Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  He entered the room quietly, and what impressed me right away was that he was alone! No fussing aide or overattentive public relations type to steer him past such reefs as might come up. It was just Ernest J. King, Admiral, USN, perhaps a little tense as one might be who has committed his fate to dubious hands. He was, nonetheless, completely poised, projecting an air of authority, of command, without having to make the slightest effort. Great men may enjoy the ruffles and flourishes, but they do not need them to win instant respect.

  Nelie walked the Admiral around the room, presenting each correspondent in turn. He shook hands with each, a quick, firm pressure, repeating the name and accompanying the words with a keen eye-to-eye look. The eyes were not at all unfriendly, but it was no great trick to imagine that under less favorable circumstances they might look as though forged from the same steel that protected his battleships.68

  After the introductions, all were seated—King in an easy chair in the corner, the reporters arrayed in a rough circle around him. Beer was served from an ice-filled washtub. The men drank directly from bottles.

  King began speaking off the cuff, and for the first hour or so the reporters did not interrupt him at all. He gave a complete chronological narrative of the global war, beginning with the problems he had faced in getting convoys across the Atlantic in 1941, and then the attack on Pearl Harbor, the early crises in the Pacific, the victory at Midway, and the vicissitudes of the fight for Guadalcanal.

  The journalists hung on every word. Vast strategic and logistical complexities were suddenly made clear to them. King’s masterful summary of the big problems of the war was a priceless education in itself—but when he moved to specifics he displayed an astonishing grasp of detail, including technical data. He drank a second beer, then a third; every fifteen minutes or so he lit a new cigarette. Most remarkable, or so it seemed to the newsmen, he spoke with complete candor about the mistakes the navy had made, and did not appear to hold anything back for the sake of security. “He told us what had happened, what was happening, and, often, what was likely to happen next,” one recalled. “He reported the bad news as fully as the good news, and in many cases, explained what went wrong on the one hand, and what strategy, weapon, or combination of both, had brought success on the other. Throughout, he was completely at ease and always patient, welcoming the questions that frequently interrupted his narrative, and answering them frankly and easily.”69

  Many questions were asked about the situation in and around Guadalcanal, where it was known that the United States had suffered heavy air and naval losses. Could the Americans hold the island, or would a tactical withdrawal become necessary?

  “We’ll stick,” said King. Explaining that the fighting in the Solomons had been savage and desperate, he admitted that the navy had suffered heavy losses. But there were good reasons to keep slugging it out. The Japanese were suffering too, and they could not easily replace their losses. Geography worked to the Allies’ advantage, because the Japanese did not have airbases nearby. King explained how and why the navy chose to announce its losses, and warned that Japanese claims were often inflated by tenfold or more. He noted that Bill Halsey had recently been appointed South Pacific commander, and predicted a pitched sea battle in the coming weeks.†

  “Doesn’t this mean you’re risking losing the fleet?” asked the columnist Walter Lippman.

  King replied: “Isn’t that what it is for?”70

  The meeting broke up after three hours, and King departed after shaking every reporter’s hand. Some stayed behind to talk among themselves, while others hurried away to commit all they could remember of the discussion to notes. They were stunned by their good fortune and felt as if they understood the Second World War better than they ever had before. One remarked that “King was—above all—a realist; that he did not indulge in wishful thinking or close his eyes to unpleasant problems in the hope that they would go away.”71 As for controversies surrounding the reporting of past sinkings, the journalists accepted King’s explanations and concluded that he and the navy had been unfairly maligned.

  To his surprise, King had enjoyed every minute of the evening. In a sense he had been talking to himself, telling himself the whole story of the war; and the experience had even helped to clarify some of his own thinking. Upon arriving at his office the next morning, he called Nelie Bull and asked, “When do we have the next one?”72

  King’s secret Alexandria press briefings continued throughout the remainder of the war, at an average rate of about one every six weeks. More correspondents were invited, and their numbers eventually swelled to near thirty. The journalists nicknamed themselves the “Arlington County commandos,” and in good cloak-and-dagger fashion they gave King a codename: “The Thin Man.” When Secretary Knox learned of the briefings, he gave his hearty approval even though the admiral had subverted his authority by starting them in the first place. None of the secrets disclosed by King ever appeared in print.

  Admiral King soon realized that he had acquired a fund of goodwill in the Washington press corps. This was an intangible asset, but it did not take him long to discover its value. Congressman Maas had been sounding off in Congress and in the media about disunity in the high command, and was pushing legislation to merge the armed services into one integrated command structure. King believed that the existing Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) organization was working well enough, and that a service unification bill should be postponed until the end of the war. He discreetly reached out to several of the Arlington County commandos. Within twenty-four hours, major newspapers across the country ran news articles and editorials opposing Maas’s views, but without mentioning King’s name. Soon thereafter, with the support of FDR and congressional leaders, service unification was shelved pending the end of the war.

  In 1941, King had arrived in Washington determined to have nothing to do with the press. Before the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, he was manipulating it from behind the scenes like a veteran Washington wire-puller. On first impression, it was a surprising reversal. But after further reflection it was not surprising at all, because no one had ever mistaken Ernest J. King for a slow learner.

  AT GENERAL MACARTHUR’S SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA (SWPA) headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, the press section was run by Colonel LeGrande “Pick” Diller, a career army officer who eventually rose (while serving in that role) to the rank of brigadier general. Diller was a charter member of the “Bataan gang,” the insular circle of MacArthur loyalists who had served in the Philippines before the war and joined him in escaping Corregidor in March 1942. The SWPA press operation never lacked for funds or manpower: Diller eventually had more than one hundred officers and enlisted personnel in his chain of command, including a long roster of captains and majors, many of whom would be promoted to full-bird colonel by war’s end. In contrast to the Pacific Fleet headquarters in Pearl Harbor, where Nimitz and his staff were dismayed by the relentless flood of journalists from the mainland, Diller adopted a “more the merrier” attitude and was always delighted to issue a new set of press credentials. The number of accredited reporters, photographers, and radio newscasters in Brisbane eventually surpassed four hundred.

  Diller and his team treated the correspondents like valued clients. They replied promptly to all queries; they arranged access to state-of-the-art communications and broadcasting facilities; they looked after the journalists’ “creature comforts” when they were touring forward combat areas. They provided regular access to MacArthur himself, albeit in carefully stage-managed press conferences. Diller composed the first drafts of SWPA’s near-daily press communiqués, which were then reviewed and often rewritten by MacArthur. Correspondents soon learned that no actual or implied criticism would survive Diller’s red pencil, while on the other hand, the thicker they laid on the praise and adulation, the more they would be rewarded with exclusive stories and other desirable privileges.

  The newsmen gave Diller and his team high marks for alacrity. In pointed con
trast to the situation in Hawaii, news stories submitted to MacArthur’s press office were reviewed, censored, approved, and transmitted back to the United States within twenty-four hours, so that the news was still fresh when it appeared in the newspapers. Fresher news was more likely to be treated as front page news, whereas the comparatively stale bulletins from Nimitz’s theater were more likely to go into the back pages. That, in turn, contributed to the American public’s impression, quite common in 1942 and 1943, that MacArthur was doing most of the fighting in the Pacific.

  More than any other American military leader of the war, MacArthur understood the importance of visual imagery. He paid diligent attention to the details of his wardrobe and accessories, which cynics called his “props”—his battered Philippine field marshal’s “pushdown” cap, his well-worn leather flight jacket, his aviator sunglasses, and his corn-cob pipes, which tended to grow larger over time. During his first days in Australia, he had experimented with an ornate carved walking stick, but discarded it after someone remarked that it made him look older. He was sensitive about his expanding bald spot, and when it was necessary to be photographed without his hat, he took a private moment to comb his hair across the top of his head, leaving a perfectly straight part about two inches above his right ear—a deftly executed version of the coiffure known as a “combover.” Photography, like press copy, was subject to Diller’s censorship—and most published wartime photographs of MacArthur were taken at a low camera angle, making him appear taller than he was.

  The Brisbane publicity machine often gave the misleading impression that MacArthur was personally leading his forces in battle. As a theater commander, it was not MacArthur’s role to lead forces in the field, and his extraordinary valor in the First World War had left him with nothing to prove. Still, it was galling to the men actually doing the fighting, who had rarely if ever laid eyes on MacArthur, to learn from an American newspaper that he had been sharing in the dangers and privations of the front lines. In October 1942, after he made a brief flying trip to Port Moresby, an Allied base in southeastern New Guinea, Brisbane-based war correspondents reported that MacArthur had toured the combat zones around Buna, near the island’s north coast. The stories were vetted and approved by the SWPA censors. A photograph of MacArthur watching a field exercise in Rockhampton, Australia, was released to the press with the location falsely captioned as “the front.” Newsreel footage depicted him seated in the back of a jeep, bouncing along a muddy jungle road, while the narrator told viewers that the general was touring forward fighting positions. In truth, a towering range of jungle-clad mountains had separated him from the nearest Japanese troops throughout his entire visit.73

  These blatant fabrications irritated Robert L. Eichelberger, commander of the Eighth Army, who concluded that the SWPA press office was abusing its powers of wartime censorship to indulge MacArthur’s personal vanity. General Eichelberger was learning the bitter lesson that Eisenhower and others had learned before him—that if a subordinate officer wanted to get along with MacArthur, he had better keep his name out of the newspapers. After he was quoted and photographed in several press accounts about the Buna campaign, Eichelberger was summoned to Brisbane to be dressed down by MacArthur, who asked: “Do you realize that I could reduce you to the grade of colonel tomorrow and send you home?”74 Eichelberger took the point, and for the rest of the war he shunned the press. To a visiting public relations officer, he said: “I would rather have you slip a rattlesnake in my pocket than to have you give me any publicity.”75

  From the start of the war, MacArthur always asserted his right to issue his own press communiqués, and he resisted pressure from Washington to tone them down. General Marshall and Secretary Stimson did not like the sensational pronouncements from Brisbane, and they questioned the accuracy of MacArthur’s claimed battle results. Truth was often a casualty of the SWPA publicity machine. Action reports were punched up to make them seem more exciting and dramatic, and in many cases not only was the language improved, but new “facts” were liberally added. In some instances, statistics concerning enemy losses were invented wholesale. Moreover, many SWPA communiqués appeared to contain a none-too-nuanced subtext aimed at the navy or at operations in Nimitz’s theater. The most notorious of these was issued in March 1943, after a successful air attack on a Japanese troopship convoy off the northern coast of New Guinea, in an action subsequently called the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. Employing a new low-altitude tactic called “skip bombing,” Lieutenant General George C. Kenney’s Fifth Air Force bombers had sunk a dozen enemy ships, including eight transports and four escorting destroyers. P-38 fighters had shot down about twenty Japanese planes flying air cover over the convoy and driven perhaps twenty more away. The transports had carried about 8,000 Japanese troops, of whom at least 3,000 were killed in the attacks or drowned afterward. (The exact number has never been tallied, as many escaped to nearby shores by clinging to wreckage or were rescued by small craft.)

  The bravura performance was a tactical breakthrough for the USAAF, whose land-based bombers had often struggled to hit enemy ships at sea. But the subsequent SWPA communiqués claimed grossly exaggerated results: twelve transports, three light cruisers, and seven destroyers sunk, and 102 Japanese airplanes “definitely observed as put out of action.” Furthermore, a communiqué asserted, the convoy had carried an estimated 15,000 Japanese troops, of whom “all perished.”76 In an accompanying statement, also released to the press, MacArthur seemed to draw from this single action the far-reaching lesson that airpower had won strategic dominion over seapower, with the implication that the Army Air Forces had won its ongoing meta-argument with the navy. In the future, he declared, command of the sea would be decided by land-based aviation rather than naval power: “The Allied naval forces can be counted upon to play their own magnificent part, but the battle of the Western Pacific will be won or lost by the proper application of the air-ground team.”77 Flabbergasted admirals demanded that Marshall and Stimson call their man to heel.

  The inflated results claimed by MacArthur and Kenney could not withstand scrutiny, and they began to unravel when pilot reports and interrogations of prisoners picked up at sea revealed that the entire convoy was smaller than the number of claimed sinkings. But when General Marshall forwarded corrected estimates to Brisbane, asking that the SWPA headquarters issue a revised communiqué, MacArthur erupted. In a long cable to Marshall that has to be read to be believed, he named twenty-one of the twenty-two ships that his forces had allegedly destroyed, asserted that the results had been conclusively verified by captured Japanese documents and prisoner interrogations, and demanded that Washington revise its figures to bring them into line with his previous report. He added that he was prepared to defend his claimed results “either officially or publicly.” Moreover, if the War Department intended to issue any public document “challenging the integrity of my operations reports,” he wanted to know the names of the men behind it, “in order that I may take appropriate steps including action against those responsible if circumstances warrant.”78

  The moonshine in MacArthur’s press communiqués was gratuitous and unnecessary, because his military achievements, in 1943 and 1944, were quite real. His advance up the coast of New Guinea, his landings in New Britain, his bold surprise amphibious landing on Los Negros-Manus, his long jump up the northern New Guinea coast to Hollandia—all those moves were deftly planned and executed. Kenney’s bombers did wipe out the better part of an important convoy; they did improvise a new and lethal tactic to sink ships at sea, a feat that had eluded them in the past. MacArthur’s forces had ample cause to take justifiable pride in their achievements, and the controversy surrounding his communiqués only tended to tarnish what should have been regarded, quite properly, as a winning South Pacific counteroffensive.

  Critics branded MacArthur a narcissist and a megalomaniac, but his souped-up publicity had a calculated purpose. It was a bid for political influence at home. Diller later said that the
general “was trying his level best to get as much help for the Pacific and for our forces as he could, and consequently he tried to keep the story attractive so that people would be sympathetic to his support.”79 In MacArthur’s mind, he was pitted against a cabal of enemies in Washington. FDR was his archnemesis, a man he knew well and cordially despised. MacArthur often told his claque that the president had “betrayed” him at the outset of the war by failing to send forces to relieve the Philippines. He was frustrated by the division of the Pacific into two separate theater commands, with the northern realm commanded by Nimitz. He regarded the navy as FDR’s pet service—which was not far wrong—and tended to distrust all naval officers as spies or usurpers. But MacArthur’s influence in the news media posed a greater problem for the army than for the navy. Marshall, Stimson, and the army leadership in Washington struggled to keep the SWPA commander in line. He was constantly testing the limits of insubordination, often threatening in barely veiled terms to take his case to the public, and any internal disagreement was likely to resonate in the papers and in Congress.

  At a visceral emotional level, MacArthur believed that the War Department had failed his army in the Philippines. He ranted about the (mostly) faceless and nameless conspirators—“they”—who had taken control of the army and were plotting to undermine him. “They” had based the global Allied strategy on a principle of “Europe first,” a policy he abhorred, and was always ready to denounce as a historic folly. “They” had denied him the forces he needed to turn back the Japanese offensive in the South Pacific. “They” were a clique of deskbound, political generals who were jealous of his public renown, and thus eager to lay him low. “They” were on the spot in Washington, while he was in Australia, half a world away from the seat of power. He had been away a long time—away from Washington, and away from the United States since he had left in 1935; he had even retired from the U.S. Army, serving as Field Marshal of the Philippine Army until appointed U.S. Far East commander by FDR in July 1941. His long physical estrangement had put him at a political disadvantage, or so he believed—and therefore he must do whatever was necessary to make his influence felt in Washington. Only by such means could he hope to obtain the troops, weapons, ships, and airplanes he needed to win the Pacific War, and to win it according to his own playbook. He must beat “them”—his Washington-based antagonists—at their own game, and that meant outbidding them for popularity with the American people.80 He wanted singular authority over the war, to absorb Nimitz’s forces into his own command; but failing that, he wanted at least to ensure that his theater received the lion’s share of Allied assets in the Pacific. He wanted his own strategic ideas to predominate over those of the navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Allies, which meant above all that he should liberate the Philippines (including and especially the main northern island of Luzon) as early as possible. Under no circumstances were the Philippines to be bypassed in favor of a more direct route to Japan itself.