Despite their differences over naval strategy (MacArthur always wanting his navy men to take more risks, Kinkaid always wanting to take fewer), they had worked out a relationship that belied claims that MacArthur had a built-in bias against the U.S. Navy, or that he had no understanding of maritime strategy.4
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Together they had supervised the steady buildup of the Seventh Fleet in Hollandia harbor, until it consisted of 471 ships of all kinds, from cruisers and escort carriers (grouped together as Task Force 3 under Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague) to amphibious landing ships and troop transports and cargo vessels acting as floating warehouses.
It had been a logistical nightmare. Even after the invasion force sailed, eighty-seven cargo ships were in harbor every day, “12 discharging, 3 loading, 24 awaiting call to Leyte, 33 waiting to discharge, 5 waiting to load, and 10 miscellaneous.”5 Fortunately MacArthur had appointed his trusty engineer Hugh Casey to head up his SWPA Army Service Command, in order to get everything ready and loaded for invasion day, while Kinkaid and Barbey knew their landing craft and escort warships would be ready.
The real issue, however, as Kenney had pointed out from the beginning, was air cover. From Hollandia to Leyte was 1,300 miles. For the first time MacArthur was extending himself beyond normal air protection. If Kenney’s air forces couldn’t get bases established on Leyte in time, then the whole liberation of the Philippines would be in jeopardy. Getting the troops there to secure those bases now depended entirely on Halsey’s and Sprague’s carriers. Yet Halsey’s principal brief from his commander, Admiral Nimitz, wasn’t to protect the beachhead but to destroy the Japanese fleet. In nominal terms, he would be free to pull his carriers out if that opportunity presented itself. MacArthur was gambling that Halsey wouldn’t, and that Kenney would get his bases on land in time.6
MacArthur meanwhile was still in Brisbane, determined to put in as much time with his son as he could before the invasion pulled him away. Barely six years old, little Arthur was evolving into a precocious musician. He could pick out Gilbert and Sullivan tunes on the piano, and his teacher discovered he could play almost anything by ear instead of reading the music. That summer, before moving to Hollandia, MacArthur rarely got home before the boy was in bed. All the same, he would stop at his son’s room and watch him sleeping—sometimes sitting and thinking for fifteen or twenty minutes.7
Soon after the establishment of the Hollandia headquarters, he went to see Jean.
“I won’t be back,” he said—meaning he wouldn’t return until the landings on Leyte were successful.
“You’ve got to send for me the minute you think it’s safe for me to come to Manila,” she said. Then Sid Huff heard her tease her husband: “When I go to Manila I want you to fix it so I can stop off in Hollandia. I want to see this mansion you built—the one that I’m supposed to have been living in luxury!”8
They laughed, then MacArthur was off. He was flying on his new plane, a brand-new B-17E outfitted with tables and leather chairs—one of only three that had been converted into passenger planes. Until November 1943 MacArthur had flown in standard transport planes like the C-47 and DC-3, although he also used Kenney’s custom B-17, nicknamed “Sally,” for flights over the ocean. Then in November he had taken delivery of the new plane, along with a new pilot: Weldon Rhoades, inevitably nicknamed “Dusty.”
Extraordinarily for MacArthur’s staff, he was a civilian—although MacArthur arranged for him to have a major’s rank, and be attached to his general staff. A tall, gangly man with sad eyes, Rhoades had an aviator’s instinct for getting a plane full of passengers wherever it needed to go despite the risks. The plane carried only one .59-caliber gun in its Plexiglas nose. If attacked by a flight of Zeros it was more vulnerable than Yamamoto’s ill-fated transport plane—that is, if Kenney’s fighter escorts weren’t sticking like flypaper to its tail.
The plane’s name was emblazoned on its port nose: Bataan. It was as much a pledge as an aircraft’s nickname; and now in the fall of 1944 it had become for MacArthur almost a public sacrament.9
Before going to Hollandia, MacArthur had one stop to make. He landed in Canberra, the Australian capital, to pay a brief visit to Prime Minister John Curtin, who was dying of heart disease.
For more than two years they had been constant and fierce allies in the battle not just against the Japanese but against the consensus view in Washington and London that the war in Europe must have top priority, and that men and resources shipped to the SWPA were, in effect, men and resources wasted. In the end, they had even been allies in the struggle against Australia’s own high command, who had their own ideas about how the war in the Southwest Pacific was to be fought and who should be in charge.
Curtin’s trust in MacArthur has not earned him plaudits from Australian historians.10 But it had been indispensable to MacArthur’s success as SWPA commander. He paid public tribute to Curtin in a message to the Australian people: “[H]e was one of the greatest of wartime statesmen, and the preservation of Australia from invasion will be his immemorial monument.” But MacArthur also knew he himself had pushed things to this point, the verge of liberating the Philippines, without having to rely on Curtin’s help.11
The Australians had been instrumental to driving the Japanese out of New Guinea. But the transformation of SWPA from a sideshow into a dagger directed at the heart of Japan’s Pacific empire was entirely the result of MacArthur’s relentless effort. Now MacArthur arrived back in Hollandia only days before the invasion was to be launched. He had left the overall planning to Kenney, Barbey, Kinkaid, and Krueger, all of whom were a ten-minute jeep ride from one another and sat down often to work out the details. This was, of course, typical of MacArthur’s approach to operational planning. Once he and his chief of staff had worked out what they wanted done, and when, they would draft up a plan to circulate with his service chiefs. Then they and their staffs would chew on it, work out and modify the details, then send it back to headquarters for final discussion and MacArthur’s approval.
This is exactly what happened in the planning for the landing on Leyte, so that when the Bataan’s wheels touched down on Hollandia’s main airfield on October 16 MacArthur was as fully briefed on the details as Kenney, Kinkaid, and the rest—and given his prodigious memory, undimmed at age sixty-four, perhaps more so.
The one flaw in the process, and MacArthur’s biggest disappointment in readying for the invasion of the Philippines, was his chief of staff, Dick Sutherland.
Since Sutherland’s promotion to lieutenant general, it was as if something had broken down in his sense of courage, integrity, and judgment. It led eventually to a breach of trust with the man to whom he had been the intimate subordinate through five stormy and crisis-laden years, a breach that would widen until the two barely spoke.
It had to do, improbably enough, with a woman.
Her name was Elaine Clark, an Australian whose mother was Australia’s top socialite, and whose father, Norman Brooks, the country’s most famous tennis player.12
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She was married to an English steel tycoon named Reginald Bessemer-Clark, who had been captured by the Japanese in Malaya. While he was starving and languishing in Singapore’s Changi prison, Elaine struck up an acquaintance, then an affair, with MacArthur’s chief of staff. When Sutherland and GHQ moved to Brisbane, she moved with him. Indeed, Sutherland’s attention grew into an infatuation as he arranged for his paramour to get a commission in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in early 1943.
This was not entirely unusual, and MacArthur—who was infallibly faithful to Jean—could say little about the nepotistic arrangement. After all, both Sutherland’s deputy Dick Marshall and General George Kenney himself made similar arrangements for their Australian mistresses. The problem was that Captain Elaine Clark became a source of friction with other members of his staff. Sutherland installed her as assistant to the headquarters commandant, where she felt it appropriate to supervise the guards and issue passes to
GHQ staff. In a high-handed way she took to rewarding those she liked with favors and perks, and punishing those who crossed her (a steadily growing number) with the opposite. When Dusty Rhoades’s predecessor, Henry Godman, secured his own jeep, Captain Clark claimed it as her own when he was away on a flight. When Rhoades dared to complain, Clark insisted that Sutherland send Godman back into combat—which Sutherland, somewhat shamefacedly, did.
MacArthur was furious when he learned what had happened. But he hesitated to overturn his chief of staff’s decision. When he learned that Sutherland had planned to move her to Hollandia, however, he read Sutherland the riot act. What Sutherland did on his own time was his business, MacArthur told him. But the relationship with Clark must never again interfere with staff business. Above all, when GHQ moved to Hollandia, Captain Elaine Clark was to remain in Brisbane. Permanently.
Sutherland had agreed, so it was with some considerable anger that MacArthur learned in July that Elaine Clark was not only in Hollandia but was acting as unofficial hostess at cocktail parties and receptions for visiting generals and admirals. There was a specific order against allowing women, American or Australian, to serve anywhere north of Port Moresby; not even Jean was allowed to come to Hollandia. Sutherland had violated that order, as well as his promise. In a towering rage MacArthur told Sutherland to send her back. In a rare burst of defiance, Sutherland said he would rather be relieved or transferred.
MacArthur refused, and instead drafted a direct written order to his chief of staff stating that Captain Clark was to return to Brisbane and remain there. When he returned from the Morotai landings, he asked and was told that Clark was gone.13
Problem solved, or so MacArthur thought. He did know that he was underestimating Clark’s deviousness, and Sutherland’s. When the final blowup came, it would send reverberations throughout the whole of GHQ and all the way back to Australia.
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Apart from Sutherland, however, MacArthur was at the top of his game. He would soon be leading the second-biggest amphibious landing in history, second only to D-Day itself in Normandy earlier that June. He now had not only Kinkaid’s and Halsey’s forces under his command, but Nimitz doing his bidding as well.
Above all, everything was now green-lighted not only for the invasion of Leyte but for the liberation of Luzon as well. The prospects for an invasion of Formosa were sinking fast. The last series of central Pacific landings—Guam, Saipan, followed by Peleliu and the Palaus—had been bloody, costly in lives but also in time lost. MacArthur’s proven bypass strategy was looking better and better, especially when he proposed that he could now move up the invasion of Luzon to December 19. Then had come a report from the Pentagon that a prospective invasion of Formosa would involve thousands of men and tons of shipping that Nimitz’s forces didn’t have—not, that is, until the war in Europe was over.
It was the end of any central Pacific–to-Formosa strategy. Admiral Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, signed on to the new MacArthur plan, as did Marshall and Hap Arnold. Admiral King, the final holdout, found himself outvoted three to one, and threw in the towel. The last fight in his long battle against MacArthur was lost.14
Soon after Washington relayed its decision to MacArthur, there came more good news. Halsey’s ten-day cruise off the Philippine Islands as well as Formosa, Okinawa, and the Ryukyus starting on October 10 had all but wiped out Japanese naval air strength, destroying more than five hundred planes, crippling thousands of tons of shipping, and completely wrecking two major base facilities. A forceful Japanese intervention to support or reinforce its garrisons in the Philippines was looking less and less likely. And while the Japanese were getting weaker and weaker, MacArthur was getting stronger and stronger. Indeed, by January he would have no fewer than six army divisions installed on Luzon for the final liberation of Manila.
The only discordant note for MacArthur’s plans was that Manuel Quezon would not be there to see them unfold. On August 1, at Saranac Lake, New York, the Philippine president had finally died of the tuberculosis that he had been battling for almost a decade. “I felt a stab in the heart” at the news, MacArthur later remembered, and to the press he commented, “He was the very apotheosis of the aspiration of the Filipinos for the higher things of life…I mourn him.”15
They had been friends, then virtual enemies, then friends again for more than forty years. Quezon had put his nation’s trust in MacArthur, and in America, twice, and both times he and America had let Quezon down. MacArthur was determined not to let it happen again. This time he would prevail—and by returning, he would fulfill a personal as well as a national pledge of honor.
Everything depended on how the Japanese army would perform in the Philippines. It would be their last chance to win a decisive victory over MacArthur, and Central Bureau and ULTRA were warning him that they were planning a red-hot reception—including appointing Japan’s finest general to bring it off.
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Spencer Akin and his team had spent weeks gleaning intelligence about the Japanese buildup in soldiers and planes on both Luzon and Leyte, since the Japanese had no doubt that MacArthur would have to take that large island to the southeast of Luzon first. By October 10, Akin and Willoughby estimated there were more than a quarter of a million Japanese in the Philippines, with 20,000 or so on Leyte, concentrated around Tacloban, and the bulk of the remainder installed on Luzon. Meanwhile, the navy was reporting large numbers of planes staging from Japan to the islands. If Halsey thought he had all but wiped out the air forces in the Philippines, the Japanese were making sure they were back in strength.16
Then came the news that Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, “The Tiger of Malaya,” had been appointed the new commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines. Yamashita had masterminded the seventy-day blitzkrieg that had captured Manila and Singapore against a numerically stronger foe; Japan’s high command obviously hoped that he could engineer a similar miracle in the Philippines.
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Yamashita took only a few days to decide that his best course of action was to concentrate his forces on Luzon, to meet MacArthur’s main assault there. This would also facilitate the main Japanese strategy for defeating the United States in the Philippines: to draw the Americans into a decisive naval engagement, a repeat of Admiral Togo’s defeat of the Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1904, that would leave MacArthur’s army stranded and cripple the U.S. war effort once and for all.
But Tokyo had other ideas, and overruled him. When the high command looked at the island of Leyte, they failed to see an underequipped and inadequate Japanese force facing inevitable defeat. They saw on their maps the major anchorage on the western side of Leyte, at Ormoc; clearly this would be the Americans’ key objective. To get there, however, General Krueger’s Sixth Army would have to fight their way across the broad, wide Ormoc Valley. It might even be possible to fight the main decisive battle on Leyte, they decided, by hemming in Krueger’s advance from the mountains running on either side of the valley. So they preemptorily ordered Yamashita to deplete his Luzon forces and reinforce the troops he had on Leyte.
With deep misgivings that the new plan was a mistake, Yamashita reluctantly agreed, and in compensation the high command agreed to shift the crack First Division from Manchuria to Ormoc Bay. It was a delayed reinforcement that ULTRA completely missed.17 Instead of facing 20,000 second-rate and unprepared Japanese troops on Leyte, Krueger’s troops would be facing some of Japan’s finest soldiers.
They would be walking into an inferno.
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Douglas MacArthur boarded the cruiser Nashville on October 16, at eleven in the morning. With him were Sutherland, Kenney, his doctor Egeberg, and other aides. As he stepped off the ladder a sudden wave struck the ship, and as a final awkward insult tossed him headlong onto the deck.
There were gasps and glances, as soldiers and sailors stared and wondered what MacArthur would do.
In fact, he did nothing. He got to his feet, returned the sa
lute, and acted as if nothing had happened. Nothing, not even nature, was going to stand in his way as he returned to face his destiny.18
The Nashville steamed out of Hollandia harbor along with the rest of the assembled ships. It was “one of the greatest armadas in history,” MacArthur noted. “Ships to the front, to the rear, to the left, and to the right, as far as the eye could see”—all steaming on zigzag courses to avoid any lingering Japanese submarines. Within three days they had joined the rest of the fleet assembling for assault on the Philippines. More than 700 ships and 140,000 soldiers were ready to fulfill MacArthur’s vow—and to take revenge for the humiliations of Bataan and Corregidor.
“I had no illusions about the operation,” MacArthur wrote later. “I knew it was to be the crucial battle of the war in the Pacific. On its outcome would depend the fate of the Philippines and the future of the war against Japan”—a perspective that Nimitz and his admirals and marine generals fighting in the Palaus might not have endorsed. Still, “Leyte was to be the anvil against which I hoped to hammer the Japanese into submission in the central Philippines”—and the springboard for the first landings on Luzon.19
On the trip out, MacArthur spent his mornings reading and writing telegrams, and his afternoons reading reports and talking to General Kenney or Colonel Courtney Whitney, his new head of the Philippine section of G-2, who had joined the staff in the late summer of 1943. Whitney would watch the supreme commander, SWPA, drift from time to time to the rail, to see the endless parade of ships stretching to the horizon on every side.
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