American Caesar

by William Manchester

  Another officer heard him also say to Eichelberger: “Bob, I think you’re doing the right thing down here. Continue patrolling and keep contact with the enemy, but do everything possible to avoid a major engagement. We don’t want to lose any more men than we have to, especially at this stage of the war.” The contrast between his casualties at this time and those of the enemy is, in fact, extraordinary. In his Philippine operations after Luzon he lost 82.0 GIs, while over 21,000 Japanese were slain. On July 5 he could announce: “The entire Philippine Islands are now liberated. . . . The Japanese during the operations employed twenty-three divisions, all of which were practically annihilated. Our forces comprised seventeen divisions. This was one of the rare instances when in a long campaign a ground force superior in numbers was entirely destroyed by a numerically inferior opponent.”

  In Borneo he relied on Australian infantry, whose commanders weren’t keen about the prospect of more jungle fighting south of the equator just as the Japanese were reeling back toward their home islands. The diggers had never mounted an amphibious attack, and they questioned the value of this one. Canberra suggested scrapping the operation. MacArthur, who could be pious about observing the chain of command when it suited him, replied starchily on May 10: “The Borneo campaign . . . has been ordered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff who are charged by the Combined Chiefs of Staff with the responsibility for strategy in the Pacific. . . . Withdrawal would disorganize completely not only the immediate plan but also the strategic plan of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” The fact that he himself had defied the Chiefs, waging battles which required fighting in Borneo if his gains were to have any meaning, was unmentioned, and the Australians may not have known of it. Reluctantly they went along, seizing Tarakan in early May and scheduling landings at Brunei Bay in June and Balikpapan in July. Because the diggers still doubted the necessity for the campaign, he resolved to appear at the front, exposing himself to heavy fire once more to show them that he wasn’t afraid to do what he was asking of them.

  He was restless in Manila anyhow. Except for one April trip to the Marakina Valley, twenty miles northeast of the capital, where Krueger’s GIs were battling thirty thousand entrenched Japanese, he hadn’t left the city since the arrival of his family, and he said he wanted “a feel” of the combat to the south. On June 3 he and several members of his staff boarded the Boise for what Eichelberger called a “grand tour” of Eighth Army battlefields and, at the end, participation in the Brunei Bay landing. He would be away twelve days. Part of the trip was nostalgic. “Under very evident stress,” Eichelberger noted, he reminisced emotionally about Corregidor as they passed it. On his instructions the skipper retraced his PT-41 escape route to Mindanao, and he visited Iloilo, Panay, where he had served after leaving West Point over forty years earlier. At Del Monte he wanted to see the country club in which he had spent four harrowing days in March 1942, and whence he had flown to Australia. Eichelberger wrote: “After considerable search we found the site—but only the site. Bombs had demolished the building; only the foundations, now overgrown by vegetation, remained to remind one that there once had been riches and luxury in northern Mindanao. And that, though man has only a short memory, nature has none.”110

  Evenings in the cruiser’s wardroom the General puffed on his corncob and held forth with his empurpled rhetoric. George Marshall, he told his acolytes, wanted him to back universal military training and the integration of black troops in white platoons. He wouldn’t do either, he said, because they were both “controversial.” The troops which were already on their way to him from Europe would be welcome, but he didn’t want their generals, not after the Bulge fiasco. He was already planning the invasion of Japan. Unless the emperor capitulated, the Japanese wouldn’t quit: “The little fellow is a mean enemy because he does not surrender.” He looked forward to Soviet entry into the Pacific war; by engaging a million Japanese and taking the sting out of their air force, he reckoned, Stalin would distract the enemy and save thousands of lives. His chief criticism of Nimitz and his field commanders was that they shed their men’s lives senselessly. The way they were handling the fighting on Okinawa, where 12,520 marines and GIs were killed and 36,631 wounded, was, he said, “just awful. The Central Pacific command just sacrificed thousands of American soldiers because they insisted on driving the Japanese off the island. In three or four days after the landing the American forces had all the area they needed, which was the area they needed for airplane bases. They should have had the troops go into a defensive position and just let the Japs come to them and kill them from a defensive position, which would have been much easier to do and would have cost less men.”

  Ashore on this trip, and on the later voyage to Balikpapan, he made informal, unannounced inspections of Allied troops. “Christ!” said an Australian soldier who looked up and saw him, “It’s the fucking messiah!” And when he approached a group of men struggling to manhandle an artillery piece across a stream and said in his old-fashioned, courtly way, “How goes it, gentlemen?” Barbey noted that “there was a sudden silence and an immediate sense of hostility.” The infantrymen knew they weren’t gentlemen and obviously considered his civility hypocritical. Filipinos, however, went wild whenever they saw him. In his famous cap and well-pressed khaki he was instantly recognizable. He enjoyed their affectionate attentions, and was as pleased as Arthur with a new boomity-boom present when the Moro sultan of Jolo presented him with a curved, hundred-year-old kris. His sense of propriety was offended on Mindanao, however, where Brigadier Clarence A. Martin greeted him with a brass band, an honor guard of three companies, and a platform taped to show where the General was supposed to stand while “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played. MacArthur refused to return the brigadier’s salute or even get out of his jeep. He said crisply, “Honors in the field are contrary to Army regulations, and I don’t like it, Martin.”111

  His physical stamina, in a man his age, continued to be remarkable. “Believe me,” Eichelberger wrote admiringly, “the Old Man can take it.” He stood erect in a souped-up PT boat slamming through heavy seas, on a trip so rough that one of his officers suspected that “the Navy lads” were “giving the older men ‘the treatment.’ ” Scorning a quick trip by air, he rode in a jeep for eight hours over a 120-mile mountain in a driving rainstorm. Twice bulldozers had to pull them out of mud holes. An aide recalls that “it was a pounding and skull-cracking ride . . . but General MacArthur never once acknowledged physical discomfort. My own teeth were clicking like castanets and my sacroiliac was in painful revolt.” On one island, he crammed himself and thirteen officers in another jeep for a two-mile ride. (“I have never doubted since,” another aide said later, “that the American jeep was the most versatile piece of equipment in World War II.”) The General waded through a half-mile of treacherous swamp so that he would understand the terrain with which his soldiers had to cope. Reboarding the Boise, an officer wrote, “it was very rough and I was afraid [MacArthur] would break his neck. It took him about ten minutes to get up the ladder . . . [he] got a good scare.” If so, he didn’t show it. Kenney, in fact, had the impression that he was “enjoying himself hugely.” And at Brunei Bay and Balikpapan, he insisted on going in with the assault waves.

  These were his last brushes with death on the battlefields of World War II, and they were hair-raising. Ashore at Brunei Bay he walked along a road paralleling the beach, about a quarter of a mile inland, with the sound of snipers’ shots and machine guns on both sides. Kenney remembers beginning “to feel all over again as I had when we landed in the Philippines at Leyte.” Two senior Australian officers asked the airman where they were going; he shrugged and said, “I don’t know. We’re with the General. Confidentially, I don’t like it either.” A tank lumbered by, and fifty yards ahead, atop a small rise, a rifleman and a machine gunner exchanged bursts of fire. MacArthur walked there to see what was happening. Two dead Japanese lay in a ditch. “They look like first-class troops,” he told the others. “Probably b
elong to a suicide party left to cover the withdrawal of the main body.” Kenney recalls, “We all nodded, pretending to take it nonchalantly.” An Australian army photographer appeared, hoping to take a picture of the General and the bodies. MacArthur refused, and the cameraman squared away to snap the two corpses. Just as his bulb flashed, the photographer fell with a sniper’s bullet in his shoulder.112

  Sir Leslie Morhead, the corps commander, hurried up and said they had reached the front line. MacArthur protested: “But I see some Australian soldiers fully a hundred yards ahead.” Sir Leslie said, “General, that is only a forward patrol, and even now it is under heavy fire. You cannot go beyond this point without extreme hazard. The enemy is right in front of it.” MacArthur said, “Let’s go forward.” Sir Leslie stepped aside and told one of the American aides, “This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a commander-in-chief acting as the point.”* The General started to pace toward the Japanese, but Kenney decided to intervene. They had found the enemy’s outpost position, he told MacArthur, and “if he wanted my vote, it was for allowing the infantry to do the job they came ashore for.” Besides, he continued, the captain of the Boise had invited them to dinner, and it would be “extremely discourteous to keep dinner waiting, when, after all, we were just guests.” Capping his argument, he reminded the General that the cruiser’s skipper had promised them chocolate ice cream that evening. “All right, George,” MacArthur said, smiling and turning back toward the ship. “I wouldn’t have you miss that ice cream for anything.” His craving for danger was unappeased, however; the next day they landed on the other side of Brunei Bay. Hearing gunfire coming from the direction of a nearby airfield, they “headed,” in Kenney’s words, “for more trouble.” Reaching the edge of the landing strip, the General said, “Let’s go on,” but just then an Australian colonel stepped out of the bush and barred the way, brusquely telling the commander in chief that he and his entourage were an unwelcome distraction. Kenney writes: “He was not awed a bit at MacArthur’s five stars and, much to my gratification, refused to let us go forward another inch.”113

  Kenney was one of the few Southwest Pacific officers who could stand up to the General, and he was elsewhere three weeks later, when MacArthur participated in the war’s last amphibious operation, at Balikpapan. After the first wave of diggers had hit the beach, Barbey signaled him from the flagship: “Have delayed barge as beach is under heavy mortar fire and it is not safe for the commander-in-chief to proceed.” MacArthur signaled back: “Send barge at once.” So, Barbey recalls, “I picked him up in a landing boat with a few of his staff, some war correspondents, and a camera crew.” Ashore, the General headed straight for the front, climbed a small shale hill less than two hundred yards from the Japanese lines, and, borrowing a map from an Australian brigadier, unfolded it and began studying it. The Australian, too proud to seek concealment when the American commander in chief wouldn’t, stubbornly stood beside him, and they pored over the chart together while, an aide remembers, “bullets whined about us, spurts of dust kicked in the air . . . bullets sliced the leaves above us.”114

  Then, according to Barbey, “An Aussie major came running up and warned everybody to take cover, as there was a machine-gun nest in a nearby hilltop. Before he had finished, there was the rat-tat-tat of machine-gun bullets. All of us had dropped. But not MacArthur. He was still standing there looking over his map, quite unperturbed . . . . I shamefacedly said something about fighting ashore being no place for the Navy, and supposed I was the first one to hit the dirt. ‘No,’ said Lee Van Atta, the I International] N[ews] S[ervice] war correspondent, ‘I was looking up as you came down.’ “ Still under fire, MacArthur calmly folded the map, handed it back to the Australian officer, who hadn’t moved either, and pointed to another hill about a quarter of a mile away. He said, “Let’s go over there and see what’s going on. By the way, brigadier, I think it would be a good idea to have a patrol take out that machine gun before someone gets hurt.”115

  On July 16 the Portland Oregonian, hearing about this, ran an open letter to MacArthur under the head “Duck, General, Duck!” It read: “You don’t have to convince your men that you are a brave man. You don’t have to convince us taxpayers and war bond buyers. . . . You are said to be bent upon saving as many lives of your men as possibly can be saved while thoroughly whipping the enemy. . . . Why take the unnecessary chance of an exit into history before your time comes?” Back in Manila the General read it and tossed it aside. The editorial had raised a valid question, but it was probably unanswerable. What was sad was that so few of his men knew that he took greater risks than most of them. Long afterward Kenney observed: “Once in a while I still hear the term ‘Dugout Doug.’ Perhaps it is meant to emphasize an entirely opposite characteristic of the man—like calling a tall man ‘Shorty.’”116

  In Dai Nippon the Japanese masses were still convinced that they were winning the war. Villages continued to erect Churen Kensho-to, monuments to the victorious dead, as though the nation’s enemies had already surrendered. Hirohito’s mightiest warships lay in Davy Jones’s locker, and the surviving Nipponese troops on Luzon had faded into the mountains, but the people, as Yoshio Kodama observes, believed that the “Japanese Fleet was still undamaged and expected the Yamashita Army Corps to turn the tide of the war in the Philippines.” To be sure, the U.S. Marines’ victory on Iwo Jima in March had dismayed them. With Iwo and Saipan as bases, American B-29s had begun firebombing one Japanese city after another. Next Nimitz’s battleships began cruising off Nippon’s shores, announcing their targets in advance and shelling coastal cities at point-blank range. Then the Americans invaded Okinawa on April 1, 1945. That was an even greater shock than Iwo; Okinawa was only a thirty-knot overnight run from Kyushu. Yet Japanese civilians retained their illusions, believing that an invasion of Nippon’s home islands was impossible because they were sacred, having fallen as drops from the sword of a god. The emperor’s government told his subjects that Okinawa, not Leyte or Luzon, would be the war’s sekigahara, its decisive battle. Readers were reminded that samurai warriors let “the enemy cut one’s skin to eat his flesh’’—that marines and GIs had been permitted to land so that kamikazes could sink their supporting fleet and isolate them on the island. Certainly they made their greatest effort of the war on Okinawa. “In size, scope, and ferocity,” Hanson Baldwin wrote, the struggle for that island, on which 110,549 Japanese died, “dwarfed the Battle of Britain.” But it was all in vain. The U.S. victory on June 21 meant that landings on the Nipponese homeland were imminent.

  Who would lead the Americans was undecided as late as March 4, when Eichelberger wrote Miss Em after a session with MacArthur: “The $64.00 question has not yet been answered but he was told it would be settled at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a few days.” Two weeks passed and no word came. Then the dying Roosevelt, receiving Kenney in Washington on March 20, summoned a faint smile and said: “You might tell Douglas that I expect he will have a lot of work to do well north of the Philippines before very long.” Back in Manila the airman told the General: “By the way, I heard a rumor that you are going to command the show when we go into Japan.” MacArthur said quickly: “I don’t believe it. My information is that Nimitz will be in charge and that I am to clean up the Philippines and then move south into the Dutch East Indies. Who gave you that rumor, anyhow?” Kenney replied, “A man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” He recalls, “MacArthur tried to keep the same expression, but it was no use. He was as pleased as I was . . . . I didn’t have anything against Nimitz, but I thought MacArthur was the better man for the job.”117

  On April 3 the Pentagon, having received its marching orders from FDR, announced a reorganization of Pacific commands. The old geographical boundaries, “Southwest Pacific” and “Pacific Ocean Areas,” were discarded as obsolete. Nimitz was given command of all naval units and MacArthur was to be commander in chief of all ground forces; reliance was placed on the closest possible cooperation between the a
dmiral, the General, and Curtis LeMay, the B-29S’ leader. That should have been the end of it. But Roosevelt was no sooner in the ground at Hyde Park than the struggle resumed, apparently on the General’s initiative. “In mid-April,” Forrestal noted, “there was a formal conference at Guam, almost on the level of international diplomacy, between delegates [from Manila and Honolulu] in which MacArthur’s people sought to secure command over all land and air forces in the Pacific, relegating to the Navy the minor role of purely naval support.”118