MacArthur's War: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan

by Douglas Niles

  —General Douglas MacArthur at the surrender ceremony

  • SUNDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 1945 •

  HIROSHIMA, JAPAN, 1730 HOURS

  Naguro Yoshi looked at the place where Michiyo’s house had been. At least, he thought it was the place—it seemed the right distance from the looming brick shell that had once been the Fukuya Department Store. But the charring from the firebomb raid was so complete, so utterly devastating, that he couldn’t be sure. He poked through the ashes, finding a few metal pots, the remnants of an iron cookstove that might mark the kitchen of the Ogawa house.

  Of the people who had lived here, there was no sign.

  Yoshi turned his back on the place, making his way along the ashen avenue, staying across the street from the looming, burned-out shell of the department store. He walked toward the riverbank, trying to get his bearings.

  The water was sluggish and shallow, choked with debris, buzzing with flies. The magnificent Aioi Bridge, he saw, was simply gone, just a few piers standing in place to mark where the footings had been planted. He had heard that the typhoon had destroyed it, with a surge of floodwaters and debris roaring up from the ocean with such force that it swept the span right off of its footings. But still, it was hard to believe.

  Yoshi was adrift, aimless and uprooted. His unit had disbanded upon word of the surrender. He had set out on his own, traveling by bicycle and, after breaking the frame, on foot for the last thirty miles. Hiroshima was his home, and it was the home of his beloved Michiyo.

  But Hiroshima was no more. What the fire had spared, the typhoon had ravaged. The city was a wasteland, a moonscape. A few survivors huddled miserably in the rubble, but they bore all the signs of extreme shock. None of them knew anything of Michiyo, or of anyone of the Ogawa or Naguro clans. So the young lieutenant was left to wander on his own, trying not to visualize the many tragedies that had happened here.

  He found two children poking through the ruins at the near end of the broken bridge. They scrambled over a slab of concrete and disappeared below it, near the water. When they again climbed into sight, one of them held a small green object, swinging from a leather strand, in a grubby hand.

  It was a jade Buddha.

  “Where did you get that?” Yoshi asked.

  The boy pointed toward the shallow water, amid several massive concrete chunks where the bridge span had tumbled straight down. “The lady had it. She lived down there after the fire. Then the typhoon came, and she died,” he said.

  “I… I would like to buy it from you,” Yoshi said.

  The boy considered the trinket. Even though it was muddy, the purity of the jade, the precision of the carving, showed it to be an object of value. The boy shrugged.

  “Here,” he replied, handing it over. “You can have it.”

  The two children ambled off, searching for more treasures—or, more likely, food. Yoshi stood there alone for a long time, holding the jade Buddha, watching the river’s nearly dead waters move past, working their way around the pieces of the ruined bridge. The current was mild, but even so the Ota managed to scour away some of the refuse around the foundation of that bridge. A piece of tattered silk, perhaps the sleeve of a kimono, drifted past.

  Yoshi watched it float by. Then he raised his hand and hurled the Buddha as far as he could down the channel of brackish water. It landed with barely a sound, and just like that it was gone.

  Aftermath

  These proceedings are now closed.

  —Concluding words of the surrender ceremony

  Now, where the hell are those airplanes?

  —MacArthur, immediately after the surrender ceremony, because the planned flyover was late

  New York Herald Front Page Wednesday, November 3, 1948

  MACARTHUR LOSES!

  Truman Reelected in Tight Race

  (WASHINGTON) Harry S. Truman won the presidency at 3:13 this morning by a margin of less than 5 percent in yesterday’s election. At 3:35, Republican candidate General Douglas MacArthur called the president-elect to concede. Afterward, before a cheering crowd outside the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, General MacArthur echoed his famous quotation, shouting, “As I have returned before, so I shall return again!” while standing in front of the largest American flag ever made.

  President-elect Truman won important battleground states including New York and Pennsylvania, while losing such states as California and Ohio to the Republicans. Illinois, which provided the president with certain victory in the electoral college, did not report until after two o’clock in the morning central standard time. The president-elect and the new vice president, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, claimed victory to riotous cheers before a crowded ballroom of supporters in Kansas City, Missouri.

  Political observers in the USA had all but written off Truman. Indeed, most commentators had concluded that MacArthur would be the sure victor. However, last-minute allegations raised disturbing questions about General MacArthur’s conduct in the Philippines and in the invasion of Japan. Despite Republican attempts to portray the accusers as vengeful navy officers and the disgruntled relatives of dead POWs, the questions stuck:

  Did General MacArthur accept five hundred thousand dollars in payments from Philippine officials? Was he incapacitated on the morning of the Japanese invasion and unable to fight? Did MacArthur and his chief of staff conspire to ensure the captivity of at least one witness? The MacArthur campaign has strongly disputed the nature and meaning of evidence that has been released publicly.

  The Philippine government has officially…

  POINT OF HISTORICAL DEPARTURE

  THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY

  4–7 JUNE 1942

  The Historical Battle

  From June 4 to 7, 1942, the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy fought the Battle of Midway, the decisive naval engagement of World War II in the Pacific. The resulting American victory broke the back of the Japanese fleet only six months into the war. With her four best aircraft carriers (Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu) lost against the American loss of only one (Yorktown), the Land of the Rising Sun would never again go on the offensive in the Pacific. Indeed, it is fair to say that before Midway, the Japanese never lost an important battle, and after Midway they never won one.

  The United States Navy, which had suffered a major black eye over Pearl Harbor, was redeemed by its performance at Midway. This enabled it to win another war, the conflict between General Douglas MacArthur, brave defender of Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines, and Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations, over who was to command in the Pacific Theater. The Pacific had been divided into the Pacific Ocean Area and the Southwest Pacific Area, under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and MacArthur respectively.

  Admiral Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, had known from intelligence reports that the Japanese were planning a major offensive. The brilliant head of Admiral Nimitz’s cryptology unit at Pearl Harbor, Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, successfully identified the Imperial Japanese Navy’s main objective as Midway Atoll, barely a thousand miles away from Pearl Harbor. Armed with this foreknowledge, Nimitz planned his own ambush, and shortly a U.S. carrier strike force consisting of two task forces was heading toward Midway. One was Task Force 16, commanded by Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, consisting of the carriers Enterprise and Hornet as well as their cruiser group and destroyer screen. The other carrier strike force, Task Force 17, consisting of the carrier Yorktown and its associated ships, was commanded by Rear Admiral Frank J. Fletcher. Fletcher also commanded the overall strike force.

  Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor and overall commander of Japanese operation, planned to lure the American carriers to their destruction by threatening a base—Midway—that the U.S. could not afford to lose. He had immense superiority in ships, planes, men, and experience. If his plan had succeeded, the United States would have been unable to return in strength to the Pacific until late 1943 at the earliest, giving the Japanese time to
establish their defensive perimeter almost as far east as Hawaii.

  Yamamoto held two beliefs that influenced his planning—neither of which was correct. First, he believed the American fleet was down to two carriers, the Enterprise and the Hornet. He thought the third carrier, the Yorktown, had been sunk during the Battle of the Coral Sea the previous month. In fact, the carrier had been patched up in an amazing around-the-clock repair operation that was still under way as the Yorktown sortied from Pearl Harbor to participate in the Midway battle.

  Second, he believed the Americans to be demoralized by their defeats in the previous months, and thus he needed an elaborate deception to lure the American fleet to its doom. As a result, the Midway plan involved widely separated Japanese formations in operations as far away as the Aleutians. These formations were unable to provide support to one another in case of surprises. This belief in Japanese infallibility, which later became known as the Victory Disease, led to overconfidence and what proved to be fatal assumptions about American plans and operations.

  Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, in command of the Midway striking force, launched his first attack wave before dawn on June 4. He firmly believed that the U.S. carriers were still at Pearl Harbor, but to be on the safe side he launched seven search aircraft to patrol the waters north of Midway Island—just in case. One of the scout planes launching from the Japanese cruiser Tone was delayed because of a catapult failure. This had serious consequences for the Japanese, because the delayed scout plane’s course was the one that intersected the approaching American fleet.

  The delayed scout plane from the Tone discovered the approaching American task force of the Enterprise and the Hornet too late. Task force commander Admiral Raymond A. Spruance had already launched his aircraft against the Japanese fleet.

  Back at the Japanese fleet, Admiral Nagumo, torn between the need for a second strike against Midway and the need to attack the American fleet, elected to wait for his first strike force to land before launching his reserve forces. As a result, his carrier decks were filled with aircraft, ordnance, and fuel lines when American dive-bombers attacked. In five of the most crucial minutes in all military history, Nagumo went from having an intact fleet to having three of his four carriers rendered into blazing infernos, fatally stricken. Had Nagumo known of the American launch, he would surely have launched his reserve, and the Japanese carriers Kaga, Akagi, and Hiryu might have been only damaged, not sunk. Furthermore, Japanese planes from four carriers—instead of only from the one undamaged flattop, the Hiryu—would have participated in the attack against Spruance’s and Fletcher’s ships.

  By the time Admiral Yamamoto ordered his shattered forces to retire, the Japanese had lost four carriers. On the American side, the badly damaged Yorktown survived two Japanese attacks but was sunk by a Japanese submarine on June 7. The Midway invasion force, aboard troop transports but now lacking air cover, withdrew with the remainder of the Japanese fleet.

  With Americans and Japanese now having roughly equivalent forces, the Japanese were unable to continue expanding the frontiers of their empire. The myth of Japanese invincibility was shattered and American industrial capacity ensured that U.S. strength in ships, aircraft, and men would quickly outstrip the Japanese.

  As a result, the strategic initiative passed to the Americans, who kept it for the rest of the war. Nimitz’s navy campaign advanced through the Gilberts, Marshalls, and Marianas islands, eventually leading to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. MacArthur, much as described in this book, advanced down the length of New Guinea and up through the Philippines. The historical campaign, however, advanced on a slower timetable than we describe, because the carrier and amphibious assault fleets were in essence doing double duty, supporting navy landings on Pacific islands, then aiding army attacks on the larger land-masses.

  Point of Departure

  Chance played a significant, even decisive, role in the outcome at Midway. Even before the two fleets found each other, the launch of that particular scout plane from the Japanese cruiser Tone was delayed because of a catapult problem. That particular scout’s course would have taken him right to Admiral Raymond A. Spruance’s Task Force 16, built around two aircraft carriers, the Enterprise and the Hornet. Spruance, who had a better idea where his enemy was located, had launched his air attack before the Japanese discovered his fleet. If that scout plane had been on time, everything might have been different.

  Fortune was capricious in other ways. The skies were partly cloudy throughout the battle, so at any time a wisp of vapor might have prevented a scout from making a critical observation, or the absence of a cloud might have meant crucial information reaching either admiral earlier than it did historically. The American dive-bombers that struck the key blow became lost when seeking the enemy carriers. In what was effectively a coin flip, Lieutenant Commander Wade McCluskey of the Enterprise guessed right, and led his planes right to the target. They might just as easily have flown over empty ocean until low fuel forced them to return to the flattop or to Midway Island. In a courageous onslaught, the American torpedo bombers from all three carriers attacked without support, their low-and-slow flying squadrons virtually annihilated. The timing of this dramatic sacrifice was fortunate, in that the Japanese combat air patrol Zeros were all down near sea level shooting up the lumbering torpedo bombers as the American dive-bombers flew over the fleet. As a result, the latter were able to attack with virtually no fighter opposition.

  In the actual fighting, Japanese superiority in aircraft quality and pilot skill was apparent, as a relatively small number of UN aircraft inflicted lethal damage against an American carrier, scoring a much higher percentage of hits with bombs and torpedoes than did the U.S. Navy air forces. Some American aircraft types, such as the Brewster Buffalo flown by marine pilots in defense of Midway, were utterly obsolete—virtual deathtraps—while the doughty little Grumman F4F Wildcat, the U.S. front-line fighter, became a match for the Zero only later, when American pilots developed tactics to counter the speedy, nimble Mitsubishis.

  The world of MacArthur’s War begins aboard Tone, when a petty officer discovers and repairs the catapult. The scout plane is launched on time and the Japanese learn the whereabouts of the American fleet. Lefty, our navy pilot, sees the scout at the far edges of his range and fails to shoot it down. He blames himself, but the truth is that the shot was nearly impossible and depended completely on luck. The Battle of Midway turns from an American strategic victory to a Japanese marginal victory. The Japanese sink two of our carriers, damage the third, and lose only one of their own carriers in return. On the other hand, the accidental discovery of skip bombing by our fictional character Ellis Halverson scares away the landing force heading for Midway itself, so the Japanese invasion of the island is canceled. The withdrawal of the Japanese invasion fleet was strategically insignificant, because Midway was too far away from other imperial bases and too close to Hawaii to have been very useful to Japan.

  We originally wrote a chapter on our alternate Battle of Midway, but decided it wasn’t central to the story. For the curious, these and other deleted scenes can be found at www.dobsonbooks.com.

  The first consequence of America losing at Midway is that the Japanese are stronger in the first year or so of the war.

  The second consequence, we felt, of a navy defeat at Midway would be to alter the political balance of power between MacArthur and the army against the navy as to which service would be in overall command.

  MacArthur, who surely wanted full and sole command, was a skilled office politician, though capable of enormous tone deafness, especially where his ego was concerned. It seems to us nearly certain that if MacArthur had been given an exploitable opportunity to wrest greater control over the Pacific from the navy he would have grabbed it with both hands.

  The world evolves from this point and leads to the story you hold in your hands.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  The behavior of Douglas MacArthur in planning for the defense of the Philipp
ines and in reacting to the Japanese invasion on the morning of December 8, 1941, has been the subject of comment and speculation by numerous historians. The explanation of that behavior presented here is our own, though we subsequently have discovered that there is scholarly support for our theory. MacArthur’s suicide threats and suicidal behavior following his escape from Corregidor have been documented by more than one of his biographers. General Sutherland’s character and personality have been written about extensively in other books about MacArthur; his specific behavior in this book is a product of the authors’ imaginations.

  The Skylark books by E. E. “Doc” Smith are real. They aren’t quite as good as Johnny and Ellis think they are, but they are classics of the field. The first novel in the series, The Skylark of Space, is the first story ever published in which mankind leaves the Solar System. As a chemist, Doc Smith is credited with developing the first process for sticking powdered sugar on doughnuts, one more example of the benefits science fiction has given our culture.

  There are two real Frank Chadwicks in addition to our fictional character. One of them is our good friend, helpful critic, fellow game designer, author of the Desert Shield Factbook and of the finest yet-unpublished novel we’ve ever read. The other Frank Chadwick, a navy captain who in fact was an aide to Nimitz (though we were unable to establish exactly when), is someone we came across during our research. The name coincidence was too good to pass up, but our Frank Chadwick is completely fictional. Our character went to the Naval Academy; the historical Chadwick went to Brown. As for the game designer Frank, our fictional character is taller, for one thing.