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

by Perry, Mark

  The president didn’t respond, but he would not have been surprised by Sherwood’s report. Roosevelt was aware that MacArthur’s cordiality was simply the face he put on in public, while privately railing against him and his political views. Roosevelt was used to it: He had tolerated MacArthur’s ego for years when the general was chief of staff, and the president was willing to do so now, as long as MacArthur’s armies advanced. This was also true for George Marshall, who put up with the Southwest Pacific commander because MacArthur not only knew how to defeat the Japanese, but also served as a foil to King and the navy, and as a reminder to the White House that Nimitz and King weren’t the only ones fighting the Japanese.

  But even Marshall’s celebrated patience could be strained, as it had been the previous September, when Eisenhower wrote to him about journalist Frazier Hunt’s adulatory MacArthur biography, MacArthur and the War Against Japan. Eisenhower cheekily described the book as “bedtime reading” and highlighted a number of MacArthur’s more unappetizing opinions. “You will be quite astonished to learn,” Eisenhower wrote, “that back in the Winter of 41/42, you and your assistants at the War Dept. had no real concern for the Philippines and for the forces fighting there—indeed, you will be astonished to learn lots of things that this publishes as fact.” Marshall let this go, calculating that it was an inopportune time to discipline the former army chief of staff. But Hunt wasn’t the only one whom MacArthur had spoken with about Marshall and Eisenhower. Another was Robert Eichelberger, who repeated MacArthur’s views among his colleagues. The opinions invariably made their way into the War Department, where they were repeated among the curia of senior military officers who served Marshall. That they reached Marshall’s ears cannot be proven, but it would be unusual if they hadn’t. “[MacArthur] thinks Geo. Patton will be remembered for 100 years as the man who struck a soldier,” Eichelberger said, and then added: “Said there was a crooked streak in Ike and George Catlett Marshall which would show up in a long war.”

  Franklin Roosevelt returned to Washington from the Yalta Conference a diminished man. When he reported on his meetings with Stalin and Churchill before a joint session of Congress, he did so while seated in his wheelchair, which he had never done before. “I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say,” he said. “But I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.” He was silent for a moment, before continuing, emotionally: “It is good to be home. It has been a long journey.” He provided Congress with a blunt if optimistic picture of the war and of the structure of the international community that would follow. “This time we are not making the mistake of waiting until the end of the war to set up the machinery of peace,” he said. “This time, as we fight together to win the war finally, we work together to keep it from happening again.” His address brought a standing ovation, with his Republican opponents among those who paid him homage. “He is slipping away from us, and no earthly power can keep him here,” one of his staff assistants remarked.

  Roosevelt was buoyed by Marshall’s daily reports. German soldiers were fighting block by block through their own cities, while Japanese civilians picked through the charred rubble of Tokyo, whose March bombing cost eighty-three thousand Japanese lives. Tokyo’s destruction was followed by that of Osaka, Nagoya, and Kobe. Then, suddenly, Japanese air power ceased to exist, with Arnold’s fliers in full and unopposed control of Japan’s skies.

  At the end of March, Roosevelt decided that a visit to his Warm Springs, Georgia, resort home (whose warm springs helped ease the cramping in his legs) might revive his spent energies. He drove through the Georgia countryside visiting old friends and, on April 1, attended local Easter services. Eight days later, he drove to Macon, Georgia, where he picked up Lucy Mercer Rutherford, with whom he had conducted a secret affair many years earlier, and the portrait artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff. The weather turned chilly as they drove back to Warm Springs. The next morning, he enjoyed a full breakfast, hobnobbed with reporters, and spoke to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau about the opening of the United Nations conference in San Francisco, telling him he’d be back at Hyde Park on May 1. He slept well, but awoke on the morning of April 12 complaining of a headache. That afternoon, as Shoumatoff sketched him, he went through his mail. It was at that point that he looked up before his head suddenly tilted forward. His hands went into spasms among his letters, as if he were arranging them. Daisy Suckley, a confidante, distant cousin, and sometime secretary, came quickly to help him. “Have you dropped your cigarette?” she asked. Roosevelt looked at her and grabbed the back of his neck. “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” he said. He then pitched forward, slumping in his chair. He was carried into his bedroom. Shortly after 3:30, ninety minutes after suffering an apparent stroke, he died.

  Douglas MacArthur heard of Roosevelt’s death just after the conclusion of yet another fight with the navy over control of the Pacific War. But now, with MacArthur’s capture of Manila and Nimitz’s move into the islands south of Japan, MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s forces were operating nearly in the same geographic area, which meant that the decision on who would be supreme commander in the Pacific could no longer be postponed. At first, Nimitz had the upper hand because the boundary of MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area extended only a short distance north of Luzon, whereas Nimitz’s area encompassed Japan’s home islands. But despite the trouble MacArthur had caused them, neither Secretary of War Stimson nor Chief of Staff Marshall wanted MacArthur shunted aside. Moreover, the army was displeased with the way Nimitz had marginalized army General Robert Richardson in Honolulu. Despite his antinavy animus, MacArthur had acted quite differently in his command area, where he had praised Kinkaid and stroked Halsey’s ego. Even so, by rights, Nimitz should command Operation Downfall—the name given to the operation for Japan’s invasion and conquest—a viewpoint stubbornly promoted by Ernie King.

  But this time it was MacArthur, in a seismic shift, who supplied the compromise. “I do not recommend a single unified command for the Pacific,” he wrote to Marshall. “I am of the firm opinion that the Naval forces should serve under Naval Command and that the Army should serve under Army command.” He then provided a surprising concession to King. “Neither service willingly fights on a major scale under the command of the other,” he noted, adding that the navy “with almost complete Naval Command in the Pacific, has attained a degree of flexibility in the employment of resources with consequent efficiency that has far surpassed the Army. It is essential that the Navy be given complete command of all its units and that the Army be accorded similar treatment.” The JCS agreed and, six weeks before Roosevelt’s death, authored the final interservice compromise of the Pacific War, with MacArthur commanding all Pacific army units (as commander in chief, U.S. Army Forces in the Pacific) while Nimitz commanded the navy. The U.S. Army Air Force units would be under MacArthur, with the exception of the Twentieth Air Force, which would continue the strategic bombing of Japan under Hap Arnold’s control.

  The historical record remains silent on whether Roosevelt pushed for this compromise, but he certainly had approved it. Despite the reports he had received on the clique of anti-Roosevelt reactionaries on MacArthur’s staff, the president had remained committed to supporting his former army chief.

  In the days prior to his death, Roosevelt offered broad hints that he wanted MacArthur to be named supreme commander in the Pacific, and confirmed that he viewed the general as the great captain of Japan’s defeat. Roosevelt had said as much to George Kenney when the air commander visited with him in late March, during one of Kenney’s occasional trips to Washington. Eyes glinting, Roosevelt had listened carefully to Kenney’s briefing on the Philippine fight, then smiled at the commander, whom he would use to pass messages on to “Douglas.” Kenne
y later recounted what Roosevelt had told him. “As I shook hands with him to leave,” he wrote, “he thanked me for coming in, congratulated me on my job in the Pacific, and then said, ‘I suppose you would like to know whether MacArthur or Nimitz is going to run the campaign when the landing is made in Japan.’ I admitted that I was a bit curious. ‘You might tell Douglas that I expect that he will have a lot of work to do well north of the Philippines before very long.”

  MacArthur received the message in early April, when Kenney briefed him on his trip. He remained suspicious. Roosevelt might be up to his old tricks, playing and replaying the delicate dance for power that had carried both of them through their careers. The general had seen it before. Supreme commander? He would believe it when he saw it, he said. What came instead was news of the president’s death. MacArthur had predicted this, back in Honolulu, but he was surprised and remained silent with reporters when asked about the news, issuing a predictable statement of regret. In private, he was much less gracious, venting his pent-up hostility at a man whom he had known and competed with his entire adult life. His treatment at the hands of Roosevelt’s New Dealers was still close to the surface: the battles of the budget, his jousting with Ickes—“General Goober of Anacostia”—and it all came out in a remark he made to his aide, Bonner Fellers. “So,” he said, “Roosevelt is dead: a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well.”

  It was an astonishing, ungrateful, and small-minded statement, not least because it was Roosevelt who had saved MacArthur from Corregidor, had defended him in public, and had in the end agreed with his views on the liberation of the Philippines. Deep down, MacArthur knew this and would be forced to admit it—if only to himself. Certainly the two had had their disagreements, but in the end, they had fought on the same side, sealing an astonishing partnership that provided MacArthur with innumerable victories and helped Roosevelt win his fourth term in the White House.

  On reflection, MacArthur, pushing away his bitterness, penned a quiet reflection on Roosevelt that noted the disagreements the two had had while confirming their odd friendship. “Whether his vision of economic and political freedom is within the realm of fruition,” he wrote many years later, “only future history can tell. That his means for accomplishment won him the almost idolatrous devotion of an immeasurable following is known to all. That they aroused bitterness and resentment in others is equally true. In my own case, whatever differences arose between us, it never sullied to the slightest degree the warmth of my personal feelings for him.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Tokyo Bay

  These proceedings are now closed.

  —Douglas MacArthur

  George Marshall thought that Germany would surrender either in the late autumn of 1944 or certainly no later than the winter of 1945 and so began the arduous task of identifying units fighting in Europe that could be transferred to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. But Marshall was overly optimistic. As Eisenhower’s soldiers moved into northern France and bumped up against the German border in the Saar region, the Wehrmacht’s resistance turned surprisingly ferocious, forcing Marshall to rethink his prediction. He had reason for concern: German units were proving more resilient than he had anticipated, slowing Allied formations that anticipated an easy vault east toward Berlin. But this had always been a delicate balancing act for Marshall: Although more sacrifice was necessary, the public was tiring of the fighting so that, in November 1944, he had advised Henry Stimson to start providing optimistic descriptions of the European war for the public. Stimson was skeptical of the advice (“Just as soon as news of victories come, everybody wants to put on his coat and stop working,” he said), but he followed Marshall’s lead, telling reporters that the war in Europe was nearly over. “I am confident we are winning,” he told reporters soon after hearing Marshall’s advice.

  This was too much even for Marshall’s staff, who thought their chief should have told Stimson to be blunt: The Allies were winning, to be sure, but the war was yet to be won. Then too, Germany’s surrender wouldn’t end the war, which had yet to be fought to a decisive conclusion in the Pacific, where tens of thousands of Americans would likely be required to give their lives. In the wake of the Battle of the Bulge, in December, General Brehon Somervell, Marshall’s brainy supply czar, sent Marshall a stinging criticism of his advice to Stimson, noting that the public was talking as if the war were all but over. “What’s a man to think otherwise?” he asked. “Listen to the highest authority in the War Department.” Such talk, Somervell pointed out, had the opposite effect that Marshall intended, leading to complacency. It was this complacency that had led to the throat-gulping surprise in the wintry forests of Belgium, which was (and there was no way around it) a defeat. Marshall defended himself, asking Somervell what he thought Stimson should have said. “You hold me responsible for production,” Somervell responded in a detailed memo to Marshall at the end of December. “Our material requirements for the E.T.O. [European Theater of Operations] have been increased since last September. I have no mandatory authority by which I can command people to produce more.” Put simply, saying “we are winning” was the one sure way to cut into industrial production, the backbone of the Allied war effort.

  Somervell was right. The public was growing increasingly complacent, and Congress, reflecting this, was holding up legislation that would deepen the draft. More worrisome still was a spate of work stoppages that interfered with the U.S. war effort. The United States (as Somervell implied) wasn’t Russia, where workers could be commanded to work—and shot if they didn’t; Americans had to be convinced that their sacrifice was necessary. That was becoming more difficult. As the end of the war came in sight, workers began to leave their defense jobs to position themselves in peacetime industries. It had been easier at the war’s outset to cajole industrialists to urge their workers to greater efforts and longer hours, because the American people were desperate for victories. Now Somervell was facing increased skepticism. If the end were in sight and American victory assured, why were more tanks and bombers necessary? Recently, Somervell added in a written reply to Marshall, fourteen hundred workers had walked off their jobs in protest over a minor work infraction. The walk-out had stopped the manufacture of crucially important ball turrets for American bombers, and it took days to end the stoppage. Somervell requested that all future press statements be written to reflect the victories that had yet to be gained, instead of recounting those already won.

  Marshall got the message and relayed it to Stimson and then on to Eisenhower, with whom he had already shown surprising impatience. During a tense meeting between the two in Marseilles in late January 1945, Marshall expressed his dissatisfaction that Ike had agreed to a British request that he appoint a British officer as his deputy commander. The army chief angrily pointed out that the war was being won because of American, not British, sacrifices: The United States was providing three-quarters of the soldiers fighting in Europe and two-thirds of all Allied munitions. The American people wouldn’t tolerate a British officer commanding American soldiers, he said, so there would be no deputy commander—and most certainly not a British one. When Eisenhower then asked for more troops, Marshall brusquely turned him down. Eisenhower should clean up his army’s stragglers, the chief said, and put everyone who could hold a rifle in the line, or the general could get troops from Italy. Marshall added that Eisenhower should now conduct his operations to “employ in the front lines the fewest possible number of divisions so as to have well-rested and refitted the greatest number of divisions when the time comes for an all-out attack.”

  On Luzon, as the newly minted commander in chief, MacArthur was making his own assessments. But his calculations did not take into account a shortfall of either men or equipment. Quite the opposite: After the fall of Manila, MacArthur had more than enough of both, as an avalanche of men and matériel descended on him. Robert Eichelberger was stunned by the sudden appearance of the riches and found that his men coul
d have the pick of anything they wanted, which only emphasized just how ignored they had once been. MacArthur’s command was no longer last on the list for supplies, because there was no list: The United States was now producing enough to equip every commander with what he needed. Eichelberger could now supply three divisions with the same kinds of matériel that Eisenhower had been getting for years. “We had never seen such wonderful gear!” Eichelberger exclaimed.

  As it turned out, Eichelberger needed all the supplies he could get, for even as Filipino and American burial parties were combing through the ruins of Manila, MacArthur directed him to begin preparations for Operation Victor, which was designed to open a supply route through the southern Philippines. The first operation, on February 28, included a landing of the 41st Division on Palawan, where hastily constructed airfields would protect American shipping destined for Luzon. Having secured Palawan, Eichelberger conquered the rest of the central Philippines, conducting a whirlwind campaign of landings and conquests that took his Eighth Army all the way to Mindanao. Between February 28 and Roosevelt’s death in mid-April, Eichelberger’s army opened the San Bernardino Straits, conquered the Sulu Archipelago, and stormed the Visayan Islands and Zamboanga. This ambitious campaign was “a clinic in amphibious warfare,” the official U.S. Army history of the campaign reports, and it featured fourteen major and twenty-four minor beach landings in just fifty-two days. Included were landings on the Zamboanga Peninsula (on March 10), Panay (March 18), Cebu (March 26), Los Negros (March 29), Sanga-Sanga (April 2), Jolo (April 9), and Bohol (April 11). The conquest of Mindanao, the last of these Operation Victor landings, took place on April 17, five days after Roosevelt’s death. Eichelberger, out from under the shadow of Krueger, was in his element and the focus of American newspaper headlines. “I believe I do not exaggerate when I tell you that the Eighth Army is riding on the crest of the waves,” he wrote to his wife.