Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  A week later an additional cavalry brigade under General Vernon Mudge took over Seeadler Harbor and by March 18 they had overrun the last Japanese defenses on Manus. The Admiralty Islands were secure. American fighters were flying off the Momote field, a new strip for bombers was being built at Lorengau, and Seeadler Harbor saw its first American ships—the first of many that would be preparing for the invasion of Hollandia.

  Back in Brisbane, MacArthur was delighted. Now he was nearly ready for the showdown with the Japanese in northern New Guinea, and more than ready for a showdown with the Joint Chiefs.

  CHAPTER 21

  STEPPING-STONES TO VICTORY

  Military strategy is based on speed—come like the wind, go like lightning, and opponents will be unable to resist you.

  —ZHANG YU, CHINESE STRATEGIST, SUNG DYNASTY

  William Halsey and his staff got a foretaste of what was up when they arrived in Brisbane on March 3, 1944, the very day the First Cavalry on Manus was bracing for the final banzai attack.

  MacArthur had radioed Halsey to come at once, and when he arrived, “even before a word of greeting was spoken, I saw that MacArthur was fighting to keep his temper.” The SWPA chief delivered a long tirade “in which he lumped me, Nimitz, King, and the whole Navy in a vicious conspiracy to pare away his authority.”

  At issue was the newly won naval base at Manus. It turned out that Admiral King wanted it transferred to his and the U.S. Navy’s authority. MacArthur insisted that since his troops had taken it, it was his; he had given orders that the only ships allowed into Seeadler would be Kinkaid’s and the Royal Navy’s, which were due in a few weeks. Everyone else, even American ships, would be kept out.

  Halsey was appalled, and said so. “If you stick to this order of yours, you’ll be hampering the war effort.” MacArthur’s staff were shocked at Halsey’s bluntness—but it worked.

  After two more days of argument, MacArthur finally yielded. “You win, Bill!” he said with an enormous smile, and no more was said about Seeadler.1 Instead they discussed the base at Kavieng—MacArthur wanted it taken, Halsey said it would be too costly—and Rabaul, which Halsey’s carrier planes had blasted, as well as Truk, the other major Japanese naval base set in the Carolines in the central Pacific.

  But in fact MacArthur’s interest in Rabaul had faded—if it had existed at all. Historian Eric Bergerud’s hunch is that his push to attack the big base was a means to an end, to get Washington to free up some of the resources earmarked for Europe and send them to him instead.2 In any case, his inclination now was, in his words, to “let ’em die on the vine” as the noose he had originally designed for Elkton and then CARTWHEEL took real shape. With Manus and the Admiralties firmly in control, he had the bases he needed for the descent on northern New Guinea. Except this time, instead of heavily defended Hansa Bay, his calipers were pointing on the map at Hollandia.

  All that was left was convincing the Joint Chiefs and their Joint Strategic Survey Committee that Halsey and MacArthur should now combine forces along the lines that MacArthur and Sutherland had outlined in their so-called Reno IV plan, a sweeping movement to capture the remainder of New Guinea and the Solomons, “sever sea communications between Japan and the vital Borneo-N.E.I. [i.e., Dutch East Indies]-China Coast area” by mid-September, then be ready for an invasion of Mindanao by November 5.3

  With Halsey’s approval, Richard Sutherland presented the plan in Washington, where the response was at first surprise and resistance, then judicious doubt, followed on March 12 by reluctant surrender—with some provisos. The first was that MacArthur had to give up on making the SWPA line of advance the axis of the entire Pacific theater. A two-pronged thrust from both MacArthur and Nimitz was still the rule. All the same, the capture of the Admiralties had caught the Joint Chiefs completely by surprise. It seemed to demonstrate that MacArthur’s overall strategy outlined in Reno IV might be fruitful after all.4 So they approved the campaign for making Hollandia instead of the Vogelkop Peninsula, at the far western end of New Guinea, the main staging base for the invasion of the Philippines. The deadline for the latter was now set as November 15, 1944.5

  The Joint Chiefs also agreed to MacArthur and Nimitz now sharing their resources as their respective drives up from the South Pacific and across the central Pacific began to converge. MacArthur would retain control of the harbor at Manus as he requested, but he would have to share the anchorage with the Pacific Fleet and provide air support for Nimitz’s push into the Marshall and Palau Islands. Likewise, Nimitz would offer naval support, including carrier air support, for MacArthur’s move on Hollandia and then Mindanao.

  There was, however, one bitter disappointment for MacArthur, and for George Kenney. They would be getting none of the new B-29 superbombers that the Air Force would soon have available, with their 20,000-pound bomb load capacity, 6,000-mile range, and 350-miles-per-hour cruising speed. Kenney’s mouth watered at the thought of having a squadron or two of these fast, well-armed monsters to demolish what remained of Japanese airpower in the SWPA.6 But those not being sent to the India-Burma-China theater were reserved for the air war over Japan, to be launched from bases in the Marianas—another reason why Nimitz’s drive to take islands like Saipan, Tinian, and Guam was viewed as crucial to the entire Pacific war.

  In the end, the loss of the B-29 made no appreciable difference to the outcome of the fighting in the SWPA. Given the major headaches that the plane gave pilots and air force commanders, with a tendency for engines to catch fire and with “more bugs than the Smithsonian Museum,” as one B-29 pilot grumbled, Kenney may have been lucky not to have to rely on the temperamental aircraft—or to have to build airfields to accommodate its mammoth size.7

  —

  All the same, MacArthur could be satisfied. His war in the Pacific had reached a major turning point. The way was now open and a deadline set—November 15, 1944—for launching the campaign that mattered most to him next to defeating Japan: liberation of the Philippines. And the faster he completed the conquest of New Guinea, the faster Nimitz’s and Admiral King’s chances of stopping him in order to shift everything over to the push through the central Pacific faded away like a Papua sunset.

  —

  That conquest would start with the capture of Hollandia.

  On March 8, even before the end of the last Japanese resistance in the Admiralties, MacArthur revealed his plan to the Joint Chiefs for an attack on the Japanese base set for April 15. Almost 80,000 men and 217 ships would be involved, bypassing the enemy still ensconced at Wewak, by 1,000 miles. Another, smaller force would land at Aitape, midway between Hollandia and Wewak, to grab the fighter field there.8 Meanwhile, Kenney and naval air support would relentlessly pound the Japanese airfields around Hollandia, and intercept any Japanese attempt to reinforce Aidachi’s Eighteenth Army as MacArthur’s move left it divided and isolated.9

  It was the kind of broad, bold offensive operation that appealed to MacArthur—the first real exercise in “bypassing the enemy” that he would become famous for—but when Admiral Nimitz came to Brisbane for a joint summit on March 25, he expressed grave doubts. He thought the Hollandia operation a reckless gamble, and worried that his big carriers would be exposed to attack from Japanese ground bases when they came in to support the Hollandia landings.

  MacArthur knew better. The priceless gift of being able to decrypt the Japanese army codes made him aware that far from being reckless, he was hitting the enemy at his weakest point, the Eighteenth Army’s vulnerable back door.

  Further decrypts had also revealed the enemy’s exact plans for reinforcing Hollandia and Wewak by sea, which Kenney’s airborne commerce destroyers would intercept and destroy. As for the air bases Nimitz was concerned about, Kenney told him point-blank that he would have those rubbed out by April 5, thanks to his new air bases on Los Negros.10

  The head of the Fifth Air Force was as good as his word. By the time the invasion forces arrived in Humboldt Bay in front of Hollandia, there wa
s no Japanese airpower left in the area. There was no way MacArthur was going to miss the Hollandia landings, so he set off on the cruiser Nashville on April 19. On the way, he made his one and only stop at Cape Gloucester, where the First Marines, still bogged down in the island’s mangrove swamps, were furious at being left to fester. The marine band members who were assembled to greet him even refused to play, claiming they were out of practice.

  But MacArthur performed his brief tour without self-consciousness and passed among officers and men, shaking hands as if they were old friends.11 Then he reboarded the Nashville. Hollandia was beckoning.

  Doc Egeberg was in awe at the size of the invasion force that a hot and muggy dawn revealed on April 22. “There were cruisers, destroyers everywhere,” along with aircraft carriers and a fleet of LSTs, LCIs, and other large landing craft loaded with tanks, trucks, and personnel. An excited MacArthur watched the preliminary bombardment of the Hollandia-Pim beaches, then the Twenty-fourth Division poured ashore three miles south of Hollandia, while the 186th Regiment moved up to take Pim, four miles south of the objective.

  “The ease of the landings exceeded even my expectations,” MacArthur later wrote. “No withering fire met us at the beach. Instead, there was disorder—rice still boiling in pots, weapons and personal equipment of every kind abandoned.”12

  They had achieved complete and utter surprise. Indeed, the first time the Japanese at Hollandia learned that an invasion was imminent was when they woke up to see MacArthur’s ships in Humboldt Bay.

  At 11:00 A.M. MacArthur insisted on going ashore to see what was happening. He and Generals Krueger and Eichelberger toured the battlefield around Pim, as the sixty-four-year-old led his staff on a three-mile hike along the beach that left everyone else out of breath. Back on the Nashville, they celebrated with chocolate ice cream sodas. The day was almost unbearably hot, and the sodas were an unexpected treat. Eichelberger remembered wolfing his down before the others had barely started. MacArthur “grinned and gave me his own untouched, frosted glass.”13

  Then they sailed to Tanahmerah Bay, the other assault landing zone. MacArthur disregarded warnings of approaching enemy planes, and insisted that his landing craft get them to the beach. They arrived at 3:00 P.M. for another busy march along the narrow beach, with dense jungle rising up behind. After two hours, they re-embarked—with MacArthur as usual not even breaking a sweat.14

  On the 24th he learned that the operation at Aitape had also been a success, and that evening he sent a jubilant communiqué back to Washington:

  “Complete surprise and effective support, both surface and air, secured our initial landings with slight losses,” it ran. MacArthur described the enemy’s Eighteenth Army as completely surrounded. “To the east are the Australians and Americans; to the west the Americans; to the north, the sea controlled by our Allied naval forces; to the south untraversed jungle mountain ranges; and over all our Allied air mastery.” While the Japanese could be expected to try to break out of their isolation with desperate attacks, “their ultimate fate is now certain. Their situation reverses Bataan.”15

  It was a stunning, if deeply satisfying, sentence for MacArthur to write. Only three Americans had been killed at Aitape, compared to 625 Japanese killed and 27 captured. The fall of Hollandia brought an even bigger bag of 600 Japanese POWs, the largest number ever captured in the entire SWPA. It was a sign of the surprise that MacArthur had achieved, as was the fact that while some 3,300 Japanese had been killed, only 159 Americans died in the entire operation.16

  It was just the kind of battle MacArthur liked, and the kind he would later claim was his specialty. An unexpected and decisive strike that resulted in low casualties, while leaving an enemy overwhelmed and in headlong retreat (more than 7,000 Japanese had to flee Hollandia west to Sarmi, and thousands never made it). He had scored a big triumph, not just against the Japanese but against the doubters in Washington.

  It remained to be seen what he would do with it.

  —

  Fortunately, the Japanese had left behind at Aitape another gift for MacArthur. A careless Japanese radioman failed to destroy 147 pages of decryption worksheets along with key and indicator tables.17 They were swiftly shipped off to Arlington Hall in Washington, where IBM machines allowed the codebreakers to crack the latest version of the Japanese army’s top secret codes. The breakthrough didn’t last long; on May 10 the Japanese stopped using the code. But a search through backlogged encrypted messages, which were now easily read, revealed something even more important. A barge that Kenney’s planes had sunk off Aitape had actually been carrying a cargo of new key registers.

  Spencer Akin and Central Bureau sent a diver over from Brisbane who found the barge in relatively shallow water.18 The steel box in which the books were contained was intact, and once each page was painstakingly extracted, remounted, and daubed with rubbing alcohol (a suggestion from one of the Australians working at Central Bureau), the books began to reveal their secrets.

  Almost 85 percent of the key register was recovered. Since General Adachi’s only method of keeping in touch with his 60,000 troops scattered across New Guinea was by radio, it meant MacArthur was learning about Japanese troop movements on the island at almost the same time as the Japanese officers in charge. And not just troop movements on New Guinea. In June General Marshall sent a message to MacArthur suggesting that since Adachi’s decrypted radio messages were supplying so much information on Japanese plans all across the Pacific, the SWPA chief might want to avoid wrapping up the New Guinea operations too quickly. “Will advise when this advantage ceases.”19

  There is no record of MacArthur’s reaction to this suggestion that he not win the war against Japan—or at least not the war in New Guinea—too fast.

  —

  Meanwhile, the buildup of Hollandia as MacArthur’s main base on New Guinea was under way.

  “Sides of mountains were carved away,” General Eichelberger remembered, “bridges and culverts were thrown across rivers and creeks, gravel and stone fill was poured into sago swamps to make highways as tall as Mississippi levees.”

  Swarms of Seabees and army engineers built roads, docks, and 135 miles of aviation fuel pipeline over the rugged hills overlooking Humboldt to feed the hundreds of airplanes that would soon be taking off from both Hollandia and Aitape airdromes. “Where once I had seen only a few native villages and an expanse of primeval forest,” Eichelberger wrote, “a city of 140,000 men took occupancy”—along with one of the biggest bases of the Second World War.20

  There was still one problem with Hollandia: none of the airfields was fit for heavy bombers. MacArthur would need them to fulfill his promise to support Nimitz in the upcoming assault on Saipan. So to do that, there was still one more island to be taken, one more stepping-stone to the Philippines: Biak Island.

  It was part of the Shouten island group 300 miles west of Hollandia and just west of the Vogelkop Peninsula at New Guinea’s westernmost end. Virtually uninhabited, Biak was covered with twelve-foot-high jungle springing up from its coral outcroppings. There were few sources of fresh water, and temperatures regularly ran higher than one hundred degrees. For all its unattractive features, it had one redeeming virtue: its three solid, well-cleared airfields, all built and maintained by the Japanese, with the biggest and best at Mokmer.

  ULTRA had told MacArthur that Japanese resistance on Biak would be “stubborn but not serious, and that the enemy had no ground reserve to move in to support the island.” That would be wrong, as it turned out; and ULTRA failed to disclose either the exact size of the Japanese forces on the island or the fact that they included tanks. Instead, Willoughby and his intelligence staff anticipated that they would find the bulk of the Eighteenth Army’s defenders gathering at Sarmi on the coast or even on the nearby island of Wakde, as every other reserve was being drained away to reinforce Japanese strongpoints on New Guinea proper.21

  The situation called for caution, and Willoughby said so. But the truth wa
s MacArthur was in a hurry; he needed to take advantage of the confusion that his advance was causing the Japanese. His codebreakers had revealed how his antagonist General Adachi was desperately scrambling to catch up with the new realities on the ground, in the air, and at sea, especially after the fall of Hollandia. The danger was that if he did, Adachi and his still formidable forces could turn western New Guinea into the kind of network of mutually supporting strongholds that made Halsey’s advance through the Bismarcks so harrowing and slow, the same kind of situation that MacArthur had narrowly avoided at Buna.

  So MacArthur disregarded his G-2’s advice and pressed ahead with the invasion of Biak, set for May 27, 1944.22

  There was also another reason for speed: the Imperial Japanese Navy. ULTRA was enabling him to keep track of Japanese fleet movements.23 As it happened, there were two sizable units within striking distance of Biak, one at Davao and the other at Tawitawi, just sixty sailing hours from Biak. If either one moved in force beyond the Malacca Strait, MacArthur reasoned, that could make landings at Biak or anywhere else, difficult or even impossible.

  The risk of tempting the Japanese navy to intervene was made obvious, paradoxically enough, when ULTRA scored one of its biggest triumphs. Its decrypts revealed the dispatch of a major Japanese convoy headed from Manila to the Dutch East Indies and western New Guinea, with no less than 12,784 troops of the Japanese Thirty-second Division and an unknown number from the Thirty-fifth Division, all in nine transports with seven escorts.

  The decrypts revealed not only the size of the convoy but its exact route, speed, and daily noon position, so that when the convoy entered the Celebes Sea an American submarine, the USS Gurnard, was waiting for it. Within ten minutes on May 6 the Gurnard had sent three transports and 3,954 soldiers to the bottom of the sea. Another 6,800 soldiers were rescued, but all their heavy equipment had been lost. The rest of the convoy turned back. There would be no Japanese reinforcement for New Guinea from the Philippines.