Answering a reporter’s question about whether the Germans would continue to resist, Patton said, “I hope they do [but] I don’t see what the fools are fighting for … I crossed the Danube River today and it wasn’t even worth pissing in.”
On May 6 Patton got word that some 100,000 misguided White Russians were attempting to surrender. They had been fighting with the Germans against the Red (Communist) Russian army with the notion of somehow “liberating” the Soviet Union of its present form of government. The question arose of whether they were prisoners of war, and Patton said he hoped not, “because if the Russians ever get them they will unquestionably be eliminated.” He was right. SHAEF ultimately designated these people POWs and thousands were turned over to the Russians who hanged their leaders and sent the rest to toil in Siberia.28
A British sailor whose distasteful job it was to deliver a batch of the unfortunates into the hands of the Soviet army wrote that many of them began to faint and “lose their senses.” Having seen many fearful things during the war, the sailor wrote that he had seen nothing “like the fear of those people who were being returned to their native Russia.”
Stories like this incited Patton to hate the Russians—“a scurvy race, and simply savages.” He thought they would disturb postwar stability, and that Eisenhower’s determination to let them take Berlin was a terrible political move. Patton was convinced that a confrontation with the Soviet Union was bound to come to a head, and he knew the American army was at present superior—his Third Army alone contained nearly half a million combat veterans. “We could beat hell out of them,” Patton announced.29
To a visiting U.S. undersecretary of war Patton strongly recommended that the administration not break up the American army at the conclusion of the war but leave it in place in case the Communists threatened to overrun all of Europe. When the horrified diplomat responded, “You don’t realize the strength of these people,” Patton scoffed that with the kind of fighting he could give them the Russians might be able to defend themselves up to five days or a week. “After that … if you wanted Moscow, I could give it to you.”
GERMANY SURRENDERED, UNCONDITIONALLY, at a minute past midnight, May 8, 1945. By that date Third Army had inflicted 1,486,000 casualties on the Germans, including 144,500 killed, at a cost to themselves of 136,865 battle casualties, with 21,441 killed in action. According to Colonel Harkins, the Third Army had “gone farther, captured more prisoners, crossed more rivers, liberated more friendly territory, and captured more enemy territory, than any army ever before in American history.”30 George Patton was the man of the hour and the darling of most of the press.
The long nightmare in Europe was over, though another bad dream lay ahead. Hitler was dead by his own hand and the Allies quickly went about gathering up officials of the Nazi regime. Germany was prostrated, its cities in rubble, its manufactories smashed, its people dispirited and unable even to feed themselves. They crawled out of their cellars and hiding places and looked around into a profound silence enveloping the entire nation. Many—probably most of them—were terribly embarrassed and ashamed at what their leaders had put them through but, after all, they had initially voted Hitler and the Nazis into power. It was one of the most horrid mistakes a democracy had ever made and a powerful lesson for today and tomorrow. The Third Reich that Hitler predicted would “last a thousand years” was abolished in little more than a decade, though at terrible cost.
At yet another press conference, Patton was asked whether SS prisoners would be treated differently from other German soldiers and made this reply: “Hell no, SS means no more in Germany than being a Democrat [does] in America—that is not to be quoted.” But the remark was quoted, and Patton’s final self-destruction was set into motion.
* Although the British and Americans made up most of the invasion force on D-day there were also troops representing Australia, Canada, and New Zealand as well as Norway, Poland, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, France, and other nations occupied by the Germans.
† Hitler at one time held a job as a wallpaperer.
‡ Later an SS officer named Stroop, who claimed he was on von Kluge’s trail regarding the bomb plot, asserted that he had shot and killed von Kluge after the field marshal refused to take the cyanide capsule he offered him.
§ Actually the French took it from the Germans in 1552, but the Germans took it back in 1870.
ǁ Also known as “immersion foot,” trench foot, a World War I term, has been a bane of armies since the time of Napoleon. It describes a painful debilitation of the feet caused by water seeping through boot leather. Prolonged exposure causes the feet to swell and begin to decay.
a Pyramids of reinforced concrete to arrest the advance of enemy tanks and mechanized infantry units.
b The argument over the strategic bombing campaign in Germany continues to this day. At the time there were those in both the RAF and the U.S. Army Air Forces who argued that the Germans could be bombed into surrender. When it appeared they could not, it was then argued to bomb them into oblivion, which they very nearly did but still the Germans kept on fighting and at last had to be put down by field armies on the ground.
c About $1.23 billion in today’s money.
George Marshall (left) talks with British prime minister Winston Churchill in 1942.
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Marshall (right) discusses strategy with chief of the Allied forces Dwight Eisenhower during the North African campaign in 1943.
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George Marshall (left) receives the Distinguished Service Medal from President Truman in 1945.
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Marshall as U.S. secretary of state urges Congress to approve his European recovery program—known as the Marshall Plan.
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Major General George Patton commands the U.S. First Armored Corps, wearing his “war face,” in 1942.
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General Patton, wearing his trademark ivory-handled pistols, watches a desert armored attack in Tunisia, North Africa, in 1943.
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Patton delivers one of his famous profanity-laced motivational speeches to U.S. troops in Sicily in 1943.
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Generals Omar Bradley, Patton, and Eisenhower examine Nazi looted art and other treasures uncovered by Patton’s Third Army in Merkers, Germany, in 1945.
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Generals Bradley, Eisenhower, and Patton (left to right) survey damage in Bastogne, Belgium, in 1945.
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General Douglas MacArthur (left) and his controversial chief of staff Richard K. Sutherland in U.S. underground headquarters on Corregidor Island, Philippines, in 1942
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MacArthur (left) at war conference, Pearl Harbor, in 1944 with President Franklin Roosevelt, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and Admiral William Leahy
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MacArthur (center) and staff wade ashore on Leyte, Philippines, 1944, fulfilling his promise: “I shall return.”
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Japanese general Yoshijiro Umezu signs the surrender documents aboard the USS Missouri in September 1945 while General MacArthur looks on.
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MacArthur aboard his command vessel during the U.S. landings at Inchon, Korea, 1950
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THESE PROCEEDINGS ARE CLOSED
The October 20, 1944, landing had taken the Japanese by surprise, and Douglas MacArthur was holding on to the Philippine island of Leyte by little more than an eyelash, as the enemy fought furiously to prevent the Americans from gaining a stronghold in the islands. The Philippines, after all, were the key to protecting Japan’s lifeline to the oil, rubber, rice, copra (from coconut), and mineral resources of Southeast Asia and the southern se
as. Since moving south, following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had virtually made slaves of the populations of numerous nations and islands and set them to working for the self-defined Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was, in fact, the Japanese empire.
For several days after the landing, MacArthur’s men had fought a bitter inch-by-inch battle to push the Japanese army back from its beachhead, but unbeknownst to the Americans a potential disaster was brewing on the high seas. The Japanese Imperial Navy had summoned its entire naval force—four fleets, one from as far away as Brunei—a mixture of aircraft carriers and heavy surface ships, including the monster “super battleships” Yamato and Musashi whose 18-inch guns were superior to any warship in the world. What followed would turn out to be the greatest naval battle in history.
The Japanese strategy was to get their heavy ships to the invasion beaches at Leyte, isolate the American troops by destroying the U.S. naval ships there, wreck the supply dumps on the beaches, then pound the U.S. forces into oblivion. The gunfire of just one super battleship could equal the firepower of nine battleships and twenty cruisers in the combined Japanese fleets. To ensure the safe passage of these valuable vessels, to get at the American beachhead, the Japanese avoided being caught in open ocean by timing night passages through two straits—one northern and one southern—that provided passages through the Philippine Islands from the west into the Leyte Gulf and the Philippine Sea.
Still, an enormous obstacle for the Japanese was lack of aircraft and pilots following an ill-advised tangle four months earlier with American naval forces in the Battle of the Philippine Sea or, as it became known, the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” In an overwhelming U.S. victory the Japanese lost three fleet carriers and some six hundred warplanes—and their pilots—for all practical purposes putting the Japanese air arm out of business.
On the American side, the U.S. Navy had assigned Admiral Thomas Kincaid’s Seventh Fleet to protect MacArthur and facilitate his invasion of Leyte and, in addition, Admiral Bull Halsey’s Third Fleet in case the Japanese came in full force with their navy, which they did.
It was Halsey’s practice to go after Japanese aircraft carriers whenever and wherever he found them and in the Leyte Gulf battle he found them far to the north of the invasion site. The problem was that the enemy carriers were decoys, because following the Philippine Sea debacle the Japanese navy barely had enough planes and pilots to man a single light carrier. Not realizing this, Halsey took the bait and steamed his fleet out of the action, chasing a phantom enemy carrier force.
The battle began in earnest during the early morning hours of October 25, when the powerful Japanese task force from Brunei entered the San Bernardino Strait near Palawan Island. It was spotted by two American submarines, USS Darter and the USS Dace, which shadowed Admiral Takeo Kurita’s armada of six battleships, twelve cruisers, and ten destroyers before firing numerous torpedo spreads that sank two cruisers—including Admiral Kurita’s flagship Atago, which went down so swiftly the admiral had to be fished out of the sea—and knocked still another cruiser out of the fight.
Shaken, Kurita continued on through the strait where he reached the Philippine Sea and steamed southward toward the Leyte beachhead. Because of confusion and some questionable orders by Halsey, the only thing standing in Kurita’s way was “Taffy 3,” a grab bag of sixteen small, slow, unarmored light escort carriers with several hundred older-model planes and some unarmored destroyers. From a distance, however, Admiral Kurita wrongly perceived that he had encountered Halsey’s fleet carriers. The Americans were just as surprised to see the large battleships and cruisers looming ahead of them, but Rear Admiral Thomas Sprague immediately ordered the escort carriers to launch all planes with whatever weapons were on hand. This Taffy 3 did, convincingly, attacking the big enemy battleships and cruisers like a swarm of pesky horseflies—in fact, another of Kurita’s cruisers was sunk. Hits were made on both super battleships. When all the American torpedoes were used up, the torpedo bombers made “dummy runs” at the enemy just to keep them feeling threatened.
By all rights, Sprague’s weak force should have been destroyed in detail by the heavy guns of Kurita’s battleships and cruisers, but Taffy 3 laid down such a heavy smoke screen it simply vanished from sight on the bridges of the enemy ships. The defense of Leyte by Taffy 3 was one of the more heroic events of the naval war in the Pacific. Faced with this startling development, and confused by faulty communications, Kurita retreated back through the San Bernardino Strait, persuaded that he had saved his entire fleet from annihilation.
Meanwhile, further confusion developed on the American side when Halsey sent a message that seemed to indicate he had detached a powerful force of U.S. battleships and cruisers under Admiral Willis “Ching” Lee to guard the approaches to Leyte Gulf, but in fact he had meant to say that he would form such a force, if necessary. In any case, it quickly became necessary as reports from scout planes, PT boats, and submarines signaled that several large Japanese task forces were converging on Leyte Gulf. In the south, elements of Kincaid’s Seventh Fleet were engaging Japanese warships coming through the Surigao Strait and he sent out a plain-language message: MY SITUATION IS CRITICAL, and requested “fast battleships and air strikes” from Halsey. Matters were made more difficult by the fact that there was no unified command in the battle. MacArthur could ask Halsey for help but could not order him.
Halsey had located, and was attempting to destroy, the Japanese force that had decoyed him north. Fortunately, however, Kincaid’s emergency message soon found its way to the desk of the commander in chief of the Pacific Theater of Operations (CINCPAC), Admiral Chester Nimitz, in Honolulu, three thousand miles away. Nimitz ordered his operations people to get in touch with Halsey and find out what had happened to Ching Lee’s task force, which was supposed to be protecting the approaches to the Leyte Gulf.
Halsey, in the midst of a battle of his own, took offense when it seemed that CINCPAC wanted to know where he was and he went into one of his rages when at the end of the message he read the statement THE WORLD WANTS TO KNOW, referring to where he was. What Halsey at the time took for sarcasm is now believed to be “padding” or “wrapping,” in which the teletype operator sending secure messages would include nonsense phrases to fool the enemy, should anyone be eavesdropping.
In any case, Halsey was soon steering back south and between him and Kincaid the Japanese took another beating from which they would never fully recover. The Imperial Navy’s toll at the end of the Battle of Leyte Gulf was one fleet carrier and two light carriers sunk; three battleships, ten cruisers, and eleven destroyers sunk; three hundred Japanese planes (mostly land based) destroyed; and 12,500 sailors killed. U.S. losses were comparatively negligible. From then on, the Allies had nearly total command of the seas, and at least for the moment Douglas MacArthur and his army were safe.1
THE RELIEF OVER THE OUTCOME of the Leyte Gulf fracas did not last long. The Japanese army had lots more land-based fighter planes, bombers, and fighter-bombers up on Luzon, the northernmost Philippine island, and no misgivings about using them, especially against MacArthur who, because of the poor conditions of the captured Japanese airfields on Leyte, still required all of his aviation support from the navy. According to MacArthur the Japanese maintained “a continuous, powerful, aerial offensive” against the U.S. landing force never before seen in the Pacific war.
To make matters worse, Leyte saw the introduction of the dangerous and fearsome kamikaze weapon, in which half-trained Japanese suicide pilots made themselves human bombs by personally crashing onto the decks of American warships. To counter this, the U.S. Navy had to keep heavy “air caps” over the fleet hoping to dispatch the kamikazes before they struck, which meant far less air support for MacArthur’s ground operations.
Heavy monsoon rains hampered the advance, and the Japanese began sending major reinforcements onto Leyte. Declaring (against his better judgment) that the decisive Battle of the Phi
lippines “will be fought on Leyte,” the Japanese commander Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita—the infamous “Tiger of Malaya”—boasted to reporters, “The only words I spoke to the British commander [Lieutenant General Sir Alfred Percival] during negotiations for the surrender of Singapore were ‘All I want to hear from you is yes or no.’ I expect to put the same question to MacArthur.” For his part, MacArthur said General Yamashita “talked too much.”2
The Japanese were receiving their supplies and reinforcements through the port of Ormoc on the opposite, or western, side of the island, and they had measured out something known as the “Yamashita Line” constructed of heavy logs and interlocking trenches, at which the Imperial Japanese Army intended to stop the American advance.
After a month of bitter fighting, which included three days of a typhoon, the Allied forces had seemingly stalled. MacArthur, however, in a brilliant strategic move, joined with the navy on December 6 to convoy a full infantry division around the southern tip of Leyte and land it on beaches near Ormoc. Within five days they had seized the city and the port, slamming shut Leyte’s “back door,” splitting the center of the Yamashita Line, and trapping the Japanese army between the two pincers. As always, the Japanese fought valiantly and viciously and almost to the last man.
On December 18, MacArthur received word that he had been promoted to the five-star rank of general of the army. In his memoirs he wrote, “The old thrill of promotion and decoration was gone. Perhaps I had heard too often the death wail of mangled men—or perhaps the years were beginning to take their inexorable toll.” Maybe so, but he was not about to let the occasion pass by without a bit of drama. MacArthur told his aides to collect silver coins from America, Australia, the Netherlands, and the Philippines—representing the forces he commanded—and have a silversmith from Tacloban melt the coins down and fashion the metal into five silver stars shaped into a wreath. These were pinned by his aides on his collar lapels after a ceremony at General Headquarters the day after Christmas 1944.3
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