there an account of what MacArthur told Marshall during their telephone conversation of December 8. Neither mentioned it again. But whatever MacArthur’s explanation, this much seems certain: The calculation that had once governed their relationship, with MacArthur the senior officer and legend and Marshall the underling, was now reversed. MacArthur’s forces, despite their warning, had been surprised—and destroyed. MacArthur must have realized that if he had been any other commander, if he had not been Douglas MacArthur, he might well have been unceremoniously relieved. Indeed, the only man more angered by the events of December 8 than Marshall was Franklin Roosevelt. For Roosevelt, the debacle at Clark Field was inexplicable and, at first, hardly believable. Reading about it in a summary, he looked up from his desk and shook his head. “On the ground,” he shouted. “On the ground.”

  In the years that followed, MacArthur was held almost solely responsible for the debacle of December 8. There is a compelling reason for this conclusion: He was in command, and his bombers were caught unprepared. In less than three hours, his major striking force lay in ruins. His actions remain puzzling, all the more so because he was at his desk early on the morning of the eighth. What is most puzzling, however, is that his chief of staff, Richard Sutherland, refused air commander Lewis Brereton access to MacArthur early that morning, when Sutherland knew that Brereton was the one person MacArthur needed to see. After the war, Brereton wrote that he, Brereton, yearned to launch an attack on Japanese bases on Formosa and that he was ready to do so, but that MacArthur denied him the opportunity to strike a crippling blow. His testimony is damning.

  But there is another side to the story. A check of the daily logs at both Clark and Nielson Fields, published in the official history of the Army Air Forces, show that Sutherland told Brereton to prepare for a strike against the Japanese. According to the logs, Brereton did prepare for a strike and was preparing a reconnaissance of enemy airfields on Formosa in furtherance of MacArthur’s 11:00 a.m. instructions when the enemy struck. In fact, nothing in the official records suggests that MacArthur denied a request for a bombing mission, because there is no evidence that Brereton ever made such a request.

  In 1942, when he was no longer a part of MacArthur’s command, Brereton told reporter Clare Boothe Luce that he had met with MacArthur at sunrise on December 8 and had pleaded with him to send the American bombers north to attack Japanese airfields. He added that after he left the meeting, he was “closer to weeping from sheer rage than he had ever been in his life before.” Yet, given the official records, we can only conclude either that Brereton’s statement was based on his poor memory or that he was lying. Brereton made no claim of a meeting with MacArthur when the air chief spoke to Hap Arnold later that day; nor did he mention it to his subordinates. Did Brereton seek permission to bomb Japanese airfields in Formosa? MacArthur’s response is categorical: “Such a suggestion to the Chief of Staff [Sutherland] must have been of a most nebulous and superficial character, as there is no record of it at headquarters.” He went further: “Had such a suggestion been made to me, I would have unequivocally disapproved. In my opinion it would have been suicidal as well as in direct defiance of my basic directive.” That is to say, while MacArthur might have been uncertain about what to do on the morning of December 8, he at least realized that Brereton’s air force was no match for the Japanese.

  That Brereton’s force might have been saved if only MacArthur had listened to him and attacked echoes a similar claim made after the American Civil War. In the 1870s, General Jubal Early claimed that Robert E. Lee might have won the Battle of Gettysburg if only General James Longstreet had obeyed Lee’s “sunrise attack order” to assault the Union lines early on the morning of July 2, 1863. The problem with Early’s claim is that—while it was believed for decades—no one has ever found such an order, manifestly because Lee never gave it. But someone had to be accountable for the Gettysburg defeat, and it couldn’t be Lee. Longstreet was a good candidate for taking the blame because, after the war, he was viewed in the South as a traitor for befriending Ulysses S. Grant.

  While there are differences in their claims, Brereton’s was propounded for many of the same reasons as Early’s. The claim gained currency after MacArthur’s confrontation with President Harry Truman years after the Pacific War’s last shots were fired. Truman’s removal of MacArthur from command sparked a rethinking of the general’s war record and of the events of December 8. And so, the historical tumblers clicked into place. In many historical analyses, then, MacArthur, like Longstreet, became not only insubordinate, but also incompetent. The Japanese were no longer responsible for destroying Brereton’s air force—MacArthur was. He “allowed” it to happen.

  The actual historical record tells a different story. The Japanese attack on the American air force in the Philippines succeeded because Brereton had recalled his bombers for refueling and rearming and they were therefore on the ground, being refueled and rearmed, when they were attacked. Though Brereton was
responsible for this situation, similar mistakes were made throughout the war, until air commanders instituted a more sophisticated system of bomber and fighter rotations—or had better luck. Brereton made a mistake and he knew it, as shown by his breathless appearance at MacArthur’s headquarters after his conversation with Arnold. While historians have focused on MacArthur, less attention has been paid to Brereton, whose record as an officer was mixed. He sought psychiatric help in the 1920s after the experimental aircraft he was flying crashed (he developed a fear of flying—not good, presumably, for a man in his line of work). He was cited for being absent without leave when he commanded the air escort for Charles Lindbergh during the aviator’s triumphant return to the United States in 1927. Brereton received consistently poor efficiency reports and was cited repeatedly for excessive drinking. Additionally, his post–December 8 war record was dismal. The air chief had been drinking the night before the attack and had returned to his quarters only one hour before learning of Pearl Harbor.