Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  And so MacArthur graciously allowed his name to be placed on the Republican ballot that spring, and had the inexpressible pleasure of winning the Illinois primary, securing 550,000 votes against his nearest competitor’s 35,000. Things, however, went quickly downhill from there. In Wisconsin MacArthur suffered from a poorly organized campaign and came in third behind Dewey and Harold Stassen (who was actually serving in the Pacific as a staff officer), while Wendell Willkie did so badly that he withdrew from the race entirely.

  That was one nail in the sarcophagus of MacArthur’s presidential hopes, since it ended any chance of a deadlocked convention. The second was when Representative Miller made the mistake of making his letter public, as well as MacArthur’s reply, which set off a “furor,” as MacArthur later wrote, with critics both in and out of the GOP suggesting that the supreme commander of SWPA had somehow been disloyal to his own commander in chief in his unguarded remarks—not the last time a MacArthur letter to a congressman would land him in trouble.40

  In the end, MacArthur brought the entire matter to an end by issuing a statement from Brisbane. “I can only say what I have said before, I am not a candidate for the office [of President] nor do I seek it. I have devoted myself exclusively to the conduct of the war. My sole ambition is to assist my beloved country to win this vital struggle by the fulfillment of such duty as has been or may be assigned to me.”

  Thus the door to the White House in 1944 was firmly shut—if indeed it was ever open. Roosevelt could rest easy that he would not be meeting with a future political rival, but only with one of his two supreme commanders in the Pacific theater. Indeed, the other, Admiral Nimitz, would also be arriving for a summit discussion of strategy both present and future, for defeating Japan.

  That fact set MacArthur to thinking as their plane landed at Hicks Field in Honolulu. Political junket or not, what was said in the next few days might determine the entire course of the war—especially if he could make his strategic vision clear to the man who had so far denied him what he had wanted most, supreme leadership of the war in the Pacific.

  —

  The two men greeted each other on the 26th like old friends—but friends who had undergone transformations that caught the other by surprise. Roosevelt, for example, was surprised by MacArthur’s flamboyant new appearance, with his leather flying jacket, his Filipino field marshal’s cap, sunglasses, and enormous corncob pipe.

  “Hello, Doug,” the president said. “What are you doing with that leather jacket on—it’s darn hot today.”

  “Well, I’ve just landed from Australia, it’s pretty cold up there” was MacArthur’s reply, and from there they set off in the president’s car.41

  MacArthur, in turn, was shocked at Roosevelt’s emaciated, weakened appearance. In fact, the president was deathly ill with cancer and had less than a year to live. Yet the man was as shrewd and cunning as ever. It slowly began to dawn on MacArthur that the conference may have been called to deliver the growing consensus in Washington that retaking the Philippines would be a mistake.

  That night Roosevelt hosted a dinner for MacArthur, Nimitz, Halsey, and Admiral Leahy, the chief of naval operations. After they had eaten and chatted, Roosevelt moved everyone into a conference room with an enormous map of the Pacific.

  “Well, Doug,” the president asked, “where do we go from here?”

  MacArthur strode to the map and picked up the pointer.

  “Mindanao, Mr. President,” he said, slapping the pointer on the island. He slapped the next island: “Then Leyte.” Finally the last one: “Then Luzon.” He explained that retaking the Philippines was as much a moral as a strategic goal.

  “They look on America as their mother country,” he explained, and then paused before adding, “And promises must be kept.”

  Everyone in the room knew the remark was aimed at Roosevelt, and his failed promises to MacArthur and his men in 1941–42. Roosevelt, however, acted as if nothing had happened, and gestured to Nimitz to start his presentation.

  Nimitz laid out the new thinking among the brass in Washington. After completing the capture of the Marianas and Palaus—so the thinking went—the combined Allied forces would now strike at Formosa and the China coast instead of the Philippines, and then launch attacks on Japan’s outer islands, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Finally, Nimitz proposed, a series of coordinated naval and air campaigns would compel Japan’s surrender before Allied soldiers would have to do a D-Day–style invasion.

  MacArthur’s reply was cold and prompt. “I don’t think we could ever justify liberating the Chinese on Formosa and abandoning millions of Filipinos on Luzon.” Roosevelt pointed out there were half a million Japanese soldiers in the Philippines. “Mr. President,” MacArthur replied, “my losses would not be heavy, any more than they have been in the past. The days of frontal assault should be over,” because the casualties were too heavy. Yet that was exactly what Nimitz and Admiral King were planning to do on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

  MacArthur argued, cajoled, jabbed his pointer and his pipe at the map for the better part of two hours. He explained how capturing the Philippines would cut Japan’s remaining supplies of oil and iron and copper; how the Japanese were too thinly dispersed across the Philippines’ 2,000 islands to offer any solid resistance; and how he had the ships and troops he needed to complete the reconquest of the Philippines in less than six months. He also wrung two important concessions from Nimitz: that Manila’s harbor would be invaluable for an invasion of either Formosa or Japan, and that bomber bases on Luzon would be better able to provide essential air support for any assault on Formosa than bases in the Marianas.42

  Those at least were the arguments he presented to Roosevelt, in front of Admirals Nimitz and Leahy and assembled staff and news photographers, in a meeting that dragged on after midnight. The next morning after lunch MacArthur asked for ten minutes with the president alone.

  As the door closed behind Nimitz and the others, MacArthur was brief and to the point.

  “Mr. President,” he said, “the country has forgiven you for what took place on Bataan….But the nation will never forgive you if you approve a plan that leaves 17 million Christian American subjects to wither in the Philippines under the conqueror’s heel…Politically, it would ruin you.”43

  Roosevelt blinked. Thomas E. Dewey was now the Republican nominee. Polls showed he was giving FDR the closest election he had ever faced. MacArthur’s words were as much a threat as a prediction: if the president gave up on the Philippines, the general would make sure the country gave up on him.

  Later that day they inspected more military installations on Oahu, and chatted amicably. When MacArthur returned to Australia, he told his staff that Roosevelt was backing his plan. Roosevelt confirmed it by letter a few days later. “I am convinced that as a whole it is logical and can be done….Some day there will be a flag raising in Manila—and without question I want you to do it.”

  Roosevelt also told his doctor after his meeting with MacArthur to give him an extra aspirin. “In all my life nobody has ever talked to me the way MacArthur did.”

  Did MacArthur’s dramatic intervention really turn the president against the navy plan, and lead him to re-embrace the return to the Philippines? Historians argue otherwise. They point out that the final decision dragged on for another month and a half, and no final communiqué was made until September 15. Nonetheless, Roosevelt was someone who took his title as commander in chief very seriously, overseeing virtually every aspect of strategy and even operational command. If he had been for the navy plan of bypassing the Philippines, without question it would have become war policy. On the other hand, the meeting with MacArthur may have dissuaded him from interfering in a process that was heading back to the Philippines option, anyway, as the Joint Chiefs gathered in Washington in mid-September with Richard Sutherland acting once again as MacArthur’s advocate.

  The truth was, the plan of delivering a single thrust to Formosa had a sole champion, Admiral King, whil
e nearly everyone else, including Nimitz himself, saw the logic of the MacArthur plan. MacArthur had the bulk of land and air forces in the Pacific under his command already; he had proved his ability to perform logistical miracles over long distances and under primitive conditions. The Philippines would be an invaluable base for further operations, especially against Japan; it would also seal off any Japanese hope of reinforcing their imperial conquests farther west, from Borneo and the East Indies to Burma and India.

  Still, deadlock on further plans reigned until Nimitz pointed out that once the Marianas were secure, no further operation could start until the Joint Chiefs reached an agreement. So on September 9 they did. They issued MacArthur instructions to conduct his landing on Mindanao on November 15; Leyte on December 15; then secure Luzon and Manila by February 1945.

  MacArthur had won—but he soon found that the timetable would be seriously accelerated.44

  On September 13 Halsey reported excitedly that his flyers had made several passes over the Philippines as far north as the Visayas without finding any opposition. Forget about Mindanao, he urged MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs; speed up the timetable by going directly for Leyte instead.

  The Joint Chiefs thought it a feasible plan; so did Nimitz, who said he could send his Third Amphibious Force and XXIV Army Corps to help with the landings. Now they all wondered what MacArthur thought. MacArthur, however, could say nothing. He was sailing from Hollandia for Morotai and was maintaining radio silence. For making the most important decision of the entire war in the SWPA, its commander was out of the loop.

  It fell instead to Sutherland to make it. Although he knew his boss’s mind better than anyone, he didn’t want to do it alone. He assembled Generals Kenney, Chamberlin, and all his senior staff at SWPA GHQ. They had the intelligence reports showing that far from being “wide open” as Halsey claimed, there were 21,000 Japanese on Leyte, and that Japanese airpower in the Philippines was still formidable. The dilemma was that if they said no to moving on Leyte, that would leave the door open for Admiral King to push on to Formosa.

  So with a lump in his throat, Sutherland sent the following message: “Subject to completion of arrangements with Nimitz, we shall execute Leyte operation on 20 October….MacArthur.”

  The deed was done, and Nimitz and the Joint Chiefs never knew they were communicating not with MacArthur at all, but with his chief of staff.45

  It took just ninety minutes for the military chiefs assembled in the Quebec Conference to issue the definitive orders to MacArthur and Nimitz. There would be no more intermediate stepping-stones. The invasion of Leyte was moved up from December to October 20.

  —

  That was the message relayed to MacArthur on September 15, as he stood on the bridge of the cruiser Nashville watching the men of the Twenty-first Division descend into their landing craft. He had been busy over the last two weeks setting up his new forward headquarters at Hollandia, then set off with the Twenty-first for the landing on Morotai.

  Once more Spencer Akin and ULTRA had come to his rescue. The original plan had been to stage a landing on nearby Halmahera, but the Japanese had guessed that the latter island was all too suitable for an Allied air base and had surreptitiously been building up forces there until they numbered 40,000 ill-fed, ill-equipped Japanese soldiers—soldiers who nonetheless could be counted on to fight to the death to hold on to Halmahera.

  So MacArthur chose Morotai instead, which ULTRA said was lightly defended.46 The landings would be under General Hall with some 60,000 troops. Dan Barbey was in charge of naval forces, as usual, with six fast carriers from Admiral Clifton Sprague’s Task Force 78 in support, as well as Fifth Air Force bombers rumbling off runways on the new bases around Vogelkop and Geelvink.

  It was the kind of combined land, air, and naval forces that MacArthur could only dream about two years before. Yet now it represented only a sizable fraction of the total SWPA forces under his command, while the invasion of the Philippines would give him still more resources in men and materiel, making him the single most powerful American general in history.

  Even so, the Morotai landings were a mess. The amphibious ships ran into undetected coral reefs, which forced soldiers to unload far from shore. Troops sank up to their armpits in the mudflats, but fortunately there were no Japanese to take advantage of their vulnerability. Most had fled into the mountains after the first bombardment; the only serious fighting involved beating back a hasty banzai attack that night and then mopping up the rest until the 21st, when the island was declared secure.47

  MacArthur, as usual, insisted on landing on the beach less than two hours after the first soldiers arrived, around 10:30. He was in a lighthearted mood. Sutherland’s message had reached him about the change of plans for Leyte, which meant the liberation of the Philippines was now definitely a lock. Sutherland’s ruse had paid off. The SWPA chief had defeated the last doubters and naysayers and that was all that mattered.

  MacArthur and Doc Egeberg along with Dan Barbey went ashore near the Pitoe airfield. MacArthur inspected the field and shook hands with a party of mud-covered GIs. “You have done well. You now dominate the last stronghold which barred our way to the Philippines. The enemy, as usual, was not in the right place at the right time.” He did not say that was because he had known the enemy’s plans in advance almost as well as the enemy did.

  Then he turned to a group of officers on the beach. “We shall shortly have an air and light naval base here 300 miles from the Philippines,” he told them. He turned and stared out to sea, toward the far shore where Bataan and Corregidor lay. “They are waiting there for me,” Egeberg heard him mutter. “It’s been a long time.”48

  He was about to fulfill his vow, made in a spur-of-the-moment remark more than two years earlier: “I shall return.” In fact, that return would be harder, and bloodier, than MacArthur at that moment could imagine.

  CHAPTER 22

  LIBERATION

  Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!

  —DOUGLAS MACARTHUR, OCTOBER 20, 1944

  In late September 1944, it was hard to find a busier place in the Pacific Ocean than Hollandia harbor. The anchorage that MacArthur had seized with his brilliant stroke in April had blossomed into the staging ground for the impending invasion of the Philippines.

  The number of cargo vessels alone docked there soared from 70 in January 1944 when the Japanese still occupied it, to 120 by May, and would soon approach 200. Teams of engineers supervised the building of tents for tens of thousands of troops, while Hollywood stars like John Wayne and Bob Hope arrived to meet and entertain the throngs of sailors and soldiers. Even actress Judith Anderson came out, to perform Shakespeare in the steamy haze of New Guinea and under the stern gaze of 7,000-foot Cyclops Mountain.

  Any visitor could spot the headquarters of the SWPA’s commander, Douglas MacArthur, from the Hollandia harbor. It sat on top of a hill about eight hundred feet high overlooking Lake Sentani and the airdrome area along its shores, some ten miles south of Hollandia village. Hostile reporters described it as a New Guinea version of Shangri-La. George Kenney knew better. “The house was made of three Army-type prefabricated houses joined together and was quite comfortable,” he wrote later. “To make it look better, I had several striking aerial photographs enlarged, framed and hung up on the walls. From MacArthur’s office in Brisbane had come a few rugs and furniture.” To the north of Lake Sentani sat Cyclops, its blue mountain mass hovering over the lake’s deep blue waters, with its five-hundred-foot waterfall shrouded in perpetual clouds. It was a magnificent setting for the greatest invasion the Pacific war had ever seen.

  As he trudged up the hill, Kenney knew he had a vital role to play in what was coming. MacArthur had carved out a new position for him as head of SWPA Army Air Forces, while passing his old command of the Fifth Air Force to his brilliant subordinate, Ennis Whitehead. MacArthur felt secure with his air chiefs
, and Kenney’s ability to isolate the battlefield and to bring victory. “Of all the brilliant air commanders of the war,” MacArthur later wrote, “none surpassed him in those three great essentials of combat leadership: aggressive vision, mastery of air tactics and strategy, and the ability to exact the maximum in fighting qualities from both men and equipment.”1

  If Kenney was MacArthur’s strong right arm, his strong left arm was Walter Krueger. Nine years younger than MacArthur, he had a reputation as a soldier’s soldier who shared every hardship with his men, eating the same rations and living in the same tent. He believed officers had to pay a price to build the bond of trust that enabled them to lead in battle. During the savage fighting for Lone Tree Hill on Noempoor, Krueger asked about casualties among officers. His chief of staff admitted they had been heavy. “Good,” was Krueger’s comment.2

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  Krueger had only thirty-five more days to ready his forces for the invasion. He decided the landings on the eastern coast of Leyte would require a two-corps landing force, with the Tenth Corps sweeping in on the town of Tacloban and its vital airfield, then pushing on to Carigara. Meanwhile the Twenty-fourth Corps, made up of the Seventh and Ninety-sixth Infantry Divisions, would take Balog, then aim for Burauen. Two more divisions, the Thirty-second, which had borne the brunt of fighting at Buna almost two years before, and the Seventy-seventh, would form his reserve.3

  Thomas Kinkaid and his Seventh Fleet, together with Barbey’s amphibious forces and Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet, would provide the essential naval support for MacArthur’s and Krueger’s landing. A veteran cruiser commander of both Coral Sea and Midway like Kenney, Kinkaid found MacArthur’s principle of non-interference with subordinates liberating and refreshing. And like both Kenney and Krueger, he also found that the best way to proceed was to ignore or bypass Dick Sutherland and the rest of the Bataan Gang and deal with MacArthur directly. “He said his door is always open to me,” he wrote to his wife after their first meeting. “I could not have asked for a more cordial reception.”