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

by Perry, Mark

  On April 15, William Halsey and his staff flew into Brisbane from New Caledonia to coordinate the Rabaul offensive. Halsey expected it to be an uncomfortable meeting because his official relationship with MacArthur was ambiguous, the result of Thomas Handy’s directive that Halsey was to act under MacArthur’s “strategic direction” while being responsible to Nimitz. Despite these ambiguous instructions and George Marshall’s calculation that Halsey could stand toe-to-toe with the temperamental Southwest Pacific commander, Halsey was determined to get along with MacArthur.

  Marshall need not have worried. Meeting with MacArthur at his headquarters, Halsey laid out his plans. He would land a large unit of Marines at New Georgia, then spring onto Bougainville, leaping forward in planned amphibious operations up the Slot of the Solomons, from southeast to northwest. If all went well, Halsey said, his Marines would be approximately 250 miles southeast of Rabaul by the end of October. MacArthur listened to this in silence, but when Halsey finished, there was a smile on the commander’s face. Rising slowly from his chair, he clapped Halsey on the back. “If you come with me,” he roared, “I’ll make you a greater man than Nelson would ever dream of being.” That was fine with the bullet-shaped Halsey, whose voracious appetite for killing Japanese (“those little yellow bastards,” as he called them) was well known. After the meeting, Halsey wondered what all the fuss was about. “Five minutes after I reported,” he wrote, “I felt as if we were lifelong friends. I have seldom seen a man who makes a quicker, stronger, more favorable impression.” MacArthur was nearly poetic in his praise: “He was of the same aggressive type as John Paul Jones, David Farragut, and George Dewey,” MacArthur wrote of Halsey. “His one thought was to close with the enemy and fight him to the death. The bugaboo of many sailors, the fear of losing ships, was completely alien to his conception of sea action.”

  By April 18, MacArthur and Halsey’s staffs had put together a final plan for Rabaul, the aptly named Operation Cartwheel. Ironically, on that same day, near Bougainville, one year to the day after Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25s had bombed Tokyo, eighteen P-38s of the 347th Fighter Group shot down a squadron of Japanese aircraft, one of which was carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Japan’s greatest strategist. The mission, resulting from U.S. decryptions of the Japanese naval cipher, seemed a fitting culmination to MacArthur and Halsey’s efforts. Now the Japanese would have to respond to Cartwheel without their greatest naval commander: Halsey’s Marines would go first, fighting up the Solomons, while the Australians sidled up the coast of New Guinea. Krueger’s Alamo Force would then spring, in a series of hit-’em-where-they-ain’ts, through the Bismarck Sea. Staggered by these roundhouse blows, first from the left and then from the right, the Japanese would be beaten back into Rabaul.

  Cartwheel got under way on June 20, when two companies of Marines came ashore on New Georgia, the 45-mile-long island in the central Solomons. Other detachments landed on nearby Rendova Island, the staging area for the New Georgia invasion. More troops landed on New Georgia with elements of the army’s 43rd Division on July 2. The plan was to capture New Georgia’s Munda Point Airfield, with southern (army) forces and northern (Marine) forces fighting their way toward each other through the island’s tangled jungles. By the third week of July, Major General John Hester’s 43rd Division was bogged down in some of the roughest jungle terrain in the world. The fight for New Georgia became a reprise of Buna; like the 32nd, the 43rd was a U.S. National Guard unit, its commanders unprepared for the ferocity of what faced them. By the end of July, Halsey’s headquarters was growingly increasingly worried, with the 43rd engaged in a costly battle of attrition against five thousand Japanese. The close-in fighting took its toll among American GIs, with between fifty and one hundred men each day taking themselves out of the line due to “war neuroses.” A surgeon sent to investigate reported that the “neuroses” were often simple exhaustion. Many of Hester’s men, the surgeon reported, had “not changed clothes or had two continuous hours of sleep; all had the same expression.” The New Georgia campaign began to go well only in mid-July, after Halsey replaced Hester with Major General Oscar Griswold, who did what Eichelberger had done at Buna—he relieved officers, rested and fed his troops, and only then attacked. Griswold took Bibilo Hill, overlooking the Munda Point airstrip, on July 25, but his men had to fight their way through seventy-four pillboxes to do so. On August 5, Griswold’s northern force overran the airfield. The battle lasted into August, as Japanese aircraft and ships sortied into New Georgia, adding a hellish hue to the American victory.

  MacArthur’s landings in New Guinea and along the Bismarck barrier went more smoothly than Halsey’s on New Georgia. Soldiers from Krueger’s Alamo Force came ashore at Woodlark and Kiriwina Islands on June 30 while that same day, a detachment of the 41st Division landed at Nassau Bay, further up the coast of New Guinea. MacArthur’s plan was to trick the Japanese into believing that he coveted Salamaua, on the southwest face of Huon Gulf, thereby luring them to its defense. In fact, however, MacArthur was aiming at Lae, a coastal village at the outlet of the Markham River. The Japanese responded by reinforcing Salamaua in mid-July, then shipped 200 fighters and bombers into the airstrip at Wewak. Still outnumbered, fighters from Kenney’s Fifth Air Force conducted a series of raids along the New Guinea coast against smaller Japanese airfields, while Whitehead’s bombers softened up Japanese airstrips at Lae, Finschhafen, Saidor, and Madang. Finally, on August 17, Kenney launched a series of massed attacks against Wewak, putting 122 heavy and medium bombers into the air. This was Clark Field in reverse, with Kenney’s pilots destroying 175 Japanese fighters and bombers on the ground.

  On September 4, Australian General George Wooten’s 9th Division was brought ashore just four miles from Lae by Barbey’s amphibious engineers—his “webbed feet.” After Barbey’s work with Krueger’s Alamo Force at Woodlark and Kiriwina, the Lae landings seemed effortless: It was the largest amphibious landing undertaken by Barbey, with the Aussies protected by the fire of Kenney’s bombers. The result was a furious and desperate aerial campaign interdicting the Australians along their two landing zones, at Red and Yellow beaches. The next day, in an effort to cut off the Japanese garrison at Lae from the interior, the U.S. 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment jumped into the Markham Valley at Nadzab. The morning of the drop, MacArthur accompanied Kenney on the mission. As the troopers boarded their planes at Port Moresby, MacArthur walked down the line shaking their hands, then boarded the lead B-17. “I’m not worried about getting shot,” he told the B-17 pilot. “Honestly, the only thing that disturbs me is the possibility that when we hit the rough air over the mountains, my stomach might get upset. I’d hate to throw up and disgrace myself in front of the kids.” When he returned to Port Moresby, he bragged about his adventure in a message to Jean. “It was a honey,” he said of the operation.

  The Nadzab adventure was a personal victory for MacArthur; in a single moment, he had shrugged off the whispers of “Dugout Doug” and expunged the memory of the whining general who had arrived unceremoniously at the airstrip at Alice Springs. His hands no longer trembled. In one photograph of MacArthur, he stands amid the gun belts of a B-17 and looks into the distance over the Nadzab drop zone. His jaw is set, his distinctive command hat is perched over his brow, his ubiquitous sunglasses mask his eyes. The 503rd’s jump was spectacular—the regiment was carried to the jump zones aboard ninety-six C-47s that were escorted by an armada of fighters and B-25s. The 503rd landed nearly without incident and seized Nadzab’s airstrip. Coupled with the Australian landings between Lae and Finschhafen, the Nadzab drop forced the Japanese to abandon Salamaua, with Australian patrols intercepting their retreat. By mid-October, a Japanese column of some ten thousand soldiers had reached the north coast of the Huon Peninsula, but the heroic extrication cost them twenty-five hundred lives.

  The Japanese high command rethought its strategy. It directed that Bougainville (which it identified as Halsey’s next target) be held at all costs. A new defens
ive perimeter was drawn from Finschhafen across the Vitiaz and Dampier Straits to Cape Gloucester and from there through New Britain to Rabaul. A combat-tested division was brought from Shanghai to reinforce the Japanese on New Britain, and the garrisons at Madang and Wewak were strengthened. Japanese war planners designated Finschhafen as the key to this new defensive position, ordering Shigeru Kitagiri’s 20th Division on a 200-mile march from Bogadjim (further west on the New Guinea coast) to defend it. But MacArthur anticipated the move and reworked the Cartwheel schedule, moving up the date for Finschhafen’s capture. As a prelude, he ordered an assault on Kaiapit and Dumpu in the Markham Valley by the veteran Australian 7th Division, which was scouring the jungle west of Lae. Kaiapit was captured on September 19, and Dumpu was overrun on October 6. In the meantime, “Uncle Dan’s” amphibious engineers landed a brigade of Wooten’s Australian 9th Division north of Finschhafen in the darkness. The Japanese had spotted the convoy as the sun rose, strafed and bombed it, then contested the invasion in the jungles fronting the landing zones. Unaware that three thousand Japanese of the 21st Independent Mixed Brigade awaited them, Aussie General George Vasey’s men were forced to battle their way overland to secure the town. The fight was brutal, bloody, and at close quarters, but the Japanese were pushed into the jungle on October 2, and MacArthur gained a crucial anchorage on the tip of Huon Gulf.

  So far, at least, the MacArthur-Halsey offensive had succeeded. Although the Japanese mounted a savage defense of New Georgia, the island was eventually captured, with the heavy American casualties offset by the somersault moves of Blamey’s Australians. An air of confidence now pervaded MacArthur’s headquarters, even as the Japanese who had faded into the jungle at Finschhafen reorganized to retake the village. The attack, when it came, was the most severe since Buna, lasting from October 16 to October 20. The Japanese broke off their offensive when it proved too costly, but the Australians were forced into a series of battles near Sattelberg, before seizing it on November 17. Finschhafen provided Kenney’s growing command with airstrips for a newly arrived batch of P-38s that would escort bombers on their long run over Rabaul. Kenney was once again the man of the hour. His air force pummeled Rabaul through October and November—an October 12 raid of four hundred bombers and a November 3 raid cost the Japanese twenty planes and five thousand tons of shipping. On November 1, Halsey began his next move up the Solomons, sending the 3rd Marine Division ashore at Bougainville under the protection of the Thirteenth Air Force.

  On November 22, MacArthur and his commanders met in Brisbane to review Cartwheel’s schedule. Arrayed around a conference table in the AMP Building, MacArthur, Sutherland, Kenney, Krueger, Barbey, naval commander Admiral Arthur Carpender, and Major General William Rupertus, commander of the just-arrived 1st Marine Division, plotted their next moves. With the Australians moving west along the northern coast of New Guinea, MacArthur needed to vault Krueger’s Alamo Force north into the Bismarck Archipelago. But to do that, MacArthur needed to rethink his invasion timetables, balancing meager resources against the challenge of seizing multiple objectives.

  After hours of tense discussion, it was clear that moving Krueger’s Alamo Force into the Admiralty Islands couldn’t be done. Every time a new schedule was proposed, Daniel Barbey shook his head, arguing that he had enough landing craft to move troops onto a single beach, but not for multiple landings. Kenney, too, was still short of air assets. MacArthur’s command also faced the problem Ghormley had faced back in New Caledonia: Over one hundred unloaded supply ships lay at anchor at Milne Bay. Supply chief Richard Marshall struggled to iron out these difficulties, and MacArthur set aside hours every day to review port data. He was also stymied by requirements that transports arriving in Australia be offloaded and returned stateside. At one point, to solve the problem, he simply instructed Marshall to expropriate the ships he needed, a brazen act of theft that brought howls from the War Department. But MacArthur had to tread lightly because the JCS could resolve his supply problems by simply ordering him to stop his offensive. So he demanded that his staff rethink their plans, using what resources they had to keep the enemy off balance. Finally, after hours of difficult debate, he announced that he was adjourning the meeting until the next morning. But on his way out the door, he exploded. “There are some people in Washington who would rather see MacArthur lose a battle than America win a war,” he said.

  By “some people in Washington,” Douglas MacArthur meant Ernie King. MacArthur blamed King for his shortfall in cruisers, destroyers, and landing craft; for his meager numbers of fighters, bombers, and transports; and for his constant struggle to find more soldiers. While MacArthur’s animus for King was well known, in this instance he was right—Ernie King was plotting against him. Back in August 1943, at the Allies’ Quadrant Meeting in Quebec, the Americans and the British had not only set a date for the invasion of France, but also approved King’s plea for increased resources for Chester Nimitz, who was beginning his island-hopping campaign across the Central Pacific. King had always viewed the Nimitz offensive as the key to Japan’s defeat—and George Marshall agreed. Which is why King now supported Marshall’s fight with the British for an invasion of France. At Quebec (with North Africa conquered, Stalin saved, and Sicily seized), King cashed in, supporting Marshall’s argument for a cross-channel invasion while Marshall supported him on Nimitz. As a result, not only was MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific command now last on the list of Allied priorities, but the list had actually grown. Worse yet, the Combined Chiefs agreed that spreading resources into England, Italy, Russia, Burma, and now the Central Pacific meant that MacArthur would have to scale back his Cartwheel plans. Rabaul, they determined, would not be conquered; it would be “bypassed.”

  The decision was a hammer-blow for MacArthur, who had spent weeks stooped over his maps searching for a way back to Manila. Even more worrisome was that the communiqué issued at the end of the Quebec conclave didn’t even mention the Philippines, a silence that MacArthur interpreted as a signal that it, too, might be bypassed, with King and Nimitz reaping the plaudits that were (as he thought) rightfully his. MacArthur was not alone in this view. The Australian press jumped on the news from Quebec, complaining that MacArthur was no more than a “garrison commander.” For many in Australia, the results of the Quebec conference smacked of another British-inspired plot. That view seeped into MacArthur’s command, as noted by Colonel William Ritchie, Marshall’s liaison in Brisbane. “In discussions with General MacArthur and Sutherland,” Ritchie informed Marshall, “it is quite evident that they sincerely feel that there is an intention on the part of the Combined Chiefs of Staff to pinch off the operations of the Southwest Pacific forces. . . . The principle basis for this belief seems to be the treatment of the Far East and Pacific war strategy by the British which they assume is inspired, together with certain rather devious Navy propaganda to the effect that this would be a naval show from New Guinea on.”

  In Washington, Marshall read the dispatch and decided that he was duty bound to defend his Quebec decisions even as he tried to calm MacArthur. Marshall’s October 2 cable to MacArthur is a masterly mix of hope and terse bluntness, defending the Nimitz decision while dangling the prospect of a Philippines operation. The Combined Chiefs had confirmed the seizure of “the Admiralty Islands, Bismarck Archipelago and the North coast of New Guinea,” Marshall told MacArthur, adding that “the next logical objective for the Southwest Pacific Forces is the seizure of Mindanao.” But this was only partly true. For while he dangled Mindanao as the “next logical objective,” Marshall put MacArthur on notice that the JCS believed that the best way to defeat Japan was by supporting Nimitz’s Central Pacific campaign. “Our rapid expansion and immediate availability of naval surface forces including carriers is giving us a decided advantage in naval strength,” he said. “Not to make full use of this would be a serious error.” Back in Brisbane, MacArthur mulled over what Marshall said and, for once, didn’t respond. Instead, he and Sutherland made life as
difficult as they could for the navy. Sutherland kept naval officers visiting MacArthur cooling their heels, while MacArthur waged a campaign to replace Admiral Arthur Carpender, the commander of his naval forces.

  Carpender was a thoughtful and articulate officer, but the ambiguous command arrangements (he received his evaluations from King) put him in an impossible situation. Nimitz was hardly an innocent player in this tussle, pointedly issuing Carpender orders without informing MacArthur. The sniping between MacArthur and Nimitz was bound to break into the open, and it did in October, when Kenney confronted Carpender over control of naval air assets. Kenney argued that navy fliers should be under his, Kenney’s, control, while Carpender sided with Nimitz: These were navy fliers, he argued, and Kenney was an army air force officer. If Nimitz’s purpose was to enrage MacArthur, he succeeded, but the victim wasn’t MacArthur. It was Carpender. After MacArthur’s second complaint against Carpender, King ordered the naval commander back to Washington and replaced him with Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, a hero of the Guadalcanal campaign. But although King intended to dampen his disagreements with MacArthur, he had failed to tell him of the change, thus sparking yet another skirmish. Surprisingly, King backed down, telling Marshall that as Kinkaid’s assignment was not yet official, he was willing to change his mind. Marshall, relieved, cabled MacArthur: Was Kinkaid acceptable? MacArthur, satisfied, agreed, and Marshall followed up with a message praising the appointment. “Kinkaid has performed outstanding service against the Japs,” he wrote. “[H]is relations have been particularly efficient and happy with Army commanders.”