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

by Perry, Mark

  The day that Homma’s army came ashore in northern Luzon, Winston Churchill arrived in Washington. Roosevelt was at the airport to meet him, and the two chatted amicably on their drive to the White House. The president enjoyed playing host, particularly during his end-of-day ritual of drink mixing (which Churchill appreciated) and after more courtesies, the two had dinner. Initially, Churchill worried that the Pearl Harbor debacle would divert American attention from defeating Germany, but within hours of the prime minister’s arrival in Washington, Roosevelt reassured him that Germany’s defeat remained America’s first priority. The policy was memorialized several days later in a strategy paper by the Combined Chiefs of Staff (a committee of the senior UK and American military leadership): “Our view remains that Germany is still the prime enemy and her defeat is the key to victory. Once Germany is defeated, the collapse of Italy and the defeat of Japan must follow.”

  In spite of the Germany-first statement, George Marshall continued to focus on MacArthur. The army chief appointed airman George Brett commander of U.S. Forces in Australia, allotted millions of dollars to the purchase of supplies from Australian sources, and urged his staff to find ships to break the Japanese blockade of Luzon. Marshall also ordered that a shipment of B-24 heavy bombers be diverted to Borneo for shipment to MacArthur and directed that the dispatch of 120 pursuit planes be expedited for Australia. In a more general vein, he loosened American purse strings by promising that anything the American command in Australia needed it would get. But Marshall was also realistic. Despite his hope that the flow of matériel coupled with MacArthur’s tenacity might spell the difference between a quick collapse of Philippine defenses and a protracted fight, Marshall knew that—given the odds—the fall of MacArthur’s garrison was not only likely, but certain.

  After receiving reports that the Japanese had landed on northern Luzon, MacArthur cabled Marshall and laid out his strategy for fighting them, pointing out that the modest size of his force would “compel” him to mount a defense “on successive lines through Central Luzon plain to final defensive position on Bataan to cover Corregidor. When forced to do so I shall release Manila and the metropolitan area by suitable proclamation in order to save civilian population.” Marshall read through the cable and approved the strategy, passed it on to Roosevelt, then composed a response detailing the steps he had taken to ship reinforcements to help him. “We are doing our utmost to organize in Australia to rush air support to you,” he cabled MacArthur. “The Brisbane convoy arrived there last night and 70 planes aboard. . . . Three B-24 planes departed yesterday via Brazil-Africa route and 3 B-17 and B-24 alternate each day thereafter to total 80 heavy bombers. Fifty-five pursuit planes 4 days at sea and 55 more sail in 3 days. . . . President has seen all your messages and directs Navy to give you every possible support in your splendid fight.” But while Marshall gave the Philippines a large portion of his time, the actual implementation of his policies was left to Eisenhower.

  The first in a series of reassuring cables written by Eisenhower arrived at MacArthur’s headquarters on December 23, just as Wainwright was ushering his men into his D-4 defenses:

  It is expected that the fighter and dive bomber planes now in Australia will quickly determine feasibility of route from Darwin to Luzon for transmitting smaller planes. These planes are now being rushed to that base by fast ships. Navy sea train which is particularly suited for the transport of planes is being obtained from the Navy for additional shipment. The heavy bombers beginning to flow from this country via Africa to your theater should be able to support you materially even if compelled initially to operate from distant bases.

  Eisenhower, it seems, had learned a thing or two from Marshall. The messages, shorn of conditionals and containing what Eisenhower hoped were solid reassurances (planes were being “rushed,” supplies were aboard “fast” ships), were composed primarily to signal constant concern—as if MacArthur’s command were the only thing on the minds of Washington’s war planners. What Eisenhower couldn’t say was that while men and matériel were on their way to Australia, no one had yet figured out how to get them from there to Luzon.

  Roosevelt endorsed Marshall’s plan for building up a base in Australia, but he took a longer view. While the army chief focused on helping MacArthur and building an army, Roosevelt focused on his favorite service, deftly maneuvering a decisive change in the top leadership of his beloved navy. As always, Roosevelt was willing to make painful choices, sliding positions and personalities into different roles without hurting feelings or ruffling feathers. But his first decision was made with something close to a shout. He called Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to the Oval Office and announced that he wanted Chester Nimitz as the navy’s top commander in Hawaii. The selection wasn’t open to debate: the president knew that Nimitz would fight. “Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there till the war is over,” he told Knox. But the key for Roosevelt was Ernest King, whom he named to a new position as commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, effectively shoving aside Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark.

  Lanky and chiseled, Ernie King was a womanizer and drinker, a reputation that followed him through his career. His arguments with his wife of three decades were shockingly public and even noted in his fitness reports. “You must get yourself under control,” Harold Stark had once told him, “or at least pretend to.” If it wasn’t for his reputation as one of the navy’s finest strategists, King would have been unceremoniously drummed out of the service; he was imperious, opinionated, argumentative, and self-centered. A stickler for punctuality, King believed that fleets could be coordinated over massive stretches of ocean. On the high seas, he looked at his watch as his aides grumbled. “You can be sure that if this was a real war, with lives at stake,” he said, “you wouldn’t complain.”

  King’s reputation as a premier strategist began during Fleet Problem XX, a 1939 naval exercise pitting a friendly naval force (blue) against an enemy (orange). As the orange enemy, King was required to obey the rules of the fleet problem: He was supposed to lose. Such conceits were lost on King, who, with Roosevelt watching, maneuvered his aircraft carriers as a single unit—a move that had never been done before. He then ignored the premises of the war game and mounted a daylight surprise attack on the blue aircraft carriers as they sat in dock. His target was the USS Enterprise, commanded by Admiral William Halsey. King caught the Enterprise unprepared and at anchor and (as the fleet umpire determined) sunk the ship. Halsey was outraged, Roosevelt was amused, and King was ecstatic. The strategist was convinced that Roosevelt would pick him as the new chief of naval operations, the highest slot in the navy. In fact, King really never had a chance. Roosevelt had already decided that Harold Stark would be the new chief. “Stark is a good man,” a disappointed King said. “He will do a good job. At least Roosevelt didn’t appoint Nimitz.”

  Nimitz was Admiral Chester Nimitz, who was modest, soft-spoken, and a dedicated family man. He also had an uncanny talent for winning at horseshoes. “He could beat me with either hand,” Ray Spruance, later one of Nimitz’s fleet commanders, noted. An accomplished engineer, Nimitz had attended the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, with a large number of classmates, including Halsey. After graduating first in his class, Nimitz asked for an overseas assignment and, after serving at the sprawling naval dry dock in San Diego, was assigned to Japan, where he took a home in the small mountain town of Unzen. His wife, Catherine, was overjoyed with her husband’s new assignment. She nurtured an orchard, built a tea house, and stocked a pond with orange shimmering carp. From the porch of their home, they peered down onto Japan’s naval base, which was set out panoramically below, in the harbor at Nagasaki.

  King’s dislike of Nimitz—the two had clashed throughout their careers—didn’t bother Roosevelt, who believed personal disagreements fueled policy debates, which he relished. Then too, Roosevelt was drawn to King for precisely the same reasons that others found him repellent. King’s daughter once described
her father as one of the most even-tempered men she had met, because (as she said) he was “always in a rage.” Roosevelt poked King about his temperament, knowing it didn’t take much to get a rise out of him. “I understand that you shave with a blowtorch,” Roosevelt had once written him. Even so, when given the job of heading up the navy’s war effort, King hesitated, telling Roosevelt that he wanted to change his official title from CINCUS (commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, which sounded like “sink us”) to COMINCH (commander in chief). King also wanted his duties clearly defined (and didn’t want to wrestle Stark for control) and requested full control over all of the navy’s powerful bureaus. Moreover, King demanded a flagship as his residence (there was no question that he would live with his wife), the use of a private airplane (one was found for him), and a Cadillac.

  Roosevelt acceded to King’s wishes because the president knew that King would fight the Japanese—and the army. In any tussle with the army over resources, it would be inappropriate for Roosevelt to weigh in as the navy’s advocate, but not so for “blowtorch” King, whose view of the navy’s prerogatives was as parochial as MacArthur’s was of the army’s. Indeed, the dual moves that Roosevelt made after the Pearl Harbor attack strengthened the navy’s military position not only against the Japanese, but also in Washington. Harold Stark was a fine officer, but he was no match for Douglas MacArthur. Not so Ernie King, who thought that if MacArthur had any role at all, it would be in garrisoning the islands that Nimitz’s flattops left in their wake in their triumphant offensive against the Japanese in the Central Pacific.

  But King was also a tireless commander. The Pearl Harbor debacle had made the navy’s most senior fleet officers gun-shy. The Japanese had ten aircraft carriers operating in the Pacific, King’s subordinates pointed out, while the Americans had only three. King thought these views were defeatist and set out the priorities for Nimitz: to keep open the shipping lanes from Pearl Harbor to Australia and to send America’s remaining aircraft carriers into enemy waters to find the Japanese. When the commander of the carrier Lexington requested a return to port to provision, King turned him down: “Carry on as long as you have hardtack, beans, and corn willy. What the hell are you worrying about?” For King, fighting the Japanese was a matter of national survival—and service pride. During the three weeks that separated Pearl Harbor from his appointment as the navy’s ranking officer, the navy had probed and probed, but hadn’t fought. The only Americans who were killing the enemy were those fighting under MacArthur. For Ernie King, that was intolerable.

  In the wake of the Japanese attack, Douglas MacArthur had ordered Brigadier General Richard Marshall, his head of logistics, to run supplies into northern Luzon instead of south into the artillery-studded Bataan-Corregidor bastion. It was a mistake. Marshall’s supply teams requisitioned one thousand trucks for the operation and sent them north, where the vehicles simply disappeared or were set ablaze in central Luzon. On December 24, realizing his mistake, MacArthur reversed the order, telling Marshall to begin supplying Bataan and Corregidor. Marshall was matter-of-fact about MacArthur’s change of heart, but his subordinates were stunned; they had calculated that it would take two weeks to stock the American defenses sufficiently for forty thousand troops to hold out for six months in Bataan and Corregidor—now, with the Japanese pummeling Wainwright, they might only have a few days. Marshall’s staff struggled to meet MacArthur’s directive, but the chaos of battle made the task impossible. A depot north of Manila, stocked with fifty million bushels of rice (enough to feed the soldiers of Bataan and Corregidor for five years), was left untouched, a bow to Quezón’s insistence that Manila be fed. But Marshall and his crew did what they could, packing school buses bound for Bataan with canned goods, clothing, ammunition, and water. MacArthur’s orders were strict: After the warehouses, granaries, and depots were emptied, they were to be destroyed to deny the Japanese their use.

  Later, when the fate of America’s soldiers in the Philippines was a part of history, MacArthur’s subordinates would compare the U.S. logistics effort with the debacle of December 8. “Perhaps it was fortunate,” Colonel Ernest Miller of the 194th Tank Battalion wrote, “that, as we bivouacked amid the smoking ruins of Clark Field on that first day of the war, we could not see these things that were yet to come—food and matériel of war sabotaged by that same mismanagement and indecision which had destroyed our air power.” The judgment is harsh, but accurate. During these first months of war, the U.S. effort in the Philippines, and in all of the Pacific, was shot through with incompetence, the result of the U.S. military’s inability to master its own bureaucracy. The requisition of food from warehouses north of Manila at Stotsenberg provided a grim example of this: A local regimental commander would not allow the removal of his foodstuffs, because he viewed it as his job to “guard” the material, not use it. The Japanese had no such compunction; they took what they wanted, leaving people to starve.

  On Christmas Eve, MacArthur, Jean, Arthur (clutching his favorite stuffed rabbit), Arthur’s nurse Ah Cheu, and MacArthur’s staff boarded a launch in Manila Harbor for the evacuation to Corregidor, which lay in the misty darkness on the western horizon. The island, a tadpole-shaped rocky eminence the size of Manhattan and topped by hunchback Malinta Hill, was viewed as an impregnable fortress, the last bastion of MacArthur’s battered and undersupplied army. The island’s terraces were laced with tunnels cored out of the rock in three levels: Topside, Middleside, and Bottomside. The island’s narrow landing beaches led right up to the island’s steep slopes, providing scant cover for a seaborne invader. Washington’s war planners had chosen the fortress (dubbing it Fort Mills) well. Considering its 400-foot prominence facing out toward the southern end of Bataan (which lay a little over two miles north across Manila Bay), any landing party would be required to sprint across a narrow beach before fighting its way up through the island’s choking jungle.

  MacArthur’s wife would remember the trip to Corregidor years later—the low profile of the island in the far distance, the motors of the launch churning through Manila Bay, the heat-soaked shirts of the launch’s crew, the gently rocking waves lapping up against Luzon’s tropical shore. She was depressed, for neither she nor her husband would return to Manila anytime soon, if ever. As a parting gift for General Homma, she had left two vases in their penthouse entrance hall, a gift to her husband from the Emperor Hirohito. She hoped their presence might keep the Japanese from an orgy of looting. She took only what she needed—two suitcases for herself and her husband, an extra for Arthur, and one for Ah Cheu.

  The departure was difficult for MacArthur. Just hours before, he had bid farewell to a subdued Lewis Brereton. MacArthur had lost confidence in his airman, who was heading south to Australia, but their leave-taking was both personal and emotional. “I hope you will tell the people outside what we have done and protect my reputation as a fighter,” MacArthur said. This was an odd admission for MacArthur, who rarely admitted failure. Brereton was reassuring: “General, your reputation will never need any protection.” Those were Brereton’s last words to MacArthur; the air commander finished his career out of MacArthur’s sight.

  So too it was for Thomas Hart, who organized U.S. naval assets in Australia before returning to the United States. Harold Stark engineered Hart’s transfer to a combat command, but Ernie King had little use for Hart. The observation by Roger Miller, a historian of air power, nearly sixty years later—that if you disliked MacArthur, then you defended Brereton, and vice versa—also applies to Hart, who would become a footnote in U.S. naval history. In the heat of battle, MacArthur made mistakes, but he rarely made excuses. That wasn’t true for either Brereton or Hart, who, at key moments, worried about their careers or waited for MacArthur to tell them what to do. In the weeks and months ahead, MacArthur would search for their replacements, ably identify them, and shape a command team that was the best of any in the war.

  But that was in the future. For now, with Corregidor’s shadow barely visible on the hori
zon, MacArthur and his party watched Manila recede. Finally, Corregidor loomed just ahead, lying low above the waterline. The MacArthur party landed at the North Dock, then walked to the Malinta Tunnel, which receded for nearly fifteen hundred feet, straight back. The reinforced tunnel, laced with supporting iron beams, was the main feature of the American defenses and was designed as both a headquarters and an arsenal. The primary tunnel was one of several, a maze of interlocking caverns hollowed out of the rock of the hill. It was, for its time, an engineering marvel, with a main east-west tunnel over eight hundred feet long and a series of branches leading from it. A separate set of tunnels north of the main tunnel housed a hospital with one thousand beds. Below it was another tunnel system for quartermaster stores. “Where are your quarters?” MacArthur had asked Major General George Moore, who greeted him at the North Dock. Moore put his index finger in the air. “Topside,” he said. MacArthur nodded and announced that he was also setting up his headquarters on Topside, the island’s most prominent feature. Moore objected. Japanese fighters and bombers were targeting Topside, strafing it daily. “That’s fine,” MacArthur said. “Just the thing.”