American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  As King saw it, with the Marianas in American hands, the Navy could push through to the Philippines and coastal China. Bases in China would complete the encirclement of Japan. The Home Islands would starve, and their cities would fall under the bombsights of Hap’s new B-29s. The war would be as good as over.2

  GRANITE, Nimitz’s Central Pacific plan, made the most of the mobility and striking power of the carrier fleet that King had husbanded since Pearl Harbor. It required comparatively little “lift,” and allowed American airpower to do much of the heavy demolition work.3

  But the realist in King knew Japan would not sit still as Nimitz hopped from Makin to Honshu. In his cabin late at night, that realist kept asking, “Where would the Japanese turn and fight?”

  Picturing the great ocean from Japan’s point of view, King felt the Imperial Navy might let the United States reach the end of its supply tether before delivering a knockout punch. For that reason, he did not think the enemy fleet would sally too far east of the Philippines, much as he would love to see them try. “Because we would like them to come out is no military reason why they should do as we wish,” he reminded his journalist friends one evening. “Also—and maybe more important—the Japs have had a taste of what a wallop the American Navy packs and does not like the taste.”4

  • • •

  The American Navy packed a wallop, but so did Japan’s. While King, Marshall, and FDR were crossing North Africa to meet Stalin, the Second Marine Division landed on Tarawa, an equatorial atoll with one airstrip not much larger than an oversized carrier deck. Japanese marines fought like demons on the beaches, and the bitter fighting for this obscure strip of coral produced the bloodiest battle in the long annals of the Marine Corps. In two days, the Marines suffered 3,149 casualties, and the final toll would include more than a thousand American dead. Japanese losses were 4,609 killed, seventeen captured.5

  Before Roosevelt returned from Tehran, word of the butchery at Tarawa made the front pages of U.S. newspapers. “It has been the bitterest, costliest, most sustained fighting on any front,” a war correspondent told the New York Times. “Something suddenly appeared to have gone wrong.” The press and Congress raised a ruckus over the island’s steep cost, and Secretary Knox had to hold a press conference defending the Navy’s performance from “armchair strategists” on Capitol Hill.6

  Admiral King, seeing the larger picture, took both carnage and criticism in stride. “Nobody should be surprised if we get a bloody nose in the Pacific,” he told his journalists two months later. “The way we are throwing our weight around, it is natural to suppose that the Japanese will react very violently, and a fight is sure to follow.”7

  •

  As the Army’s senior soldier, George Marshall made an effort to visit troops whenever he left Washington. He had shaken hands with soldiers of every stripe at Casablanca, Algeria, Iran, and throughout the United States, but two years into the war, there was one soldier he hadn’t seen—a soldier who refused to be ignored.

  Taking leave from Cairo at the end of the SEXTANT meetings, Marshall flew east to MacArthur’s advance headquarters on Goodenough Island, off New Guinea, for a conference on strategy and supply. There, outside a small shack MacArthur’s staff had fixed up as a war room, the two generals shook hands for the first time since the war began.

  Pacing in his rumpled khaki uniform, MacArthur had what he called a “long and frank discussion” with Marshall about the theater’s many shortages: aircraft, ammunition, reinforcements, landing craft, and food, for starters. But the biggest problem of all was lack of “unity of command,” by which MacArthur meant that the Allies needed a supreme commander over all naval, air, and ground forces. MacArthur had more than a faint idea who that supreme commander should be.8

  For all his flaws—and he had many—MacArthur’s eloquence flowed like a mountain river when making his case in person. One of Marshall’s staffers described his performance that day:

  He stood at various maps, strode back and forth, and talked for about two hours without notes of any sort. He had at his fingertips all the dispositions and recent actions of his troops. He seemed equally well acquainted with his enemy. He named Japanese organizations and their commanders everywhere and seemed well informed of their competence. . . . Throughout the presentation he employed wit and charm with devastating persuasiveness. Although I had from the first been an advocate of a “Europe first” strategy, with attendant delay against Japan, I simply melted under the persuasive logic and the delightful charm of the great MacArthur. By the time he had finished, I was anxious to find some way to give him what he had asked for.9

  So was Marshall, but only to a point. The chief of staff’s job was to keep one eye focused on the global picture, regardless of momentary pressures afflicting any theater, even MacArthur’s. He would push King and the other chiefs to support the Southwest Pacific, but he reminded MacArthur of the “Germany First” strategy and told him many requests would not be fulfilled because of decisions made in Tehran and Cairo.

  MacArthur accepted Marshall’s response politely—outwardly, at least. The meeting ended on a courteous and correct note.10

  When courtesy and logic failed, MacArthur did what came natural to him; he went over Marshall’s head. He asked Brigadier General Frederick Osborn, a War Department staffer, to give Secretary Stimson a personal report on his battle plan, code-named RENO III. The Philippines had some 1,500 islands, but from a military standpoint the commonwealth, like Caesar’s Gaul, was divided into three parts: Mindanao in the south, Leyte in the center, and Luzon, home to Manila, in the north. If the Navy would lend him a healthy portion of its Central Pacific forces, Sutherland said MacArthur could sweep through New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies, and Mindanao by the end of the year.

  If he could control the Navy’s ships, men, and aircraft, he told Osborn, he could be in Mindanao by the end of 1944. “I do not want to command the Navy,” he added, “but I must control their strategy, be able to call on what little of the Navy is needed for the trek to the Philippines. The Navy’s turn will come after that.”

  To Osborn, MacArthur explained the true obstacle to American victory. “Mr. Roosevelt is Navy minded,” he emoted. “Mr. Stimson must speak to him, must persuade him. Give me central direction of the war in the Pacific, and I will be in the Philippines in ten months. . . . Don’t let the Navy’s pride of position and ignorance continue this great tragedy to our country.”11

  • • •

  To King, pride of position was MacArthur’s credo; for all he knew, it was probably inscribed in Latin on the MacArthur family crest. The real tragedy was that MacArthur was scaring the War Department, and probably scaring the White House, too. MacArthur was a good soldier, but having been run out of the Philippines, he had become obsessed with returning to Luzon. That obsession warped his strategic vision, because Luzon was a hell of a long way from Tokyo. Just to get there, he’d have to slog through New Guinea, finish off the Admiralties, and capture some of the Dutch East Indies. Only then could he move against Formosa or Japan.12

  To King, the dogs of war were barking in one direction: across the Central Pacific, to the Marianas, then Formosa, then Japan’s Home Islands. At Cairo, the Combined Chiefs had approved a two-pronged advance across the Pacific by Nimitz and MacArthur, but if the Joint Chiefs had to choose between the two, they leaned toward Nimitz’s Central Pacific route.

  MacArthur knew he would have to make an exceptionally persuasive sales pitch to move Allied strategy from the Marianas to Manila. He started by sending his chief of staff, Major General Richard Sutherland, to Pearl Harbor to argue the case for RENO III to the Navy’s Pacific planners.

  Nimitz’s staff generally agreed with MacArthur. Unlike King’s planners in Washington, Nimitz’s men leaned toward slowing the Central Pacific route in favor of a New Guinea–Mindanao advance under MacArthur. They also never seriously questioned the importance of
Luzon. Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, commander of the Seventh Fleet coordinating with MacArthur, and Vice Admiral John Towers, commander of Pacific naval air forces, thought the Marianas too far from Japan to serve as an effective B-29 base. MacArthur’s Philippines route through Luzon seemed preferable.13

  MacArthur lost no time in capitalizing on the momentum. On February 2 he wrote Marshall, “All available ground, air and assault forces should be combined in a drive along the New Guinea–Mindanao axis. . . . This axis provides the shortest and most direct route to the strategic objective.” He warned that a two-pronged approach would result in “two weak thrusts which cannot attain the major strategic objective until several months later.”14

  • • •

  King blew his stack when he read the minutes of the Pearl Harbor conference. He could not believe Nimitz would be so unreliable, or so dumb, as to question the Marianas-Formosa-China strategy. He fired off a blistering cable to Nimitz that began, “I have read your conference notes with much interest and I must add with indignant dismay.” Reminding Nimitz of the importance of the Marianas, he concluded, “The idea of rolling up the Japanese along the New Guinea coast, throughout Halmahera and Mindanao, and up through the Philippines to Luzon, as our major strategic concept, to the exclusion of clearing our Central Pacific line of communications in the Philippines, is to me absurd.” Formosa and the China coast, he thundered, were the proper targets for the Pacific war. Those targets must be attacked through the Central Pacific.15

  To let some of the wind out of MacArthur’s sails, King wrote Marshall to remind him that at Cairo the Combined Chiefs had agreed to make two drives through the Pacific, not one, with the Central Pacific taking priority if there weren’t enough resources to go around. He admitted, for the moment, that B-29s could be used more effectively from the Philippines—if and when they were recaptured—but he insisted that the Marianas were the proper base for Hap’s bombers. Lest there be any doubt about the Navy’s position, King refused to allow MacArthur command of any Central Pacific naval assets. MacArthur already had Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet working for him, and King would not give him Halsey’s Third Fleet, too.16

  On February 17, Admiral Spruance’s Fifth Fleet and a Marine-Army assault force captured Eniwetok, rolling up the Marshall Islands. Worried that King would accelerate the Central Pacific drive, cutting him out, MacArthur raised the stakes. He offered to bypass intermediate steps along the eastern New Guinea coast and lunge directly at the port of Hollandia, leapfrogging 40,000 Japanese troops holding the island’s eastern half. It was a dicey gamble, he admitted, but the flanking move, if it worked, would accelerate his drive against Mindanao. All he needed was the loan of Nimitz’s carriers and transport ships.17

  • • •

  As King and Nimitz considered MacArthur’s Hollandia plan, they stumbled into another political thornbush. With the capture of the Gilberts and Marshalls, the South Pacific Area, home of Bill Halsey’s powerful Third Fleet, had become the Pacific’s rear area. King and Nimitz sensibly decided to move Halsey’s fleet forward, so it could contribute to future campaigns, and that meant finding Bill a new home.

  Looking over a map of MacArthur’s upcoming conquests, in late February Nimitz and Halsey decided Manus Island, a backwater speck in the Admiralties, would make a fine forward base for the Third Fleet. At Nimitz’s suggestion, Marshall asked MacArthur to put the Navy in charge of building and running the Manus base.18

  MacArthur saw the Navy’s move as an invasion of his theater, and he fought back like he was defending the Bataan Peninsula. Under international agreement, he protested, the Southwest Pacific Area was off-limits to Halsey’s fleet except when MacArthur was using the fleet. He warned Marshall that any attempt to insert naval forces into his theater would “cause a serious reaction, not only with the soldiery but in public opinion, that would be extremely serious.”

  It was not just the fate of a small island at stake, he said. The entire Pacific campaign hinged on his having a free hand throughout the Southwest Pacific Area. His personal integrity—“indeed, my personal honor”—would be tarnished if the Joint Chiefs dropped a Navy enclave in the middle of his theater. If the Joint Chiefs trimmed his territory, he demanded “an early opportunity personally to present the case to the Secretary of War and the President before finally determining my own personal action in the matter.”19

  “Personal action” was MacArthurian for “resign,” and Marshall patiently assured the general he would not let the Navy pull Manus Island out of Army jurisdiction. But he told MacArthur that while he might command the island, he could not limit the right of Halsey’s ships to use Manus in the war against Japan. “Your professional integrity and personal honor are in no way questioned or, so far as I can see, involved,” a weary Marshall concluded. “However, if you so desire I will arrange for you to see the Secretary of War and the President at any time on this or any other matter.”20

  Bill Halsey, an admiral well liked among Army men, tried to settle the matter in person. He got nowhere. MacArthur again called the Navy’s plan an insult to his personal honor, and an exasperated Halsey told MacArthur he was putting his personal honor ahead of the welfare of the United States.

  Afterward, Halsey sent a rear admiral to Nimitz with an oral report. MacArthur, he said, was “suffering from illusions of grandeur,” while his staff officers “are afraid to oppose any of their general’s plans, whether or not they believed in them.” As Halsey later remembered, “MacArthur lumped me, Nimitz, King and the whole Navy in a vicious conspiracy to pare away his authority.”21

  • • •

  To King, MacArthur was becoming a genuine stumbling block to victory in the Pacific. Stimson and Marshall, he believed, would do anything rather than tangle with their subordinate, so he went to Leahy on Friday, March 10. He raised hell, knowing the word would get back to Roosevelt.

  Leahy did him one better. The next day he summoned King and Nimitz to the White House and gave them time to plead their case to the president.22

  Though he often meddled in Army-Navy disputes, Roosevelt refused to umpire this latest MacArthur-Navy fight. Beset by labor unrest, manpower shortages, nervous Democrats, and poor health, he told his admirals that Manus and MacArthur were problems the Joint Chiefs would have to handle themselves. He would not add to his overloaded plate a squabble among his military chiefs over a speck of coral no one had ever heard of.23

  The Joint Chiefs handled it. On Sunday, March 12, they met in a closed-door session and thrashed out another messy compromise: MacArthur would capture Hollandia in mid-April, Mindanao in November, and, if necessary, Luzon in February 1945. Nimitz would bypass the Japanese base at Truk. He would capture the Marianas in mid-June, the Palau Islands in mid-September, and Formosa the following February. MacArthur would support Nimitz with land-based aircraft, and Nimitz would provide ships and marines for MacArthur’s conquests. The grand plan made MacArthur and the Navy collaborators, while setting both horses on a race to Tokyo.24

  As he looked at the new instructions, MacArthur spotted another trap. Under the new timetable, Nimitz would capture the Marianas eight months before MacArthur had slugged his way to Luzon. He knew King wanted to hop from the Marianas to Formosa, perhaps even to Japan itself, and he feared the admiral would try to bypass the Philippines.

  When Nimitz paid a visit to MacArthur’s headquarters in late March, MacArthur was impeccably courteous until Nimitz referred to the portion of the JCS order requiring them to prepare contingency plans to bypass Luzon. Then Nimitz wrote King,

  [MacArthur] blew up and made an oration of some length—on the impossibility of bypassing the Philippines, his sacred obligation there—redemption of the 17 million people—blood on his soul—deserted by the American people—etc. etc, and then a criticism of “those gentlemen in Washington who—far from the scene—and having never heard the whistle of bullets, etc.—endeavor to set the strategy for the Pa
cific War,” etc.25

  Those men, far from the scene, would have their hands full as the year’s strategy played out.

  •

  In early 1944, Admiral King saw the enemy gaining strength. Not in the Atlantic, where the U-boat threat was waning, or the Pacific—though the fighting at Tarawa signaled that the Japanese were anything but licked.

  King’s enemies were closer to home.

  His patrols smoked them out when he learned of a plot to separate his COMINCH and CNO titles. A draft executive order being circulated around Knox’s Navy Department would make King a five-star “Admiral of the Navy and Commander, United States Fleets,” while Vice Admiral Frederick Horne would become a four-star “Chief of Naval Logistics and Material.” Horne, the draft said, would report to the navy secretary, not King. In other words, Horne would become the chief of naval operations.26

  King saw Forrestal’s fingerprints on the quarterdeck mutiny. The New Yorker was a slick political operator who resented the breadth of King’s authority. “Forrestal believed, but he never said to me, that I had too much power myself,” King remembered later. “He hated like hell that I had both jobs.”27

  At first, King figured Forrestal couldn’t trim his sails, even with Leahy’s backing, because President Roosevelt would have to repeal his executive order combining the offices of COMINCH and CNO. It would be a public admission that the president had made a mistake in giving King both jobs. He didn’t believe FDR would publicly admit to a mistake like this.

  But his bureaucratic alarm sounded general quarters when he learned that the president and Secretary Knox had buttonholed House Naval Affairs Committee chairman Carl Vinson about the change. If Forrestal convinced Chairman Vinson, King’s strongest ally, King’s position would become untenable.28

  As Forrestal gained the weather gage on King, the admiral wore around and spread more canvas. He quietly went to Vinson’s Capitol Hill office and pleaded his case.