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

by Perry, Mark

  But MacArthur had the last word. As he had done at Los Negros, he dismissed the dissenters, rehabilitated the talented Fellers, asked Kenney whether his air force was up to the task (“Sure,” Kenney said), told Kinkaid to prepare his navy for the push, and pressed Barbey to move his amphibious fleet up the coast. MacArthur’s plan was unprecedented—he was using an entire army as a mobile force, a “reckless” move. The move was instinctive, but based on sound intelligence. In the weeks leading up to the operation, MacArthur culled through Japanese radio intercepts and concluded that the Japanese were defending Wewak and leaving Hollandia open. But this time, MacArthur, who usually left the details of an operation to his combat commanders, took the reins in his hands. He briefed battalion and company commanders, oversaw Barbey’s plan to seize Hollandia’s beaches, and reviewed the details of the air campaign with Kenney.

  In preparation for the Hollandia landings, Kenney ordered the Fifth Air Force to launch a series of massed raids on three Japanese airfields near the port. While the Fifth’s fliers had already scored notable successes against Japanese fliers, the hodgepodge of B-24s, B-25s, P-38s, P-39s, and A-20s remained vulnerable to Japan’s more maneuverable Zeros. Kenney also worried that his P-38s didn’t have the range to reach the Japanese airfields, so he spent more than a week modifying his plane’s fuel tanks. Adding range meant adding weight, which inhibited their maneuverability. This was a risk, but it paid off: A March 30 mission against the Hollandia airfields caught the Japanese 6th Air Division flat-footed, destroying over ninety aircraft on the ground. A second raid the next afternoon netted nearly one hundred more. Follow-on raids, which engaged Kenney’s fliers in fierce air battles with the Japanese, further reduced Japan’s air command of New Guinea.

  Operation Reckless represented the largest invasion force yet put together by MacArthur, with three separate convoys rendezvousing near the Admiralties, then swinging southwest for Hollandia. On the morning of April 22, Eichelberger’s troops came ashore in successive waves at three locations: at Tanahmerah, at Humboldt Bay, and then further east, at Aitape. Hollandia was seized within twenty-four hours, with its three airfields under American control by April 27. The operation cost 157 American lives, while the Japanese, caught by surprise, lost 3,300. MacArthur claimed victory even before Hollandia’s seizure, issuing a communiqué commending his troops from the bridge of the USS Nashville before going ashore with Eichelberger and Krueger. Back aboard the Nashville three hours later, the Southwest Pacific commander celebrated with a chocolate ice cream soda (he couldn’t finish it, so passed it to Eichelberger), then ordered the Nashville to Tanahmerah Bay, where he again toured the beach. “The sun poured down mercilessly,” Eichelberger wrote, “and my uniform was soggy and dark with wetness.” MacArthur, he added, seemed not to sweat at all.

  But not everything went according to plan. In the midst of building Hollandia into a major base, Hugh Casey’s engineers reported that it would take time for them to build a bomber base there because of the region’s soft soil. MacArthur shrugged off Casey’s concerns and again accelerated his operations, ordering the 41st Division to storm Wakde Island and seize Sarmi, 140 miles northwest of Hollandia on New Guinea’s northwestern coast. It was another difficult assignment, with the Japanese 36th Division entrenched in a region that was, according to Kenney, “fuller of Nips and supplies than a mangy dog with fleas.” Hearing this, MacArthur called off the Sarmi operation, but substituted instead a landing at Toem on New Guinea’s northern shore and at nearby Wakde Island. Brigadier General Jens Doe was given the assignment of taking the 103rd Regimental Combat Team (RCT) into Toem, while the 163rd RCT came ashore at Wakde. MacArthur then ordered Major General Horace Fuller’s 41st Division from Hollandia to Biak, an island that guarded the entrance to Geelvink Bay. Taking Biak, MacArthur calculated, would pull Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s First Mobile Fleet south from Peleliu, out of the path of Nimitz’s oncoming carriers. In effect, the 41st Division was to serve as bait for Ozawa’s fleet, which would be destroyed by Kenney’s and Twining’s bombers as it sailed to confront MacArthur.

  The Japanese responded to MacArthur’s offensive by rushing reinforcements to New Guinea and mounting a series of counterstrikes at Toem, Wakde, and Biak. The fight for Toem, a small village near strategic Cape Maffin, began soon after the 103rd RCT came ashore on May 15, along a series of low hills across the nearby Tor River. On May 21, MacArthur reinforced the 103rd with the 158th RCT, which arrived with four Sherman tanks. The 158th’s commander, Brigadier General Edmund Patrick, ordered his men across the Tor River to the west of Toem on the twenty-first, but they ran into Japanese who were dug into a series of bunkers, pillboxes, and caves along the central prominence—the 165-foot Lone Tree Hill. Fighting raged there for five days, with the Japanese defending the hill with a suicidal fury. A crushing artillery barrage on the twenty-fifth scattered the enemy’s first line of defense. Patrick’s men thought they had taken the hill on the morning of the twenty-seventh, but the Japanese sprung an ambush and the fighting turned desperate. The 158th’s response was to withdraw until reinforcements could come ashore. The problem was that the 158th was operating on bad intelligence. Initially, it was believed there were few Japanese at Toem, but those numbers were soon revised upward, to sixty-five hundred. In fact, there were upward of eleven thousand men of the 222nd and 224th Infantry around Toem, and it took most of May to dislodge them. It was not until September that the region was cleared.

  The fight for Wakde—an island nine thousand feet long and three thousand feet wide—was not nearly as bloody. Kenney’s fliers softened up the landing zones on May 17, aided by Kinkaid’s fleet. The first of five amphibious waves took heavy fire from the beaches when they waded ashore on the eighteenth and were pinned down until Barbey’s engineers reinforced them with two tanks. Wakde’s valuable airstrip was overrun that afternoon, and by 2 p.m., all Japanese resistance had ended. Within days, a new airfield was in operation, at a cost of forty dead Americans. MacArthur desperately needed the airfield to support operations on Biak, which proved to be one of his bloodier battles. Biak, an oddly shaped seventy-mile-long scrub-covered island north of Geelvink Bay, supported three airfields and was heavily defended. But as at Toem, MacArthur’s intelligence staff underestimated the size of Japanese defenses, which were manned by three thousand soldiers of the 222nd Imperial Infantry Regiment, fifteen hundred men of the 28th Special Naval Landing Force, a battalion of light tanks, two heavy artillery battalions, and several thousand combat support troops. The Japanese commander, Colonel Naoyuku Kazume, was a talented officer who laid out his defenses along a ridgeline above the island’s southern landing zones.

  The invasion of Biak was led by two regiments of Major General Horace Fuller’s 41st Infantry Division. The 186th Regiment came ashore in four waves on May 27, followed by artillery, tanks, and support fire from three light cruisers and twenty-one destroyers and supported by attacks by B-24s from Twining’s Thirteenth Air Force. The 162nd Regiment followed. Fuller, who harbored uneasy feelings about Biak, was nevertheless pleased when reports showed his regiments moving inland. One day later, in a reprise of his early Buna communiqués, MacArthur praised Fuller and announced “the practical end of the New Guinea campaign.” That same day, the Japanese struck, bloodying the 162nd with devastating small-unit attacks and bracketing Fuller’s follow-on landings with disciplined artillery fire. On the twenty-eighth, the Japanese cut off the 186th Regiment from Biak’s airfields, funneling the regiment’s lead elements into narrow defiles where they were slaughtered. The Japanese attacked in force on the twenty-ninth, deploying four tanks against the Americans. The fight for Biak’s ridges continued for four days, with Fuller’s artillery pummeling Kazume’s defenders, with the 121st Field Artillery pouring two thousand rounds into Japanese positions on a single day.

  Senior Japanese commanders in New Guinea worked to exploit the Biak success. The Japanese high command planned to reinforce Kazume with the 35th Division (in Operati
on KON), but was forced to divert its forces (in Operation A-GO) to meet the threat of Nimitz, who was moving into the western Pacific, skirting to the north of the Mariana Islands and threatening the Philippines. MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s grand plan worked: A-GO meant that Kazume would not be reinforced, while KON diverted vital air resources for Japan’s naval battle in the Marianas. In modern parlance, MacArthur dodged a bullet—if KON had gone forward, or if Japan’s 1st Air Fleet (tied down by Nimitz) had supported Kazume, the Americans would have lost Biak. As it turned out, the Japanese failed on both fronts. The American force on “Bloody Biak” survived, while Raymond Spruance’s and Marc Mitscher’s four carrier groups scored the most decisive victory in American naval history. The Battle of the Philippine Sea, also known as “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” resulted in the loss of three Japanese aircraft carriers and 433 of their aircraft.

  The murderous battle for Biak raged into June, embarrassing MacArthur, who was unable to send his bombers north to help Nimitz. MacArthur picked at Krueger. “The situation at Biak,” he radioed, “is unsatisfactory. The strategic purpose of the operation is being jeopardized by the failure to establish without delay an operating field for aircraft.” Stung by the words, Krueger replaced Fuller with Eichelberger. Fuller was more than ready to cede command. He was fed up with Krueger, who had ignored his pleas for reinforcements. “He says he does not intend to serve under a certain man (Walter) again if he has to submit his resignation every half hour by wire,” Eichelberger gleefully wrote to his wife. Eichelberger came ashore at Biak and did what he had done at Buna, ordering his men to reduce the Japanese positions one by one, rooting out Kazume’s defenders from their ridges and pillboxes soldier by soldier. In his last act, Kazume burned his regimental colors and committed hara-kiri. The battle’s final act was carried out in mid-July by the Japanese against the American line, which was laid out along the Driniumoor River just east of Aitape. Desperate to score a victory against his American antagonist, Lieutenant General Hadacho Adachi ordered two of his divisions in an all-out attack, which cost him ten thousand of his soldiers. By the end of July, Adachi’s command was streaming westward, a broken remnant of what was once a force of eighteen thousand soldiers.

  In the summer of 1944, MacArthur moved to Hollandia, putting his headquarters atop Engineer’s Hill. In the near distance loomed the picturesque Cyclops Mountains. Correspondents dubbed MacArthur’s home the “White House of the South Pacific”—a not-so-subtle dig at MacArthur’s political hopes—but it was actually constructed of three prefabricated houses and cobbled together by army engineers. Jean poked fun at him about the stories: “When I go to Manila,” she told him in Brisbane, “I want you to fix it so I can stop off at Hollandia. I want to see that mansion you built there—the one where I’m supposed to have been living in luxury.” Sir Boss was not amused.

  MacArthur spent the early summer of 1944 reorganizing his command. He established a new Eighth Army commanded by Eichelberger, and formed the Far Eastern Air Force, with Kenney as its head. Ennis Whitehead was promoted to Kenney’s slot as commander of the Fifth Air Force. Charles Lindbergh, the famed flier and controversial isolationist, arrived in Brisbane in July, helped Kenney extend the range of his P-38s, then flew one of them on an unauthorized combat mission. All of this was eclipsed by news that the Republicans had nominated New York Republican governor Thomas Dewey as their standard-bearer. MacArthur was disappointed but not surprised, as the nail in his political coffin had been hammered home by Nebraska Republican congressman A. L. Miller, a prominent member of the MacArthur for President Committee who had written to him about how the Roosevelt presidency “doomed” the United States. After responding in an ill-advised note that expanded on Miller’s views, MacArthur was embarrassed when Miller released the letter to the press, in April 1944. MacArthur blamed Miller, saying the letter was “not for publication.” Senator Arthur Vandenberg, MacArthur’s powerful patron, let out a sigh that might have been heard all the way to Hollandia—if MacArthur had never written the letter, he wouldn’t have been embarrassed, the senator said. Roosevelt must have been pleased, for he never had to lift a finger: Douglas MacArthur had defeated himself. Finally, MacArthur bowed to the inevitable, and in early June, he pulled his name out of contention. “I request that no action be taken that would link my name in any way with the nomination,” he said in a simple statement. “I do not covet it, nor would I accept it.”

  With his political future now decided, MacArthur focused on the planning for a Philippines invasion. On June 12, the members of the JCS notified MacArthur and Nimitz that they wanted their “views and recommendations” on the next steps in “expediting the Pacific campaign” and provided three options—“advancing the target dates for operations now scheduled through operations against Formosa,” “by-passing presently selected objectives prior to operations against Formosa,” and “by-passing presently selected objectives and choosing a new objective, including Japan proper.” MacArthur responded three days later. “It is my most earnest conviction that the proposal to bypass the Philippines and launch an attack across the Pacific against Formosa is unsound,” he said. He was exasperated. “The Philippines is American territory,” he wrote, “where our unsupported forces were destroyed by the enemy. Practically all of the 17,000,000 Filipinos remain loyal to the United States and are undergoing the greatest privation and suffering because we have not been able to support or succor them. We have a great national obligation to discharge.” Marshall disagreed. A battle for the Philippines would be costly, he told MacArthur, adding that the airfields MacArthur proposed capturing were available further north—in Formosa. “We must be careful not to allow our personal feelings and Philippine political considerations to override our great objective,” he warned.

  What is perhaps most surprising about MacArthur’s views is that nearly every navy commander in the Pacific agreed with him. Bill Halsey was particularly outspoken: The United States should invade the Philippines, then Okinawa, and then the Japanese homeland, he said. Admiral Ray Spruance agreed: Nimitz’s seizure of the Marianas was important, but better air bases were available on Luzon. Nimitz was also inclined to agree, and when Ernie King visited Nimitz’s command in early July, the two toured a number of Marine battlefields, then talked at length about Nimitz’s next moves. King was still adamantly opposed to a MacArthur-led Philippines invasion, angrily snapping at Nimitz subordinates who disagreed. One of these was Rear Admiral Robert Carney, a brainy Annapolis graduate and future chief of naval operations. Carney’s defense of MacArthur sparked an angry response from King. “Do you want to make a London out of Manila?” King asked. “No sir,” Carney replied. “I want to make an England out of Luzon.” King sensed that Halsey, Spruance, and Carney had more influence with Nimitz than he did and that his power over the Pacific War was waning. Over a period of two days, he argued his point while nursing a quiet rage against Nimitz.

  But worse was yet to come: When King learned that Roosevelt had decided to come to Hawaii for a meeting with Nimitz and MacArthur (to which he was not invited), he exploded. Roosevelt’s journey was a campaign stunt, he said. “He had to show the voters he was commander in chief.” MacArthur agreed. When, on July 23, he received a cable from Marshall directing him to meet the president in Hawaii, he told his staff that the conference with Roosevelt was simply a show put on by the president to gain votes. The Southwest Pacific commander would continue to mutter about the “political picture-taking junket” aboard the Bataan as it winged its way toward Honolulu.

  When MacArthur arrived in Hawaii on July 26, he was driven to the home of General Robert Richardson, an old friend. That afternoon, Roosevelt had arrived and was holding a reception for a select group of commanders aboard the USS Baltimore, which had brought the president to Hawaii from San Francisco. MacArthur was purposely late—and conspicuous by his absence. Aboard the Baltimore, Roosevelt sat shaking hands with the brass and smiling broadly, but as the minutes ticked by, everyone
wondered where MacArthur was. Roosevelt speechwriter Samuel Rosenman recounted what happened next:

  Just as we were getting ready to go below, a terrific automobile siren was heard, and there raced onto the dock and screeched to a stop a motorcycle escort and the longest open car I have ever seen. In the front was a chauffeur in khaki, and in the back one long figure—MacArthur. . . . The car traveled some distance around the open space and stopped at the gangplank. When the applause died down, the General strode rapidly to the gangplank all alone. He dashed up the gangplank, stopped halfway up to acknowledge another ovation, and soon was on deck greeting the president. He certainly could be dramatic—at dramatic moments.

  Roosevelt smiled and extended his hand. “Hello, Doug,” he said.

  There have been few meetings between a president and a military commander in U.S. history as crucial as the one that took place between Franklin Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur in July 1944. And despite MacArthur’s and King’s objections, no meeting was more necessary. The JCS had failed to resolve the key issues of the war against Japan: where its last campaigns would be fought and who would command them. Only Roosevelt could do that. The day after Roosevelt and MacArthur arrived in Hawaii, the two toured military installations, with Nimitz squeezed between them in the back seat of a convertible. MacArthur remembered the day lyrically—how the two had “talked of everything but the war—of our old carefree days when life was simpler and gentler, of many things that had disappeared in the mists of time.” The language was sentimental, but MacArthur meant it. Both men were older now and had spent much of their public lives together. Nimitz remained silent, taking it all in. That night, Roosevelt hosted a dinner for MacArthur, Nimitz, Halsey, and William Leahy, who had come with Roosevelt from Washington. After the dinner, Roosevelt moved into a nearby conference room, picked up a pointer, and slapped it on a map of the Pacific. “Well, Doug,” he asked, “where do we go from here?”