Everyone breathed a strong sigh of relief, including the Central Bureau when its deciphering of radio traffic revealed that the Japanese were blaming the disaster on spies in Manila, not the breaking of their codes.24 But the lesson was clear, including to MacArthur. The sooner the Allies made their move on Biak, the less likely there would be interference from the sea. The resistance on land would be bad enough.
“The Hollandia invasion initiated a marked change in the tempo of my advance westward,” MacArthur wrote later. “I was determined to reach the Philippines before December, and consequently concentrated on the immediate utilization of each seized position to spark the succeeding advance.”25
But Biak was important for another reason. By taking it and putting heavy bombers on its airstrips, MacArthur would prove his bona fides in support of Nimitz’s offensive in the Marianas, which would start with Saipan on June 15—less than three weeks away.
MacArthur ordered his amphibious team to strike first at the island of Wakde, a few short miles from the New Guinea coast. Wakde would serve as a useful staging area for the final assault on Biak. George Kenney was also delighted by the decision. He needed Wakde as a forward air base, but he too knew the other danger of waiting too long. His reconnaissance flights over Biak suggested the Japanese might finish and equip their airstrips there before the United States could capture them.
On May 18, 1944, the landings at Wakde took place. There was only a small Japanese force to greet them, but it still took two days of fighting to clear the island. Even before it was over, Kenney had the captured airstrip up and running. In less than two weeks his B-24s would be flying their first reconnaissance missions over Mindanao. MacArthur’s return to the Philippines was starting to take shape.26
Biak was next, and the Japanese knew it. They had built up formidable defense lines with bunkers and pillboxes, connected by caves cut through the coral, with additional defenses overlooking the seven-mile-long coastal road to Mokmer. They then put 12,000 defenders inside the fortified complex, and waited.
On May 27, lead elements of the Forty-first Division came ashore after a sweeping air and naval bombardment. Watching from their transports, the divisional commander Major General Horace Fuller and his soldiers wondered, as they always did, how anything could survive the savage onslaught of waves of Vought Corsair ground attack fighters and A-20s in addition to the five- and twelve-inch naval guns, as the glare from explosions and clouds of smoke rose up almost to blot out the sun.
The shelling, however, had done nothing to disturb the Japanese, who waited it out in their coral caves. As the Third Battalion, 162nd Infantry moved from the beach down the coastal road toward Mokmer, the Japanese opened up with machine guns and mortars. Another Japanese battalion swung out to cut off the American line of retreat. It was a grim afternoon’s fighting until the Third’s sister battalion, the Second, moved up and covered the Third’s withdrawal.
The next day, as a blood-red sun rose over the haze, a tank battle opened, as Japanese nine-ton tanks clashed with Fuller’s Shermans. Three times the men from the Second Battalion drove back the Japanese, under a broiling sun with stupefying humidity. After sundown the survivors were pulled back by amphtracs dodging through the inky darkness. Fuller ordered up two fresh battalions for an encircling movement, while more troops backed by artillery and air support pushed forward to the Mokmer road.27 A week later they were still pushing, as the casualties mounted and the enemy kept the Americans pinned down.
This was not what the swift capture of Hollandia and Wakde had led Krueger’s men to expect. Back in Brisbane, MacArthur was blissfully unaware of what was happening. The very day the Japanese tanks launched their counterattack he was telling the world, “[Biak] marks the practical end of the New Guinea campaign.” On June 3 came his dispatch that “mopping up is proceeding,” even though Fuller was still readying himself for his main attack.28
On June 5 MacArthur finally became aware of how the fighting on Biak was bogged down. He composed a stern note to Krueger. “I am becoming concerned at the failure to secure the Biak airfields. Is the advance being pushed with sufficient determination?” Stung as well by Fuller’s slow progress, Krueger wrote back that he had “seriously considered” relieving Fuller, but he would get out a full report once his chief of staff, Brigadier General George Decker, visited Biak to find out what had gone wrong.
What Decker found was a writhing, living hell. Weary American soldiers were reduced to one canteen of water every twenty-four hours as they tried to fight their way uphill through a network of pillboxes and foxholes occupied by a well-supplied, determined enemy who had been reinforced by another 1,000 men slipping through the navy’s cordon of the island at night.
On the 13th, Fuller demanded his own reinforcements. Krueger reluctantly sent elements of the Twenty-fourth Division along with General Robert Eichelberger with a mission: take over Hurricane Task Force on Biak, relieve Fuller, and get the job done. Douglas MacArthur desperately wanted that airfield, and Walter Krueger was hell-bent on giving it to him.
Eichelberger arrived on the 15th to find the battle area in chaos, and a discouraged and disgusted Fuller. Krueger had ordered him to give up high ground he had taken to devote himself to a full frontal assault on the Mokmer airfields, even though those fields were useless as long as the Japanese could fire down from their fortified positions above—and even though that meant more casualties in a futile cause. Fuller told Eichelberger, “I do not intend to serve under a certain man [i.e., Walter Krueger] again even if I have to submit my resignation every half hour by wire.”
As Eichelberger took charge, the men of the Twenty-fourth arrived to find “the smell of death and war was all over the place.” Where the tank battle had taken place two weeks before, there were “bodies blown apart; human parts laying about the area” and rotting in the high heat. Captain Eric Diller wrote, “As we moved forward to relieve a company engaged in a firefight, the walking wounded were moving slowly to the rear….I saw men in bloody bandages becoming a deeper shade of red since the crude first aid administered was not enough to stem the flow of blood.” After another round of bitter fighting, the easternmost airfield was secured on June 22, but only for Kenney’s single-engine fighters. The other strips weren’t finally safe for use by his bombers until August 5.29
As Captain Paul Austin of the Twenty-fourth and his company patrolled Biak, he remembered later, “Some places were just engulfed with the smell of death. The decaying human body puts out a fierce odor that permeates the area,” including their clothes. Because the island was literally made of coral and rock, his men couldn’t bury the dead Japanese bodies. Instead they had to find a sump hole in the coral, soak the bodies with gasoline and set them alight. The flames got rid of tens of thousands of the blue flies feasting on the dead flesh, but thousands more survived to contaminate everything they touched, including the food, with dysentery. “It got to me so badly I passed out,” Austin remembered. He had to retreat to a first-aid station until he recovered after a few days.30
Still the fighting ground on. On August 20 Eichelberger finally felt he could declare the entire island secure; by then MacArthur’s deadline was past and useless. The same was true at Noemfoor, sixty miles east of Biak, where MacArthur and Kenney had thrown in some 8,000 tons of bombs to soften up the island before the 158th Regimental Combat Team, the same men who had overrun Wakde, waded ashore to meet the enemy, while paratroopers of the 503rd made a mass jump onto a coral airfield lined with trees and strewn with wreckage. Almost one in ten troopers broke a leg and smashed an ankle or an arm without the enemy firing a shot. Other troopers on patrols found ample evidence that the Japanese on Noemfoor had been reduced to cannibalism, and had butchered American prisoners for food. Nothing was said to the media, then or later, because “the story would have a negative effect on home front morale,” one of the troopers, Paul Rodriguez, was told by MacArthur aides.31
Certainly the news from the Biak operation was b
ad enough. In addition to the injured paratroopers and those killed on Noemfoor, Hurricane Task Force had lost 400 men killed and 2,000 wounded. The Japanese had suffered 4,700 killed and 200 captured, but then some 7,400 Americans had also been taken out of action by injury and illness. Almost two months had been required to take an island that was supposed to fall in a few days.32
But there was no denying that MacArthur’s campaign was working. The 7,400 sick and injured troops would return to duty; the 4,700 dead Japanese were never coming back and would never be replaced. For Japan’s Eighteenth Army, cut off and surrounded, time was running out; on July 10 General Adachi brought things to a quick conclusion. MacArthur’s intelligence people had lost track of Adachi’s forces after he evacuated Sarmi; in fact, his units were moving piecemeal through jungle and mountain, advancing on Hollandia and the airstrip at Aitape for a final attack to reverse MacArthur’s progress. For most it was a harrowing journey, with thousands starving and dying while thousands of others, living skeletons but battle hardened, finally reached the banks of the Driniumor River, and waited for the final command to attack.
Central Bureau got the first wind of preparations for the attack on May 28, and after painstakingly piecing together decrypted radio messages, issued a warning to troops defending Aitape that a Japanese assault was coming on July 4. Nothing happened. MacArthur’s codebreakers issued another warning for the night of July 9–10 (they were actually eavesdropping on Adachi and his staff debating which night would be better).33 Again nothing happened, and soldiers began to wonder if the rear echelon wasn’t getting spooked.
In fact, the Japanese were now lining the riverbank in strength. Just as Willoughby had all but given up and concluded in a briefing for MacArthur that “present patrol activity would not seem to point that attack imminent,” men on night patrol from the 128th Infantry heard noises from across the Driniumor barely one hundred yards away.
A soldier raised his M-1 and fired a shot at the sound. At that instant 10,000 Japanese poured out of the jungle, with a shrill scream of “Banzai!”
A hail of bullets from Browning Automatic Rifles and M-1s slammed them back, then artillery opened up while Japanese mortars barked their sharp replies. The heavier American shells smothered the attack, while machine guns fired until the barrels glowed red hot. Flares lit up the night sky as the desperate Japanese refused to quit, surging over piles of fallen bodies, until the Americans, overwhelmed, fell back.34
General Charles Hall of XI Corps, commanding the task force defending Aitape, ordered his troops to counterattack. XI Corps eventually retook the Driniumor line and held it, while Adachi tried various outflanking maneuvers, which only added more casualties to both sides. Fighting dragged on for several more weeks, until Hall’s force had suffered 440 killed and 2,500 wounded, while Adachi’s Eighteenth Army had lost more than 10,000 men in battle and thousands more from starvation and exposure. The Eighteenth Army had virtually ceased to exist.
“Make the supreme sacrifice, display the spirit of the Imperial Army,” Adachi had exhorted his men before the battle, and they had, but to no purpose other than to destroy what was left of their own effective resistance on New Guinea.
MacArthur sent a congratulatory message to Hall, expressing his “admiration for the splendid conduct of the campaign…The operations were planned with great skill, were executed with great determination and courage, and were crowned with great success”—all of which ignored the fact that the Americans had almost been caught flat-footed, and that if Adachi had indeed retaken Aitape MacArthur’s whole campaign would have been in very serious straits.35
Yet nothing succeeds like success, and MacArthur now moved to finish up operations in New Guinea. After the bloody fighting at Aitape, Japanese resistance faded and the rest of the Vogelkop Peninsula fell almost harmlessly to the Americans, first at Sansapor and then at Mar. On September 15 soldiers from the Thirty-first Division would be landing on the island of Morotai, the last stepping-stone to Mindanao and the Philippines.
It had been amazing progress, despite the missteps and near-fatal blunders. In less than three months MacArthur had come 1,400 miles, and opened up the Southwest Pacific from Finschhafen to the Moluccas.
He was now only a few hundred miles away from Mindanao, the southern gateway to Luzon and Manila—and freedom for the Filipino people and the American POWs he had been forced to leave behind. Only three men could prevent that from happening. All three were in Washington, and MacArthur prepared a grim, ruthless campaign to get them on his side—or to push them out of his way.
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The first was President Franklin Roosevelt.
It was with a mixed sense of surprise and irritation that MacArthur received a bulletin from General Marshall on July 23 summoning him to a meeting at Pearl Harbor on the 26th with the president, who was arriving on the cruiser Baltimore.
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“Purely political,” was how MacArthur described Roosevelt’s visit, which included key speechwriters but didn’t include the Joint Chiefs of Staff—his first-ever tour of an American overseas theater of war without them.36
Nineteen forty-four was an election year, and Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented fourth term. Most observers, even his own advisors, assumed the visit was a chance to burnish his image as commander in chief. Being seen with one of America’s most celebrated generals and heroes wouldn’t hurt Roosevelt’s reelection chances, either—especially if that general was a popular Republican hero.
Still, MacArthur felt free to complain about the trip all the way to Hawaii, as he paced up and down the aisle of the plane, “disgruntled and angry at being called away from his war duties.” At one point he exclaimed in disgust: “The humiliation of forcing me to fly to Honolulu for a political picture-taking junket!”37
But as he paced, he was also thinking. This would be his first meeting with Roosevelt in almost ten years. During those ten years Roosevelt had gone from being “Mr. New Deal” to being “Mr. Win-the-War,” as the president quipped to a reporter in 1942. He had been transformed from a politician whose urgent focus was domestic matters to a commander in chief holding together the greatest wartime coalition ever seen, and presiding over the greatest war machine in history that was outproducing Japan in ships by a factor of sixteen to one, and in planes by thirty to one.
MacArthur had undergone his own metamorphosis, from the Bonus Army–tainted retired chief of staff sent into virtual exile to be field marshal in a remote foreign country, to the most celebrated war leader in America, with the exception of Roosevelt himself—indeed, poised in a few short months to possibly challenge FDR for the presidency.
Running for president had crossed MacArthur’s mind more than once. First in 1936 after retiring as chief of staff; briefly also in 1940 when his fortunes in the Philippines were at low ebb and returning to America to challenge Roosevelt in his bid for a third term seemed a fleeting possibility.
It wasn’t until October 1943, when a Mutual Broadcasting System radio report mentioned that MacArthur “has definitely agreed” to be a candidate in the 1944 election, that the idea gained a genuine public airing (although an SWPA spokesman quickly warned the general had no plans for leaving for the States to run a political campaign: “General MacArthur’s ambition is still to fly the American flag on Bataan as soon as he can”). But over the next several months the rumors grew, and MacArthur for President clubs began to spring up around the country—especially in Wisconsin, an important primary state, with SWPA GHQ staffer Colonel Philip La Follette, son of the famous Wisconsin senator Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, acting as unofficial campaign chairman.
The rumors became so rife that General Kenney took it upon himself to sit down in the living room of the MacArthur apartment in Lennons Hotel and read him and Jean the facts of life.
“I don’t think anyone can defeat Roosevelt while the war is going on,” he said. “I hope you don’t listen to those politicians in or out of the service”—Ke
nney knew that La Follette and some others on MacArthur’s staff wouldn’t have minded running his presidential campaign—“who may try to persuade you to throw your hat in the ring.”
MacArthur smiled and reassured his air force chief, “Don’t worry. I have no desire to get mixed up in politics.” His number one priority, he said, was to fulfill his and America’s pledge to set the Philippines free. “Then I want to defeat Japan.” That, it seemed, was the end of the matter.38
All the same, there were those who disagreed with Kenney. They believed the two top contenders for the Republican nomination, Wendell Willkie and Thomas E. Dewey, would likely deadlock in the convention, opening the way for MacArthur as a compromise candidate. They believed that if he were nominated, MacArthur could decline to campaign in order to remain at his post—or alternately, accept a vice-presidential candidacy and remain in the Pacific while his running mate ran the campaign.
They also believed the best way to win the war was to have a man with military experience in the White House. One reason the war had been dragging on for so long, they believed, and would continue to drag on until 1946 at the earliest, was that the country didn’t. MacArthur himself wasn’t about to disagree with that conclusion, especially when so many wanted him to be that man.
In January, for example, Republican congressman Albert L. Miller of Nebraska had written a letter to MacArthur, saying, “You owe it to civilization and to the children yet unborn” to run for president, to prevent Roosevelt from “dooming” the country and the war. “If this system of left-wingers and New Dealism is continued for another four years,” Miller wrote, “I am certain that this Monarchy that is being established in America will destroy the rights of the common people.”
MacArthur wrote a polite letter back, thanking Miller for his views and adding, “Your description of the conditions in the United States is a sobering one, indeed….[But] Like Abraham Lincoln, I am a firm believer in the people, and, if given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis,” especially with the right man at the helm. MacArthur didn’t exactly suggest himself, but he did clearly imply that the right man wasn’t Franklin Roosevelt.39
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