Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  A few examples may suffice. MacArthur told Bob Eichelberger (six weeks later) and Red Blaik (years later) that he was summoned to Hawaii without being informed of the purpose of his visit and did not learn that the president was there until he arrived. To Blaik he further maintained that George Marshall had deliberately withheld the information from him, so that he would “walk into such a trap.”53 In fact, as we have seen, MacArthur knew that the president would be at the forthcoming rendezvous, and spent much of his flight from Australia ranting to his staff and flight crew about it. In a yarn he told to a military secretary after the war, MacArthur maintained that FDR had invited him to Washington for the conference, but “I made him cross over to Hawaii. That was as far as I was going to leave my work.”54 That, too, was flimflam: MacArthur did not learn of the president’s trip until after it had been scheduled. In the account he gave to Blaik, the conference took place on board the battleship Missouri in Pearl Harbor, and was attended by Roosevelt’s civilian political aides, including Sam Rosenman and Elmer Davis. But the newly launched “Mighty Mo” was not in the Pacific at that time, and no civilians or staff took part in the formal strategy discussions. In presenting the case for a unified Pacific theater command, MacArthur piously vowed that if FDR “desired a Navy man as Supreme Commander, I would have willingly accepted the inevitable, as a military victory necessitated such a decision”—and although he was the senior ranking officer in the Pacific, “I would be willing to accept a subordinate position, to accomplish the general good.”55 Privately, to General Richardson, he confided that he “would never serve under the Navy.”56

  MacArthur even appears to contradict himself in the relevant passages of his memoir. He credits FDR for being “entirely neutral in handling the discussion,” but four paragraphs later quotes the president as saying that invading Luzon “would demand heavier losses than we can stand.”57

  One could go on, but with diminishing returns. MacArthur was a serial confabulator, and his account of the July 1944 summit should be filtered skeptically, especially with respect to certain self-serving assertions for which no corroborating evidence can be found. Alas, his version has been quoted freely and at length in biographies and histories of the Pacific War, often without a word of caution. It is not hard to see why. MacArthur gives us a scene endowed with tension and drama. It soars majestically over the dreary intricacies of Pacific military planning. It casts MacArthur in the role of protagonist, facing down a united front of opposition—and in the end the hero prevails, by dint of genius and force of personality, over the navy and his rival in the White House. But MacArthur’s account does not do justice to Roosevelt, who was a seasoned military strategist in his own right; nor to Nimitz, who was already on record as being inclined to agree with MacArthur that Luzon should precede Formosa; nor to Leahy, who was looking past these intermediate operations to the ultimate problem: How was Japan to be conquered without a bloody invasion?

  The brief account FDR gave to Morison encapsulates MacArthur’s views. After dinner on the twenty-seventh, Roosevelt looked up at a wall map of the Philippines, pointed to the southern island of Mindanao, and asked: “Douglas, where do we go from here?”

  MacArthur replied, “Leyte, Mr. President, and then Luzon!”58

  Morison added a cautionary footnote, noting that the president mistakenly placed the scene on the Baltimore rather than at the villa in Waikiki. But any doubt that FDR might have fudged the exact wording of the exchange was dispelled in 2015, when the personal diary of General Richardson was provided to the author. After being debriefed by MacArthur later the same night, Richardson made this entry:

  “The president opened a conference after dinner by pointing to Mindanao and saying to General MacArthur: ‘Now, Douglas, where do we go from here?’ That was the fuse that touched off the discussion and MacArthur then elaborated his point of view and the strategy which he thought should be employed, all of which culminates in the taking of Luzon prior to any action against Formosa, China, or Japan.”59

  MacArthur’s case for invading Luzon, which he had been refining for two-and-a-half years, was grounded in conventional principles of logistics and airpower. He championed an orthodox, “by the numbers” amphibious drive, with each new thrust covered by land-based airpower and a fleet train staging from relatively nearby harbors. He maintained that the island-dominated geography of Southern Oceania offered better prospects than regions to the north, where islands were separated by thousands of miles, and could be bombed only by aircraft carrier task forces. In MacArthur’s theater, unlike in Nimitz’s, land, sea, and ground-based air forces could advance together, coordinated for mutual support. Moreover, he argued, Luzon offered a wealth of potential landing beaches, so that the enemy could not concentrate forces against the initial landing—he had learned this lesson the hard way in December 1941—and terrain suitable for large-scale maneuvers, thus offering the hope of limiting casualties in ground fighting. MacArthur could draw upon intelligence and support from friendly guerillas on Luzon and other Philippine islands, whereas Formosa had been a Japanese colony since the nineteenth century, and much of its population was presumably hostile. Once in possession of Philippine airfields, American airpower would quickly win supremacy over the South China Sea, and could prey upon the shipping lanes linking Japan to its oil supply in the East Indies.

  In MacArthur’s re-creation of the scene, written from memory two decades later, he hurled these thunderbolts in an uninterrupted monologue, apparently holding the others in thrall. But in Leahy’s account, committed to his diary shortly after the event, FDR was the maestro, addressing pertinent questions to both theater commanders, and probing expertly for the bottom line: “Roosevelt was at his best as he tactfully steered the discussion from one point to another and narrowed down the area of disagreement between MacArthur and Nimitz.”60 The president questioned MacArthur closely about enemy troop strength in the Philippines, and tried to nail down his casualty projections. According to the account given by MacArthur to Richardson, FDR asked, “How many Japs are there in the Philippine Islands?”

  “About 100,000,” MacArthur replied, “scattered all over the archipelago.”

  FDR said that he had been informed that there were “many more.”

  “I am in command there,” said MacArthur, “and I would like to ask you where you got your information?”

  The president did not reply directly, but gave his opinion that “to capture Luzon would be very bloody.”61

  In this version of the exchange, Roosevelt was obviously concerned about casualties, but there is no suggestion that he was leaning against the Luzon operation. He may only have been echoing what he had heard in his recent briefings with General Marshall, whose War Department intelligence staff believed there were at least 176,000 Japanese troops in the archipelago.62 On that point, as it turned out, the president’s doubts were well-founded, because even the War Department’s estimates were low. At least 250,000 Japanese troops were in the Philippines in July 1944, and those numbers were swelling as new troopship convoys arrived from China, Manchuria, Burma, and Formosa.‡

  Did FDR arrive in Hawaii with a prior inclination to bypass Luzon? According to the recap given by MacArthur to Richardson just hours after the exchange, FDR had expressed his concern that the operation would be “very bloody.” But twenty years later, in MacArthur’s best-selling and oft-cited memoir, FDR is made to say: “But Douglas, to take Luzon would require heavier losses than we can stand” (emphasis added). The discrepancy invites close scrutiny. The implication that FDR was leaning against taking Luzon is not corroborated elsewhere in the historical record. The president had previously backed many invasions and operations bound to incur heavy casualties, including the Normandy invasion seven weeks earlier. For Roosevelt to suggest that the nation could not “stand” heavy troop losses, given the carnage occurring elsewhere in the world, would seem out of character. Questioning the general closely about his casualty projections was simply due
diligence; the president asked similar questions of Nimitz about Formosa.

  In any event, MacArthur responded to the president’s query with a sermon against unwarranted and excessive bloodshed in Nimitz’s theater. This was a debating tactic that he had employed since November 1943, when the Marine Corps lost a thousand men killed in action on Tarawa Atoll, the first step in the central Pacific offensive. The cudgels had been taken up by his allies in Congress and the American media—notably in the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst, where MacArthur was often praised for keeping his battlefield casualties in check. In his memoir, MacArthur maintains that he told Roosevelt: “Mr. President, my losses would not be heavy, any more than they have been in the past. The days of the frontal attack should be over. Modern infantry weapons are too deadly, and frontal assault is only for mediocre commanders. Good commanders do not turn in heavy losses.”63 According to Richardson’s diary, MacArthur also predicted that a Formosa operation would be at least as bloody as Luzon, and added that “there had been less bloodshed in his area in all the campaigns—that there were less dead than in any other theater.”64

  Nimitz suffered these gibes with his customary German-Texan equanimity, letting them pass without rebuttal. But the implied criticism must have rankled, especially since his forces were suffering heavy combat losses in the Marianas at that very moment, and Douglas C-54 “flying ambulances” filled with wounded soldiers and marines were landing on Oahu each passing hour. Later, in a postwar analysis, Nimitz granted that the butcher’s bill had generally been higher in the central Pacific than in the south, but called it a “common fallacy” to assume that the Japanese “would have acted as they did even had the Allies acted otherwise than as they did.” Operations north of the equator had diverted enemy forces from the south—and if they had not done so, “the Southwest Pacific forces would have met far greater resistance in the New Guinea area.”65 Had he been inclined to bicker, Nimitz might also have pointed out that MacArthur had argued long and hard in favor of attacking Rabaul, the strongest Japanese position in his theater, until being ordered by the JCS to bypass it. And he could have added that a direct comparison of casualty figures in the two theaters was beside the point. What mattered was the cost in American casualties relative to the inherent strategic value of captured territory—and the seizure of islands north of the equator, closer to Japan, offered a more decisive contribution to victory.

  On the morning of July 28, Nimitz took the floor and presented Admiral King’s case to bypass Luzon in favor of Formosa. No doubt he made a competent presentation, but it seems to have been largely pro forma. Under FDR’s close questioning, Nimitz did not disguise his reservations. Both Leahy and MacArthur noted that he was not wholly committed to CAUSEWAY.

  Nimitz offered two specific concessions to the case for Luzon. First, he acknowledged that he could support the Luzon operation with existing forces, whereas he would likely need reinforcements to take Formosa. And second, as recorded by Leahy in his diary: “He admits that developments may indicate a necessity for the occupation of the Manila area.”66

  With that, Luzon was comfortably ahead of Formosa on points, even before taking into account the moral, political, and psychological dimensions of the issue. But MacArthur’s knockout argument, which he had been rehearsing since departing Corregidor in March 1942, was that liberating “17 million loyal Christian Filipinos” was an American responsibility, tantamount to a blood-oath. “I argued that it was not only a moral obligation to release this friendly possession from the enemy, now that it had become possible, but that to fail to do so would not be understandable to the Oriental mind. . . . I felt that to sacrifice the Philippines a second time could not be condoned or forgiven.”67

  Bypassing Luzon, said MacArthur, would vindicate Japanese propaganda, which had always maintained that white men would not spill their blood for Asians. Luzon was home to about 7,000 American prisoners of war and thousands more Allied civilian internees. With each passing month, hundreds died in the camps, and bypassing the island would require a cold-blooded decision to let many more perish in abysmal captivity. As for the notion that bypassing Luzon might spare the island needless bloodshed and destruction, MacArthur was unmoved: “We had been thrown out of Luzon at the point of a bayonet and we should regain our prestige by throwing the Japanese out at the point of a bayonet.”68

  MacArthur’s March 1942 declaration—“I shall return” to the Philippines—was one of the most famous public utterances of the war. But FDR’s promises had been every bit as explicit, and the SWPA chief was not going to let him forget it. During the crisis of early 1942, as Japanese forces overran the Philippines, President Quezon had considered giving himself up to the enemy and suing for peace. MacArthur had half-endorsed this proposal on the grounds that it might alleviate the Filipino people’s suffering. But FDR had rejected it categorically. In a letter to President Quezon he had pledged: “Whatever happens to the present American garrison, we shall not relax our efforts until the forces which we are now marshalling outside the Philippine Islands return to the Philippines and drive the last remnant of the invaders from your soil.”69 The wording of that oath would seem to leave little room for maneuver.

  When Admiral King subsequently learned that MacArthur had strayed from the straight-and-narrow path of debating military strategy, he cried foul. He seemed to believe that the broader moral or foreign policy elements of the decision lay wholly outside any military officer’s professional ambit. In postwar notes, he complained that MacArthur had “started in talking not of the military problem in the Pacific . . . but about the poor Philippines whom the United States had promised to free from the Japanese.”70 But here King diminished himself. If ever a commander had earned the right to petition for a decision on such grounds, MacArthur was that man. Since December 1941—and even since the Spanish-American War, one might say—American honor, prestige, and credibility had been at stake in the Philippines. Since the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, the chief aim of U.S. policy had been to assist the Filipino people in constructing a functioning democracy capable of repelling aggressors. The Philippines had been promised independence by 1946, and that commitment remained in force. For FDR, the successful decolonization of the Philippines was to set a righteous example for the world, and especially for the British. In this terrible global war, no major strategic decision could be separated from its long-term political or foreign policy consequences. In both Europe and the Pacific, the campaign against the Axis had entered its endgame, and a new postwar order was struggling to be born.

  According to another anecdote that has become familiar through frequent repetition, MacArthur took FDR aside and bluntly warned that bypassing the Philippines would imperil the president’s hopes of reelection. This hearsay can be traced to Courtney Whitney, a lawyer and reservist army officer who served under MacArthur during and after the war. In 1956, a dozen years after the Hawaii conference, Whitney published a MacArthur hagiography rife with myths and invented dialogue. In one passage, he has MacArthur tell FDR: “Mr. President, if your decision be to bypass the Philippines and leave its millions of wards of the United States and thousands of American internees and prisoners of war to continue to languish in their agony and despair—I dare to say that the American people would be so aroused that they would register the most complete resentment against you at the polls this fall.”71 This prolix tongue-lashing would have been, at the very least, a breach of protocol. Considering MacArthur’s recent caper in party politics, it might even have been interpreted as a threat. Lacking corroboration, Whitney’s anecdote is best understood as a fabulist’s retelling of a story he had heard from another fabulist.

  Others have gone even further, speculating that a clandestine bargain might have been struck in Hawaii, with the understanding that FDR would greenlight the Luzon operation in return for MacArthur’s pledge to supply favorable headlines before the election. Proponents of this theoretical “secret handshake” admit that they can fin
d no shred of evidence to support it.72

  Whatever the truth, there seems little doubt that MacArthur gave Roosevelt an earful. According to Dr. McIntire, the president told him, “Give me an aspirin. In fact give me another aspirin to take in the morning. In all my life, nobody has ever talked to me the way MacArthur did.”73

  After lunch on the twenty-eighth, Roosevelt, Leahy, and Nimitz accompanied MacArthur to Hickam Field, where his C-54 was fueled and ready to take off. It seems that whatever was said in the car, MacArthur concluded that he had won his case. Leahy told him, as they parted, “I’ll go along with you, Douglas.”74

  As MacArthur strode across the tarmac toward his waiting plane, the pilot Dusty Rhoades fell into step beside him. He asked the boss whether the conference had been a success. MacArthur glanced around to be sure no one was in earshot, then replied in a low voice: “Yes, everything. We are going on.”

  “To the Philippines?” asked Rhoades.

  “Yes. It will not be announced for a few days yet, but we are on our way.”

  Nine hours later, when the Skymaster touched down on the airfield at Tarawa for a refueling stop, Rhoades entered the exchange into his diary. He noted that MacArthur was in a euphoric mood, “like a child with new toys.”75

  WITH MACARTHUR ON HIS WAY BACK TO AUSTRALIA, one might have expected FDR to retreat to his bed at the villa on Waikiki, or to his cabin on the Baltimore. But he had another day and a half remaining in Hawaii, and he was determined to see as much of Oahu as time would permit. For a man with terminal heart disease, FDR was exhibiting seemingly phenomenal powers of recuperation. This had been his pattern in the past: intervals of deep rest (as on the Baltimore during her passage from the mainland) followed by torrents of astonishing vitality. “Throughout this period of hectic activity,” Dr. Bruenn observed in his clinical notes, “the President moved without obvious fatigue or difficulty of any kind.”76 That impression is confirmed in the film footage. He appears gaunt and frail, with large dark bags under his eyes; yet he somehow remains cheerful and animated while greeting scores of high-ranking officers, civilian VIPs, and servicemen. On Friday afternoon, the presidential motorcade drove up and over the rugged Koolau range to the east, to a jungle combat training program in the wild country around Kahana Bay on the island’s windward coast. FDR remained seated in the back of the red touring car, hat pushed back on his forehead, and watched an hour-long live firing demonstration through binoculars. Green-clad infantrymen crawled under wire, then rose and advanced across a field in a line abreast, firing machine guns and flamethrowers from the hip. The finale was a coordinated practice assault on a plywood mockup of a Japanese village. Then the motorcade headed south on the coast road, stopped at the Naval Air Station at Kaneohe Bay, and returned to Waikiki (as the White House daily log noted) by way of “Kaialua, the Amphibious Base at Waimanalo, Koko Head, the Coast Guard Base at Wailupi and Diamond Head.”77