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

by Perry, Mark

  MacArthur rose from his seat and walked to the front of the room. “Mindanao, Mr. President,” he said, “then Leyte—then Luzon.” MacArthur faced the room and detailed his plans at length, ending by noting that he viewed the liberation of the Philippines as “a moral obligation.” This last comment, with each word said for emphasis, was particularly pointed. The Filipinos had been betrayed by the American surrender in 1942, MacArthur said, and they were starving. “They look on America as their mother country,” he said, and—after a dramatic pause—added, “Promises must be kept.” Roosevelt said nothing, betrayed no emotion, and needed little reminder of what he, and Stimson, had told Manuel Quezón back in early 1942: “So long as the flag of the United States flies on Filipino soil as a pledge of our duty to your people, it will be defended by our own men to the death. Whatever happens to [the] present American garrison, we shall not relax our efforts until the forces which are now marshaling outside the Philippines return to the Philippines and drive out the last remnant of the invaders from your soil.”

  MacArthur then dived in, raising his voice, looking directly at the president, and lecturing him. America had made a promise and MacArthur had made a promise—but so had Roosevelt. A long silence then followed before Roosevelt spoke. He ignored MacArthur’s political plea, focusing instead on the cost of a Philippines operation. “Douglas,” he said, “to take Luzon would demand heavier losses than we can stand.” MacArthur disagreed: “Mr. President, my losses would not be heavy, anymore than they would have been in the past. The days of the frontal attack are over. Modern infantry weapons are too deadly, and frontal assault is only for mediocre commanders. Good commanders do not turn in heavy losses.”

  Nimitz spoke after MacArthur. A man given to succinct statements, he detailed the step-by-step strategy he would use to defeat the Japanese. Nimitz’s workmanlike approach was effective, and Roosevelt leaned forward to listen. The session broke up at midnight, but during the meeting, MacArthur had extended an unusual peace offering. “I spoke of my esteem for Admiral King and his wise estimate of the importance of the Pacific as a major element in the global picture,” he later wrote, “however I might disagree with some of his strategic concepts.” This seemed an odd comment, though an admission that Nimitz’s aircraft had been essential in his operations, and it struck a tone of interservice amity not often heard during the war. Or perhaps MacArthur realized he could now afford to be expansive, for Nimitz seemed to be arguing King’s case, and not his own. Under questioning from Roosevelt, Nimitz had conceded two important points: The navy could use Manila’s harbor, and Formosa would be more easily seized if he was supported by MacArthur’s bombers on Luzon. That night, an exhausted Roosevelt spoke to his doctor, Ross McIntire. “Give me an aspirin before I go to bed,” he told him. “In fact, give me another aspirin to take in the morning. In all my life nobody has ever talked to me the way MacArthur did.”

  Two more sessions were held the next day, with Roosevelt posing a series of questions. Leahy was pleasantly surprised by the MacArthur-Nimitz friendship, which had been cemented by their earlier meeting. “Both told the President they had what they needed, that they were not asking for anything, and that they would work together in full agreement toward the common end of defeating Japan,” he later wrote. That afternoon, MacArthur accompanied Roosevelt for a ride through downtown Honolulu. The conversation was private, but Leahy overheard a part of it, which included a discussion of Roosevelt’s campaign against New York’s Thomas Dewey. What were Dewey’s chances? MacArthur asked. Roosevelt responded that he, Roosevelt, had been too busy to deal in politics, which brought an open laugh from MacArthur. Roosevelt shot him a disapproving glance, but then he laughed too. “Dewey is a nice little man,” Roosevelt said, “but inexperienced.” In fact, Roosevelt hated Dewey and told MacArthur he would crush the Republican in November. Roosevelt then asked MacArthur for his views on the election. The Southwest Pacific commander said that he “knew nothing of the political situation in the United States, but that he, Roosevelt, was an overwhelming favorite with the troops.” Roosevelt tipped his head back and flashed a broad smile. At one point during the tour, MacArthur peered intently yet again at the president, telling him that bypassing Luzon would arouse the American people to such a degree that “they would register most complete resentment against you at the polls this fall.” Roosevelt didn’t respond.

  After leaving Honolulu, MacArthur decided to meet his staff in Brisbane, where he assured them that he had won the Honolulu argument. One account has him telling them that Roosevelt had reassured him that he wouldn’t bypass the Philippines. “Carry on your existing plans,” he quoted Roosevelt as saying. “And may God protect you.” A second account has Roosevelt eyeing MacArthur in private, out of earshot of Nimitz. “Okay, Douglas, you win,” he reportedly said. Yet a third account, by William Leahy, has Roosevelt leaning over to MacArthur during their tour of Honolulu and saying, “I’ll go along with you, Douglas.” None of these accounts is authoritative, and each is colored by recollections faded by time. What can be confirmed is that while MacArthur believed he had convinced Roosevelt that the Philippines should be “redeemed,” MacArthur told Eichelberger in Brisbane that “the question of whether or not the route will be by Luzon or Formosa has not yet been settled in Washington.” We’ll never know when or why—or actually if—Roosevelt made a decision, but it seems unlikely he was persuaded by MacArthur’s argument that a wrong decision could cost him votes. Roosevelt was a master politician and had already made that calculation. In the end, the JCS made the decision, not Roosevelt. The chiefs debated the Luzon-Formosa question throughout August and into early September before concluding that invading Leyte prior to a landing in Luzon could take place sooner than Nimitz’s conquest of Formosa. In the end, this decided the issue: The Japanese must be given no rest.

  For MacArthur, this last meeting with his old adversary was almost poignant, for while they had been competitors, they more often found themselves working together. Although Roosevelt had once described MacArthur as the most dangerous man in America, the general seemed much less so now. MacArthur, on the other hand, was envious of Roosevelt’s success and had once told a subordinate that he “hated” the president—but that seems hardly true. Those who saw them in Honolulu were struck by how comfortable they were together. Looking back on the relationship years later, MacArthur highlighted his political disagreements with Roosevelt while admitting that the president had always been fair. This note of regret and accommodation crept into what MacArthur told his staff about Roosevelt after his return from the Honolulu conference. Roosevelt looked tired, MacArthur said, and “the shell of the man I had known.” MacArthur shook his head and left unsaid what he meant: Franklin Roosevelt—his political enemy, his sometime friend, his competitor, and his commander in chief—was dying.

  CHAPTER 13

  Leyte

  People of the Philippines, I have returned.

  —Douglas MacArthur

  On July 30, 1944, the day that Douglas MacArthur returned to his headquarters from Honolulu, Allied troops had been ashore in France for fifty-four days. On the Eastern Front, the Red Army had nearly completed Operation Bagration, whose goal was the destruction of Hitler’s Army Group Centre. East Prussia beckoned. Eisenhower’s Allied army and Georgy Zhukov’s Soviet formations were almost precisely fourteen hundred miles apart. In Italy, Mussolini had been overthrown and Rome captured, while Mark Clark’s Allied army continued its bitter slugfest with the Germans along the Arno River. The air over Europe was filled with Allied bombers; though the Normandy invasion had diverted them from their primary mission of attacking German urban areas, they would return in September, with nearly round-the-clock strategic bombing that set Germany’s cities ablaze.

  In the Central Pacific, the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions and the 27th Infantry Division came ashore on Saipan in early June, then fought through five weeks of relentless combat before defeating Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito’s 43rd
Division. The battle annihilated the 43rd, costing the Japanese 30,000 soldiers and the Americans 2,949. Four months later, American B-29s lifted off from Saipan to begin the bombing of Japan. The air campaign brought the war to new heights of cruelty, as America’s air armadas burned Japan’s cities. In Tokyo, after a fortnight of debate, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo stepped aside, evidence of a badly shaken Japanese leadership. He was succeeded by Kuniaki Koiso, an ultranationalist who stood uneasily between the military’s prowar lobby and an emerging antiwar current. Yet, despite these setbacks, neither the Germans nor the Japanese believed that their defeat was inevitable, just as the United States and its allies didn’t believe their victory was assured. What seems obvious to us now, that the Allies would win, was not so obvious then. And so the war went on.

  The MacArthur-Nimitz competition in the Pacific is one of the fascinating stories of World War Two. But not only did the feud fail to paralyze America’s ability to wage war, it actually promoted strategic flexibility. Furthermore, although army generals and navy admirals were inordinately proud of their services, the pride never overrode their love of country. The same was not true for Japan, where the army’s relationship with the navy was much like the relationship between mafia families: There was arms-length cooperation, interrupted by brief periods of enervating political infighting. An ultranationalist army clique had started Japan’s war in China—a war whose prosecution militarized nearly every aspect of Japanese life. Endless studies of how and why this happened have occupied scholars for decades, but a compelling case can be made that army extremists precipitated the conflict to gain ascendance in the Japanese government over the influential Imperial Japanese Navy.

  In the United States, the war forced interservice cooperation, whereas in Japan, it deepened service rivalries. Not wishing to lose prestige to the army, the Imperial Japanese Navy downplayed the damage of its defeat at Midway and hid its losses from senior army officers. It was perhaps for this reason that at Guadalcanal, the navy failed to inform the army of the size of the American force on the island, then underestimated the U.S. ability to resupply those forces. As a result, the Japanese mounted bloody offensives against the Marines without adequate air support, and when this didn’t work, Japanese army commanders (fearing a loss of prestige to the navy) ordered their men forward anyway. When, finally, the Japanese high command ordered Guadalcanal abandoned, it could not do so openly, because the emperor had ordered the island held.

  How could this have happened? Initially at least, the earliest victories of the Pacific War served as an opiate for the Japanese high command, but after these first triumphs, neither army nor navy leaders knew what would come next. Just as the Japanese had shifted resources from New Guinea to the Solomons and back again, so too—throughout the war—they shifted resources from China to the Pacific, but always too late. By mid-1944, the Japanese had transferred five of their China divisions to the Pacific, but without turning the tide against the Americans. There was no binding overall strategy. The situation was different for the United States and its allies. In the immediate aftermath of World War One, Major General Fox Conner—the most influential of a group of army strategic thinkers—had tutored Dwight Eisenhower on the three pillars of American warfare: Never fight unless you have to, never fight alone, and never fight for long. The United States followed Conner’s principles in World War Two: The nation went to war because it had to, prosecuted it by forming a coalition of like-minded nations, and then worked to end it as quickly as possible. Japan didn’t follow those principles. The Japanese chose war, fought it alone, and implemented strategies to prolong it.

  By 1943, senior Japanese officers doubted that the war could be won, but hoped that at some point, a series of favorable events would result in a setback so serious that the Americans would seek a political solution. Other Japanese officers, however, had given up. One of these was Lieutenant General Shigenori Kuroda, who was dismissed from his post in Manila after a commission sent from Tokyo determined that he was “devoting more time to his golf, reading and personal matters than to the execution of his official duties.” General Yamashita took command from Kuroda in September 1944, but soon realized that his predecessor had reason to be demoralized. Although Kuroda had commanded the 14th Area Army—with ten army divisions, five brigades, and two air divisions—his forces were unprepared and understrength. The plan to defend the Philippines called for the transfer from China of an additional army division plus two brigades when an invasion was imminent. An air armada would interdict the invading flotilla, Tokyo said, while reinforcements gathered to destroy the invaders. Kuroda scoffed. “Words alone will not sink American ships and that becomes clear when you compare our airplanes with theirs,” he said. “That is why the major battles have been occurring on land. We can say that the power of our air force is negligible at this time.” Kuroda noted that new air bases had been built at Davao (on Mindanao) and Tacloban (on Leyte). This was a waste of time, Kuroda said, as there were no fighters to put on them. “It amounts to construction for the use of the enemy,” he argued.

  Yamashita sympathized with Kuroda, not least because the reinforcements that Tokyo planned to send to the Philippines seemed unlikely to arrive. They were busy in China, where the fighting had escalated. Back in April, the Japanese had launched Operation Ichi-Go (Operation Number One), sending its Kwangtung Army south into Henan, Hunan, and Guangxi provinces to deny the Americans access to airbases from which to strike Japan. Ichi-Go was one of the largest operations of the war, involving some 380,000 men in seventeen divisions. By early September, the Kwangtung Army was overrunning airbases in Southeast China, forcing the Americans to move their air operations further west, out of reach of Japan’s cities. But the victories were actually bad news for Yamashita because the loss of airbases in China put the Philippines next on the list of American war priorities. Now, the Americans had to invade the Philippines, as they needed the airbases there. Japan’s victory in China, Yamashita reflected, meant its defeat in the Philippines.

  On August 1, 1944, Manuel Quezón died at Saranac Lake in Upstate New York. MacArthur paid him homage: “President Quezon’s death will be a great shock to the people of the Philippines, who so keenly anticipated his return to Manila. . . . I mourn him.” In the wake of Quezón’s death, MacArthur invited the Philippine president’s successor, Sergio Osmeña, to his Brisbane headquarters. The two had never gotten along, for Osmeña had opposed MacArthur’s effort to enlarge the Philippine military, but both men were willing to forget the past, particularly now that MacArthur was on Manila’s doorstep. Once again, however, Harold Ickes (still in charge at the Interior Department) proved meddlesome. After Quezón’s death, Ickes recommended that Roosevelt appoint a new high commissioner for the islands and that Osmeña postpone his reunion with MacArthur. He added that he, Ickes, should be personally responsible for determining the loyalty of Filipinos who had remained in the islands after their conquest. MacArthur was enraged. Ickes, he said, thought of the Philippines as “another one of his national parks.” Hounded by the venomous Ickes throughout his career, MacArthur now put him in his sights and asked Roosevelt to intervene. In previous years, Roosevelt had gingerly mediated Ickes’s disputes with MacArthur, but now, in the wake of Honolulu, the president acted decisively: Ickes was to stay out of Philippine affairs, Roosevelt said, and let MacArthur handle them.

  After his dustup with Ickes, the Southwest Pacific commander showed a renewed sensitivity to the plight of Americans imprisoned in the Pacific. While the Japanese sent U.S. commanders (like Jonathan Wainwright) north to Korea, out of the reach of the American military, they could not do the same for those held in the Southwest Pacific. More than thirty thousand Dutch, British, Australian, and American soldiers were being held in occupied areas of Borneo, Sumatra, West Java, and the Celebes, and thousands more were detained in rear areas bypassed by MacArthur’s command. Since 1942, a slow trickle of these prisoners had made their escape from captivity, been brought south,
and told their harrowing stories to the commander. With an end to the war still a distant prospect, MacArthur was determined to rescue as many prisoners as possible. But since doing so would involve siphoning troops from more strategically important areas, MacArthur assigned Australian units to a series of operations against Japanese forces still ensconced in the northern Solomons, New Guinea, and Bougainville.

  Australian commander General Thomas Blamey had hoped that his troops would have a larger role, which included the use of two of his divisions in the Philippines invasion, but the Australian government had barred the deployment of its soldiers outside the Southwest Pacific theater. Blamey was embarrassed by this limitation but could do little to change it. MacArthur salved him by keeping the Australians out of the Philippines fracas while directing that Australian troops be given “the responsibility for the continued neutralization in Australian and British territory and mandates in the SWPA.” In so doing, however, MacArthur opened himself to criticism that he was expending Aussie lives in unnecessary operations. But the deed was done, and the ties that bound MacArthur to Blamey were ended. On September 25, Alamo Force was dissolved, and in its place MacArthur recast his command, which now contained two armies (the Sixth and Eighth) and fourteen divisions—and no Australians.