Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  Bruenn later confessed that he and his colleagues had thrust aside medical ethics to answer a higher patriotic calling. FDR was the single most important person in the world. His role in leading the global Allied coalition was seen as indispensable. He was the linchpin of plans and negotiations to create a stable postwar order. Axis propaganda had made a fetish out of physical virility and strength, and had tried to make the wheelchair-bound Roosevelt a symbol of Western democratic decrepitude. His domestic political adversaries had spread rumors that he was in poor health, and would pounce on any evidence that the rumors were true. For all of these reasons, Dr. Bruenn’s diagnosis was treated as a state secret, and reporters and photographers were rarely permitted into FDR’s presence. On the Presidential Special, the three wire service correspondents (whom the president cheerfully denounced as “cutthroats,” “vultures,” or “ghouls”) were not permitted within three cars of Pullman No. 1. Usually they could be found in the club car, killing time at the bar or the card tables.

  AFTER A BRIEF STOP IN THE HUDSON VALLEY, where the Roosevelts spent the day at their home in Hyde Park, they were back aboard the Presidential Special by evening on the fourteenth. That night the train traveled the entire length of the New York Central Railroad. At noon the following day, it came to rest at the Fifty-Fifth Street Coach Yard in Chicago, where it would remain for two hours while Roosevelt met with Robert Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

  A majority of the party was determined to be rid of the sitting vice president, Henry Wallace, and Roosevelt bowed to their wishes. The story of how Senator Harry S. Truman landed on the Democratic ticket has been recounted elsewhere, and need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that it was an odd result, surprising even to the president’s inner circle. After a short meeting with Hannegan, FDR signed a letter agreeing to either of two prospective running mates: Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, or Truman. The original letter named the two men in that order: Douglas or Truman. But at the last moment before the train pulled out of Chicago, Hannegan emerged from the president’s private compartment and asked FDR’s secretary, Grace Tully, to retype the letter with the order of names reversed. FDR thus effectively chose his successor in a seemingly spontaneous, seat-of-the-pants exchange with the DNC chairman, even though his doctors had reason to doubt that he could survive another term in office.

  This historically momentous stopover in Chicago lasted all of two hours. Before nightfall the Presidential Special was on its way again, bound for Topeka, Kansas, and points west on the Rock City Railroad. For the next three days, the train meandered through the Great Plains and the desert regions of the Southwest. Its speed rarely exceeded 35 miles per hour, partly because Roosevelt found the ride more comfortable at that imperial pace—but also because he wanted to deliver his speech accepting the party’s nomination from a naval base in San Diego, and the exact timing of his nomination was uncertain. At that speed the train’s batteries would not recharge, so it stopped often at local sidings to plug into charging stations. FDR was sleeping well each night, a vital consideration for his health. Travel had always done wonders for his spirits. He was invigorated by the peaceful ritual of watching the country roll past while identifying towns and other landmarks on a map he kept in his lap. He impressed his staff and companions by citing esoteric details of local history, and seemed to possess an encyclopedic recall of his past electoral performance in each local voting precinct.

  Police and local troops maintained a heavy presence along the route, guarding all trestles, junctions, bridges, and tunnels. Where highways ran parallel to the tracks, army jeeps and trucks motored along in company. Naturally curious, the soldiers stared into the windows of the president’s car, hoping to catch a glimpse of the commander in chief, the First Lady, or Fala, their famous little black Scottish terrier. Advance notice of the train’s approach spread by word of mouth to the stations ahead. On the sweltering afternoon of July 16, at the train station in El Reno, Oklahoma, Eleanor Roosevelt was seen walking Fala on a leash up and down the platform. Word spread quickly through the town, and a crowd of about five hundred curiosity-seekers converged on the station. More were arriving when the train departed an hour later.6

  Besides the First Lady and Admiral Leahy, the presidential entourage included a long list of military aides; a medical team, including McIntire, Bruenn, and two other doctors; the speechwriter Sam Rosenman; OWI chief Elmer Davis; Major General “Pa” Watson; Rear Admiral Wilson Brown; and Grace Tully. There was the usual large wartime detail of Secret Service agents, navy porters, railroad employees, and the “three ghouls” of the wire services.

  Near the front of the train, behind the locomotive and the baggage car, was a windowless communications car manned by the Army Signal Corps—an intricate warren of cables, tubes, electrical panels, and decoding machines. From here, the signalmen maintained constant secure contact with the White House Map Room through shortwave and radio teletype. Lieutenant William Rigdon, a junior naval aide, spent much of the transcontinental journey walking the fifteen cars between the communications car and the president’s private car, a journey of nearly a quarter of a mile. He carried messages through a series of roomette cars, upper- and lower-berth Pullman cars, the club car, the dining car, and more roomette cars; and finally past the armed plainclothesmen who guarded the president’s car, always the last on the train.7

  At two o’clock in the morning on July 19, the Presidential Special pulled up to a siding at the Marine Corps Base in San Diego. The party would spend three days here, at the nation’s great West Coast naval bastion, touring local military facilities. The Roosevelts visited their son James and his family, who were living across the bay in Coronado. FDR and his retinue reviewed amphibious training exercises of two marine regimental combat teams of the 5th Marine Division in Oceanside, California, 40 miles north of San Diego. This was a highly realistic “live fire” practice landing, including lots of heavy armor and advanced landing craft. It was a valuable education, both for the president and his senior military aides. The Pacific island-hopping campaign was a new kind of war, and large-scale amphibious maneuvers of the kind they saw in Oceanside had been unknown in peacetime. Leahy was particularly impressed with the close coordination of naval fire and air support with the landing teams.8

  On July 20, the Democratic Convention in Chicago nominated the president for a fourth term. With the train sitting at the Marine Corps railroad siding, Roosevelt gave a fifteen-minute acceptance speech, which was broadcast to the convention by radio. Afterwards, he reread some of the highlights for the newsreel cameramen. At a little before nine o’clock, Eleanor Roosevelt bid the party good-bye and left to catch a military flight back to Washington. The president, Leahy, and Fala transferred into a car for the short drive to the Broadway Pier, where the heavy cruiser Baltimore was berthed. The ship’s crew had not been forewarned that President Roosevelt would be a passenger, but some had guessed the truth when wheelchair ramps were constructed in the corridors around the captain’s quarters. Roosevelt moved into the captain’s cabin, Leahy into the flag officer’s cabin.

  The president being mindful of the old seaman’s superstition against beginning a sea voyage on a Friday, the ship waited until midnight to cast free her lines. Five destroyers followed the darkened cruiser as she headed down the long mine-swept ship channel to the open sea. The formation set a base course of 243 degrees, with cruising speed of 22 knots, and vanished into the offing.

  IN MARCH 1944, THE JOINT CHIEFS HAD ORDERED MacArthur and Nimitz to cooperate in seizing Palau, a group of Japanese-held islands in southern Micronesia, with a deadline of September 15; and Mindanao, the big southern island of the Philippines, with a deadline of November 15. But the chiefs remained undecided about the major moves to follow in early 1945. As always, the Philippines were the cynosure of MacArthur’s war, and he continued to press Washington to endorse his preferred southern line of attack. He wanted to concentrate all available U.S. forc
es (including the Pacific Fleet) to liberate the northern island of Luzon, including the capital city of Manila, before undertaking any further amphibious invasions to the north. Admiral King and most of the internal JCS planners preferred to bypass Luzon and aim their next major thrust at the island of Formosa (Taiwan). A March 12 dispatch to the two Pacific theater commanders had laid bare the disagreement, directing both headquarters to prepare contingency plans for “Occupation of Formosa, target date 15 February 1945, or occupation of Luzon should such operations prove necessary prior to the move on Formosa, target date 15 February 1945.”9

  As the Baltimore carried the president to Hawaii, invasion forces were in the process of seizing the Mariana Islands of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944), a naval air battle west of the Marianas, the Japanese had lost about three hundred aircraft and three aircraft carriers. With its sea links to the southern resource areas under increasing assault, the economic and military foundations of the Japanese imperialist project were beginning to crumble. Although the regime in Tokyo was not prepared to face facts, the loss of the Marianas and the destruction of its carrier airpower marked Japan’s irreversible strategic defeat in the Pacific War. The final phase of the campaign had begun, and the supreme question loomed: how to force the Japanese leadership to admit defeat, and to accept the terms of peace offered—unconditional surrender? The Americans knew they could take either path at this fork in the road—Luzon or Formosa—and be sure of victory. It was a proverbial high-class problem, but it presented war planners with many-sided strategic and technical complexities, and it had produced a confounding array of opinions both in Washington and in the Pacific. In other words, it was a close call.

  In early 1943, the planning arm of the JCS had circulated a “Strategic Plan for the Defeat of Japan.” This document envisioned a vital role for China in the last stage of the Pacific War, as a base for bombing raids against Japan and as a source of infantry manpower to destroy the Japanese armies in Asia and (if necessary) the Japanese home islands. To carry it off, the Allies would need to land on the coast of mainland China, and the island of Formosa seemed to offer the key that would unlock the continent’s front door. This China-centric vision of the Pacific endgame created momentum in Washington for the navy’s preferred central Pacific line of attack, which ran through Micronesia, the Marianas, and Formosa.

  The most influential in-house JCS planning body was the Joint Strategic Survey Committee (JSSC), a panel of gray eminences who reported directly to the chiefs. For much of the war the JSSC was chaired by Lieutenant General Stanley D. Embick of the army, who had graduated from West Point in 1899. The four principals of the JCS continued to show a certain degree of deference to the venerable old warriors on the JSSC, who offered advice unfettered by service rivalries or institutional biases. In November 1943, the JSSC had rendered a unanimous and “unequivocal” judgment that the central Pacific offensive was more important than MacArthur’s South Pacific campaign, because it offered the shorter route to Japan, and therefore “the key to the early defeat of Japan lies in all-out operations through the Central Pacific, with supporting operations on the northern and southern flanks—using all forces, naval, air and ground, that can be maintained and employed profitably in these areas.”10 MacArthur’s impassioned dissent, and his demands for a shift in emphasis to the southern route and the Philippines, had consistently failed to move the JSSC. Each new study tended to reinforce the panel’s past conclusions—that MacArthur’s South Pacific campaign had become redundant, that the dispersal of effort in the Pacific risked prolonging the war, and that Japan’s evident weakness invited a more direct assault upon the enemy’s inner ring of defenses. In the committee’s considered judgment, that pointed to Formosa.

  To his perpetual vexation, MacArthur could never rely on George Marshall to protect the parochial interests of his SWPA theater, or to assign priority to his preferred route of attack through the South Pacific and the Philippines. The previous year, he had expressed himself in remarkably bald terms to his deputy, General Richard Sutherland, who was on his way to Washington: “Emphasize to Marshall that he can control the situation through his allocation of the air and ground forces which are necessary for operations in Pacific. Without these army resources the navy will be helpless. If he will send here the air and ground reinforcements instead of sending men to the navy areas he can accomplish the desired purpose by indirection.”11 It is not known how much of that appeal was conveyed by Sutherland to Marshall, but the army chief of staff was never temperamentally inclined to act by “indirection,” defined by Webster’s as “a lack of straightforwardness or openness.” Marshall was not blind to the service rivalries in the Pacific, but he never saw the campaign as a zero-sum struggle between the army and navy, or between MacArthur and Nimitz, and he was always willing to consider the merits of a more direct route of attack on the Japanese homeland. As for leaving the navy “helpless,” a mere glance at a map of the Pacific was enough to grasp the likely consequences.

  In June 1944, spurred by the JSSC’s forceful arguments, Marshall urged MacArthur to let go of outmoded assumptions and to reexamine the entire Pacific chessboard with a fresh perspective. Given signs of Japanese weakness, was it not time to speed the tempo of the campaign? The strategy of bypassing strongly held islands had been a hallmark of MacArthur’s successful South Pacific offensive—why not apply the same logic to Luzon? If the Allies would eventually require a port on the coast of mainland China, perhaps it was better to take Formosa sooner rather than later. Marshall was even considering a bolder proposal—then circulating among the JSC planners—a surprise landing on Kyushu, the southern island of Japan. In either case, Marshall told the SWPA commander, “we must be careful not to allow our personal feeling and Philippine political considerations to override our great objective, which is the early conclusion of the war with Japan. In my view, ‘bypassing’ is in no way synonymous with ‘abandonment.’ On the contrary, by the defeat of Japan at the earliest practicable moment the liberation of the Philippines will be effected in the most expeditious and complete manner possible.”12 But MacArthur disagreed entirely, arguing that liberating Luzon was necessary, both for strategic reasons and because “We have a great national obligation to discharge.”13

  MacArthur’s desire to liberate the Philippines was genuine, honorable, and deeply felt. But in the interest of a full accounting of this history, the following facts should be weighed in the balance. On February 13, 1942, in the command bunker on Corregidor, Philippine president Manuel Quezon signed an order transferring from Philippine commonwealth treasury funds the sums of $500,000 to MacArthur, $75,000 to Sutherland, and lesser amounts to two other senior officers on MacArthur’s staff. The payments were described as compensation for past services in the U.S. military mission to the Philippines. The current-day equivalent of the sum paid to MacArthur was a cool $8 million. Because the commonwealth treasury funds were on deposit in New York, in accounts partly controlled by the U.S. government, the payments required the approval of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Marshall and Stimson knew what was happening and did not raise objections, or at any rate, did not act to stop the transactions. It is likely, based on the surviving paper trail, that President Roosevelt was informed.14 Later, after his escape to the United States, Quezon visited General Eisenhower in Washington and offered him an “honorarium”—the sum is not known—to compensate his past services in the Philippines. Eisenhower declined the offer, tactfully explaining that “the danger of misapprehension or misunderstanding . . . might operate to destroy whatever usefulness I may have to the Allied cause in the current war.”15 The future European theater commander judged that the offer was improper under the circumstances, and would be exposed to public scrutiny in the long run. He was right on both counts.

  Behind closed doors, in the summer of 1944, Admiral King bluntly questioned MacArthur’s competence as a military strategist. In his estimation, the SWPA comm
ander had little knowledge of (or curiosity about) recent advances in amphibious warfare, which had lately proven its capacity to cross long ocean distances to seize strongly fortified enemy islands. MacArthur’s past predictions of disaster in the central Pacific had been discredited, but he continued to offer similarly dire prophecies about the Formosa operation. King had championed the South Pacific counteroffensive in 1942—indeed, he had touched it off with his Guadalcanal operation, which had been opposed by MacArthur. But the southern line of attack, in King’s view, had been justified only in the early part of the war, when the United States was not yet strong enough to fight across the heart of the Pacific. Now that Australia was secure and Allied forces had smashed through the Bismarcks barrier, it was time to wind down the southern offensive. Mindanao was the logical terminus for MacArthur’s campaign. In one of King’s regular off-the-record press briefings in Alexandria, he told the reporters that recapturing the Philippines was “sentimentally desirable” but “eccentric,” and would likely delay victory in the Pacific by three to six months.16 To Rear Admiral Daniel E. Barbey, MacArthur’s amphibious fleet commander, King acidly remarked that “MacArthur seemed more interested in making good his promise to return to the Philippines than in winning the war.”17