Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  After a second fueling stop at Canton Island before dawn, the plane took off for the final leg into Hickam Field. It arrived over Oahu at 2:30 p.m., just as the Baltimore was in the offing. The whole regal scene opened up in a panorama beneath them. Rhoades noted that they “could see the sky literally filled with aircraft that had just become airborne and were maneuvering and assembling to fly a review for the president, approaching in the cruiser off Diamondhead.”32

  On the tarmac at Hickam Field, Admiral Towers met the plane and proposed that they go immediately to the Navy Yard to greet the commander in chief. MacArthur refused, noting that he had traveled a long way and wanted to wash up and change into a clean uniform. He told Towers, “I am going to my quarters! When the president wants me later, he may send for me.”33 Then he walked briskly to a waiting automobile, which took him to Fort Shafter.

  MacArthur’s tardy arrival on board the Baltimore is one of the most familiar scenes of the Pacific War. Sam Rosenman, a longtime FDR aide and speechwriter, recalled that MacArthur’s arrival was heralded by a chorus of sirens, “and there raced onto the dock and screeched to a stop a motorcycle escort and the longest open car I have ever seen. In the front was a chauffeur in khaki, and in the back one lone figure—MacArthur. There were no aides or attendants. The car traveled some distance around the open space and stopped at the gangplank.”34

  Every other flag and general officer involved in the ceremony was turned out in immaculate dress uniform. MacArthur, in the heat of a Hawaiian summer afternoon, wore his famous brown leather flight jacket over khaki. The corncob pipe was not in evidence on this occasion, but he wore his familiar aviator sunglasses and his battered Philippine field marshal’s cap with a mass of “scrambled eggs” (gold braid) above the visor. “He stood out from his fellows, as he always arranged it,” said a naval officer who watched the scene from the patio of a nearby officers’ club. “He was truly a caricature of a caricature, but being the ranking officer and popular old hero that he was, he could get away with it.”35

  When the immense crowd behind the barriers caught sight of him, they sent up a roaring ovation. MacArthur waved, climbed the Baltimore’s gangway, and then paused a moment to let the multitude have another good look at him. Then he stepped aboard the ship to the whistle of the boatswain’s pipe, returned the salute of the officer of the deck (OOD), and went up to meet the president.

  On the bridge deck, FDR took MacArthur’s hand and greeted him as “Douglas.” The general would later say that he was annoyed to be addressed in that familiar manner.36 Having been away from Washington for so long, MacArthur may have forgotten that the president generally called everyone by their first name, including all of his military chiefs, while expecting to be addressed in turn as “Mr. President.” But if MacArthur was offended, he seems to have concealed it well: the bridge was crowded with eyewitnesses, but none noted any sign of strain. Moreover, he reciprocated by addressing the president as “Franklin.” Roosevelt did not flinch at this effrontery, and they remained “Douglas” and “Franklin” for the remainder of the conference.

  Eyeing MacArthur’s careworn leather jacket, Admiral Leahy asked: “Douglas, why don’t you wear the right kind of clothes when you come up here to see us?”

  “Well,” replied MacArthur, “you haven’t been where I came from, and it’s cold up there in the sky.”37 The reply was a non sequitur, since the general had already returned to his quarters for the stated purpose of bathing and changing into a fresh uniform. But Leahy’s remark was friendly badinage, and MacArthur took it in that spirit.†

  The photo shoot was now running about thirty minutes behind schedule, so the party moved down to the Baltimore’s weather deck, where navy photographers and camera crews had set up their equipment. It was customary for cameramen to wait for FDR to be situated before taking pictures or rolling film. But in this case, a brief 16mm film clip captured an image of FDR being pushed in his wheelchair. (The footage is believed to be the only such surviving motion picture image.)38

  MacArthur was seated to FDR’s right, Nimitz to his left, and Leahy to Nimitz’s left. The four men posed for a round of photos. Then Leahy withdrew and the president was filmed and photographed with the two Pacific theater commanders. In the silent film footage, FDR chats amiably into MacArthur’s left ear, while the general stares impassively back into the camera’s lens. For a moment he appears deeply uncomfortable, as if he would rather be anywhere else. But then Roosevelt says something that appears to amuse MacArthur, and the general turns to respond with a warm grin. At that moment, a terrier-shaped dark silhouette ambles into the frame from MacArthur’s right, passes under their chairs, and continues out of the frame a few feet to Nimitz’s left.39

  When it was the turn of Governor Stainback to be photographed with the president, MacArthur and Nimitz vacated their chairs. A subsequent film clip caught MacArthur off to one side, chatting with General Richardson. MacArthur uses a handkerchief to mop sweat from his face and neck. He appears uncomfortably hot, but the leather flight jacket stays on. Every great actor knows the value of his wardrobe.

  As the photographers and film crews finished their work, the officers began to leave the ship. FDR was wheeled onto a small wooden platform, ringed with rails. The entire platform was lifted from the Baltimore’s deck by one of the ship’s cranes, and slowly lowered to the pier. A naval officer who watched the process imagined that the crane operator “must have been sweating blood.”40 A marine guard and brass band rendered honors as Roosevelt was helped into the back of the red convertible touring car. In his diary, Leahy described being accompanied off the base by a large police escort, and driving to Honolulu “through lines of soldiers and a cheering populace.”41

  The presidential party was quartered on Waikiki Beach, in a cream-colored stucco villa surrounded by soaring palm trees. The palatial mansion had once belonged to Chris Holmes, heir to the Fleishmann Yeast fortune; during the war it was leased to the military to provide lodging for VIPs and visiting brass. Security was heavy. A company of marines guarded the walls and gate. Patrol boats hovered offshore. The coming three-day schedule would be long and exhausting, and the doctors insisted that the president go to bed early. After a private dinner with aides, he slept nine hours to the music of surf crashing on the nearby beach.

  MACARTHUR AND RICHARDSON DINED at the latter’s Fort Shafter residence, and afterward retired to their bedrooms. At 11:45 p.m., however, MacArthur sent word to Richardson, who was already in bed, that he would like to continue their conversation. “We sat up and talked until about 4:00 in the morning,” Richardson recorded in his diary: “He did most of the talking, as I was dead tired.”42

  It is worth pausing to note that based upon the contemporaneous diary entries of Rhoades and Richardson, it appears that MacArthur went two consecutive nights with little sleep on the eve of the most important command conference of the war.

  Referring to his recent misadventure in presidential politics, the SWPA commander protested “that he had been the subject of such vigorous attacks when he had nothing in God’s world to gain now; that he was not at all ambitious and only wanted to do his duty.” MacArthur ranged over personal territory, speaking sadly of his first marriage—“doomed to failure”—and sounded melancholy when he reflected that all he had left was his present wife, “a little southern gal,” and his “little boy.”43

  Presumably MacArthur must have slept at least a few hours before returning to the Holmes villa on Thursday morning. From there he would accompany the president, Leahy, and Nimitz on a long day of inspection tours around Oahu. The party climbed into a large black hardtop sedan—Leahy in front, Nimitz wedged between Roosevelt and MacArthur in back—and departed at a quarter to eleven. Their route took them west, through the Marine Corps Air Station at Ewa, the naval installations around Barbers Point, and the ammunition depot at Lualualei. They passed a prisoner of war enclosure where Japanese prisoners stared curiously through the wire. At the supply depots, they
drove down long, narrow alleys between walls of crates stacked 30 or 40 feet high. The crates were filled with ammunition, provisions, and every conceivable commodity, all awaiting transshipment to new advanced bases in the western Pacific. Oahu had become the ultimate showcase of the phenomenal power and scale of the American military juggernaut.

  The president was surprised by how much the island had developed since his previous visit in 1934. It seemed scarcely possible, he later told reporters, that “any place could change as much as the Island of Oahu has.”44 A decade earlier, vacant or cultivated land had been abundant even on the plains surrounding Pearl Harbor and Honolulu. Now, newly built military bases and residential districts abutted one another directly, separated only by chain-link fences.

  Escorted by a long motorcade of jeeps and motorcycles stretching to about a quarter of a mile, the car carrying the president and his three companions drove up the sparsely populated Waianae Coast, through green cane fields and native wildflowers. Even here, on the most isolated rural roads of the west Oahu backcountry, they encountered sentries who stood to attention by the roadside, their hands raised to their helmets in salute. At midday, the motorcade climbed a steep, winding blacktop road to Kolekole Pass, high in the Waianae mountains, where they took in a magnificent vista of Pearl Harbor and the many airbases spread out on the plain to the southeast. Here they were met by General Richardson in the red Packard touring car, and the cameras were turned off as FDR was carried by Mike Reilly, head of the Secret Service detail, from one vehicle to the other. The afternoon’s itinerary would take them to Schofield Barracks, Oahu’s largest army base.

  FDR’s visit was supposed to have been a secret, but the news had spread widely by word of mouth. The route into Schofield was lined with soldiers—and just behind them, crowded three- or four-deep, a host of cheering civilians. It seemed as if the entire population of Oahu not only knew that the president was on the island, but had somehow learned the route of his motorcade, and had turned out with the enthusiasm of spectators at a tickertape parade. Families brought picnic baskets and folding beach chairs. Young children perched on their fathers’ shoulders. School-age boys and girls climbed banyan trees and sat in the branches, where they could see over the heads of those in front. Hawaii was a melting pot of many Asian and Pacific races and ethnicities, as well as haole (whites) and various others—but all equally craned their necks for a glimpse of the long red car with the twin American flags mounted on the front fenders, and the man in the backseat wearing a rumpled cream-colored linen suit and Panama hat.

  Reilly called the visit “the worst kept secret I have ever known,” and half expected one of the warplanes patrolling overhead to skywrite: “Welcome, Franklin D. Roosevelt.”45 He did not like the open touring car, observing that it would pass within 30 or 40 feet of thousands of spectators. Seated among the uniformed officers in the car, Roosevelt was easily identified even from a distance. Japanese-Americans represented Hawaii’s single largest ethnic group, with a population of nearly 150,000. Even if the overwhelming majority were loyal—and by 1944 it was abundantly clear that this was so—it would take just one assassin to lob a grenade from the roadside, killing at a stroke both Pacific theater commanders, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the president of the United States. The burly Reilly stood on the Packard’s running board, leaned protectively over FDR, and kept his eye on the crowd—but there was no sign of trouble, and Japanese-Americans appeared to cheer as ardently as their fellow citizens.

  Despite all that had passed between them, Roosevelt and MacArthur seemed pleased to be in each other’s company. Each must have enjoyed the heady novelty of spending the day with the only other American whose national stature and popularity was on a par with his own. The impression is reinforced by the comments of eyewitnesses and by the film footage. Rigdon wrote that FDR was “particularly fond of General MacArthur and seemed genuinely glad to see him again, for the first time in seven years.”46 Dr. McIntire had often heard FDR talk about MacArthur with “sincere admiration,” referring to him as a “friend” and “military genius.”47 On MacArthur’s part, he recorded in his memoir that they “talked of everything but the war—of our old carefree days when life was simpler and gentler, of many things that had disappeared in the mists of time.”48 Not having seen the president in many years, MacArthur was taken aback by his diminished appearance. He predicted, accurately, that FDR would not survive another term in office. But after watching the president lifted like a child and carried from wheelchair to car and back again, the general “marveled at the spiritual strength Roosevelt obviously possessed in order to retain his mental acumen and wit in the face of evident physical deterioration.”49

  In the silent motion picture footage, the two men appear to evince sincere fondness for one another. Seated in the back of the car on the parade ground at Schofield, they seem lost in private conversation, their faces close together, each grinning broadly, like a pair of mischievous boys cooking up a prank. At some unrecorded quip of the president’s, both erupt into full-throated laughter. Perhaps that was the moment (one can only speculate) when MacArthur asked about the upcoming election, and FDR replied, with deadpan earnestness, that he had not given the matter a single moment’s thought. “I threw back my head and laughed,” MacArthur later told Eichelberger. “He looked at me and then broke into a laugh himself and said, ‘If the war in Germany ends before the election, I will not be reelected.’ ”50

  At some point in the day, MacArthur remarked that FDR was the overwhelming favorite of U.S. troops in Australia, which was certainly true. Roosevelt told MacArthur that he (MacArthur) would have made a good president, if all had gone differently. Now that Dewey was the Republican nominee, it cost the president nothing to pay his rival this compliment.

  It is reasonable to infer that the feelings on both sides were mixed. Perhaps they were politicians, merely playing to the cameras. But they may also have been genuinely stirred by the awareness that they were making history, in the heart of America’s great Pacific stronghold, amidst the acclamations of thousands, in a summit of warlords who knew that they would soon be masters of the Pacific.

  Entering the front gate to Schofield at 12:35 p.m., the motorcade passed through seemingly endless files of tanks and other armored vehicles, through hangars and down the long plane-lined taxiways of Wheeler Field, and past the Post Hospital, where Japanese-American soldiers wounded in Italy saluted from the third-floor windows. The route was lined by soldiers standing to attention, their hands fixed to their helmets in salute. The 7th Infantry Division, 14,000 strong, was drawn up in ranks on the Schofield Parade Ground. The red touring car drove up onto a wooden platform, specially constructed for the purpose, and the president gave a short speech without leaving the vehicle. Fumbling with the microphone, he asked a technician to assist—but the device was already live, so FDR’s befuddled queries were broadcast to thousands of men standing in ranks. MacArthur, Nimitz, and Leahy, still seated in the car with the president, wore their best poker faces.51

  The day’s public schedule concluded at 4:30 p.m., and all returned to their respective quarters. But MacArthur and Nimitz were back at the Holmes villa on Waikiki for dinner that evening. They were joined by Bill Halsey, who was preparing to take command of the fleet the following month, and Wilson Brown, who was (like Halsey) a veteran carrier task force commander. The six dined in the mansion’s grand dining room, attended by Filipino mess stewards. After dinner, Halsey and Brown departed, and the remaining four discussed the war in a casual way for about two hours. At midnight they adjourned, but the formal conference had been scheduled for the following morning (Friday, July 28) in the same location—so after an overnight intermission, MacArthur, Nimitz, Leahy, and the president reconvened in the mansion’s airy parlor, this time with a band of army and navy photographers and a motion picture crew.

  The Pacific Fleet intelligence staff had prepared the room with large wall maps of the Philippines and the western Pacific.
The session began with a fifteen-minute posed photo session, in which FDR and Leahy looked on as Nimitz and MacArthur took turns holding a bamboo pointer up to the map. Flashbulbs popped, and the film crew moved around in the background, trying different angles. The four men were patient while the cameramen did their work, cooperating willingly in posing for the scene. All were public figures, well accustomed to the ritual. When it was Nimitz’s turn with the pointer, he moved it from Saipan, to Guam, to Tokyo, to the lower part of Japan’s Inland Sea. But when MacArthur took it, he held it unmoving on the island of Luzon, his supreme objective in the Philippines.52

  No minutes were kept of this historic debate at Waikiki. Once the film crew and photographers had finished their work and cleared the room, no staff were invited to remain. Accordingly, scholars and historians have been obliged to rely upon first- and second-hand recollections of the four participants. The record is thin. FDR gave a thumbnail synopsis to the historian Samuel Eliot Morison several months after the fact. Leahy recorded a brief summary in his diary and set out the issues in a memorandum to his fellow joint chiefs. Nimitz did not leave any direct account, although his views can be gleaned from cables he sent to King immediately before and after the conference.

  MacArthur was the only one of the four to leave a detailed firsthand account of the conference. He reconstructed the entire scene, quoting himself at length, in his 1964 autobiography, Reminiscences. This book was published nineteen years after FDR’s death, five years after Leahy’s death, and two years before Nimitz’s death, when the latter was in his dotage. The dialog in the scene appears to have been reconstructed entirely from memory. As a summary of the strategic issues under discussion, MacArthur’s account is plausible. But it is characteristically self-serving, and some of its important particulars are at odds with other accounts subsequently given by MacArthur in private conversations.