by Perry, Mark
The Battle of the Bismarck Sea is now decided. We have achieved a victory of such completeness as to assume the proportions of a major disaster to the enemy. His entire force has been practically destroyed. His naval component consisted of 22 vessels, comprising 12 transports and 10 warships. . . . His air coverage for this naval force has been decimated or dispersed, 55 of his planes having been shot out of combat and many others damaged. His ground forces, estimated at probably 15,000, destined to attack in New Guinea, have been sunk or killed almost to a man.
But there were problems with this report, not the least of which was the double counting by Kenney’s airmen, who believed they had attacked two convoys instead of just one. Such double reporting was not unusual among airmen, who regularly overestimated their kill rate. But Kenney’s reporting was immediately questioned by Navy Secretary Frank Knox, who still doubted that an air force could actually sink ships. He set out to correct the record. Knox’s first move was to fire off a letter to John Curtin: “You must remember that an attack on Australia must be accompanied by a tremendous sea force, and there is no indication of a concentration pointing to that.”
In Brisbane, MacArthur angrily responded that the Battle of the Bismarck Sea was a great victory for Kenney, and that Knox’s navy hadn’t been much help. The Japanese, as he explained to Curtin in a letter (which he then forwarded to Washington), still had “complete control of the sea lanes in the western Pacific and of the outer approaches toward Australia.” Knox directed his staff to give MacArthur’s note to Marshall and to conduct an investigation of Kenney’s claims. The controversy that followed involved Knox, MacArthur, Kenney, King, and Marshall in an ugly interservice battle that rivaled anything else that took place during the war. Marshall could see it coming, but hoped it might be deflected by MacArthur himself—all MacArthur needed to do was agree to investigate Kenny’s figures. Such an investigation, Marshall calculated, would drag on and eventually be forgotten. MacArthur refused. “The bases for the communiqué [of March 7] were official reports from air headquarters to GHQ,” he wrote to Marshall. “Information acquired later from captured documents, photographs, and other data, while making minor changes in [the] original knowledge, showed increased rather than diminished losses. The communiqué as issued is factual.” Back in Washington, Marshall reviewed MacArthur’s cable—and buried it.
Ironically, the payoff of this controversy was that in defending his airmen, MacArthur was transformed into an outspoken airpower advocate. The skeptic became the true believer, the doubter an airpower disciple. George Kenney had his own memories of MacArthur’s support. In the wake of the investigation of the Bismarck Sea claims, Kenney remembered how MacArthur blamed the navy for purposely downplaying his fliers’ victory, essentially repeating the same claims made years before by Billy Mitchell. “MacArthur said he thought the Navy was trying to belittle the whole thing because they weren’t in on it,” he recalled. “He said, ‘You know, it’s against the rules for land-based airplanes to sink ships, especially naval vessels. It’s bad enough for them to sink merchant vessels. They ought to be sunk by battleship gunfire or by submarines. But for airplanes to do it, especially if they aren’t naval airplanes, it’s all wrong.’”
In the midst of his fight—and now back in Brisbane following the Buna victory—MacArthur and his staff focused on Rabaul, issuing a plan (Elkton I) for its capture. Not surprisingly, Kenney’s air force would play a pivotal role in the campaign, primarily because MacArthur’s navy remained modest. Even so, Elkton called for a series of combined arms operations involving dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of soldiers, whose movements would be coordinated over thousands of miles of ocean. The MacArthur plan envisioned the destruction of Rabaul in a series of leaps by his divisions working in parallel with Halsey’s South Pacific command: The Allies would seize New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula, capture Munda Point on New Georgia and airstrips on Bougainville and New Britain, reduce Kavieng on New Ireland, and assault Rabaul itself. Elkton II, the update of Elkton I, was even more detailed. But when the JCS reviewed that plan, they decided that the timetable for Rabaul’s conquest (to begin in May 1943) was too optimistic. MacArthur’s planners reported that ninety-four thousand Japanese were stationed in or near Rabaul, along with 383 land-based planes, four battleships, two aircraft carriers, fourteen cruisers, and forty destroyers. Additionally, the JCS was troubled by MacArthur’s estimates of what it would take to secure a victory; the estimates included five additional divisions, forty-five more air groups, and additional cruisers, destroyers, transports, and landing craft.
MacArthur knew that Elkton II would be a hard sell, particularly given the goals set out at the recently concluded Casablanca Conference, where Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff set out Allied goals for 1943. The Allied leaders ordered an invasion of Sicily, an escalation in the air campaign against Germany, more troops for Burma, and the continued buildup of resources for the invasion of France. Then too, the navy viewed any buildup in the Southwest Pacific as detracting from Chester Nimitz’s planned mid-1943 Central Pacific island-hopping campaign. So when George Marshall suggested that the Pacific commanders send delegations to Washington to hammer out a unified strategy, MacArthur appointed the irascible Richard Sutherland (“the chief insulter of the navy,” as Marshall described him) to lead the Southwest Pacific contingent, along with operations chief Stephen Chamberlin, public relations expert Larry Lehrbas, and George Kenney, the last of whom would be sitting across the table from naval officers who had recently questioned his honesty. Halsey, Nimitz, and King responded in kind. Halsey sent General Millard Harmon and General Nathan Twining to the conference, while Nimitz (“the boss man in the Pacific,” Kenney called him) sent Admiral Raymond Spruance and General Robert Richardson. Finally, King designated Admiral Charles Cooke as his representative—a naval officer who was viewed by one attending officer as even “meaner than King.”
The resulting brouhaha met every expectation: Sutherland was imperious, Cooke insulting, Spruance sullen, Harmon stubborn, and Kenney immovable. What agreement there was came when JCS planners pointed out that the invasion of Sicily and the planned invasion of France meant that MacArthur and Halsey would have to scale back their requests for more ships, aircraft, and soldiers. There weren’t enough to go around, and Europe still came first. On the conference’s last day, George Marshall decided to break the stalemate. After reviewing everyone’s position, he argued that instead of adopting an accelerated approach to the conquest of Rabaul, MacArthur and Halsey should rewrite their plans to reflect their modest resources. Within hours, conference planners agreed to send two additional divisions to MacArthur, with Halsey receiving modest additional air groups.
It was Richard Sutherland who authored the plan for how each commander would use his units, suggesting that to save resources, MacArthur and Halsey orchestrate a series of alternating attacks—MacArthur would seize New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula, after which Halsey would make his move into the central Solomons. MacArthur could then leap forward, followed by Halsey. The only remaining problem, then, was over command. Predictably, King argued that Nimitz be given responsibility for the offensive, while Sutherland argued that Nimitz was too far away to be effective. Marshall’s chief planner, General Thomas Handy, provided a tortured solution, recommending that while operations in both the Southwest and the South Pacific would fall under MacArthur’s control, naval units assigned to him would report to King. With this, the final plan for Rabaul’s conquest was approved on March 28.
But an end to the conference did not mean an end to controversy. Kenney was particularly worried about his meager air force. “Everyone was really stubborn about giving me airplanes, or even replacements for my losses,” he said. “I warned them that if they didn’t keep me going, we would be run out of New Guinea.” Halfway through the conference, Kenney showed up in Hap Arnold’s office to argue his point. “The European show did not like the B-24, or the P-38,
or the P-47 Republic Aircraft fighter,” Kenney later remembered. “I told Arnold I was not that particular. All I wanted was something that would fly.” A few days later, Kenney trooped over to the White House for a meeting with Roosevelt, an audacious move designed to rile King and to brag about the victory at the Bismarck Sea. Kenney gave Roosevelt a blow-by-blow account of the battle, then pressed him for more resources. Roosevelt enjoyed the meeting, smiling indulgently at Kenney’s audacity. “He asked about General MacArthur’s health and asked me to be sure to remember him to the General,” Kenney later wrote.
Kenney was also prepared to talk to the president about press speculation that his commander, a darling of Roosevelt’s Republican critics on Capitol Hill, wanted Roosevelt’s job. MacArthur had been viewed as a presidential hopeful ever since heading up the U.S. Olympic Committee in 1928, and at the beginning of the war, he was so popular among Republican leaders that they pressed Roosevelt to name him commander of all U.S. military forces. Kenney wanted to know whether Roosevelt was worried about a MacArthur candidacy, but the president never mentioned the topic. “MacArthur had told me several times that he was only interested in winning the war,” Kenney later reflected, “and was not in the market for any political office.” That may be, but speculation about Roosevelt’s political prospects was a topic of discussion in Washington, so at the end of their War Department meetings, Kenney and Sutherland met with Congresswoman (and former reporter) Clare Boothe Luce and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the pillars of MacArthur’s political support. Kenney failed to note the meeting in his postwar memoirs, but it was a shameless attempt to prod the JCS—and a reminder that MacArthur had powerful friends in Washington. Kenney’s mini-campaign worked, for by the time he left Washington, he had five hundred more airplanes than when he had arrived. The Southwest Pacific would be “pinched for aircraft for a few months yet,” he said, but by “the end of August we would be ready to go places.”
While Sutherland, Chamberlin, and Kenney were meeting in Washington, MacArthur decided that what he needed was an expert in amphibious warfare—someone who knew how to bring soldiers onto a beach and keep them supplied. MacArthur cabled Marshall, who passed the request to King. Several days later, King ordered Rear Admiral Daniel Barbey to report to MacArthur in Brisbane. An eccentric but brilliant officer, Barbey was nearly alone in his understanding of amphibious operations. But even after Pearl Harbor, Barbey was given only a single assistant to help him. The situation was as bad in Australia, where MacArthur’s newly designated VII Amphibious Force consisted of Barbey, a single aide, as well as “ships yet to arrive or even be built, and men still to be assigned,” as Barbey later recalled. But unlike MacArthur’s many other commanders, Barbey was singularly unimpressed with MacArthur, who, he concluded, was “too aloof and too correct in manner, speech and dress.” Still, Barbey—so likable that nearly everyone in his command referred to him as “Uncle Dan”—thought there was something compelling about the commander. When Barbey walked into MacArthur’s office, the general smiled, shook his hand, and announced that he was going to conquer New Guinea, lay waste to Rabaul, and liberate the Philippines.
“Your job,” MacArthur said, “is to develop an amphibious force that can carry my troops in those campaigns.” MacArthur then hesitated. “Are you lucky?” he asked.
Barbey was taken aback. Lucky? “Yes,” he said.
While Barbey’s appointment was King’s idea, General Walter Krueger’s appointment was MacArthur’s. In mid-January, as his staff was mulling the new plan to capture Rabaul (Elkton II), MacArthur requested that Krueger and his Third Army staff be transferred from the United States to Brisbane. “I am especially anxious to have Krueger because of my long and intimate association with him,” MacArthur told Marshall. The request surprised the army chief, who, because of Krueger’s age (he was sixty-one), had slotted him for a noncombat billet. But no one was more surprised than Krueger. “That he should have remembered me well and favorably enough to ask for my service in the SWPA,” Krueger later wrote, “was as remarkable as it was flattering.”
Marshall agreed to the request, but told MacArthur that Krueger would come to Brisbane with only a part of his staff and head up a new command, the Sixth Army. In fact, MacArthur’s request was a subterfuge, for he wanted his men commanded by Americans, not Australians, and Krueger outranked Thomas Blamey. Krueger also outranked Robert Eichelberger, who interpreted Krueger’s appointment as MacArthur’s punishment for the press attention the senior combat commander had received at Buna. There was another surprise. When Krueger arrived, MacArthur informed him that he would command Alamo Force, which included the Sixth Army “augmented as required by elements of other forces.” None of them were Australian. It was an unusual arrangement, but it kept Blamey out of the chain of command. Privately, the Australians were offended, though Blamey said that he understood the “practical and psychological obstacles in the way of leaving an Australian commander in control of Allied land forces in the field.”
In fact, and despite Marshall’s hesitation, appointing Krueger may well have been the best command decision MacArthur ever made. Unlike the fiery Eichelberger, Walter Krueger was predictable and austere, though in a state of constant anxiety—a characteristic remarked on by his staff, who read his mood by the number of cigarettes he smoked. While historians often compared him to the plodding Union General George Thomas, Krueger’s battlefield mien was more reminiscent of Ulysses S. Grant: He had the expression of a man who could drive his head through a brick wall and might do so at any moment. Born in Prussia, he came to St. Louis with his mother and then moved to Indiana after the death of his father. He joined the army, served in Cuba in the Spanish-American War, left the service as a sergeant, then reenlisted and fought under Arthur MacArthur in the Philippines. Krueger was commissioned an officer in 1901, then served as chief of staff of the American Expeditionary Force’s tank corps in France.
Competence brought success. He was a senior commander during the army’s crucial prewar Louisiana Maneuvers (his chief of staff was Dwight Eisenhower), where he proved an able planner. But for MacArthur’s gossipy staff, Krueger was a man of little imagination, a “no-nonsense drill sergeant.” Others were even less charitable. Krueger, they said, was methodical, distant, and difficult. But while Krueger might have lacked dash, his planning was meticulous. He was the anti-Patton—he sacrificed speed and maneuverability for power. The enemy, he believed, must not simply be defeated; it must be crushed. And he loved his men. When MacArthur complained about one of his divisions, Krueger loudly corrected him. They are all fine soldiers, he snapped.
While MacArthur exaggerated his “long and intimate association” with Krueger (they had met incidentally in 1909 at Fort Leavenworth), he trusted Krueger’s eye for detail. In one celebrated instance, Krueger embarrassed a GI by ordering him to remove his boots, then conducted a close-up inspection of his feet to detect signs of “immersion foot” (caused by prolonged exposure of the skin to warm water); in another incident, he reduced the rank of a commander for failing to treat the condition. Krueger paid particular attention to the 32nd Division after its experience at Buna, where the 126th Regiment had been shot out of existence with a 90 percent casualty rate. Those who were not killed or wounded were suffering from dysentery, malaria, typhus, dengue fever, and hookworm. The incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (then called battle fatigue) was high, exacerbated by liberal doses of antimalarial drugs (quinine and atabrine), which caused manic depression. Soldier suicides were a constant problem. Krueger’s first act as head of Alamo Force was to establish a rehabilitation center in Rockhampton for the treatment of malaria, but when the 1st Marine Division, which had fought at Guadalcanal, arrived to reinforce MacArthur, the prevalence of the disease shocked Krueger. He then cabled Washington, insisting that additional malaria specialists be sent to Australia.
With the creation of Alamo Force, MacArthur shaped a command structure at odds with the kind created by Eisenhower in Europ
e. Whereas Eisenhower built an integrated command that included officers of all national armies, MacArthur created an American combat force integrating air, sea, and land assets and a separate “Allied” force under Blamey, who commanded the Australians. In effect, MacArthur’s Americans and Blamey’s Australians fought the same war separately, while Eisenhower’s coalition fought the same war together. The differences set out competing models for American and Allied military cooperation in the postwar era. In fact, although MacArthur was later criticized for giving Blamey’s Australians a secondary role in the Pacific War, the separation of the Australians and Americans dampened the command controversies that plagued Eisenhower. The approach also allowed MacArthur to divide combat responsibilities over a large geographic area. More simply, MacArthur and Eisenhower adopted different command arrangements because they fought different kinds of wars. It was impossible for MacArthur’s armies to fight along a single front (as Eisenhower’s did in France) because of the distances involved. MacArthur’s final plan for Rabaul reflected this reality: As Blamey’s Allied Land (Australian) Forces vaulted up the coast of New Guinea, Krueger’s (American) Alamo Force would cartwheel north from island to island. Both prongs would support the other, as MacArthur’s New Guinea and Halsey’s Guadalcanal operations had at the end of 1942.
After being briefed by MacArthur, Krueger met with Eichelberger. Knowing that Eichelberger resented his presence, Krueger and his chief of staff, Brigadier General George Honnen, spent an evening with him. “Walter Krueger and George had dinner with us last night,” Eichelberger told his wife. “They were in their best form. Walter said the Big Chief said magnificent things about me. . . . [H]e was most friendly in every way and really quite amusing.” But while Krueger wanted to reassure Eichelberger that he, Krueger, wasn’t there to supersede him, it was also clear that MacArthur would give Krueger the toughest combat assignments while assigning Eichelberger to train Krueger’s army. This division of responsibility was the result of the fight at Buna, after which Eichelberger wrote a report criticizing the 32nd Division’s preparations. “The regiments of the 32nd Division needed training in the simple things such as scouting and patrolling,” he said. After reviewing Eichelberger’s report, MacArthur tasked him with providing newly arrived combat units extra weeks of physical hardening designed to replicate the conditions they would find in New Guinea’s jungles.