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

by Perry, Mark

  Actually, Curtin couldn’t. Churchill’s proposed diversion, taken even as the Japanese were beginning their occupation of northeastern New Guinea, was yet another betrayal (as Curtin believed), worse even than the sacrifice of some fifteen thousand Australians imprisoned when Singapore fell. Was India more important than Australia? Or was it that a Japanese victory would trigger (as Churchill noted) a pan-Asiatic anticolonial movement of “the brown and yellow races,” which would “complicate our situation there.” Curtin didn’t need a translator: By “our,” Churchill meant England; by “there,” he meant India. While Churchill eventually decided that diverting Australia’s troops wouldn’t be necessary after all, the damage was done. But now, with MacArthur greeting throngs of Australians in Melbourne and shaking the hands of parliamentarians in Canberra, Churchill could at least claim that he had met Australian fears by giving them America’s greatest soldier, and one who had received its highest honor. For Roosevelt, transforming MacArthur from “Dugout Doug” to “Choco Doug” (a “chocolate soldier”—an affectionate Australian moniker) was easier than any political sleight of hand: The Australians were happy, Churchill was happy, the American people were happy, Roosevelt’s Republican critics were happy—and so too was Douglas MacArthur.

  MacArthur learned of his award in Canberra from journalist Robert Sherrod and immediately cabled Marshall and Roosevelt. He expressed his gratitude but deferred credit for the defense of Bataan to his soldiers, saying that “this award was intended not so much for me personally as it is a recognition of the indomitable courage of the gallant army which it was my honor to command.” The cable, in the past tense, was also MacArthur’s way of acceding to George Marshall’s view that Wainwright would now report directly to Washington. His own wording aside, MacArthur fumed at the change, for the Bataan army (as he told his aides) would always remain his army, no matter what Washington said. Marshall’s only palliative was a confirmation that while Wainwright would answer to Washington, MacArthur would head a separate command consisting of all army, air force, and naval assets in the Southwest Pacific as the commander in chief (a title that MacArthur preferred to that of “Supreme Commander”), Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA). Marshall’s strategy with MacArthur throughout the war was first evidenced here: The army chief mixed the bad with the good, taking away with one hand while giving with the other. MacArthur’s was a separate theater from that given to the navy’s Chester Nimitz, who was designated commander in chief, Pacific Ocean Area (POA), and the admiral had the responsibility of shaping and launching an offensive against Japan through the islands of the Central Pacific.

  As Marshall no doubt intended, MacArthur’s elevation irritated Ernie King, who was angered that the navy would now have to compete for resources and headlines with a commander who had just received the Medal of Honor. But King could not so easily do that: He had no one who could equal MacArthur’s fame, and King could not be seen as opposing America’s most famous soldier. What Marshall did was to force King’s cooperation. And that’s precisely how it worked: At key moments over the next three years, as MacArthur’s soldiers and Nimitz’s carriers slugged it out with the Japanese, King found himself grudgingly agreeing with MacArthur requests for more divisions, arms, and other resources despite what Henry Stimson called the navy’s “astonishing bitterness against him [MacArthur].” Indeed, as the war went on, King’s staff noted their boss’s grudging bow to MacArthur’s status whenever his name was mentioned: Even though King railed privately against MacArthur’s constant denigration of the navy’s Pacific strategy, the irascible admiral would peer at the battle maps, listen to his staff’s arguments, and inevitably nod his agreement. “Give him what he wants,” he would grumble.

  In fact, as was apparent even now in April 1942, neither MacArthur nor Nimitz would command enough men or ships to defeat Japan by himself. And so, just as Dwight Eisenhower, as the supreme Allied commander in Europe, would eventually be required to delicately balance a fragile coalition of nations to ensure victory, MacArthur and Nimitz would be required to balance a fragile coalition of services to ensure victory. These were the crucial wars-within-a-war of World War Two: In Europe, the United States, Britain, and their allies faced off in an acrimonious contest over how best to defeat Italy and Germany, while in the Pacific, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy struggled with each other over how to defeat Japan. The struggle in Europe was driven by resources, as a coalition with access to almost limitless pools of men and munitions enforced its will on a nation that commanded a continent. In the Pacific, the fight was also driven by resources, or, rather, by a lack of them, and by geography. From the very beginning, MacArthur acknowledged that the vast stretches of ocean and thousands of islands separating him from the Philippines required his reliance on Ernie King’s navy. Similarly, in Hawaii, Chester Nimitz concluded that although the islands and atolls of the Central Pacific might be conquered by divisions of the navy’s marines, his forces couldn’t defeat Japan by themselves. Nimitz needed MacArthur’s help, just as MacArthur needed the navy to provide transport and the offshore firepower to protect his jungle-bound soldiers.

  Which is to leave unmentioned the obvious: that both MacArthur and Nimitz would be dependent on B-17s, B-25s, B-29s, P-38s, P-51s, and a myriad of air transports commanded by officers of the semi-independent army air forces, without which the war in the Pacific could not even be waged, let alone won. Then too, in stark contrast to the campaigns in Europe, MacArthur and Nimitz were required to plan and execute complex military operations that involved the coordination of land, sea, and air assets to a degree unprecedented in American military history. But that was Marshall’s plan—to impose cooperation between Allied militaries in Europe and differing military services in the Pacific. For while the alliance between the Americans and the British in Europe, and the army and navy in the Pacific, might threaten to unravel at any moment, the absolute necessity for everyone to work together was essential. It was the only way that Germany and Japan could be defeated. It was the key to victory.

  April 1942 found MacArthur at the ornate Menzies Hotel at 140 Williams Street in Melbourne. He brought in his staff (headquartered in a large office building at 401 Collins Street) and set to work. At MacArthur’s request, Charles Willoughby, his intelligence chief, prepared a map of MacArthur’s command and overlaid it with a U.S. map, which MacArthur would produce, with a dramatic flourish, to impress his visitors. The map brought predictable expressions of shock from visiting dignitaries, as it showed the enormity of what faced him. From east to west, MacArthur’s command covered an area equal to that extending from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, and from north to south, a distance equivalent to that stretching from Alaska to Guatemala. But Willoughby’s map couldn’t be used for planning: For that, MacArthur’s staff searched out dozens of maps detailing the seas, bays, inlets, mountains, and rivers of New Guinea (the world’s third-largest island); the islands, reefs, and channels of the Solomon Islands; the topography of New Britain; the treacherous tidal flows of the Bismarck Archipelago; the vast expanses of the Celebes Sea; and, finally, the looming landmass of Mindanao—the gateway to the Philippines.

  MacArthur carefully plotted his strategy for the defeat of Japan, then replotted it. After weeks of intense study, he thought the best way forward was to hold and reinforce Port Moresby on New Guinea’s southern coast, then leap east to secure Milne Bay on the island’s eastward claw-shaped peninsula, then vault across the island’s soaring Owen Stanley Mountains to New Guinea’s swampy northern coast. He would fight the Japanese first in Papua New Guinea—sending his yet-to-arrive soldiers into the most inhospitable, disease-ridden, spider-infested tropical swamps and triple-canopy jungles in the world, winning lodgments for Allied bombers and fighters that would attack Japanese convoys coming his way. With enough soldiers, airmen, transports, cruisers, and destroyers, he would then hopscotch his way up New Guinea’s northern coast, sidle west into the Netherlands New Guinea and into the Vogelkop Peninsula, befor
e leaping northward again across the Bismarck Sea and into Borneo and the Celebes Sea to Mindanao. After vaulting into Mindanao, he could land on Luzon and liberate Manila. That was the plan.

  The problem, as MacArthur himself realized, was that he didn’t have the resources to do what he wanted. So, as he studied the maps of the Southwest Pacific, he shaped a strategy that emphasized speed. The only way to defeat a foe that outnumbered him and to surmount the rivers and mountain ranges of the Southwest Pacific, he believed, was to create a light and mobile force that would “paralyze” the Imperial Japanese Army’s “powers of resistance.” The more he studied his maps, the more he realized that the key to the Southwest Pacific was the Japanese bastion at Rabaul, in New Britain. From Rabaul, a town with one of the most impressive natural harbors in the world, Japan controlled the sea lanes into and out of the Solomons, as well as the approach to Australia. Japanese aircraft flying from the Rabaul base controlled the Celebes Sea and Borneo and could ship thousands of soldiers south into New Guinea. After Japan’s elite South Seas Detachment captured Rabaul in a battle with Australia’s cobbled-together Lark Force at the end of January, the Japanese immediately began reinforcing the base with tens of thousands of soldiers, who were protected by dozens of destroyers and cruisers of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

  Rabaul, its harbor hollowed out from an extinct volcano, was a veritable ocean crossroads from which the Japanese extended their tentacles everywhere, even to Australia. Defeat the Japanese at Rabaul, and the gateway to western New Guinea’s Vogelkop Peninsula could be pried apart. Defeat the Japanese at Rabaul, and the great blue highway across the Celebes Sea to the Philippines would be opened. Defeat the Japanese at Rabaul, and the war could be won.

  With Jean and Arthur out of danger, the planning for a return to the Philippines became MacArthur’s obsession. He was short-tempered, abrupt, sullen, and impatient: He snapped at his staff, sequestered himself from prying eyes and endless questions, and maintained an aloof silence. Radio Tokyo broadcast a report saying that he was a “nervous wreck,” and it was right. He sensed the imminent fall of Bataan and the inevitable destruction of the Corregidor garrison. Knowing what would follow—the shame of defeat, the terrible march into captivity, the practiced brutality of a triumphant adversary—MacArthur was at his worst. He lashed out at the navy, at Roosevelt, and at Marshall and reflected endlessly on the plotters he was certain were everywhere around him. He searched for villains, and found them: Army Air Force General George Brett was singled out and rudely shunted aside. This was MacArthur showing his ugliest side, looking for a scapegoat for his troubles, and Brett was it. MacArthur blamed him for everything—for the defeat at Clark Field, for failing to have a suitable aircraft ready for him on Mindanao, and for failing to defend Darwin when Brett had first arrived. In fact, however, MacArthur’s complaints against Brett were partly justified. Brett’s staff was weighted with a constellation of officers who trailed him like the tail of a kite. MacArthur didn’t trust him, eyed his trailing retinue with suspicion, and vowed to get rid of him.

  This was the private MacArthur: small-minded, embittered, suspicious. In public, however, MacArthur appeared always and everywhere as confident and certain of victory. He smiled and waved to the crowds that gathered outside his hotel to greet him, glad-handed Melbourne’s powerful with an open smile, and played the part of the Great Captain for Australia’s parliament. “I have come as a soldier in a great crusade of personal liberty as opposed to perpetual slavery,” he told them. “My faith in our ultimate victory is invincible, and I bring you tonight the unshakable spirit of the free man’s military code in support of our joint cause.”

  These were fine words, honorably stated, but MacArthur was less focused on Australian morale than he was on creating a combat staff that could lead a fight. What he wanted, he determined, was a lean organization that simplified planning and implementation. At first he had only the skeletal remains of what he had brought with him from Manila, but within weeks, he established an Allied Land Forces command (under Australian General Sir Thomas Blamey), an Allied Air Forces command (headed temporarily by Brett), and an Allied Naval Forces command (initially under Admiral Herbert Leary). Just as important, MacArthur established a command team to manage theater logistics—an SWPA Services of Supply command. In light of what he saw on his maps, this command was more crucial to victory than any other that he had created. MacArthur was dependent on a supply line that ran from the U.S. West Coast to Hawaii and then south to New Caledonia, then in an arc west from New Caledonia to northwest Australia. This line was three times longer than the one that tethered Great Britain to the United States and three times the length of the line that married Pearl Harbor to San Francisco. MacArthur grasped for fuel, lubricants, barges, dinghies, balloons, launches, tools, engines, uniforms, bulldozers, medicines, tents, canteens, and huge metal mats (to cover the spongy soil of New Guinea’s jungles, where his aircraft would be required to land). These supplies didn’t even include the required weaponry: rifles, tanks, ships, artillery pieces, aircraft—and boxes of bullets, mines, mortars, and shells. All of this matériel had to be produced, packed, shipped, unpacked, counted, repacked, and finally offloaded (or not, depending on whether Australia’s stevedores were on a work stoppage), unwrapped, and prepared. Finally, it would be parceled out to the squads, platoons, battalions, regiments, and divisions that MacArthur did not yet have.

  This structure of three combat commands and a supply command was in addition to MacArthur’s professional staff of administrators, clerks, linguists, cartographers, stenographers, terrain experts, engineers, logisticians, trainers, cryptologists, and planners, the most senior of whom MacArthur knew and trusted. Ironically, MacArthur followed the model provided by John Pershing in the Great War. Circling the wagons, MacArthur drew his allies and colleagues into a tightly knit group of partisans that rivaled anything that Pershing had created with “the Chaumont crowd.” This new “Bataan Gang” formed a cordon around their chief, fed his ego, and extolled his every virtue. But while these praetorian guards focused on the chief and were led by the autocratic—if capable—Richard Sutherland, they were far from the narrow-minded caste of sycophants often described by MacArthur’s War Department critics. In fact, numerous members of his staff proved extraordinarily adept at implementing his plans; these staff members included Sutherland, deputy chief of staff (and later logistics chief) Richard Marshall, operations and plans head Stephen Chamberlin, intelligence officers Charles Willoughby and (later) Courtney Whitney, air defense expert William Marquat, senior aide Sid Huff, signal officer Spencer Akin, medical officer George Rice, operations chief Constant Irwin, and Colonel Hugh Casey—perhaps the most brilliant engineering officer in the U.S. Army.

  Of these officers, Casey would prove the most influential, for he was charged with determining not simply how MacArthur would take on the Japanese, but also where he would do so. MacArthur and Casey didn’t need to study their maps to know that New Guinea, Borneo, New Britain, the Solomons, and the Bismarck Archipelago contained few roads, only one or two ports, and almost no airfields: It was immediately obvious that Casey would have to build and maintain them. As MacArthur told Casey, it was going to be “an engineer’s war,” a statement that Casey would proudly quote again and again as the war went on. For Casey, the “engineer’s war” was unprecedented, as his construction crews were forced to double as soldiers throughout the years ahead. In innumerable cases, the unsung Casey could be found directing jungle-clearing bulldozers while MacArthur’s soldiers were busy killing Japanese snipers just yards away.

  On April 4, MacArthur’s staff and Australia’s senior military leaders concluded their initial assessment of the military situation. The Japanese had undisputed control of the sea from Tokyo south past the Philippines to the northern coast of New Guinea, with the Imperial Japanese Navy ranging as far east as Hawaii and as far west as the Indian Ocean. The Imperial Japanese Army, meanwhile, was building its fortress at Rabaul, from whi
ch it could somersault forward into northern New Guinea and then across the razor-sharp Owen Stanley Mountains to Port Moresby, threatening Australia. From Rabaul, the Japanese could also slip down into the Solomon Islands, build airfields from which their Zeros and Betty bombers could cut the American supply line to Australia, then surround it, isolate it, and kill it. To stop them, MacArthur needed aircraft, a navy, and divisions of American soldiers. But to get them, he knew, he would have to push Marshall—and play politics with Franklin Roosevelt.

  On April 6, in the Philippines, General Masaharu Homma, reinforced by thousands of fresh Japanese soldiers and hundreds of massive artillery pieces, opened his offensive against General Jonathan Wainwright’s Orion-Bagac line. Homma told Tokyo that it might take him all of April to storm Wainwright’s position, but as he pledged, he would do it or sacrifice himself in the process. In fact, it took him only three days. The starving American and Filipino defenders fought gamely for twenty-four hours, then disintegrated. “Lines were formed and abandoned, before they could be fully occupied,” the official army history notes. “Communications broke down and higher headquarters often did not know the situation in the front lines. Orders were issued and revoked because they were impossible of execution. Stragglers poured to the rear in increasingly large numbers until they clogged all roads and disrupted all movement forward. Units disappeared into the jungle never to be heard from again. In two days an army evaporated into thin air.” On the night of April 7, Wainwright cabled Washington that he doubted his forces could hold out for long, but that he had formed a new defensive line, further south, along the Alangan River. “Fighting is intense,” he wrote, “casualties on both sides heavy.”

  By the afternoon of April 8, the American and Filipino defenses had been breached, with soldiers streaming south or collapsing, exhausted and emaciated, along Bataan’s jungle trails. The newly occupied defensive line was now in danger of being overrun. The Japanese increased the pressure, using their command of the air to pummel the American defenders with incendiary bombs. “The infantrymen turned fire fighters to avoid being burned out of their positions,” the official history notes. Late on the night of the eighth, Wainwright ordered his forces to counterattack. His next message went to MacArthur, in Australia. “It is with deep regret,” he wrote from Corregidor, “that I am forced to report that the troops on Bataan are fast folding up.” MacArthur, in Melbourne, despaired. He had hoped that somehow a surrender wouldn’t be necessary, and had cabled Wainwright’s chief of staff that if the Bataan garrison were to be destroyed, “it should be upon the actual field of battle taking full toll from the enemy.” MacArthur was not alone in advocating a fight to the last man. Back on February 9, Franklin Roosevelt had penned his own orders. There would be “no surrender,” he had said then.