The atolls, waters, and land masses of Oceania were even less familiar. Though many of the place-names reflected the origins of their European discoverers—for instance, Port Moresby, Finschhafen, Hollandia, the Bismarcks, the Treasuries—all were equally strange to readers in what was then called the civilized world. Americans mistook Singapore for Shanghai and thought it to be a Chinese city. Most of them were unaware that Hawaii is closer to Japan than to the Philippines. Men on Iwo Jima got V-mail from relatives who thought they were fighting in the “South Pacific,” though Iwo is over seventeen hundred miles north of the equator. Egypt and Algiers evoked memories of school days, but who had heard of Yap? Or of Ioribaiwa? What was the difference between New Caledonia, New Guinea, New Ireland, New Georgia, New Hanover, and the New Hebrides?
Social studies teachers, unfortunately, hadn’t gone into that. Until the air age, islands like Wake and Midway had been almost worthless, and as late as 1941 entire archipelagoes were solely of interest to traders, oil prospectors, and soap companies. Often the only way MacArthur’s soldiers could find out where in the world they were was by capturing enemy maps. The U.S. Navy began the war using eighteenth-century charts; sea battles were broken off because captains didn’t know where the bottom was. Guadalcanal’s first clash occurred on the wrong river—marines thought it was the Tenaru and discovered afterward that it was the Ilu—and the Battle of the Coral Sea was actually fought on the Solomon Sea. Even the Australians, toward whom the Japanese bayonets were lunging, were astonishingly ignorant of the islands north of them. Like the Americans, they were preoccupied with Hitler, and with geography they knew. On the day after one of MacArthur’s most brilliant successes, at Aitape in New Guinea, the Brisbane Courier-Mail devoted five columns to war news from France, Russia, and Italy—the entire front page. One column summarized events in the Pacific. A third of it was about Guam. There was no mention of Aitape at all.1
Most of what the American and Australian publics thought they knew about the isles of the Southwest Pacific had been invented by movie scriptwriters. Even as the Japanese were pictured as a blinky-eyed, toothy Gilbert and Sullivan race, so the South Seas was an exotic world where lazy breezes whispered in palm fronds, and Sadie Thompson seduced missionaries, and native girls dived for pearls wearing fitted sarongs, like Dorothy Lamour. In reality, the proportions of the women there were closer to those of duffel bags. It is quite true that most Pacific veterans could later recollect scenes of great natural beauty—the white orchids and screaming cockatoos in Papua’s dense rain forests, or the smoking volcano in Bougainville’s Empress Augusta Bay, or Saipan’s lovely flame trees—but they weren’t there as tourists. They were fighting a war, and the more breathtaking the flora looked, the more dangerous amphibious landings turned out to be. Some islands were literally uninhabitable—army engineers sent to survey the Santa Cruz group for airstrips were virtually wiped out by cerebral malaria—and battles were fought under fantastic conditions. Guadalcanal and Leyte were rocked by earthquakes. Volcanic steam hissed through the rocks of Iwo. On Bougainville, bulldozers vanished in the spongy bottomless swamps, and at the height of the fighting on Peleliu the temperature was 115 degrees in the shade. On New Britain sixteen inches of rain fell in a single day. In November 1944 the battle for Leyte was halted by a triple typhoon, and a month later another storm sank three American destroyers. Lurid settings produced bizarre casualties. Twenty-five marines were killed at Cape Gloucester by huge falling trees. Shipwrecked sailors were eaten by sharks. Nipponese swimming ashore after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea were carved up by New Guinea headhunters, and others, on Guadalcanal, were eaten by their comrades. The jungle was cruel to defeated soldiers, who, as the war progressed, were usually Japanese. If they were surrounded, only ferns, snakes, crocodiles, and cannibalism were left to them.
Charles Willoughby has called the Pacific conflict the “War of Distances.” Its magnitude may be conveyed in many ways. MacArthur, for example, was feverishly preparing to defend an area as large as the United States, with a coastline just as long (twelve thousand miles). Put another way, in Melbourne he was like a foreign general arriving in New Orleans and facing the need to repulse enemy offensives expected at any moment all along the U.S.-Canadian border. In a third comparison, his theater of operations was twenty-five times as large as Texas. While traveling from Batchelor Field to the Menzies Hotel he had traversed approximately the same distance as a Canadian journeying from Winnipeg to Miami. Overall, his coming campaigns would cover mileage equivalent to that from the English Channel to the Persian Gulf— twice the farthest conquests of Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon.2
MacArthur insisted on a good map room. Newly arrived officers were shown a huge chart of the Southwest Pacific and then, superimposed on it, another of the United States. As Willoughby has pointed out, “Against this comparative geographical background, the logistical difficulties of the Southwest Pacific Theater in the conduct of the war loomed as something tremendous. . . . Not only was the line of communications from the United States to the scene of operations one of the longest the world has ever seen, but the entire route was by water at a time when the Japanese Navy was undefeated and roaming the Pacific almost at will.”
If we expand the General’s superimposition to include the whole of the western hemisphere and the reaches of the Atlantic, we may start by putting Tokyo in northern Canada. Iwo Jima is in Hudson’s Bay. Rangoon is near Seattle; Saipan and Guam in Quebec; Bangkok in the state of Washington; and Singapore in Utah. Tarawa and Guadalcanal are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Manila is in North Dakota; Cagayan, in Minnesota. Central Borneo is in Kansas; central Sumatra in Arizona; and central Java in Texas. Port Moresby, New Guinea, is at Bermuda. Darwin is at Tampa, Florida. Alice Springs is in Jamaica; Adelaide, in Colombia; Melbourne, in Brazil. Brisbane is at Barbados. The Admiralty Islands lie off the coast of New Jersey, New Caledonia is halfway between Puerto Rico and the Cape Verde Islands, Midway is between Greenland and Iceland, and Hawaii is off the coast of Scotland.
Another commander would have been intimidated by the immensity of the Pacific, but the General, remembering the horrors of 1918, when the huge armies had been wedged against one another in bloody stalemate, regarded the vast reaches between Melbourne and Tokyo as opportunities. Despite his distrust of the navy, he was quick to appreciate the difference between soldiers’ and sailors’ attitudes toward bodies of water, and to come down hard on the side of the admirals. At West Point he had been told to regard rivers and oceans as obstacles along which men could dig in, forming lines of resistance. At Annapolis, he knew, midshipmen were taught that streams and seas were highways. By adopting their concept, he could open up his theater to some of the most stunning campaigns in the history of warfare.
Here his long years of studying military feats of the past were to reap spectacular harvests. Altogether he would make eighty-seven amphibious landings, all of them successful, cutting Japanese escape routes and lines of communications. Mark S. Watson, the distinguished military analyst, would call them “ingenious and dazzling thrusts which never stopped until Japan was beaten down.” Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, chief of Britain’s Imperial General Staff and his country’s senior soldier, would write in his diary that MacArthur “outshone Marshall, Eisenhower and all the other American and British Generals including Montgomery.” B. H. Liddell Hart agreed: “MacArthur was supreme among the generals. His combination of strong personality, strategic grasp, tactical skill, operative mobility, and vision put him in a class above other allied commanders in any theatre.” Watson, Alanbrooke, and Liddell Hart recognized the touch of past masters in the Southwest Pacific’s campaigns. MacArthur’s guide in insisting on mobility was Genghis Khan. His brilliant maneuvers against the enemy’s flanks and rear would evoke comparisons with Napoleon’s fluid movements at Fried-land, Jena, Eylau, Ulm, Marengo, and Bassano. MacArthur, however, possessed a tactical arm Genghis Khan and Napoleon had lacked: air power. His bombers and figh
ters would permit him to execute triple envelopments, or, to use Churchill’s happy phrase, operations in “triphibious warfare.” The shortening of the Pacific war and of Allied casualty lists was incalculable. John Gunther would write: “MacArthur took more territory, with less loss of life, than any military commander since Darius the Great.”3
During the weeks after his arrival in Melbourne, he spent long evenings in the map room. His first duty was to safeguard Australia, so he began by mastering the intricacies of that continent’s twenty-nine-hundred-mile eastern coastline, which lay naked to invasion all spring. Then he familiarized himself with the beaches, bays, inlets, and tides of the oceanic islands between him and the Philippines. And all the time he was pondering the lessons of his long study of the Japanese. Unlike other senior American officers, who had expected that any conflict with the Nipponese would swiftly end in an Allied triumph, MacArthur now had tremendous respect for the foe. “The Japanese,” he said, “are, the greatest exploiters of inefficient and incompetent troops the world has ever seen.” They themselves, he knew, were anything but inefficient. Like the Germans, their infantrymen were an elite. (U.S. infantrymen, on the other hand, tended to be the residue of draftees left after the Air Corps, the Marine Corps, and the navy had skimmed off the top.) The enemy’s brutalized Shintoist philosophy, which encompassed all ranks, taught their men that they were invincible. They had no word for “defeat.” Their suicidal mind-set was summed up in the war song “Umi Yukaba,” which, roughly translated, went:
Across the sea,
Corpses in the water;
Across the mountain,
Corpses heaped upon the field;
1 shall die only for the Emperor,
I shall never look back.4
“Never let the Jap attack you,” MacArthur told his officers. “When the Japanese soldier has a coordinated plan of attack he works smoothly.” On the other hand, he added, “When he is attacked—when he doesn’t know what is coming—it isn’t the same.” Then the Nipponese were vulnerable because of their very rigidity. Their inability to imagine that they might be vanquished prevented them from planning to cope with such crises. He compared their inflexibility to a fist which cannot loosen its grasp once it has seized something. “A hand that closes, never to open again,” he said, “is useless when the fighting turns to catch-as-catch-can wrestling.”5
Among the Allied commanders in Asia, only MacArthur and Lord Louis Mountbatten of Burma grasped the appeal of Japan’s Pan-Asianism to the Oriental masses. In the United States the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was treated as a joke. Since its creation by Prince Fumimaro Konoye in the autumn of 1938 it had, in fact, been corrupted by Japanese imperialists, but as Pearl Buck tried vainly to explain to any American who would listen, the oppressed masses of China, Burma, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines were stirring; their native leaders were determined to throw off the yoke of domination by white men. MacArthur understood that. His political awareness is widely regarded as a tragic flaw which led to his undoing, but it had another, more attractive side.6
If that side was visionary, his concept of himself as a warrior remained medieval. Other Allied commanders thought of the war as a complex confrontation between rival ideologies, the “totalitarian” Axis and the “democratic” Allies. To MacArthur it was much simpler. If anything, he felt more em-pathetic with Japanese Bushido than with the sophisticated psychological abstractions popular in the Pentagon, which explains why he had intended to die on Corregidor with his wife and son. It is as impossible to imagine MacArthur bearing a white flag as it is to think of him telling Filipinos, “We shall return.” To him the war in the Pacific was a duel with two antagonists, himself and the enemy, whom he usually identified in the singular, as “the Jap.” Visitors like Hap Arnold and George Marshall were startled when MacArthur said of the foe, “He ran into a trap I prepared for him, and I shall drive him back to the beaches and annihilate him,” or “He had no idea of the plan I was putting into operation,” or “He never believed I could do it. “ Similarly, he called the Fifth Air Force “my air,” and to the fury of U.S. admirals he referred to Allied warships in the Southwest Pacific as “my navy.” Others in Canberra, Washington, and London anguished over the question of Japanese intentions in 1942. MacArthur never gave it a second thought. He knew they were coming after him.7
After one day’s rest at the Menzies Hotel, during which, among other things, he mailed his new address to Milwaukee County’s Draft Board No. 4, he established temporary headquarters a few blocks away, in an old insurance building at 401 Collins Street. There he found that he was Supreme Commander of absolutely nothing. No directive had arrived from the Joint Chiefs, and there had been no approving echo in Washington of his Adelaide announcement that he had been ordered from the Philippines to lead an “American offensive against Japan.” Days passed; then a week; then two weeks. Still he received no instructions. Never a patient man, he told his aides that he had been “led to believe” that he would direct all Allied forces in the Pacific, and that he now realized that he had been “tricked” into leaving Corregidor. On April 1 he radioed George Marshall that he had a desperate plan to break out of Bataan peninsula and wage guerrilla warfare from the hills. He concluded: “I would be very glad to attempt myself to rejoin this command temporarily and take charge of this movement.” The next day Marshall rejected the suggestion and reassured him that his orders would be cut soon. They weren’t, though they should have been. The difficulty was that Washington couldn’t decide how to organize the Pacific commands. It took the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs five incredible weeks to hammer out an interservice agreement—weeks that would have to be bought back in blood later, because the enemy used them to capture and fortify the Admiralty Islands, Buka and Bougainville in the Solomons, and Lae and Salamaua on the north coast of New Guinea.8
MacArthur liked to say, “I’m a soldier and will hold the horse if ordered,” but that was nonsense. He was America’s most gifted commander of troops, he knew it, and he expected to be treated accordingly. U.S. correspondents in Melbourne, aware of his frustration, wanted to cable home stories about it. At first he told his chief press officer, LeGrande Diller, to censor such reports, but then, exasperated by the Pentagons procrastination, he lifted the ban. A Time piece, “Hero on Ice,” was one of the consequences, but the only immediate result in Washington was a bizarre suggestion by an Air Corps brigadier that the General be appointed U.S. ambassador to Russia. Ever alert for treachery, MacArthur denounced “the New Deal cabal” and “the Navy cabal.” At one point he radioed Marshall that ten years earlier, during his tenure as Chief of Staff, he had “accidentally discovered” a plot for “the complete absorption of the national defense function by the Navy”—a conspiracy which, he hinted darkly, might be responsible for the present, maddening delay. It never seems to have occurred to him that bureaucratic tangles and the disarray of the Allied world that spring might account for much of the problem. He was convinced that his inexhaustible haters were at work, thwarting him.9
To some extent he was, for once, right. Believing that the General had slighted Hart in Manila, admirals and their staffs made a fetish of loathing him. In Stimson’s diary the secretary acknowledged that “the extraordinary brilliance of that officer is not always matched by his tact, but the Navy’s astonishing bitterness against him seems childish.” William Frye, a Marshall biographer, observed “a queer notion that the war with Japan was the Navy’s exclusive property,” and Hap Arnold, touring the Pacific, noted that “it was impossible not to get the impression that the Navy was determined to carry on the campaign in that theater, and determined to do it with as little help from the Army as possible.” Admiral Ernest J. King, Stark’s successor as Chief of Naval Operations, argued that since the war against Japan would be largely naval, naming an army officer as supreme commander made no sense, and he refused to entrust his precious carriers to MacArthur. His candidate for the command was Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.
But Nimitz was junior to the General and unknown outside the navy. The Chiefs therefore compromised by creating two theaters, an arrangement which violated all conventional military precepts. To everyone’s surprise, the future would prove that it worked, with MacArthur’s assaults becoming the left prong of a vast pincers, or double envelopment, closing in on Japan, while Nimitz’s later expeditions, starting at Tarawa in the central Pacific, became the right prong. Once the General had saved Australia, opened his counterattack northward, and achieved a certain momentum, his successive bounds toward the Philippines would be limited only by his B-17s’ range, 925 miles—the distance the aircraft could fly into enemy territory and drop their bombs, before returning to American airfields to refill their depleted fuel tanks.10
On April 18, a month and a day after his arrival in Australia, MacArthur was designated Commander in Chief of the Southwest Pacific Area (CINCSWPA). Nimitz was commander of the Pacific Ocean Areas (CINCPOA). Under Nimitz another admiral—first Robert L. Ghormley and then William F. Halsey—commanded the South Pacific. The line between the Southwest and South Pacific theaters was the 160th degree of east longitude. Almost immediately it had to be moved west to the 159th degree to put Guadalcanal, which was to be a Marine Corps operation, in the navy’s South Pacific area. That would be the only major land battle fought in that part of the world which would not be under MacArthur’s supervision, however. Most of the navy’s theater was, appropriately, water. E. J. Kahn, Jr., one of the first American soldiers to arrive down under, explained that the South Pacific “is an area that includes Guadalcanal and many quieter and less renowned islands, including New Caledonia and New Zealand. It is commanded by Admiral Halsey. The Southwest Pacific, consisting of Australia, New Guinea, and various other islands, belongs to General MacArthur. When we landed in Australia we were even a bit confused ourselves about which theater we were in, but we did know that General MacArthur was going to be our boss.”11
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