by Perry, Mark
From the moment MacArthur landed in Australia, George Marshall had made it clear that MacArthur’s command would be last on the list to receive support—everything of importance was going to Europe. The army chief fixed limits on what MacArthur would get: Two divisions would be assigned to help him, air units already in Australia would be brought up to strength (but no more would be added), and the navy was directed to secure his supply route with whatever resources it already had. In fact, however, the situation was worse than MacArthur knew. The Southwest Pacific Command was not only last on the list of American commands to receive reinforcements, but also last on the list behind Russia, whose armies were still reeling before the German onslaught. Reinforcing Russia, even at the cost of American lives in the Pacific, Marshall calculated, was essential.
Not surprisingly, Chief of Naval Operations Ernie King, who had the president’s ear, argued against making the Pacific a lower priority. He told Roosevelt that without a deployment of additional ships to Hawaii and aircraft to Australia, the Japanese offensive would continue to roll on. Australia, he said, was in grave danger, and the tenuous American lifeline to MacArthur might be severed. In a memorandum written to the president in March, King appealed to Roosevelt’s fighting instincts. What was needed now, he told the president, was the kind of fearless leadership that would allow his sailors to go over to the offensive. “No fighter ever won his fight by covering up—by merely fending off the other fellow’s blows,” he argued. “The winner hits and keeps on hitting even though he has to take some stiff blows in order to be able to keep on hitting.”
This, then, was King’s gambit: to argue that the trucks, tanks, and munitions earmarked for Russia would be “better employed in war areas where we are actively engaged.” With American lives at stake, he implied, Russia should have to fend for itself. The one sure way to help the Red Army, he added, was for Americans to start killing the enemy. Then too, Russia could hardly be helped if the United States was losing the war in the Pacific.
Back at the War Department, Marshall reflected on King’s views but held his temper. While he would never say so publicly (and in the interest of interservice comity, rarely said so to his staff), he was convinced that King’s motives were self-serving. King, he thought, wanted to draw down shipments to Russia, not because that was the best way to defend America, but rather because a Russian drawdown would help the navy. The army chief gathered his views and struck back at King with an argument that mimicked the one being made by Winston Churchill and which would thus be more to Roosevelt’s liking: Reinforcing the Pacific wouldn’t matter if Russia were defeated, he told Roosevelt, because if that happened, the war could not be won. The Americans could stand alone against the Japanese, but couldn’t stand alone against the Germans. “The most pressing need, in the opinion of the Army General Staff,” he wrote, “is to sustain Russia as an active, effective participant in the war. That issue will probably be decided this summer or fall. Every possible effort, we think, must be made to draw off German forces from the Russian front.” The priority of keeping the Red Army in the field was crucial, as was the plan to build up American ground and air forces in England. “The increases in U.S. Army Air Force suggested for Australia and South Pacific Islands, if executed this summer, would have the effect of postponing, by more than two months, the initiation of American air offensive in Western Europe,” he pointed out.
MacArthur, in Melbourne, learned of the King-Marshall debate from his friends at the top of the army’s command and decided that now would be the perfect time for him to intervene—on the side of Ernie King. MacArthur weighed in with both fists, requesting that a single aircraft carrier be deployed to Australia for his use. When that didn’t work (all aircraft carriers were elsewhere, on “indispensable missions,” as Marshall curtly informed him), the Southwest Pacific commander approached Australian Prime Minister Curtin, complaining about the “entirely inadequate” strength of his forces. The situation was grim, MacArthur said. The Japanese were moving south from New Guinea, and he had no way to stop them. Curtin listened with mounting alarm to MacArthur and agreed: Reinforcements needed to be rushed to Australia immediately, he said. He suggested that MacArthur write to Churchill, who could bring pressure to bear on Roosevelt to send him more soldiers. MacArthur nodded vigorously—that was an excellent idea. But what he really needed, MacArthur reiterated, was an aircraft carrier. That way, he could take the fight to the Japanese. On April 28, Curtin cabled Churchill, requesting that the British prime minister deploy an American carrier and two British divisions to Australia. Curtin then requested that Churchill ask Roosevelt to increase the number of convoys the Americans were sending his way. He added that he was sending the request at MacArthur’s direction.
Churchill read Curtin’s cable at 10 Downing Street on the morning of April 29 and immediately set to raving about Curtin and, especially, about Douglas MacArthur and the audacity of military commanders who believed they had the right to go outside accepted channels. Churchill visualized the scene almost exactly as it had happened: The worrisome MacArthur seated as a supplicant in the office of the easily swayed Aussie prime minister—the guileless Curtin gulled by the ribbon-laden American war hero. That afternoon, Churchill passed Curtin’s cable on to Roosevelt, adding his own comment. “I should be glad to know,” he huffed, “whether these requirements have been approved by you, and whether General MacArthur has any authority from the United States for taking such a line.” That same afternoon, Roosevelt (we do not know if he was angered or, more likely, bemused by MacArthur’s stratagem) directed Marshall to tell MacArthur that in the future, he should follow the chain of command. Marshall passed the message on to MacArthur, who feigned hurt surprise and, in a response sent on May 3, pleaded his innocence. He was in a delicate position in Australia, he said, because he was being asked not only to defend the country, but also to give Curtin his best military advice. Curtin had asked his opinion, and MacArthur had given it. He, MacArthur, could not be held responsible if Curtin had passed on that opinion to Churchill.
All this was so much eyewash, of course (as both MacArthur and Marshall knew), but the issue was joined: MacArthur thus not only notched a small political victory by focusing Washington’s attention on his command in Australia, but also had inserted himself into the debate on American war strategy. MacArthur’s appointment as commander in Australia might have reassured Curtin, and the general’s Medal of Honor might have salved Franklin Roosevelt’s Republican critics, but it wasn’t enough to please MacArthur, who wasn’t going to be satisfied with sitting in Melbourne while Marshall, King, and Nimitz fought the Japanese. Then too, as MacArthur calculated, the British weren’t the only ones who could pressure Roosevelt for more and more support. If they could do it, so could he.
Marshall took MacArthur’s innocence-pleading cable into the Oval Office and showed it to the president, who thought that at least this once, he would respond to MacArthur personally. It was a unique moment and a concession by the president that his relationship with MacArthur was different from his relationship with any of his other military leaders. He rarely wrote to any American senior military officers, leaving that to Marshall and King. But on May 6, Roosevelt penned a detailed personal message to his former chief of staff. He didn’t want the resupply of the British slowed down, he told MacArthur, because he didn’t like it that the Russians were “killing more Axis personnel and destroying more Axis matériel than all the twenty-five United Nations put together.” The United States, he argued, must help the Russians “in every way that we possibly can, and develop plans aimed at diverting German land and air forces from the Russian front.” MacArthur would not be forgotten, Roosevelt said reassuringly, but then closed his note with a pointed piece of advice: “I see no reason why you should not continue discussing military matters with the Australian Prime Minister, but I hope you will try to have him treat them as confidential matters, and not use them as appeals to Churchill and me.”
The pe
rsonal message should have ended the matter, but MacArthur was only getting started. He ignored Roosevelt’s “leave me alone” response, sallying forth with another of his own. He acknowledged the importance of Russia’s fight against Germany, but argued that a “second front” against the Axis could be opened as usefully in the Pacific as in Europe. Doing so, he said, would have “the enthusiastic psychological support of the American nation” and (not least) force the Japanese to end their attempted conquest of India (a well-aimed fillip for Churchill). Then too, if Churchill (as MacArthur implied) was really concerned about the fate of the “brown and yellow people,” the best way to reassure them was to attack their oppressors. Twenty-five nations might be fighting the Germans just then, but the United States had been attacked by Japan, not Germany. Oh, and by the way, he added, what he needed to defend Australia were two aircraft carriers (and not just one), as well as one thousand planes and three newly trained divisions.
John Curtin, meanwhile, joined MacArthur’s mini-offensive by directing Australia’s London-based minister for external affairs, H. V. Evart, to make Australia’s views known to Churchill in person. Buffeted by Curtin, assailed by MacArthur, and worried about India, Churchill remained as patient as he could, but he conceded a bit, perhaps in the hope of ending the exasperating squabble. After meeting with Evart, Churchill fired off yet another cable to Curtin. In the case of an invasion of Australia, he told Curtin, he would respond “immediately” by sending everything he could to its defense. He finished his message with an apology of sorts, noting, for the record, that he preferred the “defence of Australia” to the defense of India. In mid-May, George Marshall reentered the fray with a cable to Australia’s prime minister that restated the Allied strategy: “The directive to General MacArthur definitely assigns a defensive mission with the task of preparing an offensive. The measures General MacArthur advocates would be highly desirable if we were at war with Japan only. In our opinion the Pacific should not be the principal theatre.” With this, the contentious back-and-forth on strategy was finally settled: The Germany-first strategy was confirmed, Churchill was satisfied, Curtin was reassured, King was routed, and MacArthur would have to wait his turn—at the back of the line.
Watching all of this from Melbourne’s Menzies Hotel, MacArthur responded with a mental shrug, deciding that if his own government couldn’t give him the aircraft carriers and men he needed, he would make do with what he had. He would follow Marshall’s directive and stand on the defense, but he would do so in his own way while (in Marshall’s memorable phrase) “preparing an offensive.” In short, MacArthur decided that instead of waiting for the enemy to attack him in Australia, he would deploy his two newly arrived divisions to New Guinea, where they could take on Japan’s highly vaunted South Seas Detachment. Then too, though MacArthur didn’t know it at the time, his messages to Marshall and Roosevelt had a far-reaching impact. While Marshall’s cable insisted that MacArthur end his requests for reinforcements, Marshall and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even Franklin Roosevelt, weren’t entirely convinced that MacArthur was wrong. In arguing that Germany was not America’s primary enemy, MacArthur had helped Marshall, King, and Roosevelt persuade Churchill and the British chiefs to stop dragging their feet on taking on the Germans in France, a confrontation the Americans knew that the British wanted to postpone as long as possible.
The year 1942 was a bad one for Franklin Roosevelt. Although he remained immensely popular, his first eight years as president had taken their toll. The gaunt look that would mark his last years was now becoming visible; he fought a series of debilitating bronchial infections, his heart was weakened by a minor attack, and his aides noticed that he was slowing down. Though only sixty, he was weakened by the breakneck pace that had marked his first two terms, and he was dogged by the surfeit of cables detailing a roll of defeats. So while he remained outwardly optimistic about America’s war effort, he was much less so in private. The nation was simply not prepared to fight a two-front war, he had told his wife Eleanor after Pearl Harbor. Moreover, the country would have “to take a good many defeats” before it built enough ships and aircraft and trained enough soldiers, sailors, and airmen to defeat Germany and Japan. His son, James, could tell that his father was worried. “I could see right away that we were in deep trouble,” he said.
Roosevelt did his best to prepare the country for what lay ahead. Like MacArthur, he was captivated by maps, and impressed by Churchill’s informal war room (which was filled with maps), he directed his staff to set one up in the White House. He could often be found there, at the end of the day, tracing out with his finger German offensives and Japanese conquests. The maps reflected the harrowing reality of the war: All of Europe was under German control, with a thin line separating the eastern German armies from Leningrad and Moscow, while another army was poised to move south and east into the Crimea. Scandinavia was either neutral (Sweden) or conquered (Norway and Denmark), as was most of North Africa. Japan’s conquests were even more impressive. Its armies were camped out deep in China. Indochina, Thailand, Burma, Java, Sumatra, and the Philippines had been conquered, as well as nearly all of the Central and South Pacific islands, including Rabaul. Japanese ships had sortied into the Indian Ocean and reached as far east as Hawaii, while the Imperial Japanese Army was moving west and south. If the Japanese military conquered New Guinea, Australia would be next.
Roosevelt didn’t worry about America’s capacity to wage war, but he wasn’t so sure about Russia’s. It had taken the Russians seven months (from the German invasion in June 1941, until December) to mobilize enough men to match the Wehrmacht’s blitz, but by the spring of 1942, they had only succeeded in blunting it. German forces had stalled on the outskirts of Moscow, and a planned Russian counteroffensive in early 1942 had ground to a dismal halt. The Russians were poorly armed and relied on a shoddy and outmoded transport system; their vaunted wall of steel, as Roosevelt knew, was actually a wall of bodies. The Germans were regrouping for a summer offensive aimed at Russia’s southern oil fields, and entire Russian divisions were being destroyed in a whirlwind that liquidated hundreds of thousands, and then millions, of lives. Stalin was barely holding on.
On March 25 (on the verge of MacArthur’s Pacific-first cable offensive), Roosevelt had sat through a detailed briefing in which George Marshall set out the American military strategy. The presentation proposed an early Allied landing in France (Operation Sledgehammer) to take the pressure off Russia, whose collapse would be fatal for the Anglo-American cause. Marshall was blunt: If the British opposed the plan, he said, he thought the United States should turn its attention to the Pacific. Or, as Eisenhower had put it in a note to Marshall the week before, if the British refused to cooperate on Sledgehammer, the “United States should turn its back on the Atlantic and go full out against Japan.”
Roosevelt agreed, and in a “Dear Winston” message on April 3, he promoted the Marshall-Eisenhower plan. While Allied bombers were then hitting German cities, this wasn’t enough. The Wehrmacht would need to be defeated on the ground, in France. So the object, he told Churchill, was to get ashore in France as soon as possible. The president then added that he was sending Marshall and Harry Hopkins, his most trusted political advisor, to London to argue the position in person. “What Harry and Geo. Marshall will tell you about has my heart and mind in it,” he said. “Your people and mine demand the establishment of a second front to draw off pressure from the Russians [who] are today killing more Germans and destroying more equipment than you and I put together. Even if full success is not attained, the big objective [helping the Russians] will be.”
Hopkins, in particular, was skeptical that Churchill would accept the American plan; or rather, he suspected that the prime minister would accept it but then undermine it. Even so, the first meeting between Marshall, Hopkins, and Churchill in London on April 9 went well, with Churchill saying he had no objection to the American strategy. On April 15, Marshall confirmed to Alan
Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff (later, Field Marshal The Rt. Hon. 1st Viscount Alanbrooke), that Roosevelt’s haste in calling for an invasion of Europe was spurred, in part, by Ernie King’s call for more ships in Hawaii and Douglas MacArthur’s push for more troops in Australia. The message was unmistakable: The Americans and the British would go ashore in France, or the United States would shift its attention to the Pacific. Alanbrooke, an adept political thinker, committed to his diary his reflections on Marshall’s presentation: “Marshall has stated the European offensive plan and is going all out for it. It is a clever move.” Churchill accepted the American plan on April 14, and four days later, Marshall and Hopkins told Roosevelt that the president had gotten what he wanted. The British were committed to an early invasion of France.
Marshall and Hopkins were pleased with what they had accomplished. Churchill concluded their meetings with an effusive show of support, telling the Americans that his decision on a cross-channel invasion was “irreversible” and would be the primary focus of the Anglo-American alliance. They might have been less pleased, however, to learn the views of those who knew Churchill best. Sir Charles Wilson, the prime minister’s personal physician, was puzzled by Churchill’s agreement. The doctor knew that Churchill feared a replay of the Great War, when British divisions were chewed to pieces by the Germans in the trenches of northern France. Churchill, he speculated in his private journal, “must have decided the time has not come to take the field as an out-and-out opponent of the Second Front in France.” Wilson speculated that Churchill, fearing that Roosevelt “might be driven by public clamor to concentrate on the war with Japan,” decided that “it was no time for argument.” But as Churchill didn’t fool Wilson, neither did he fool Roosevelt. The president assumed that the British were likely to drag their feet when it came to opening a second front.