Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  In a nutshell, the dilemma was that the Philippines could not be saved, but they could not be abandoned outright. They could not be saved because the Allies could not yet muster even a fraction of the shipping, naval strength, and air power needed to fight across the Pacific. A rescue mission would only increase the scale of the defeat; any ship attempting to run the Japanese blockade to reach the Bataan Peninsula, where MacArthur’s army was besieged, would be sunk or captured. No matter how the figures were calculated, Bataan would run out of provisions, ammunition, and other needed supplies long before the Allies could mobilize forces on a scale needed to return to the Philippines. On the other hand, Eisenhower told Marshall, the besieged army could not be “cold-bloodedly” abandoned to the enemy. Even if hard military logic dictated cutting losses, the United States was a great nation with a reputation to uphold. It must try to get at least some supplies into Bataan by submarine, blockade runners, and airplanes. Even if it amounted to little more than “driblet assistance,” and even if it prolonged only by a few weeks the inevitable surrender, “we must do everything for them that is humanly possible.”27 Marshall agreed, and authorized Eisenhower to spend virtually any amount of funds to make the token shipments.

  MacArthur had given no indication that he wanted to abandon his army. He kept a loaded derringer pistol with him and vowed that he would not be taken alive. But his young wife and four-year-old son were also with him in the Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor Island, off Bataan. To leave the general and his family to their fate would invite a public backlash against the Roosevelt administration. General “Pa” Watson, the influential aide to FDR, had been urging the president to order MacArthur out of the Philippines, arguing that he was worth “five Army Corps.” The proposal was to smuggle the general to Australia, and to place him in command of the eventual counteroffensive.

  Mulling it over in his diary on February 23, Eisenhower recorded prophetic views about MacArthur: “He is doing a good job where he is, but I’m doubtful that he’ll do so well in more complicated situations. Bataan is made to order for him. It’s in the public eye; it has made him a public hero; it has all the essentials of drama; and he is the acknowledged king on the spot. If brought out, public opinion will force him into a position where his love of the limelight may ruin him.”28 When FDR finally decided to order MacArthur out of the Philippines, and to appoint him supreme commander of Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific, Eisenhower lamented: “I cannot help believing that we are disturbed by editorials and reacting to ‘public opinion’ rather than to military logic.” Eisenhower would play no role in the Pacific War—he would be busy elsewhere—but in early 1942 he foresaw all of the various headaches that MacArthur would cause for leaders in Washington. MacArthur would use his political influence and his unparalleled access to the American media to demand that more troops, ships, and airplanes be sent to his command. He would reject the “Europe-first” principle as a basis for global strategy. He would meddle in Australian politics. He would insist on running the naval war in the Pacific. He would claim the right to liberate all of the Philippines before any final offensive against Japan. Leaders in Washington would have to reckon with MacArthur’s singular influence at every stage of the coming war, Eisenhower predicted, for “the public has built itself a hero out of its own imagination.”29

  ERNEST J. KING, THE HATCHET-FACED SEAMAN who led the U.S. Navy, was determined to have nothing to do with the press. When President Roosevelt had offered to make him commander in chief of the U.S. fleet (“COMINCH”) a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, King had taken the job on the condition that he would not be required to appear at press conferences. He said that his concern was to protect wartime secrets, and his staff batted away interview requests by explaining that King did not want to give “aid and comfort to the enemy.”30 But Washington journalists rightly suspected that Admiral King’s hostility ran deeper—that he regarded them as gatecrashers from a contemptible civilian demimonde of hacks and gossips. According to one, King seemed to rank them “somewhat above bubonic plague as something to be avoided at all costs.”31

  This instinct was widely shared among the navy brass. Naval officers tended to regard reporters as pests—dangerous pests, who might spill the navy’s secrets. And they were wary of newspapers’ tendency to build stories around individuals, particularly those with colorful or forceful personalities. Personal publicity of the kind lavished on Douglas MacArthur, they believed, was incompatible with the navy’s team-before-player ethos.

  King and his contemporaries had begun their naval careers at the turn of the twentieth century, in the period after the Spanish-American War. In those years, a bitter public quarrel had broken out between William T. Sampson and Winfield Scott Schley, two senior officers who had commanded naval squadrons at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba on July 3, 1898. Each man claimed credit for winning the battle, and each belittled the role of the other. The two officers and their partisans vied for public acclaim and traded accusations and insults in print. A court of inquiry, convened in September 1901, was given headline coverage in the press, especially in the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst; but the court issued a divided ruling, which only inflamed the spectacle. President Theodore Roosevelt attempted to suppress all public discussion of the dispute, fearing that it had tarnished the navy’s victory over Spain, but the contretemps continued to echo in the newspapers for years afterward, and was even the subject of one of the earliest American silent films: The Sampson-Schley Controversy (1901).

  To the midshipmen who passed through the Naval Academy in those years, the unbecoming public spectacle left a lasting impression. The navy’s triumphs in the late war had lifted the United States to the status of a global military power. The service should have been basking in acclamation, planning for the future, and consolidating its standing in Washington. Instead, Sampson and Schley and their respective followers, seeming to care only for their own selfish interests, had hung the navy’s dirty laundry out on a public clothesline. That generation of young officers, which included King (Class of 1901), William Leahy (1897), William Halsey (1904), Chester Nimitz (1905), and Raymond Spruance (1906), swore to themselves and each other that they would never let it happen again. By the 1940s, most Americans had forgotten the Sampson-Schley affair, if they had ever heard of it. But the admirals of the Second World War remembered it well. They took pride in a culture of teamwork, cool professionalism, and personal modesty, and tended to shun newspapermen altogether if they could get away with it.

  But the crucible of war would soon expose the risks and limits of the navy’s aversion to publicity. Its failure to provide adequate and timely information about the naval war left a vacuum in the public’s understanding of the subject—and inevitably, as if by a law of physics, wild rumors and speculation rushed into that vacuum. No one questioned the need to protect military secrets, but in the early stages of the war, when Japanese forces rampaged across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, influential voices in Washington charged that the navy was abusing its control over war reporting to conceal its fiascos. Worse, leading Republicans accused the navy of carrying water for FDR and the Democrats by managing the news flow with an eye toward the 1942 midterm congressional elections. That was a false charge, but a damaging one, and Admiral King eventually understood that he would have to refute it, or stand accused of trespassing into the demilitarized zone between war-fighting and politics.

  Equally pressing was the question of the navy’s status in the postwar defense establishment. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, congressional leaders of both parties had vowed to streamline the military’s organizational chart. The War and Navy Departments, which had been independent and coequal since the administration of John Adams, were to be merged into a unitary department of defense under a single civilian cabinet officer. Although the specific arrangements remained to be negotiated, the army, navy, marines, and air forces would be fused into an integrated command structure. FDR persuaded Congress to
postpone those reforms until the war was won—but anyone could foresee that service unification was destined to be a political brawl of epic proportions, in which the navy had much to lose in the way of command autonomy and clout. Secretary Knox and his undersecretary, James Forrestal, who each had backgrounds in journalism, warned King and the admirals that the struggle had in a sense already begun, and that the navy had better “tell its story” to the American people. Forrestal noted that the army was already making its case to congressional leaders through back channels, and “it is my judgment that as of today the Navy has lost its case and that, either in Congress or in a public poll, the Army’s point of view would prevail.”32 In August 1944, Forrestal told King: “Publicity is as much a part of war today as logistics or training and we must so recognize it.”33

  IN THE WEEKS AFTER PEARL HARBOR, hundreds of working journalists applied to the War and Navy Departments to be accredited as war correspondents, the forebears of today’s “embedded journalists.” According to the army’s Basic Field Manual for Correspondents, these frontline reporters would be subject to military authority and would be required to “submit for the purposes of censorship all statements, written material, and photography intended for publication or release.”34 Although they would remain civilians, they were to wear plain khaki uniforms with brass shoulder insignias identifying them as “Correspondent,” “Photographer,” or “Radio Commentator.” In all, through the end of the war, about 1,600 war correspondents were accredited by the armed forces.

  Journalists shipping out as war correspondents were told to pack their bags and be ready to leave the country with ten hours’ notice. Like soldiers and sailors, they were forbidden to disclose sailing dates or destinations, even to their own editors or loved ones. They would travel with the troops, either by air or by sea. Although they had no rank, they were allowed officers’ privileges, meaning that they messed with officers and shared the same berthing and living arrangements. As civilians, they were not supposed to salute nor to be saluted—but since they wore khaki uniforms, they frequently were saluted by officers and enlisted men. Strictly speaking, if they were to follow protocol, they ought to refrain from returning salutes. On the other hand, none wanted to give offense. No official solution to this dilemma was ever decreed. According to William J. Dunn, a CBS radio correspondent posted to Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia, most of his colleagues adopted the custom of not saluting first, but returning salutes as “a matter of simple courtesy.” Whenever coming face-to-face with high-ranking officers wearing “a bevy of stars,” however, they found themselves raising their hands to their foreheads quickly and instinctively, protocol be damned.35

  War correspondents and press liaison officers were natural enemies. In most overseas military headquarters, their working relationship was inevitably fraught with misunderstandings and ill feelings. At the root of the problem was a mismatch between their respective professional cultures and attitudes. Military men of all ranks were accustomed to operating in a chain of command. If an order seemed capricious or illogical, it was not the soldier’s first instinct to demand an explanation or justification. The slang acronym SNAFU (“Situation normal, all fouled up”), which gained wide currency during the Second World War, summed up the serviceman’s resigned acceptance of regulations and procedures that appeared to defy reason. That stoic attitude did not come naturally to the civilian journalist, who had always felt free to argue with his editor if he thought he was right.

  In some overseas headquarters, especially during the first year of the war, press sections practiced a system of “blind censorship.” Censors reviewed each story with a red pencil, crossing out whatever sentences or paragraphs they deemed unsuitable, and then cabled the censored version directly back to the United States. The author was not notified of the edits and redactions, nor given any explanation for them, nor allowed to rewrite and resubmit. In some cases, a story vanished into the censor’s “kill file,” and the reporter who had written it received no word of the decision. Only later would he learn whether his story had “passed” and how much of it had eluded the red pencil. It was galling to see his hard work disappear into such a vortex. Fierce arguments inevitably ensued. The press officer, conscious of his authority and his responsibility to protect secrets, was not inclined to back down. When five war correspondents at a headquarters in New Zealand approached their press censor with a list of complaints, he told them, “I’m not afraid of you any more than I would be of five Japs.”36 Another press office distributed a mimeographed form letter in response to protests:

  MY FRIEND:

  It is with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat that I listen to your sad tale of woe. Allow me to offer my deepest and sincerest condolence. However, I do not have the Chaplain’s duty and I am short of towels. Please see the Captain of the Head for material for drying your eyes.

  PEACE ON YOU, MY FRIEND,

  Chief Censor37

  But it was the press officer’s bad luck to be pitted against adversaries who were not cowed by authority, and whose ranks included some of the most lethal polemicists and name-callers in the world. The New Yorker correspondent A. J. Liebling profiled the press officers he encountered at General Eisenhower’s headquarters in London. As civilians they had been corporate publicity agents or “Chicago rewrite men,” Liebling observed—but then the war had transformed them into army majors and colonels who had never been to boot camp or laid eyes on a battlefield. They were feckless “dress extras,” immaculately turned out in finely tailored, starched uniforms, who spoke of the army with a practiced “unctuousness.” Before the war they had not been respected as journalists; now they were not respected as army officers. Possessing a certain flair for legerdemain and spin, they had “adapted themselves to this squalid milieu and flourished in it.” In May 1945, just after V-E Day, when the loss of his press credentials would no longer impose a career penalty, Liebling opened fire in the pages of his magazine. He denounced the use of censorship for “political, personal, or merely capricious reasons” and announced that the time had come to expose “the prodigious amount of pure poodle-faking that has gone on under the name of Army Public Relations.”38

  In Hawaii, where Admiral Chester Nimitz was commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), correspondents soon learned to their dismay that the stolid white-haired Texan was determined to give them nothing interesting or quotable. Newspapermen seemed to think that the man sent to avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor ought to look and talk like a salt-stained swashbuckler out of a boy’s adventure novel. But Nimitz, as one of them observed, could have passed for a “retired banker.”39 According to Time magazine correspondent Bob Sherrod, the CINCPAC was “the despair of his public relations men; it simply was not in him to make sweeping statements or to give out colorful interviews.”40

  Nimitz’s first formal press conference, which he gave only after being pressured to do so by Navy Secretary Frank Knox, was held on January 29, 1942, a month after he took command in Pearl Harbor. The war correspondents were ushered into his office at his headquarters, which was housed for the moment at the submarine base in the Navy Yard. They found Nimitz seated behind a standard-issue wooden desk, dressed in plain khaki with no necktie. He did not rise to greet them. The walls were bare but for an analog clock, a calendar, and a map of the Pacific. The journalists sat on folding chairs that had been set up for the occasion. Nimitz read a prepared statement setting out the command arrangements that had been established between the army and navy. All of that information had already been released in Washington, so it was not news. Then he took questions. Yes, he did expect to hold and defend the Hawaiian Islands. No, he did not care to elaborate. New York Times correspondent Foster Hailey asked for “some reassuring word for the people back home as to the operations of the Navy since December 7.” One imagines the collective sense of letdown as the reply was given: “Admiral Nimitz said that any statement as to the operations of fleet units must come from Wash
ington as part of the grand strategy of the war.”41

  That month, again under pressure from Knox, Nimitz brought on a full-time public relations officer. This was Waldo Drake, a commander in the naval reserve, who had previously been the shipping news correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. The practice of commissioning civilian reporters as press officers was based on the premise (as one naval officer put it) that “one hippopotamus can talk to another hippopotamus.”42 Drake made a good first impression with the war correspondents, pledging that the door to his office at Pacific Fleet headquarters would always be open to them. But his job was largely thankless, because his boss continued to regard working with the press as a problem to be managed rather than an opportunity to communicate with the public. Drake’s authority did not extend beyond Pacific Fleet headquarters, but there were many other military commands on Oahu—including those of the army, the Army Air Forces (USAAF), and the Fourteenth Naval District—and the various headquarters had their own censorship practices and public relations strategies.43

  Day after day, the correspondents knocked on Drake’s door to air their complaints. News given out by Pacific Fleet headquarters was already generally known, they said. The sluggish pace of Drake’s censorship procedures meant that their stories were already stale when they arrived on the mainland. Too few of them had been permitted to go to sea with the fleet. When Wake Island was taken by the Japanese, censors removed the name “Wake” and identified it only as “an island.” A correspondent asked, “Is there anybody in the navy who thinks that the Japs are under the impression that they have taken some other island?”44 As the result of an administrative snafu, correspondents were invited to a press briefing with Admiral Robert English, commander of the Pacific Submarine Force. But Nimitz had decreed a complete news blackout of the submarines, so Drake was obliged to rush into the room and put an end to it. He collected all of the reporters’ notepads before allowing them to leave.45 In an incident that anticipated Joseph Heller’s satirical novel Catch-22, a news story was passed by both army and navy censors, but the navy censor altered one of the paragraphs. Finding that it did not like the navy’s version, the army suspended the credentials of the correspondent who had written it, even though the fellow had not seen the amended version until it appeared in print.