American Caesar
Page 48
Here, as on Los Negros, the General himself narrowly escaped being one of the casualties. Despite Barbey’s protests, he insisted that he and his cortege ride to and from the shores of both bays in an unarmed Higgins boat. The admiral’s fears were realized on Tanahmerah Bay, where the cruiser radioed them that an enemy fighter was coming in low, strafing small craft. Barbey writes: “I ordered the coxswain to head for the nearest destroyer to get the protection of her guns. An open boat without protection seemed hardly the place to concentrate most of the brass of the Southwest Pacific when there was a Japanese plane on the loose. MacArthur, however, thought otherwise. He asked that I direct the boat to continue to the beach, which I did. A few minutes later a lone plane came in, swooped over us, then continued on in the direction of Hollandia. In thinking about this incident and similar ones at other times, there was never the feeling that it was an act of bravado on MacArthur’s part, but rather that he was a man of destiny and there was no need to take precautions.”145
One of the three aides cowering on the deck of the little vessel was Dr. Egeberg, who did not regard himself as a man of destiny and felt the need for precautions strongly. He forgot his qualms on the shores of Humboldt Bay, however, where his professional curiosity was aroused by his patient’s physical performance. Aged sixty-four, the General was by far the oldest member of the party, yet he took off on a brisk three-hour hike, leaving the others, the physician noted, “panting hard.” Not only wasn’t he out of breath; despite the equatorial heat, he wasn’t even sweating. Later MacArthur would speak of New Guinea’s “broiling sun and drenching rain,” its “tangled jungle and impassable mountain trails,” but he was describing the hardships of others. He himself seemed to be almost unaffected by the climate. Back on the Nashville, Eichelberger noticed that “my uniform was soggy and dark with wetness. I remember my astonishment that General MacArthur, despite the sweltering heat and vigorous exercise, did not perspire at all.” As a small-town Ohio boy, Eichelberger had acquired an unquenchable appetite for ice cream. He had never outgrown it, and MacArthur, to his delight, celebrated their return to the cruiser by producing a tray of chocolate ice-cream sodas from a ship’s locker. “When I finished mine with celerity,” Eichelberger wrote, “the allied commander grinned and gave me his own untouched, frosted glass. I polished off that soda, too.”146
He almost gagged on the last swallow. The General was off on one of his soaring flights of rhetoric, telling his staff that Hollandia was only the first of several bounds he meant to make. Now that the Japanese were in disarray, he wondered aloud, why not leapfrog another 120 miles westward to the enemy airdrome in the Wakde Islands, and then leap 180 miles more to the island of Biak, guarding the mouth of Geelvink Bay, New Guinea’s largest inlet? Kenney was elated—“The Philippines,” he wrote, “didn’t look anywhere near as far as they did a few months before”—but he was the only enthusiast in the Nashville’s wardroom. According to Barbey, Krueger was “noncommittal,” while Eichelberger was “vehemently opposed to the idea.” By now they knew he would override their objections, however; both unrolled new maps on drawing boards while he returned to Moresby, to pace his veranda and then set down what would be expected of each of them.147
During his absence Hollandia was converted into a major base, and one of the structures erected by army engineers became part of the MacArthur legend. According to Kenney’s recollection, the airman told his own deputy “to fix me up some buildings, as I intended to move my whole headquarters up from Brisbane as soon as I could get the communications in and enough buildings erected to let me operate.” At the same time, Eichelberger noted, “one by one the high-ranking officers of GHQ began to arrive by air from Brisbane to take up residence.” If the commander of MacArthur’s air force was entitled to new dwellings, some of them reasoned, the commander in chief should have a Hollandia home commensurate with his rank. Therefore they ordered that three shingle-and-beaverboard prefabs be joined together and painted white. Aides then installed rugs and furniture sent up from Australia.148
The result was spectacular. After inspecting it Eichelberger wrote enviously of his chief, “I hope he likes his new home.” MacArthur would have been hard to please if he hadn’t. It was situated on the slope of a six-thousand-foot mountain mass above the bright blue waters of Lake Sentani, Kenney remembers, and “the deep green hills of central New Guinea formed a backdrop of peaks, ravines, and jungle growth that was almost unreal. Little cone-shaped green islands, with native houses on stilts clinging to their shores, dotted the lake. To complete the picture, directly in back of the camp and perhaps two miles away, a five-hundred-foot waterfall seemed to spring out of the center of Cyclops Mountain, dark and forbidding, with its crest perpetually covered with black rain clouds. I have lived in many places in New Guinea that I liked less than Hollandia.”149
So had the GIs, and that was the problem. One officer remembers: “Sitting on top of a beautiful hill, this white structure seemed a splendid thing from the beach below, and the war correspondents made the most of it.” Stories about it circulated throughout the Southwest Pacific, gaining in the telling until troops spoke of “Dugout Doug’s White House” and his “fabulous villa overlooking dreamy Sentani,” and indignantly canceled their war-bond purchases. The rumors reached Brisbane, where Jean wrote her husband: “When I go to Manila, I want to see that mansion you built for me—the one where I’m supposed to be living in luxury!” There is no record that he ever replied, or that he knew of the scuttlebutt that he was waited upon by infantrymen in livery. Indeed, there is no evidence that he gave the prefab building any thought. His office diary shows that he spent just four nights in it. If building it was bad taste, the blame falls on his subordinates, not him.150
At about the same time, buzz began circulating that his chief of staff was sleeping with a beautiful mistress from Melbourne. That was true. Her husband, an Australian officer, was fighting in the Middle East. Dr. Egeberg recalls that she had “fucked her way to the top.” Apparently she never slept with enlisted men, but she did start with junior officers and was promoted through the field grades, so to speak, until she reached Sutherland, who commissioned her as a WAC captain. She wasn’t the only woman in Hollandia—Kenney and Dick Marshall had secretaries from down under—but unlike the others, she lacked office skills. She couldn’t type, take dictation, or even file reports. “Sutherland was screwing the socks off her every night,” a member of his staff says, “and we didn’t know what else to do with her, so we made her a receptionist.” One morning MacArthur, to his amazement, saw her passing out cups of fruit juice on a little tray. He asked for an explanation and was told that she was an Australian girl who could be loosely described as an acting hostess, which in a sense was correct. He looked even more startled and seemed about to snap out an order. Then he checked himself, probably because he knew that they would soon be moving north of the equator, and that under an agreement between himself and Canberra, no Australian women or conscripts would follow them there. Never dreaming that his chief of staff would flout an understanding with Curtin, he dropped the matter without comment.151
There were three reasons why he remained unaware of this time bomb ticking away under his nose. The first is that he assumed that all his officers were as loyal to him as he was to them. The second is that his staff was genuinely intimidated by Sutherland. The chief of staff was feared just as Nixon’s staffers feared H. R. Haldeman, whom Sutherland in some ways resembled. Both of them referred to themselves as “the old man’s son-of-a-bitch,” both could be ruthless with anyone who crossed them, and—this should be said in their defense—both served as lightning rods for leaders who recoiled from personal confrontations.
The third reason is that MacArthur in these months was preoccupied with annihilating or circumventing the Japanese garrisons between him and his cherished goal, the Philippines. To do it he had to create concepts of attack new to military science. If there is such a thing as an art of war—and he never do
ubted that there was—he was now performing as a virtuoso. Exploiting the most recent developments in twentieth-century technology, he was pivoting adroitly from one island or coastal base to another, avoiding the foe’s troop concentrations, caroming from airfield to airfield, using Nipponese rigidity to break Nippon’s back, shielding his flanks, and avoiding bloodlettings like Buna and Tarawa.
MacArthur’s controversial house in Hollandia
Bypassed Hansa Bay fell on June 15, and in late July, when surprised enemy units were overwhelmed at Sansapor, on the extreme western tip of the Vogelkop Peninsula, the head of the New Guinea buzzard, the campaign which had begun with the defense of Moresby should have ended. The General announced that it had, but he was wrong. Biak had turned out to be just as tough as Eichelberger had predicted. MacArthur’s June 1 communique had reported that the enemy’s defense of the island was “collapsing,” and two days later he proclaimed that “mopping-up” was proceeding on schedule. In reality the battle there was then a stalemate. Colonel Naoyuki Kuzumi, the commander of the garrison, had ten thousand men, five times Willoughby’s estimate. And Kuzumi had made the most murderous discovery of the war. Before Biak, Japanese commanders had tried to defeat Allied assault troops on the beach, where their defenders could be scythed down by U.S. naval gunfire. Kuzumi holed up his men in cave-pocked hills and gorges. As a result, the island held out until early August, and Japanese generals on Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa resolved to follow the colonel’s example.152
MacArthur had hoped to lend Biak’s airstrip to Nimitz for the Saipan operation. To his chagrin, he couldn’t; the great air battle of the Philippine Sea, in which the enemy lost 480 planes off Saipan, proceeded without him, and when Tojo’s government fell, as expected, after the island had been secured by the marines, none of the credit went to the General, although captured records later revealed that Tokyo was more concerned about MacArthur’s offensive than Nimitz’s. All the same, the feats in the Southwest Pacific had been remarkable. In less than two years the General had advanced nearly two thousand miles, eleven hundred of them in the last two months. His master plan, drawn up at Finschhafen when the road to victory had seemed endless, had unfolded almost precisely on schedule. His officers now thought of him as almost supernatural, a view he of course encouraged. Vice Admiral A. W. Fitch recalls a revealing episode at Hollandia. MacArthur, sitting on a little platform at one end of a Quonset hut, was briefing assembled officers who sat facing him in a semicircle, like students in a classroom. Suddenly they heard the familiar whine of a strafing Zero. Everyone except the General sprawled on the floor. As the plane soared away, they looked up and saw him sitting bolt upright, holding out his hands, palms down, like a pontiff bestowing a benediction. “Not yet, gentlemen,” he said solemnly; “not yet.”153
The General did not move his headquarters to Hollandia until August 30, 1944. Before then, he received various eminent guests at Lennon’s Hotel or his Port Moresby bungalow. George Marshall, however, was welcome at neither. After the Sextant conference in Cairo, Marshall flew to Australia because, in the words of Forrest Pogue, he “thought it highly important that he see the Pacific situation for himself” and “wanted to show MacArthur that he had not been forgotten.” This was no small gesture on Marshall’s part. The Chief of Staff didn’t even tell Roosevelt that he was planning to go, because he felt certain that the President would forbid the flight as too dangerous, and in those prejet days a long C-54 trip was exhausting—the last leg of this one, from Ceylon, covered thirty-four hundred miles and took fifteen hours. When he arrived down under he found that MacArthur, who had been in Brisbane for six weeks, had chosen this time to fly to New Guinea. Colonel Lloyd A. “Larry” Lehrbas, one of his aides, met the C-54, took his distinguished guest surfing, and led him in an unsuccessful jeep chase after kangaroos.154
The two four-star generals finally lunched, like adversaries negotiating a truce, on Goodenough Island, lying off the coast of Papua between Buna and Milne Bay. Marshall, feeling that the swim and the chase had been a waste of his time, was in a brittle mood, and his host was equally stiff. No notes were taken at the luncheon, their only World War II meeting. MacArthur had told a member of his staff: “He’ll never see me alone. He’ll always find a way to have someone else present.” In fact this happened, though it is difficult to see why any significance should be attached to it. MacArthur, ever distrustful of the man he had once outranked, would have been taken aback to read in Stimson’s diary that at one meeting of the Joint Chiefs, when King was savaging MacArthur, “Marshall finally said to him, thumping the table, ‘I will not have any meetings carried on with this hatred,’ and with that he shut up King.”155
Pogue quotes the Chief of Staff as saying, “With Chennault in China and MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific, I sure had a combination of temperament.” Marshall may, however, have fueled MacArthur’s feeling that he was antagonistic toward him. At one point during their Goodenough lunch, his host began a sentence, “My staff—” and Marshall cut him short, saying, “You don’t have a staff, General. You have a court.” It was true, but it was equally true that the Chief of Staff had been off horseback riding when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and tactful officers never reminded him of it.156
In the light of MacArthur’s navalophobia, it is odd to note that most admirals, King excepted, found him congenial. The New Republic noted in October 1944 that “both Halsey and Nimitz have shown infinite patience in their dealings with the temperamental General.” Nimitz, as the Pacific’s other commander in chief, occasionally aroused MacArthur’s indignation. (At such times he would refer to him as “Nee-mitz. “) Unlike Marshall, he did not journey to Australia voluntarily. Nevertheless, when Secretary Knox told him he “would be pleased” if he and the General met, he flew down four weeks before the Hollandia invasion, and their talks went well. Addressing their two staffs, Nimitz said of himself and MacArthur that “the situation reminds me of the story of the two frantically worried men who were pacing the corridor of their hotel. One finally turned to the other and said, ‘What are you worried about?’ The answer was: ‘I am a doctor and I have a patient in my room with a wooden leg and I have that leg apart and can’t get it back together again.’ The other responded: ‘Great guns, I wish that was all that I have to worry about. I have a good-looking gal in my room with both legs apart, and I can’t remember the room number. “ MacArthur roared.157
But the General’s favorite admiral was still Halsey, who achieved something Marshall and Nimitz never did. He faced MacArthur down in an angry test of wills, won, and kept his respect. The issue was the anchorage of Manus, in the Admiralties. Naval officers had planned an expansion of the base there, Seabees were building it, and the navy wanted to run it. MacArthur was apoplectic; the island was in his theater, and his men had captured it. He summoned Halsey, who found him surrounded by his nervous staff. “Before even a word was spoken,” the admiral writes in his memoirs, I saw that MacArthur was fighting to keep his temper.” He noted that “unlike myself, strong emotion did not make him profane.* He did not need to be; profanity would merely have discolored his eloquence. The General said he had “no intention of tamely submitting to such interference.” When he had finished, the admiral tautly replied that if he took that line, he would “be hampering the war effort.” The staff “gasped,” Halsey later remembered, observing: “I imagine they never expected to hear anyone address him in those terms this side of the Judgment Throne.” The quarrel lasted into the next day, when MacArthur suddenly “gave me a charming smile and said, ‘You win, Bill.’ ”158
Most of MacArthur’s guests in Moresby were Allied officers, but occasionally civilian VIPs were entertained, and as the 1944 presidential campaigns approached, some of these were politicians. In the second week of September 1943, he dined with five American senators, an event which might have passed unnoticed had he not rejected Eleanor Roosevelt’s request that she be allowed to visit Moresby that same month. The President’
s wife was touring American hospitals, troops, and Red Cross billets, and early in August the General had received a personal letter from FDR saying, “As you know Mrs. Roosevelt is leaving for the Southwest Pacific, and I am delighted that she will be able to see you. She is, of course, anxious to see everything . . . . I think that Mrs. Roosevelt’s visit to places where we have military or naval personnel will help the general morale.” MacArthur was not delighted. The following day we find Eichelberger writing to his wife that “much to my surprise I am in the big GHQ plane en route to the city [Brisbane]. . . . Yesterday noon your dickey-bird [Sutherland] called up and said the Chief wanted to see me. At first, I was all jazzed up . . . but after questioning I found . . . it was something to do with a distinguished visitor.” The visitor was the First Lady; he had been chosen to act as her chief host, and was on his way to a full-fledged briefing on protocol, travel arrangements, and conversational topics which should be avoided.159
MacArthur and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, March 1944
MacArthur, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Admiral Nimitz in Hawaii, July 1944
When she arrived, wearing her Red Cross uniform and traveling under the code name “Flight 231, Pacific,” Halsey gave one dinner in her honor, and Jean MacArthur another. Both went well. Some spectators wearing “MacArthur for President” buttons were persuaded to remove them, and Eichelberger, though a Republican and a critic of FDR, was captivated by her. He wrote how at one point “Mrs. Roosevelt got out of the jeep and went along to each truck and talked to the disconsolate soldiers. She introduced herself and asked what communications she could send home to their families. I suppose . . . it will be hard for people to understand how warming it was for a sick or wounded or well soldier in a foreign land to see the wife of the President of the United States at his elbow. It made him, ten thousand miles away from his childhood, confronted with unknown and incalculable future dangers, somehow feel remembered and secure. And perhaps, in some mystic way—and I do not want to sound sentimental—Mrs. Roosevelt served as his own mother’s deputy.”160