American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  Churchill was loath to concede the point. He lapsed into historical analogies, reciting instances where “supreme commanders” had failed, and coalitions ruled by committees had been victorious.

  Marshall cut him off. “I told him I was not interested in Drake and Frobisher, but I was interested in having a united front against Japan, an enemy which was fighting furiously,” he said later. The Army needed sea transport, the Air Force land bases, the Navy anchorages. All would be selfish, and all needed an arbitrator on the spot. If the Allies didn’t have a unified command, he warned, they would be finished.28

  Churchill’s round face soured. He tossed the covers aside, swung his stubby legs off the bed, and padded off to the bathroom, where a warm tub awaited him. Marshall waited patiently as the PM splashed around in deep thought for a few minutes.

  Even with America in the war, Churchill knew he had to proceed gingerly, for the American public was bloodthirsty against Japan, and not yet fully invested in the war against Germany. “Marshall remains the key to the situation,” Churchill’s personal doctor, Lord Moran, told his diary. “The PM has a feeling that in his quiet, unprovocative way he means business, and that if we are too obstinate he might take a strong line. And neither the PM nor the President can contemplate going ahead without Marshall.” 29

  Stepping out of the tub and toweling off, Churchill announced his verdict. The Americans, he said, would have their way. He gestured to the doorman to show in his chiefs of staff. Marshall had won this round.30

  • • •

  When Churchill forwarded Marshall’s idea for a single theater commander to the British War Cabinet and Lord Privy Seal in London, they wired back to ask who would be giving the theater commander his instructions. With a shrug, Churchill referred the question to the military chiefs.31

  That question bothered Roosevelt, who did not like the idea of a gaggle of Wellingtons running their own wars across the globe. The war would be run from Washington, and Roosevelt wanted to make certain that every “supreme commander” knew who the supreme commander was. On December 29 he asked Admiral King to lunch with him at the White House, and the two men discussed who would command the supreme commander.

  King suggested a war council for the ABDA theater, on which the chiefs of the Australian and Dutch forces would be invited to deliberate with U.S. and British. FDR told King to consult with Marshall and the British, then come back with a recommendation.32

  King gathered the chiefs, and in a hurried session the British proposed using “existing machinery”—meaning the British and American chiefs of staff—to command the ABDA theater. The Anglo-American chiefs would issue broad directives to the supreme commander and allocate troops and supplies to his theater. The British chiefs in London would consult with the Australians and Dutch where their interests were affected, but only the two great powers would sit on the committee. The committee would be known as the “Combined Chiefs of Staff,” while the U.S. and British service heads, when conducting business separately, would be known as the “Joint Chiefs of Staff.”33

  Thinking it over, Marshall said he was prepared to accept the British proposal. King fell into line, and Stark and Arnold went along. The Combined Chiefs forwarded their proposal to Churchill and Roosevelt, who had one important change. FDR wanted the “chiefs of staff” council based in Washington—not split between London and Washington.34

  Churchill balked. He wanted Washington to run the Pacific war and London to run the European war, and as a compromise, he suggested having committees in both capitals. But Roosevelt insisted on having the council in Washington; he wanted the levers of power at his elbow, not divided between himself and Churchill.

  But once again, Churchill was prepared to give up control over the Combined Chiefs to keep America focused on the war against Germany, and he would not risk a rift at this delicate stage in the alliance. After arguing his point with FDR and getting nowhere, Churchill capitulated. The war would be run from Washington.35

  •

  The U.S. “Joint Chiefs of Staff” was not a body created by law or executive order. It was an association presumed to include, at a minimum, Marshall, King, and Stark—and possibly Lieutenant General Arnold, though he was merely Marshall’s assistant for air matters. At Marshall’s request, Arnold showed up for the group’s regular Tuesday luncheons in the Public Health Building on Nineteenth Street. Since the Navy had two votes—King and Stark—not even King questioned Arnold’s right to be there.36

  Hap Arnold’s status was important to Marshall, who envisioned the emancipation of the Air Forces from Army control some day in the future. To ensure that he was accepted as a full-fledged member of the new Joint Chiefs, Marshall asked Roosevelt’s secretary, Marvin McIntyre, to include Hap’s name in a press release announcing the president’s military advisers. “I tried to give Arnold all the power I could,” Marshall said later. “I tried to make him as nearly as I could Chief of Staff of the Air.”37

  Arnold’s rise coincided with Marshall’s grand reorganization of the Army, and it fit with FDR’s determination to keep the important military men reporting directly to him. In March 1942, President Roosevelt signed an executive order placing Marshall in more or less absolute command of the Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces, and Services of Supply. Brushing Stimson aside, the executive order also provided that the duties of the secretary of war “are to be performed subject always to the exercise by the President directly through the Chief of Staff of his functions as Commander-in-Chief in relation to strategy, tactics, and operations.” In other words, FDR was sidelining Henry Stimson on questions of strategy.38

  •

  Admiral King had a logical mind, a mind fascinated by laws and regulations. Much of his daily thought—from working complex crossword puzzles in his cabin to crafting clear fleet orders at his desk—was devoted to the power of the written word. That unsentimental, logic-driven brain refused to accept ambiguous organizational structure, especially at the top of the command chain. So shortly after the ARCADIA conference ended, he began pressing Roosevelt for an official written charter to make the Joint Chiefs of Staff a legal, authoritative body.39

  FDR scotched the idea. As a rule, he disliked rules. He intended to run the war out of the White House as he saw fit, and the last thing he wanted was some stuffed-shirt lawyer telling him, or his military chiefs, that they had exceeded their authority or were limited in what the president could order them to do. The Joint Chiefs of Staff would remain exactly what Roosevelt wanted it to be—a useful, pliable implement of the commander-in-chief’s will.

  For that, he did not need a piece of paper. When the Joint Chiefs sent him a draft executive order establishing their authority, he blithely declared that a legal charter might “impair flexibility in operations,” and ignored the matter. The group’s chairman later wrote, “I have heard that in some file there is a chit or memorandum from Roosevelt setting up the Joint Chiefs, but I never saw it.”40

  • • •

  Marshall had once been appalled at Roosevelt’s informal style of war management, and it was now the British turn to adjust to the shock of FDR’s methods. The Combined Chiefs, like the Joint Chiefs, had no precedent, formal authority, or, grumbled Sir John Dill, much formality. The British Army’s representative in Washington complained to London, “There is the great difficulty of getting the stuff over to the President. He just sees the Chiefs of Staff at odd times, and again no record. . . . The whole organisation belongs to the days of George Washington.”41

  Ernie King was as uncomfortable as Dill was. During the first meeting of the Combined Chiefs, he voiced his concern that the group had no legal authority to act. Their only “charter”—a reference in a memorandum they wrote earlier that year—had never been formally approved by the heads of state, and even that piece of paper did not explicitly extend beyond the ABDA theater.

  Siding with King, the American and Britis
h chiefs drafted a comprehensive charter for Churchill and Roosevelt to sign. They sent it to the White House, where it was marooned in a sea of paper, probably as Roosevelt intended.

  But the chiefs persisted, and in successive meetings, the Combined Chiefs and Stimson separately asked Roosevelt’s military aide, Pa Watson, to ask the president to approve their charter.42

  Roosevelt ignored them. The current structure appeared to be working, and it was not in Roosevelt’s nature to tie his own hands with a document spelling out what his lieutenants could and could not do.*

  King pleaded that to issue orders to theater commanders, he needed the imprimatur of the heads of the United States and Great Britain. So two months after receiving the draft, an exasperated Roosevelt pulled out his fountain pen and jotted in the letter’s margin the words “O.K. F.D.R.” 43

  The Allied command structure finally had the official backing of the United States.

  • • •

  On January 14 Britain’s war leaders, less Sir John, who would stay in Washington, packed their bags and bade good-bye to their compatriots. During their short time on Mount Olympus, the headstrong leaders had agreed upon the major issues: Germany first, a committee to run the war, and a supreme commander in charge of the Southwest Pacific and Asia. The Americans and the British had tested each other’s mettle, and had forged personal relationships that promised to make future decisions easier.

  But while they agreed at the highest levels, they would soon find devils scampering through many complex details—details growing into sharp focus as the war grew more violent, difficult, and uncertain.

  SIXTEEN

  “THERE ARE TIMES WHEN MEN HAVE TO DIE”

  ERNIE KING WASN’T A MAN TO MAKE SNAP DECISIONS. HE CONSIDERED problems from every angle, and gave his men plenty of time to think until they found the right answer.

  But in the opening months of the war, time was scarce and answers were few. In the Atlantic, U-boats were wreaking hell on shipping to England and Russia, and King lacked the destroyers, cutters and corvettes to protect them. In the Pacific, he had three fleet carriers to Japan’s ten, and a handful of damaged battleships to engage a dozen of Yamamoto’s.

  The big fighting ships were only the most conspicuous part of the U.S. Fleet, a complex organism swimming in many seas and oceans. In early 1942, King’s most desperate need was not new warships, but combat aircraft to protect the ships he had. The planes, in turn, needed antiaircraft guns to protect them while they were on the ground. The guns, in turn, needed shells. Shells could be moved only by cargo ships, and cargo ships needed combat ships to protect them. King’s navy was a great wheel that could not roll forward until the whole circle was complete.1

  Pressure to roll that wheel forward clanged like a ship’s bell in King’s ears. In his heart he was a pugilist, not a desk admiral, and he wanted his fleet wreaking destruction on the enemy, not merely defending what he had. As he summed up his philosophy of war, “No fighter ever won his fight by covering up—by merely fending off the other fellow’s blows. The winner hits and keeps on hitting even though he has to take some stiff blows in order to be able to keep on hitting.”2

  • • •

  During the ARCADIA meetings over Christmas, the Combined Chiefs had agreed that the places where Japan was throwing stiff blows—from the Philippines to Malaya—should be lumped into a single theater, “ABDA.” Britain’s Indian theater lay to the west of ABDA; everything north of ABDA was Chinese territory, and everything to the east was the Pacific theater.

  At the time, the Allied chiefs assumed that Britain could hold Malaya from its great fortress of Singapore. The Dutch, they hoped, could hold the long islands of Sumatra, Java, and New Guinea, forming a rough barrier dividing the Pacific and Indian oceans. The chiefs also recognized that if Japan captured the “Malay Barrier,” supply lines between American-supplied Australia and British-supplied India would be severed. So as a contingency plan, they made a “gentlemen’s agreement” to split the theater if the enemy reached Sumatra.3

  The enemy did. On February 15 Singapore fell, and Japan’s armies invaded Sumatra and Java, driving back the Dutch colonial defenders. The Allied leaders knew the collapse of the Malay Barrier would only be a matter of days, and when it fell, the ABDA theater would be split into two. General Wavell, whose headquarters was in India, would be cut off from Australia, the Pacific, and his supply line to America.

  Reviewing the situation over lunch, Roosevelt and Hopkins concluded that the latest Japanese onslaught required the Allies to split ABDA into two theaters: a “China-Burma-India” theater, for everything of west of Malaya, and a Pacific theater for everything east.

  King agreed, for he felt it was a logical next step. With an eye toward shutting the British out of the Pacific, he suggested treating the Australia–New Zealand area, along with the other Pacific islands, as a U.S. sphere of activity. Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Combined Chiefs, seeing this as a logical division of labor, agreed. Britain would take the lead in India, its historical dominion, and the United States would run the Pacific war.4

  •

  As MacArthur’s trapped remnants dug in on the Bataan Peninsula, General Homma’s Fourteenth Army closed in on Manila, and the capital city’s residents fled to the mountains. Japan’s Third Fleet cut off all supplies from the sea, and MacArthur’s famished men huddled in their bunkers day after miserable day as waves of Betties and Vals pounded them from the sky.5

  Stimson and Marshall had both served in those islands, Marshall as a soldier and Stimson as the territory’s governor-general. The two men sweated bullets to aid the beleaguered defenders, but without a Navy to provide transport, a million men in America would do MacArthur no good.6

  Every soldier above the rank of lieutenant, Stimson said, knew the Philippines could not withstand a determined assault. Early naval war plans called for a withdrawal from the Philippines to a defensible line in the Marshall and Caroline islands. Stark’s Plan Dog memorandum assumed the Philippines would be lost, then recaptured, hopefully in about six months. These plans, drafted atop government-issue desks in Washington, were a logical response to an untenable situation, though logic gave little comfort to the soldiers, marines, and nurses marooned on the Alamo of the Pacific.7

  It was also cold comfort to Philippine President Manuel Quezon. Ill with tuberculosis, trapped in the claustrophobic tunnels of Corregidor, Quezon grew despondent as he watched the slow death of his country. He ranted to MacArthur, accusing the United States of abandoning his people, and in a message forwarded by MacArthur, he asked the American government to grant the Philippines immediate independence. The new nation would declare itself neutral, disband its army, and prohibit all foreign forces, Japanese and American, from remaining on the island.*8

  In his cover message to Marshall, General MacArthur vaguely endorsed the idea of neutrality. He suggested that no military advantage would be lost if the Philippines were neutralized, and he emphasized the hopelessness of the political and military situation. “The temper of the Filipinos is one of almost violent resentment against the United States,” he wrote. “Every one of them expected help and when it has not been forthcoming they believe they have been betrayed in favor of others. . . . In spite of my great prestige with them, I have had the utmost difficulty during the last few days in keeping them in line. If help does not arrive shortly, nothing, in my opinion, can prevent their utter collapse and their complete absorption by the enemy.”9

  Henry Stimson had known war and peace from the front lines of both. As war secretary, he had a duty to protect the men on Corregidor and Bataan. Yet he knew the other nations of Asia—the Dutch colonies, the Burmese, the Australians—were looking to the United States for deliverance. America was in no position to save the Philippines, much less the rest of Asia, but neutralizing the islands would be a body blow to the Allied cause—a virtual surrender of American territory.10

/>   Stimson walked into Marshall’s office, where he found Marshall and Eisenhower leaning over a table, drafting a proposed response to MacArthur. Over Marshall’s mahogany table, the three men wrestled with an awful decision: to accept defeat, or to order thousands of Americans and Filipinos to fight to their deaths.

  It was a sobering moment for the two very different men—one, a hot-blooded patrician, the other a cold military calculator of blood, treasure, and machines. But different as they were, the two leaders arrived at the same place. Weighing carefully the lives of twenty thousand soldiers against the needs of the nation, Henry Stimson reached a conclusion often accepted by politicians but uttered by few: “There are times when men have to die.”11

  • • •

  Roosevelt read Quezon’s message, then looked at Stimson and Marshall. To refuse Quezon’s plea would condemn thousands to their deaths, a fact driven home every time he received an updated casualty report from General Marshall. But to neutralize the Philippines would be a tacit admission that the United States would abandon its duty before it would stomach heavy losses. It would signal Tokyo and the rest of Asia that the United States was unwilling to bear the cost of victory.12

  “We can’t do this at all,” said Roosevelt, his voice firm.

  Marshall knew it was a call that only a man with his eye on the largest of pictures could make, a decision by a man who had asked his people to accept a draft and place their sons in harm’s way. Now he would have to ask some of those sons to die. To Marshall, the liberal Democrat from upstate New York, the dilettante yachtsman whose career had centered on unemployment, social services, and economic reform, had become a decisive war leader. “I immediately discarded everything in my mind I had held to his discredit,” Marshall said years later. “Roosevelt said we won’t neutralize. I decided he was a great man.”13

  So the garrison would go down fighting; MacArthur would be allowed to arrange for the surrender of Filipino forces, but not Americans. In his reply, Roosevelt explained his decision to MacArthur. “As the most powerful member of this coalition we cannot display weakness in fact or in spirit anywhere,” he said. “It is mandatory that there be established once and for all in the minds of all peoples complete evidence that the American determination and indomitable will to win carries on down to the last unit.”