Storm Over Leyte

by John Prados

  The president, code-named “Duke,” arrived in San Diego with no fanfare on July 21. The press that day reported an apparent revolt among Hitler’s henchmen. With FDR on his way to the Pacific, he would largely be on his own to speculate upon the meaning of the July 20 Plot.

  Accompanied by his son James—now a Marine officer—plus the base commander, FDR visited the naval hospital at Balboa Park. His auto passed Evans F. Carlson, the redoubtable Marine officer, convalescing after wounds suffered on Saipan. Carlson, who had organized and led the Marine Raider force, and under whom James Roosevelt had served, waved. President Roosevelt had his driver stop the car so he and the Marine colonel could trade compliments.

  Then the party moved on to the San Diego–Coronado ferry. FDR crossed to the island to see the Navy’s Amphibious Training Center, on the Strand not far from the famous Hotel del Coronado. Admiral Leahy heard a briefing on techniques—newly premiered on Saipan a month earlier—whereby ships’ guns, strike aircraft, and artillery would all be coordinated in support of troops on the beach. Their arrival coincided with the graduation exercise of newly trained amphibious combat teams of the 5th Marine Division, and the president actually witnessed a landing of 10,000 troops. The mock invasion fascinated Roosevelt.

  Late that afternoon Franklin stopped by his son John’s home, about a mile away, off Alameda Boulevard. John served aboard the aircraft carrier Wasp, but Franklin could greet both his daughters-in-law, along with his grandchildren. Just after sunset the president arrived at Broadway Pier, where the heavy cruiser USS Baltimore lay moored on the south side of the wharf. There were no photographers. No honors were rendered. The trip had been kept hush-hush, strictly on the q.t. Together with his Scottish terrier, Fala, and Admiral Leahy, plus other admirals and White House advisers, FDR boarded the warship. Captain Walter L. Calhoun raised the president’s flag on the yardarm of the Baltimore. The cruiser cast off at midnight and cleared the swept channel just before 4:00 a.m. Four destroyers escorted the presidential ship. Captain Calhoun of the Baltimore led the entire force. It set course for Hawaii.

  For all the security afforded a president of the United States, Roosevelt had a bit of a scare. Less than two days out from the West Coast, Captain Calhoun received a message from the admiral leading the Hawaiian Sea Frontier, the local naval command: “POSSIBLE ENEMY TASK FORCE LOCATED 200 MILES NORTH [OF] OAHU.” The dispatch must have sent shivers down a few spines—but it proved unsubstantiated. In this third year of the war, with the Japanese Navy having just sustained a major defeat off the Marianas, no enemy should have been hazarded off the powerful American bastion Pearl Harbor. In any case, Captain Calhoun, Admiral Leahy, and other top Navy officers decided the cited position lay so far away that, if there were any Japanese, they posed little threat.

  The effort to maintain security extended down the chain of command, and the secrecy almost led to a snafu—General MacArthur, in ignorance of FDR’s visit, rejected the first invitation to come to Pearl Harbor. Pacific theater commander Admiral Chester W. Nimitz learned of the visit only when Michael F. Reilly, chief of the president’s Secret Service detail, arrived to check on security. Techies waited until the last minute to install FDR’s dedicated phone and Teletype lines. Leahy asked that only official military photographers be permitted to take pictures. Mike Reilly escorted Nimitz and other military potentates who boarded the Baltimore from a tug as she slowed to round Diamond Head at about 2:30 p.m. on July 26.

  Despite all this care, Admiral Leahy noticed that everyone on Oahu seemed to know about Roosevelt’s visit. An area of about two acres had been cleared, but beyond that stood a throng of people. As Captain Calhoun’s cruiser approached the harbor, the sky filled with planes, a veritable air show for the president. Sailors in dress whites manned the railings of ships in the harbor. CINCPAC chief of staff Vice Admiral Charles H. McMorris assembled flag officers in formation on the pier. Two dozen admirals and generals stood at attention.

  At 3:00 p.m. the Baltimore entered and moored at Pier 22-B of the Navy Yard, riding just astern of the USS Enterprise, returned from the fleet only a week earlier to receive a new propeller and a fresh air group. “Soc” McMorris ordered “right face.” A couple of the military pooh-bahs turned the wrong way, bringing guffaws from the multitudes of enlisted. The brass marched up the gangway, and aboard FDR’s flagship Captain Calhoun held a reception for the visitors.

  Forty minutes later, as the party broke up, howling sirens announced the arrival of a long car, led by a motorcycle escort. Douglas MacArthur sat in the backseat wearing a leather flight jacket. The car made the rounds of the cleared dock area before stopping in front of the gangway. Admiral Leahy, who’d known the general nearly forty years, wondered why he sported winter garb in tropical Hawaii. “Dugout Doug” shot back that Australia was cold—and an airplane at altitude worse still. MacArthur, Nimitz, and Leahy huddled together for half an hour with President Roosevelt in his quarters.

  At 4:15 p.m., the big shots emerged to pose for the newsreels and photographers before officers helped FDR ashore. Because of animal quarantine regulations, Fala was left behind aboard the Baltimore. A Marine band and guard rendered honors for the president. Roosevelt got into the open car driven by Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class W. F. Reasley, the 14th Naval District commander’s regular chauffeur, for the twenty-minute drive to Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki. The Chris Holmes house, usually occupied by Navy pilots on leave, had been commandeered, and teams from the Pacific Submarine Command had prepped it for the official visit. A palatial mansion in cream-colored stucco, the Holmes House offered a glorious setting on the beach.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt’s thoughts must be imagined. He had been to Hawaii only once, a decade before, almost to the day. That time the president had visited several of the islands, gone fishing, been greeted by a huge crowd at Honolulu, and dedicated a new gate to Pearl Harbor naval base. This time, there was a war that needed to be won, and the final stage of that endeavor was to start right here. Thus began a fateful meeting.

  • • •

  FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT had a very particular problem. The question of what to do next in the Pacific war was fraught with consequence. With the new tactic of “island hopping” piled atop huge matériel superiority and a major intelligence edge, Allied offensives were gaining momentum so quickly that actual moves threatened to outrun the planning. The Marianas and northwest New Guinea, specifically, marked a nexus. From the Marianas, Japan itself would be within striking range of Allied heavy bombers for the first time. The way lay open to invasion of the Inner Empire, including Taiwan (then called Formosa), the Bonin and Ryukyu islands, even Japan itself.

  As for New Guinea, winding up the struggle for that land freed General MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific forces to cooperate with Admiral Nimitz’s Pacific-area juggernaut in an unprecedented fashion. The question of what to do became paramount.

  Everyone had their own ideas, but the alternatives essentially boiled down to two options. One, to leap from the Marianas to Taiwan, would cut off Japan’s supply lines to the resource-rich lands of Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, the source of practically all the fuel that ran the Japanese war machine. Invading Taiwan would also make available airfields close to Japan—and it would furnish a platform from which the Allies could strike the Inner Empire, the China coast, or indeed the Philippines.

  The other possibility would be to jump to the Philippines. This would succor Filipino partisans, who had been fighting the Japanese for many long years, and liberate a land in which the United States had a direct interest. The islands also offered airfields and an invasion platform, though less centrally located. A Philippine invasion would make good on the American promise during the dark early days of the war, articulated by none other than Douglas MacArthur, to return and free the islands from Japanese occupiers.

  Both approaches were already on the table when Admiral Nimitz’s fleet descended upon the Mari
anas, and the capture of those islands crystallized the debate. As a matter of fact, the American and British chiefs of staff—together making the Combined Chiefs of Staff—were meeting in London when the U.S. armada began its Marianas invasion, called Operation “Forager.” At those meetings General George Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff, spoke of the accelerating pace of the advance and the need to nail down a strategy. Admiral Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. Navy and chief of naval operations, raised the specific idea of gaining surprise and speeding up operations by means of bypassing the Philippines, despite Washington’s promise of independence, in favor of attacking Taiwan. The top brass at this conference even toyed with the notion of bypassing all the rest in favor of a direct invasion of the Japanese island of Kyushu.

  When they queried the theater commanders, General MacArthur stood firm. On June 18, on the cusp of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Southwest Pacific boss rejected any idea of bypassing the Philippines as foolish, insisting that logistics problems made it impossible for him to accelerate his operations any further and that the United States had a moral obligation to liberate Filipinos. General Marshall, wary of the Japanese building their strength there, remained open to bypassing the Philippines. Once MacArthur understood that King wanted to spring ahead to Taiwan, he put down a marker: If Washington moved toward that option, then MacArthur wanted to come home and make his case in person.

  For planning purposes, American war strategists slated the southern Philippines island of Mindanao as the next target, and November 1944 as the date, but neither was set in stone. The Japanese fleet and air force remained powerful and could be expected to fight hard. At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz had no problem with Mindanao as an objective, but he felt perfectly comfortable presenting Ernie King’s Taiwan scheme too. In early July, when representatives of both commands met to hammer out a way forward, Nimitz plumped for invading Mindanao, then skipping the rest of the Philippines to hit Taiwan.

  Franklin Roosevelt, in a nutshell, needed to arbitrate between two strategic visions, and it was apparent in three ways that he took the problem seriously. First, the president was prepared to go as far as Pearl Harbor to settle the dispute. It would be the only time Roosevelt went to the Pacific theater in the entire war. Because of his physical disabilities, FDR traveled mostly by train and ship. Visiting Pearl Harbor in that fashion meant being away from Washington for an entire month and represented a serious commitment.

  Second, President Roosevelt was serious about that commitment. When he initially spoke to Admiral Leahy, FDR wanted to schedule two trips. The other would have been to Europe to see Winston Churchill, who was anxious for a new meeting of the Allies. FDR canceled the European trip—within hours of scheduling it—but the Pacific journey stayed on his calendar.

  The third strand of evidence is the trip itself. Roosevelt treaded lightly as a war manager. He was not like Hitler, pushing flags for his divisions around on a map of Europe; nor was he Lyndon Johnson, meeting his Joint Chiefs of Staff to consider schedules for bombing North Vietnam. The president rarely saw his military leaders except when the Chiefs accompanied him to Allied conferences, and he did most of his business through Admiral Leahy. Over the entire length of the Pacific war there were just a handful of times when FDR took a hand in military operations—and one of them was this conference at Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt must have perceived the situation as requiring his personal attention.

  • • •

  DOUGLAS MACARTHUR HAD no use for this meeting. He rejected the invitation—admittedly, before he knew the president would be there, but MacArthur had to be ordered to Pearl Harbor. General Marshall knew the score and wanted his American Caesar on board. MacArthur groused that this was all a political stunt. He left Brisbane on a four-engine C-54, not his personal B-17, called the Bataan, which he considered not quite up to the long haul to Hawaii, and paced the plane’s aisle, openly complaining of his humiliation at being summoned to “a political picture-taking junket.” His personal pilot, Major Weldon “Dusty” Rhoades, had set up a cot for the general at the back of the plane, but MacArthur wouldn’t go near it. The general brought along only a few aides, none of his senior officers, and no planning documents. At an intermediate stop on Canton Island, MacArthur received a Nimitz dispatch requesting he delay his arrival two and a half hours, likely so that FDR’s cruiser could dock. The general refused.

  MacArthur’s plane landed about an hour before the Baltimore docked, but the general would not be there to welcome his president. Only when others had already greeted FDR did MacArthur go to the Baltimore. The gesture seemed a calculated snub aimed at Chester Nimitz, a delayed arrival, carefully staged for maximum publicity, after the lesser fry were off the board—all classic MacArthur.

  Yet MacArthur’s complaints about the trip had some substance. The strategy papers were on file. Planners had discussed them. Why have a conference? President Roosevelt would be seen meeting his top Pacific theater commanders, taking an active role. The photos in the papers would help his upcoming political campaign. But there was more to it than that. In actuality the Pearl Harbor event reflected careful orchestration. The planners had had their say. The papers were on file. The Combined Chiefs of Staff had commented. Yet whom did FDR leave out of his travel party? Admiral Ernest J. King, the very person who counseled the Combined Chiefs to accept the more cerebral strategy of bypassing the Philippines. While FDR slowly made his cross-country journey by train en route to Hawaii, the Navy chief grabbed a plane and flew out to Pearl Harbor for the ostensible purpose of making a quick inspection of newly conquered Saipan, now declared secure. He huddled with Nimitz, then took the admiral with him to Saipan, counting on the shared experience to cement his arguments with the Pacific theater commander. Then Nimitz returned to Pearl Harbor to receive his president.

  Roosevelt, supreme political animal that he was, had to be keenly aware of MacArthur’s promise to return to the Philippines, and he certainly knew liberation of the islands would be good for his own prospects in the upcoming presidential election. He also knew that King advocated bypassing the archipelago. Chester Nimitz represented the wild card. The admiral had accepted part of MacArthur’s plan while also aligning himself with Ernie King’s Taiwan strategy. FDR needed to get Nimitz and MacArthur to play from the same sheet music. Admiral Leahy’s presence among the group, as a colleague of Marshall and King, would reassure the other Joint Chiefs.

  Formalities had to be observed before the president could get down to business. On July 27, President Roosevelt, together with General MacArthur and Admirals Nimitz and Leahy, toured Oahu military bases in a red Lincoln Zephyr convertible. There were just two like it on Oahu. The fire chief owned one. The other belonged to Jean O’Hara, a flamboyant former Chicagoan who had run a brothel there and now was a landlady and call girl madame in Honolulu. O’Hara had been leery of driving of late—she had been sent to trial on charges of trying to run down a friend’s husband. Though acquitted, the madame needed to build goodwill, and lending out the car looked like a good prospect. Admiral Soc McMorris, having forbidden naval officers (who included some of O’Hara’s tenants) from attending the salacious trial, rejected the loan. The Navy got its car from the fire chief.

  At each base, Roosevelt made short remarks to assemblies of servicemen, and even an impromptu speech to the mustered troops of an Army division on its way to the front. Between stops, riding in the Zephyr, Nimitz sat in the middle of the backseat as FDR and Doug MacArthur talked past him. The president and general had a history stretching back before World War I, when Nimitz was no more than a young engineering lieutenant with the Atlantic Fleet. Now the two men chattered away, with the admiral mostly an attentive listener. MacArthur later bragged to a subordinate that he had talked with President Roosevelt for six hours while the Navy sat mute.

  With all the pomp and ceremony, Roosevelt got only a couple of hours to himself late in the afternoon, before hosting the sa
me officers to dinner at the Holmes mansion. Admiral William F. Halsey, who had arrived from the United States just that afternoon, joined the festivities. Afterward the group, minus Halsey, repaired to trade horses.

  Early on, in the conversation where MacArthur had been teased about his flight jacket, FDR had said he supposed the Southwest Pacific commander knew what this meeting was all about. The general had professed complete ignorance, though of course the denial was part of his studied posturing. Early in the war, detractors had nicknamed MacArthur “Dugout Doug” for his propensity to wax heroic from the safety of fortress Corregidor. But the sobriquet applied equally to MacArthur’s bulldog refusal to budge when he had decided to have his way. He would tell the president he had no idea what this conference was about, but the moment it came time to talk turkey in the huge living room of the Holmes House, its walls now hung with maps, MacArthur stood ready with an articulate, detailed argument for why his approach had to be the one—his case complete with a timetable. The United States, not merely MacArthur himself, he insisted, had made a commitment when he had promised to return to the Philippines. Politician Roosevelt could not miss that point. MacArthur lectured—and he presented myriad details. The island of Mindanao would be just the first step. Then Leyte, and finally Luzon, the prize, with the Philippine capital, Manila.

  Roosevelt worried about combat losses. General MacArthur assured him that modern weapons were too deadly for frontal assaults. His losses would not be excessive. He already had the forces needed. Compared to this vision of the Philippines as a low-cost mission, MacArthur held Iwo Jima and Okinawa—and, by extension, Taiwan—out as expensive frontal assaults. Were that option selected, the Southwest Pacific theater that MacArthur commanded stood to be reduced to just a couple of divisions of combat troops. No doubt that irked the general too.

  MacArthur argued that seizing the Philippines would block Japanese sea-lanes to the southern resources area. “The blockade that I will put across the line of supply between Japan and the Dutch East Indies will so strangle the Japanese Empire that it will have to surrender.”