by Perry, Mark
As MacArthur perfected his Philippine plans in Brisbane, Franklin Roosevelt issued a series of unusually warm personal endorsements of the commander. During a mid-August radio address, he praised “my old friend General MacArthur” and summarized their successful conference in Hawaii. The message was unmistakable: Roosevelt’s “old friend” was on the job in the Pacific, and the two of them, the New Dealer Roosevelt and the Republican MacArthur, were plotting Japan’s defeat. For his part, MacArthur remained silent on any disagreements he had had with Roosevelt. The American press guessed that MacArthur’s sudden reticence resulted from an agreement the general had made with the president in Honolulu: Roosevelt would publicly applaud MacArthur, while MacArthur’s communiqués would portray the war as going well. The plan was mutually beneficial, ensuring MacArthur’s return to his penthouse in Manila and Roosevelt’s return to the Oval Office.
The agreement was on display when Roosevelt arrived in Quebec City for the Allied Octagon Conference in mid-September 1944. After a preliminary meeting with the JCS, Roosevelt cabled MacArthur that he was working to gain the Joint Chiefs’ approval for a Philippines operation. “I wish you were here because you know so much of what we are talking about in regard to the plans of the British in the Southwest Pacific,” he said. “In regard to our own force, the situation is just as we left it at Hawaii though there seem to be efforts to do bypassing which you would not like. I still have the situation in hand.” This was a 13,000-mile wink, for although Roosevelt had once told his advisor Rexford Tugwell that he would “tame” MacArthur, the SWPA commander had, it seems, tamed him.
Roosevelt was now MacArthur’s lead advocate. Of course, the president could have simply ordered his military commanders to approve MacArthur’s Philippines offensive, but he didn’t need to. For when Roosevelt said he had “the situation in hand,” he meant that George Marshall had come around to MacArthur’s point of view. An invasion of Leyte, Marshall now believed, might not be as costly as the navy had once argued. Yet, it was neither Roosevelt nor Marshall who finally tipped the balance, but Bill Halsey and Raymond Spruance. Having weighed in with Nimitz on the Philippine question back in July, the two now launched a campaign on behalf of a Philippines invasion, with Spruance in the lead.
As the Quebec Conference got under way, Spruance turned over temporary command of the Fifth Fleet to Halsey (it then became the Third Fleet) and returned to Pearl Harbor, where he met with Chester Nimitz.
“The next operation is going to be Formosa and Amoy,” Nimitz told him. “You just hop a plane, go back to California to see your family, and be back here in a couple of weeks.”
Spruance hesitated. “I don’t like Formosa,” he said.
Nimitz was surprised. “What would you rather do?” he asked.
Spruance didn’t hesitate. “I would prefer taking Iwo Jima and Okinawa,” he said. With eastern China overrun by the Japanese, he said, fighters could escort bombers over Japan from Iwo Jima, while ships headed south from Japan could be intercepted from Okinawa. Aircraft from Luzon, he added, would be a welcome addition.
“Well,” Nimitz said, “it’s going to be Formosa.”
Spruance remained silent, but he didn’t order his staff to make plans for Formosa’s invasion, because he didn’t believe it would ever happen.
That same day, “Bull” Halsey radioed Nimitz from the Enterprise. His carrier fighters, he said, had returned from raids over the central Philippines. A few Japanese fighters had gotten into the air to oppose them, but that was all. Not only were the Philippines “wide open,” but one of his few downed pilots, rescued by a group of Filipinos, had told him that there were “no Japanese on Leyte.” Halsey recommended that the stepping-stone approach to Leyte through the Palaus, Mindanao, and Yap be abandoned and that the JCS approve an accelerated Leyte operation. Nimitz immediately radioed the JCS in Quebec to promote the Spruance-Halsey plan, adding that MacArthur could make use of his Third Amphibious Force and the army’s XXIV Corps for the Leyte invasion. In Quebec City, the JCS forwarded Nimitz’s proposal to George Marshall, recommending that the Southwest Pacific commander invade Leyte on October 20—what was called Operation King II. For Marshall, Nimitz’s views reflected an iron logic: MacArthur and Halsey had worked well together in the Southwest Pacific and could team up now for the invasion of Leyte.
At MacArthur’s headquarters in Hollandia, Richard Sutherland received word of the decision in a cable from Nimitz, who asked whether MacArthur approved of the new schedule. Sutherland was in a quandary. MacArthur was hundreds of miles to the north aboard the Nashville, headed to the island of Morotai and observing radio silence. Sutherland called in his senior staff, gave them the Nimitz proposal, and then cabled MacArthur’s acceptance to Marshall: “I am prepared to move immediately to execution of King II with target date October 20th.” Several hours later, Nimitz radioed his support: “Delighted to assist you in your return to the Philippines. This is your show and I stand ready to help you any way practicable to make it a complete success.”
Two days later, MacArthur returned to Brisbane, and announced that he was “completely satisfied” with Sutherland’s decision. The same day, the commander had lunch with Sutherland, operations chief Stephen Chamberlin, air chief George Kenney, Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, and General Walter Krueger to discuss the Leyte operation. But in middle of the lunch, MacArthur unexpectedly recommended that Luzon’s invasion take place the same day as the Leyte operation. The proposal brought his commanders to a stunned silence: This was another Los Negros or, worse yet, another Biak, island battles where MacArthur had gambled that the Japanese would put up slight resistance. “Kinkaid was frozen in anguish,” a staff aide remembered. It was Sutherland who stepped into the breach, saying there weren’t enough aircraft or landing craft for both operations. MacArthur nodded, then surveyed the faces at the table, stopping only when he got to Kenney. His favorite airman remained silent. MacArthur conceded defeat. “Okay,” he said, “we can’t do it. But you must have me in Lingayen before Christmas. If Leyte turns out to be an easy show, I want to move fast.”
The lunch then broke up, with Kenney, Kinkaid, and Krueger relieved that they could now plan for one—and not two—operations. But MacArthur’s official business wasn’t completed. The next morning, he called Sutherland into his office. The two had enjoyed a close working relationship for years, and Sutherland had proven an effective, if dictatorial, staff director. But in recent weeks, with MacArthur in Honolulu and then in Brisbane, Sutherland was in charge in Hollandia, and he had quickly taken on princely trappings. “I am in command now,” he announced one day. “I am running this show. The General is an old man. He can’t operate anymore.” It was a stunning claim. In open defiance of a MacArthur directive, Sutherland had also transferred a young (and married) Australian woman by the name of Elaine Clarke to his headquarters to serve as his “hostess” and had even brought her with him to Krueger’s officers’ mess. Krueger barely kept his temper. MacArthur heard of this aboard the Nashville, and when he returned to headquarters, he confronted his chief of staff. It was the first time that any of Sutherland’s staff—who were eavesdropping outside his office—had heard MacArthur swear.
According to staff assistant Paul Rogers, who listened in on the exchange, MacArthur began by reviewing the events leading to the Leyte decision. He approved the decision now, he said, but that was now. His jaw set, he turned on Sutherland. “You’re out of line,” he said. Sutherland didn’t command anything. “This must never happen again,” MacArthur said. Sutherland was defensive, arguing that MacArthur’s commanders had endorsed his, Sutherland’s, decision. MacArthur waved him off. He would not have it said in Washington that one of his subordinates was making decisions for him. It will not happen again, MacArthur repeated, his voice rising. There was also “the problem of the young lady.” He was peremptory: She would be sent to Australia. He had given his word to Blamey that no Australian women would be transferred to a forward base. Sutherland’s voice
trembled. He’d had no idea that MacArthur had given his word to Blamey, he said. MacArthur exploded: He didn’t need to explain himself to anyone.
Sutherland was now nearly blubbering. He wanted to be relieved. He wanted to be sent home. He would resign. “You will not resign,” MacArthur said. “You will do your duty, like everyone else.” Sutherland then threatened to take sick leave. MacArthur was now in a rage. You will stay at your post, he shouted. “Finally,” recalled a staff member, “with a voice of steel, MacArthur ended the debate.” Either the young woman would go, or Sutherland would. Defeated, Sutherland agreed. He had no choice. Not only could MacArthur end the chief of staff’s career, but Sutherland also knew that there was only one man who had ever stood up to MacArthur, and that man was sitting in the White House. That evening, Sutherland put his “hostess” aboard a flight to Australia, while MacArthur’s staff celebrated. “Sutherland’s playhouse,” as they called his Hollandia headquarters, had been broken up. Years later, in poor health and nearly blind, Walter Krueger was told of Sutherland’s death. “It is a good thing for humanity,” he said.
The Allied invasion of Normandy was the largest amphibious operation of World War Two, delivering just over 155,000 soldiers across choppy waters to five landing zones in a single day. The operation took months to coordinate and nearly shattered the comity of Eisenhower’s planners. MacArthur’s staff had far less time to plan the invasion of Leyte, but the SWPA’s high command had engaged in dozens of such operations. Even so, MacArthur’s task was at least as daunting: One convoy was required to sail thirteen hundred miles from Hollandia to Leyte, while a second convoy sailed to meet it from Hawaii. Two separate fleets, with 430 troop transports, closely coordinated their operations, establishing to-the-minute timetables for their arrival. The task was enormously complex, with Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet and Halsey’s Third Fleet accounting for 738 vessels, including 96 combat ships, 2 of which were fleet carriers “loaned” to MacArthur by Nimitz. Kinkaid and Halsey’s mainline battle force consisted of 12 battleships, 32 carriers, 23 cruisers, 18 escort carriers, 100 destroyers, 23 destroyer escorts, and 1,400 aircraft. To supply the troops ashore, MacArthur’s planners set aside nine far-flung bases that stockpiled tens of thousands of tons of ammunition and medical supplies.
The invasion of Leyte was MacArthur’s biggest gamble. Through months of conflict, his luck had held, though not without cost, as Buna and Biak had shown. No one on MacArthur’s staff recommended canceling the Leyte operation, but George Kenney issued a warning about its dangers and suggested that more fighter cover was needed. Kenney had been overseeing the bombing campaign of his Fifth Bombardment Group against oil refineries at Pandansari, in the Netherlands East Indies, and his pilots’ nerves were shattered. In one mid-October operation, the Japanese sent aloft ninety fighters in one of the toughest fights of the war. The Japanese were getting desperate, ramming their aircraft into his bombers. If the Japanese could put so many of their fighters in the air over Balikpapan, then why not over Leyte? What if Halsey were wrong? Kenney’s men would not have fighter bases on Leyte until well into the operation, and MacArthur’s soldiers would have to rely on fighters from Halsey’s carriers for protection. The men landing on Leyte’s beaches would be at risk, Kenney argued, and even more vulnerable if Halsey were engaged with the Japanese fleet. MacArthur heard Kenney out, but he dismissed his worries. “I tell you I’m going back there this fall if I have to paddle a canoe with you flying cover for me with that B-17 of yours,” he said.
“We had to work fast,” Kinkaid later remembered, “but I think when you work fast you work better.” Kinkaid organized his navy planners in adjoining rooms in two Quonset huts below MacArthur’s Hollandia headquarters. Halsey’s deputy, Rear Admiral Theodore Wilkinson, headed up a group of planners in one hut, with Kinkaid’s in the other. Nearby, amphibious commander Daniel Barbey’s staff scoured the Pacific for landing craft, then assigned each to an assault unit. The landing would be a precise operation that required the delivery of enough men at the right time to the right place. The final tally included 5 command ships; 151 huge landing ships carrying cargo, armor, and soldiers (LSTs); 79 landing craft carrying just infantry (LCIs); 21 landing craft with tanks (LCTs)—all supported by 40 attack and 18 high-speed transports. Ennis Whitehead’s bombers would appear over Leyte’s beaches during the assault, while Halsey’s carrier aircraft provided ten days of preinvasion raids over Leyte and Luzon. The Thirteenth Air Force would backstop Kenney, along with several squadrons from the Royal Australian Air Force, which pleased Blamey. But the most powerful, and important, punch would be provided by the infantry. Krueger wanted to put six divisions ashore at H-Hour (1000 on October 20), but Barbey didn’t have enough transports to lift the 32nd Division (at Hollandia) and the 77th Division (at Guam) to the Philippines, so Krueger would have to make a four-division assault of just over one hundred thousand men along six landing zones—Red, White, Yellow, Blue, Orange, and Violet.
Krueger was worried. Two divisions, the 7th and 96th, would land on Leyte’s eastern shore (near Dulag), while two more (the 24th and 1st Cavalry) came ashore north of them, near Tacloban. The two landing zones were widely separated—there was a ten-mile gap between them. Krueger asked for more troops, but MacArthur said that if he needed help, he could call on the approximately 4,000 Philippine guerrilla fighters on the island. Krueger didn’t doubt Philippine patriotism, but he thought the guerrillas would probably be useless. He was mollified, somewhat, that he could count on a total of 203,000 troops, including veterans of the 6th Ranger Battalion and 21st Regimental Combat Team, who were scheduled to seize the islands in Leyte Gulf a day prior to the landings. Krueger’s anxiety was also heightened by Halsey’s message that there were “no Japanese on Leyte.” That wasn’t even close to being true. Facing Krueger was Shiro Makino’s well-supplied 6th Division of 23,000 soldiers, with another 80,000 on Samar and southern Luzon. Additionally, Krueger knew that Japanese air strength in and around Leyte included fifteen hundred bombers and fighters of the Fourth Air Army. There was another problem. Krueger would be fighting during the monsoon season, which meant his soldiers would be slogging through rainstorms along water-soaked supply lines and defended by aircraft that couldn’t fly.
Then too, the Japanese had learned from their mistakes. Makino and Yamashita decided to fight for Leyte behind well-established defensive lines, far from the guns of Kinkaid’s navy. Makino’s plan called for a small force to make MacArthur’s landings difficult, before fading into the mountains, where it would take up entrenched positions along the hills guarding Leyte’s western Ormoc Valley. The force would fight and fall back, while looking for an opportunity to flank Krueger’s army. This was bad enough, but the Japanese had developed a new weapon. Just as the American invasion fleet appeared off Leyte on October 20, a special unit of Japanese fighter pilots met at Mabalacat, an air base north of Manila. Their commander, Admiral Takejiro Ohnishi, spoke to them somberly. Japan was losing the war, he said, and must take special measures to retrieve the situation, just as a “divine wind” had once saved Japan from a Mongol invasion fleet in the thirteenth century. When he finished, he shook the hand of each of his pilots, the first of the thousands of kamikaze tokubetsu kogeki tai—or kamikaze—suicide units to follow. Their special task was to plunge their aircraft into Halsey’s and Kinkaid’s ships.
Four days prior to that sobering scene, in Hollandia, MacArthur and his staff conducted a final review of the Leyte plan. MacArthur then greeted new Philippine president Sergio Osmeña—who would accompany him north—before boarding the USS Nashville for the journey to Leyte Gulf. It had been thirty-one months since MacArthur had seen the Philippines, and he was anxious to begin the fight. “It is difficult even for one who was there to adequately describe the scene of the next two days,” he later wrote. “Ships to the front, to the rear, to the left, and to the right, as far as the eye could see. Their sturdy hulls plowed the water, now presenting a broadside view, now their sterns,
as they methodically carried out the zigzag tactics of evasion.” As the Nashville approached the Leyte coast just before dawn on the twentieth, Kinkaid’s fleet began its preinvasion bombardment: “The noise, like rolling thunder, was all around us,” MacArthur noted. As MacArthur stood, binoculars trained on Leyte, the men of the 24th Division grappled down their nets and into their landing craft, then sped their way to the beach silhouetted in the distance.
The men of the 24th hit Red Beach on schedule, right at H-Hour. “The Japanese allowed the first five waves to land,” the official army history notes, “but when the other waves were 3,000 to 2,000 yards offshore, they opened strong artillery and mortar fire against them.” The Japanese hit four incoming LSTs and drove away two more. An arriving officer, Colonel Aubrey Newman, moved among his men. “Get the hell off the beach,” he shouted at them. “Get up and get moving.”
To the south, the 96th and 7th Infantry Divisions came ashore near Dulag. LCIs preceded the landing, firing rockets onto suspected Japanese emplacements before moving aside for the assault waves. The Japanese responded with mortar and artillery fire as two regiments of the 96th landed on Orange and Blue Beaches. The 96th sprinted inland, fighting off several platoons of Japanese defenders. Further south, the 7th Division landed. Tanks were brought ashore at midday to destroy a set of pillboxes, along with a heavy-weapons company dug in along a hedge overlooking the beach. So far, at least, all of the landings had been a success. “By nightfall of A-day,” Walter Krueger later wrote, “it was apparent that the initial landings had been completely successful and had been accomplished more easily than we had anticipated.”