Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  THE BALTIMORE AND HER ESCORTING DESTROYERS headed north from Oahu, and once safely beyond the offing (far enough so that they could not be observed from land) they set a base course of 353 degrees at speed 22 knots. FDR retreated to his cabin and was rarely seen in the following week, sleeping long hours and seeming to do little work. Their destination was the Aleutian Islands, where the president would inspect the region’s naval and air bases.

  At home, where the sound and fury of the election campaign was at full blast, Republicans and opposition newspapers had charged that FDR, his entourage, and his dog were on a Pacific pleasure cruise at the taxpayers’ expense. In his diary, Admiral Leahy wrote that the Hawaii conference had been justifiable and necessary, but he was skeptical of the value of this Alaskan side-jaunt. As a former chief of naval operations, he was sensitive to the insinuation that American warships had been deployed solely for the president’s comfort or recreation, especially in wartime. But there is no evidence that he shared these misgivings with his friend and boss.

  On August 9, with the ship engulfed in pea-soup fog in Alaska’s Inside Passage, FDR wrote a warm personal note of thanks to MacArthur, declaring that “to see you again gave me a particular happiness.” Regarding the Philippines, the president wrote, “As soon as I get back I will push on that plan for I am convinced that on the whole it is logical and can be done. . . . Someday there will be a flag-raising in Manila—and without question I want you to do it.”88

  On the strength of this letter, and a second “Dear Douglas” the following month, many scholars and biographers have asserted categorically that the president granted MacArthur’s wish to liberate the Philippines. But the facts are more nuanced, and the story more convoluted. The ultimate decision to send MacArthur back to Luzon was not confirmed until the end of September, more than two months after the Honolulu conference. In the interim, it seemed entirely possible to all concerned that Luzon might be bypassed, at least momentarily, in favor of an all-out assault on Formosa.

  On August 1, two days out of Pearl Harbor, news had arrived on the Baltimore that President Quezon of the Philippines had died in a hospital in Saranac Lake, New York. Both MacArthur and Roosevelt had made many promises to Quezon and his countrymen. MacArthur’s had been more public, but FDR’s were no less clear and binding. In the long run, both men knew, FDR’s promises would be laid bare in the historical record. In MacArthur’s mind, a decision to bypass Luzon would constitute a disgraceful betrayal, and he would do his utmost to convince posterity to censure FDR. It is fair to infer that Roosevelt, as a keen student of history, perceived this latent threat to his posthumous reputation. In writing to pledge support for a “flag-raising in Manila,” FDR knew that his secretary, Grace Tully, would deposit a carbon copy of the letter into his outgoing correspondence file, which would eventually find its way (under the heading “MacArthur”) into his presidential library at Hyde Park, where it would serve as a flashing neon billboard for future historians.

  But what exactly did Roosevelt promise MacArthur? Just as in his earlier letters to Quezon, the president chose his words carefully, and they should be parsed carefully—not only for what they say, but for what they do not say. “I will push on that plan.” As commander in chief, FDR possessed the undisputed constitutional authority to order MacArthur into Luzon, either before or instead of the contemplated Formosa invasion, regardless of what the Joint Chiefs advised. But he held that power in abeyance. “Someday there will be a flag-raising in Manila.” The president said nothing of timing, and such a pledge could even be fulfilled in a postwar ceremony. To the correspondents in Waikiki he had said, “We are going to get the Philippines back, and without question General MacArthur will take a part in it. Whether he goes direct or not, I can’t say.”89 The newspapers were barred from printing that statement, but it seemed to leave the door open to all options under consideration. His slapdash conflation of “the Philippines” with the main northern island of Luzon was shrewdly ambiguous. In fact, the JCS had already authorized (in March 1944) the capture of Mindanao, the big island at the southern end of the archipelago, so MacArthur had already received orders to liberate a major portion of the Philippines.90

  It is not known precisely what FDR and Leahy said to MacArthur on their last day together in Hawaii, but the SWPA chief told his C-54 pilot that he had received three specific verbal commitments. His troops would be brought up to full strength with fresh replacements from the United States, his Fifth Air Force would be reinforced with new fighters and bombers, and the Pacific Fleet’s carrier task forces would be deployed to support his amphibious landings in the Philippines (wherever and whenever they might occur).91 He was in an ebullient mood during the flight from Oahu to Brisbane. One can only imagine his outrage, then, upon arriving at his SWPA headquarters to find a new cable from Washington confirming an intention to bypass Luzon and land troops in Formosa at the “earliest practicable date.” The message had been sent by the planning staff of the JCS, and was dated July 27, the same day FDR and MacArthur had first met in Hawaii. The Washington planners warned that “Some SoWesPac air, ground, and service forces would be necessary in CAUSEWAY (Operation against Formosa)”—and added that those assets would not be returned to MacArthur afterward, but retained by Nimitz for “post–causeway operations.” MacArthur should plan for the “eventual complete reoccupation” of Luzon and the rest of the Philippines, but—here was a twist of the knife—“These operations would be conducted without the direct support of the Pacific Fleet.”92

  It was a planning-level message, meaning that it did not have the imprimatur of the four JCS principals. But it directly contradicted the conclusions MacArthur had taken away from Hawaii, and he must have wondered if he had been bamboozled. He wrote directly to General Marshall, expressing his “strongest nonconcurrence” with the assumptions of the JCS planners, and insisted that liberating all of the Philippines was essential from the “highest point of view of national policy.” Condemning the proposed invasion of Formosa as a course “fraught with the gravest danger of disaster,” he noted that President Roosevelt had already stated that the Philippines would be recovered. Worse yet, MacArthur wrote, the bypass proposal carried a “more sinister implication”—it would impose a complete sea blockade on the Philippines, leading to a famine that might starve millions of innocent Filipinos, as well as Allied prisoners and internees, and such an outcome “would exceed in brutality anything that has been perpetrated by our enemies.”93

  But this jeremiad made little impression on the planners in Washington. They were under instructions to consider purely military factors. Political or foreign policy arguments lay outside their scope of authority. The in-house JCS planning apparatus has received negligible attention in most histories, and none at all in most FDR and MacArthur biographies, but it held great sway over strategic decisions in the Pacific. The subject is somewhat dismal, requiring the researcher to descend into a labyrinth of committee memoranda and planning studies. Much of the relevant material was not declassified until the 1970s, when some of the most widely read histories of the war had already been published. For that reason, the point needs emphasis: whatever passed between Roosevelt and MacArthur in Hawaii, the gears of the JCS planning machine continued to turn in Washington, and influential voices (especially on the JSSC) continued to argue that the Pacific campaign should be consolidated on the northern line of attack. To MacArthur’s disgust and frustration, this remained the governing assumption even after the Hawaii conference.

  Those internal mechanisms of the JCS would have been irrelevant if FDR had peremptorily overruled his military chiefs, as he had done at least a dozen times before. The Constitution gave him the power to put his finger down on a map and tell his generals and admirals to attack. Most dramatically, the president had decided in favor of Operation TORCH, the November 1942 invasion of North Africa, over the unanimous resistance of his service chiefs. But most such presidential overrulings had occurred in the first year of the
war, and a lot had changed between 1942 and 1944. The in-house planning and study committees of the JCS organization had barely existed in 1942; by 1944 they were fully staffed-up, and included some of the best strategic minds in the armed forces. In the later stages of the war, FDR allotted more of his time and attention to postwar planning and diplomacy, and less to the brass tacks of strategy and military operations. He trusted Leahy to act as his agent on the JCS, and although Leahy backed MacArthur’s “Luzon-first” policy, he did not move to preempt the ongoing planning and preparations for causeway. At a special meeting of the JCS on August 22, the admiral argued that Luzon would be “less costly in life and resources and not more costly in time” than the alternatives, but he did not say that Formosa should be ruled out, and did not press for an immediate decision.94 That was hardly a resounding endorsement of MacArthur’s position. Assuming that Leahy and Roosevelt were in harmony, as they generally were, it appears that the president chose to allow the JCS planning process to continue without his interference.§

  Out in the Pacific, meanwhile, the naval and ground commanders to whom it would fall to execute CAUSEWAY remained skeptical of the operation. The more they studied Formosa, the less they liked it. Admiral Forrest Sherman, the forty-seven-year-old wunderkind who served as Nimitz’s deputy chief of staff—in 1949 he would become the youngest CNO in the navy’s history—told colleagues that it was “ridiculous” to propose an amphibious landing on Formosa while “leaving Luzon with all its airfields and available supplies and everything on the flank.”95 Sherman said he intended to sabotage CAUSEWAY by writing a draft operations plan that was “so obviously bad that they would cancel the idea.”96 Richmond Kelly Turner, the Pacific Fleet’s leading amphibious specialist, to whom it would fall to command the amphibious fleet in the operation, threw his influence against CAUSEWAY on similar grounds.

  Each new draft of the army’s CAUSEWAY plan called for more troops. The Joint Chiefs planners had assumed that American forces could seize and defend a handful of strategic ports on the coast, but the Pacific commanders concluded that they would probably have to conquer and garrison the entire island. Formosa was a large, rugged landmass populated by people who might be loyal to the Japanese, so the job would be long and bloody. On August 18, 1944, Nimitz estimated that the operation would require 505,000 army troops, 154,000 marines, and 61,000 navy shore personnel.97 Those were huge numbers, and delivering them would be difficult, especially as it became clear that the war in Europe would last into 1945. CAUSEWAY would be comparable in size to the Normandy invasion (OVERLORD), but instead of staging it across the English Channel, the fleet and amphibious forces would have to leap from the Marianas across a thousand miles of open ocean. The Herculean shipping and logistics effort would divert scarce resources from other priorities, such as the development of B-29 bases on Saipan and Guam. Admiral Towers called King’s attention to this problem, noting that “the Army Air Force would fight any change” in the scheduled airfield development program.98 Thus, by late August 1944 the Formosa operation had earned another powerful enemy on the JCS—General Henry “Hap” Arnold of the Army Air Forces, who foresaw that the Marianas (rather than China) would serve as the major launch pad for strategic bombing of the Japanese homeland.

  Most importantly, perhaps, Admiral Spruance remained implacably opposed to the Formosa operation and was determined to substitute his preferred Iwo Jima–Okinawa one-two punch. Upon returning to Pearl Harbor in August 1944, Spruance began building a case against CAUSEWAY. Like Sherman, he assumed that the disadvantages of Formosa were so obvious that the plan would be cancelled, and told his staff to pay no attention to it.

  At a planning conference in early September, General Simon Bolivar Buckner of the army was briefing Nimitz and the CINCPAC staff on his preparations for CAUSEWAY. Spruance apparently concluded that Buckner’s presentation was a waste of time. He stood up, begged pardon to interrupt, walked to the back of Nimitz’s office, pulled down a wall chart of the western Pacific, and began speaking. The other officers turned their chairs toward Spruance, leaving Buckner seething with indignation, and listened as the admiral laid out his grand vision for the final phase of the Pacific War. Marine Major General Graves B. Erskine said it was “one of the most professional off-the-cuff estimates of the situation for an operation that I think I’ve ever heard.”99 Spruance demolished the assumptions underlying the CAUSEWAY operation, arguing that Okinawa was a better target in every respect. Okinawa could not be taken before the following spring—another six months was needed to build up the necessary fleet, air, and logistics capabilities—but he anticipated that he could do it by March or April 1945. That timetable would leave ample time for MacArthur to secure the Philippines, including Luzon. Formosa could be safely bypassed.

  Spruance was a reserved figure who did not normally speak so forcefully to Nimitz, especially in the presence of others. By deviating from his usual phlegmatic style, he must have made a powerful impression. Nimitz trusted Spruance more than any other officer in his chain of command, and since it would fall to him to execute the operation, his opinion was uniquely influential.

  Even then, CAUSEWAY died a lingering death. On September 9, 1944, the JCS ordered MacArthur and Nimitz to cooperate in seizing the island of Leyte, in the central Philippines, with a target date of December 20. But the chiefs directed that planning should continue for subsequent landings on both Luzon and Formosa, and “A firm decision as to whether Luzon will be occupied before Formosa will be made later.”100

  In a meeting at his Brisbane headquarters three days later, MacArthur told General Eichelberger, “At the present time . . . all I have won out on is the agreement that we will go up to and including Leyte. The question of whether or not the route will be by Luzon or Formosa has not yet been settled in Washington.”101 Upon his return from Hawaii six weeks earlier, MacArthur had led his staff to believe that he had secured a presidential decision to liberate all of the Philippines. Evidently, he had not understood that FDR intended to leave the matter in the hands of the JCS. That week MacArthur received another letter from the president, written from the Allied OCTAGON conference in Quebec. FDR told him that “the situation is just as we left it at Hawaii though there seems to be some efforts to do bypassing which you would not like. I still have the situation in hand.”102 The elusive phrasing again begged the question: If FDR had already decided for MacArthur, why didn’t the president simply issue orders for the invasion of Luzon?

  Meanwhile, events in the Pacific were quickly rendering past planning assumptions obsolete. In mid-September, the Third Fleet’s carrier airstrikes in the Philippines revealed that enemy air strength throughout the region was surprisingly weak. On September 12, an American fighter was shot down near the island of Cebu. The pilot ditched his plane at sea, got ashore, and was told by local natives that there were only about 15,000 Japanese troops on Cebu and none on Leyte. Admiral Halsey radioed this intelligence to Nimitz, recommending that American forces be landed on Leyte as soon as possible. Nimitz passed the message up the chain to Admiral King and the JCS, who were in Quebec with FDR. By the end of the day on September 16, the chiefs had moved the landing date for Leyte up by a full two months, to October 20, 1944.

  Five days later, in a long cable to the JCS, MacArthur laid out his overall vision for the future course of the Pacific War. From Leyte he proposed to jump directly to Luzon, landing four amphibious divisions at Lingayen Gulf by December 20. This operation would require “support by the full resources of the United States Pacific Fleet,” but once ashore on Luzon, MacArthur would recover Manila and its bay by the end of February. “This will permit of the launching of contemplated operations to the northward on the schedule now projected with the great advantage of [Luzon] bases and land-based air support. The [Formosa] operation will then be unnecessary and, particularly with a prior attack on [Iwo Jima], a direct move may be made on [Kyushu].”103

  MacArthur’s vision had obvious merit. His proposed chronology
of operations could be achieved with forces already in the Pacific, and did not call for redeployments from Europe. It would keep MacArthur and Nimitz’s forces continuously engaged against the enemy, while avoiding the one operation (Formosa) that virtually no one in the theater liked. Subsequent events would show that it matched up closely to the actual course of the war, omitting only the invasion of Okinawa. Even MacArthur’s projected dates were close to the mark: in the end, he landed in Lingayen Gulf on January 9, 1945, and secured Manila in early March. Thus it can be said that in mid-September 1944, MacArthur and Spruance—who did not know one another and had scarcely any direct contact—had together provided a final blueprint to win the Pacific War.