American Caesar

by William Manchester

  This pettiness obscured his genius, which at this point should have been clearly revealed in his recognition of the role the Admiralties could play in the next stage of his New Guinea campaign. If the Bismarck Sea is perceived as a crude wineskin, with Papua and New Ireland as the sides and New Britain as the bottom, the Admiralties, at two degrees south latitude, lie in the mouth. Taking them, in his words, would “cap the bottle.” The acquisition of the second largest island, Los Negros, would decide the battle; its larger neighbor, Manus, would then topple into his hands as surely as an outfought chess queen can be used to trap her king in checkmate. Once he had taken Manus, he would have locked up his right wing. Hansa Bay and other heavily fortified Japanese strongholds could be ignored. In addition, the island would give him priceless airfields and a large enough harbor to accommodate his amphibious striking forces. “The situation,” he said afterward, “presented an ideal opportunity for a coup de main.” 132

  His staff was appalled. It meant an enormous risk, they argued, and they were right. An intelligence team reported that Los Negros was “lousy with Japs.” The General, not for the first time, trusted his intuition, which told him that the team was exaggerating. Even if it was, his officers insisted, the risks were unacceptable; the closest Allied replacement depot was in Finschhafen, three hundred miles to the south, too far to reinforce the beachhead. He replied that he would reinforce it by air. They told him he was assuming the airstrip would be in American hands. He was aware of that, he said; it would be. Persisting, they pointed out that even if the lowest estimate of enemy strength was accepted, the Japanese had enough troops on the island to repel the invaders. MacArthur serenely answered that he understood how Oriental leaders reasoned; he was convinced that the Nipponese commander would feed in his men in piecemeal attacks, which could be destroyed one by one.133

  Kenney noted that though the General “brushed away any arguments that we had already outrun the capabilities of our supply system,” he knew that Los Negros was going to be a close one. He hedged his bet by calling it a “reconnaissance-in-force, ‘ and he decided to accompany the task force so that he would be there to order the evacuation of the troops, if it came to that. On Sunday, February 27, 1944, he slipped out of Lennon’s Hotel, flew to Milne Bay, and strutted up the gangplank of the cruiser Phoenix, the first navy vessel he had boarded since leaving Bulkeley’s PT-41 on Mindanao. Monday morning Krueger came aboard and handed him a sheaf of new G-2 appraisals reporting a strengthening of the enemy garrison on Los Negros. Willoughby now estimated—and events would prove him to be correct—that they would be met by over four thousand Japanese troops. MacArthur handed back the papers, turned to several anxious officers awaiting his decision, and said, in his calm way, “We shall continue as planned, gentlemen.” After a pause he added that he intended to land with the troops. Krueger was alarmed. In his memoirs he writes: “He had expressly forbidden me to accompany our assault loadings and yet now he promised to do so himself. I argued that it was unnecessary and unwise to expose himself in this fashion and that it would be a calamity if anything happened to him. He listened to me attentively and thanked me, but added, ‘I have to go.’ He had made up his mind on the subject—and that was that.”134

  The General spent most of that night alone at the Phoenix rail, gazing out at the black, phosphorescent sea. At dawn, when they dropped anchor in Hyane Harbor off Los Negros, they were greeted by a bombardment from Japanese shore batteries. A Life correspondent who was present wrote: “One salvo went over the ship. The second fell short. Men on the deck, expecting that the third might well be on the target, were preparing to get behind anything handy when it hit. MacArthur began to take an increased interest in the matter at that point, standing up straight on the bridge to survey the scene while chatting with his staff. Fortunately, his survey included the obliteration of the Jap gun positions by the cruiser, which had got the range in the nick of time.”135

  Six hours later he went ashore in a pouring rain. The fighting was heavy. GIs of the 1st Cavalry Division wearing steel helmets and camouflaged battle dress were lying prone, but the General, conspicuous in his trench coat and cap, awarded a Distinguished Service Cross to the man who had led the first wave and then, to the amazement of his party, strolled casually inland. Anguished aides tried to persuade him not to expose himself. One senior officer warned him that he was in “very intimate danger.” MacArthur lit up his corncob pipe, waved out the match, and explained that he wanted to get “a sense of the situation.” A lieutenant touched him on the sleeve, pointed at a path, and said, “Excuse me, sir, but we killed a Jap sniper in there just a few minutes ago.” The General nodded approvingly. “Fine,” he said. “That’s the best thing to do with them.” Then he walked in that direction. Stumbling over the cadavers of two enemy soldiers who had been slain a few minutes earlier—their bodies were still warm—he continued on, merely remarking, “That’s the way I like to see them.” A GI called, “You are beyond the perimeter, sir!” MacArthur courteously thanked him for the information, but he didn’t break his stride until he came to a wounded American infantryman. Crouching down beside him, he took the man’s hand and asked, “Son, what happened?”136

  John Gunther wrote: “He stalks a battlefront like a man hardly human, not only arrogantly but lazily.” One officer who was discovering this on Los Negros was Dr. Roger O. Egeberg, the General’s new physician, who had joined his staff the month before. Egeberg, an intellectual, had accepted the appointment with misgivings. “I was,” he says, “anything but a starry-eyed idol worshipper.” He had expected that he and the General would disagree about politics, and had been pleasantly surprised to find that the subject hadn’t been raised. Here in the Admiralties he was distressed for a very different reason. Other aides, he remembered, had told him that accompanying MacArthur within range of enemy riflemen was to be avoided if at all possible. Now the physician was terrified. He recalls: “I thought about my children at home. Maybe if I ‘accidentally’ dropped something, I could stoop over, but I wondered if I ever would be able to stand again. . . . All of the officers with MacArthur were uneasy at Los Negros—uneasy about MacArthur’s safety and, more vital to them, about their own safety.”137

  MacArthur viewing a dead Japanese soldier at Los Negros, February 1944

  MacArthur at Hollandia, April 1944

  The most dangerous spot on the island was the airstrip. Kenney had told the General that it could become “the most important piece of real estate in the theater.” Now he wished he hadn’t, because MacArthur was heading straight for it. From the number of corpses later counted there, officers estimated that eight hundred pairs of Japanese eyes were watching as, Kenney remembers, “General MacArthur wandered up and down the strip . . . digging into the coral surfacing to see how good it was.” A correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post who had joined his entourage wrote: “With his yellow trench coat swinging out behind and smoke trailing from his pipe, MacArthur paced off the puddled coral runway himself. At first the width, and then down the length, far outside our lines.” A dumbfounded cavalryman said afterward, “Why they didn’t kill him, I don’t know.” Egeberg concluded that “MacArthur wanted to experience the smell of gunpowder and the sights and sounds of combat. Being in or near a battle seemed to quicken him . . . . It was almost as though battle ‘fed’ his system . . . . It was true also that he could appreciate the problems of his commanders and soldiers much better by getting a taste of the fighting than by poring over maps and operations reports back at headquarters.”138

  Soaking wet and coated with mud, the General reboarded the Phoenix two hours later, satisfied that no evacuation would be necessary. As he had predicted, enemy troops had counterattacked in small, ineffective charges. That night he sailed back to Finschhafen and flew to Moresby. By Thursday he was in his Lennon’s apartment, where he learned three days later that U.S. troops were in firm control of both Los Negros and Manus. Some naval officers thought he had been very fortunate, th
at the triumph had been a fluke. Barbey wrote in his memoirs, “Looking backward, I have wondered if MacArthur ever questioned his own judgment in this matter,” and William M. Fechteler, Barbey’s deputy, has said, “Actually we’re damn lucky we didn’t get run off the island.”139

  The General might have agreed with Fechteler—one of the first questions he asked of men joining his staff was, “Are you a lucky officer?”—but he could hardly have been expected to admit it. John Kennedy once remarked that “victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan.” In this case, however, responsibility fell so clearly on one man’s shoulders that it would have been impossible for him to have shared it. If the Admiralties operation had been a fiasco, it would probably have meant the end of his career. Certainly the Joint Chiefs would have ordered him to assume a defensive stance, leaving Nimitz to command all future offensives in the Pacific.

  So MacArthur may be forgiven for accepting, and even glorying in, the praise from Allied leaders which followed this new conquest. George Marshall sent Brisbane his “congratulations on the skill and success’ of the engagement, adding: “Please accept my admiration for the manner in which the entire affair has been handled.” John Miller, Jr., an army historian, wrote: “Always a man of faith, self-confidence, and buoyant optimism,” MacArthur had seen “opportunities where other men saw problems and difficulties.” The General’s decisiveness at Los Negros, he continued, “had the very great virtue of hastening victory while reducing the number of dead and wounded.” Even Admiral King, MacArthur’s bitterest critic among the Joint Chiefs, conceded that it had been “a brilliant maneuver,” and Winston Churchill cabled Lennon’s: “I send you my warm congratulations on the speed with which you turned to good account your first entry into the Admiralty Islands. I expect that this will help you to go ahead quicker than you originally planned.”140

  As Churchill’s message intimated, he was one of the few who were aware of MacArthur’s grand design. Even he didn’t know much of it, however. Point thirty-six of Quadrant’s directive had authorized “an advance along the north coast of New Guinea as far west as Vogelkop, by step-by-step airborne-advances,” but this was like instructing Eisenhower to proceed from Normandy to Prague, an equivalent distance, and leaving the details up to him. It was, in short, extremely vague. The General had been given the broadest possible mandate, and the only Quadrant qualifications—sanctioning “operations in New Guinea subsequent to the Wewak-Kavieng Operation”—had been superannuated by his seizure of the Admiralties. He didn’t need Wewak or Kavieng now. Instead he ordered a series of intricate moves to keep the enemy off balance. His Japanese adversary in Manila, General Hisaichi Terauchi, interpreted these to mean that MacArthur intended to edge ahead, fighting for village after village. He had something much grander in mind: a tremendous, four-hundred-mile leap to Hollandia, over two hundred miles behind the enemy’s supply depots. Dazzling in its conception and magnificent in its execution, the Hollandia lunge would have been beyond the talents of all but a few of history’s great captains. In retrospect it looms as a military classic, comparable to Hannibal’s maneuvering at Cannae and Napoleon’s at Austerlitz.141

  It is, of course, less famous. That may be attributed to a curious principle which seems to guide those who write of titanic battles. The higher the casualty lists, it appears—the vaster the investment in blood—the greater the need to justify them. Thus the dead are honored by hallowing the names of the places where they fell; thus writers enshrine in memory the Verduns, the Passchendaeles, the Tarawas, and the Dunkirks, while neglecting decisive struggles in which the loss of life was small. At the turn of the eighteenth century Marlborough led ten successful, relatively bloodless, campaigns on the Continent, after which he was hounded into exile by his political enemies. In World War I Douglas Haig butchered the flower of British youth in the Somme and Flanders without winning a single victory. He was raised to the peerage and awarded £100,000 by a grateful Parliament. Every American child learns in school how Jackson’s brigade stood like a stone wall against the river of gore at Bull Run, but only the most dedicated Civil War buffs know how, husbanding his strength, he flashed up and down the Shenandoah Valley in 1862 with brilliantly diversionary tactics, preventing the dispatch of reinforcements to McClellan, who, had he had them, would have taken Richmond. Similarly, in World War II Salerno and Peleliu are apotheosized, though neither contributed to the defeat of Germany and Japan, while the capture of Ulithi, one of the Pacific’s finest anchorages, which was essential for the invasion of Okinawa, is unsung because the enemy had evacuated it and the landing was therefore unopposed.

  So it is with Hollandia, where, once again, MacArthur ignored the advice of his officers. An aide remembers: “We had to go up the coast, we had to secure all or a large part of New Guinea; it was a great land mass 1,400 or 1,500 miles from one end to the other. At that time the staff felt that we could not get air cover to neutralize Hollandia, that we should land at Wewak. MacArthur increasingly felt that the Japanese troops had been brought forward to Wewak and that Hollandia was ill-defended”; therefore “MacArthur against the majority of the advice decided that our landings would have to be made at Hollandia. . . . We landed at Hollandia, a rather empty but well-upholstered rear headquarters,” and “in a week or two we were well-established with a strong perimeter and the Japanese whom we had passed at Wewak had to work their very slow and murderous way through our great ally, the jungle, to attack us many weeks later—sick and demoralized through dysentery, starvation, and malaria. MacArthur’s move, skipping the intermediary areas that everybody thought we should have tackled, seemed so easy and later so logical that not much fuss was made about it.”

  The first staff officer to receive an inkling of what the General had in mind was Willoughby. MacArthur told him that he wanted his monitors of Japanese radio messages to report every enemy reference to Hollandia. G-2 found that the base there was being used as a staging area, but had been stripped of all fighting troops to reinforce Wewak, where the Japanese, like MacArthur’s staff, expected the next American blow to fall. Then Kenney was called in. The General asked him whether he could take out the three airfields around Hollandia. The airman nodded; his new long-range P-39S, which were just now being uncrated, could fly there and back, and by installing belly tanks in the old ones, he could guarantee protection for bombers making the round trip. That decided it. Sutherland flew to Washington to explain the plan to the Joint Chiefs. In theory the Chiefs were MacArthur’s superiors, but the more victorious he became, the less likely they were to overrule him, and they gave him a green light.142

  In the third week of April, while Kenneys fighter pilots were destroying three hundred enemy planes around Hollandia, Barbey’s Task Force 77—its code name was “Reckless”—began its thousand-mile voyage to the new target. On Friday, April 21, it rendezvoused west of the Admiralties and headed north to deceive enemy scouting planes; then, after the sudden tropical sunset, the convoy veered southwestward. The General, who had hoisted his flag on the light cruiser Nashville, ordered feints at Wewak and Hansa Bay—“the MacArthur touch,” as such ruses were now called among the staff. Since Buna he had learned to gather all the reins into his hands at the start of an operation. In fact, Blarney, who had been appointed commander of his ground forces, had little to do. The General’s guiding hand was reaching down, not only to divisional commanders, but to regiments and, at times, to battalions. Thus he could improvise on short notice. On that hot, humid Saturday morning he made simultaneous landings at Humboldt and Tanahmerah bays, thirty miles apart, on either side of Hollandia. A third force of GIs went ashore at Aitape, midway between Hollandia and Wewak, to seize the airfield there. The dazed Japanese faded into the jungle. In four days Kenney was using the airfields, now his main base. In a postwar interrogation Jo Iimura, who was in command of the defenders, said, “The allied invasion of Hollandia and Aitape was a complete surprise to us. After considering the past operational tactics of the enemy .
. . we believed they would attempt to acquire an important position somewhere east of Aitape. . . . Because we misjudged . . . we were neither able to reinforce nor send war supplies to their defending units.”143

  MacArthur later wrote of the operation: “Just as the branches of a tree spread out from its trunk toward the sky, so did the tentacles of the invasion convoy slither out toward the widely separated beaches in the objective area.” He watched the bombardment of Humboldt Bay’s beautiful harbor from the Nashville’s bridge, and at 11:00 A.M., four hours after the first wave had hit the beach, he went ashore with Eichelberger, Krueger, and three aides. After inspecting the beachhead and talking to the beachmaster, he asked Barbey to convey him and his party to Tanahmerah Bay. There, too, the landing had been unopposed. In fact, the great prize had fallen into his hands with only a few scattered shots. Later, when over 200,000 Wewak-based Japanese counterattacked Aitape in July and August, fighting would be heavy, but the total cost at Hollandia, including the mopping up, was just 150 GI lives.144