American Warlords
Page 48
The fifteen-minute speech was no better than workmanlike, and after it was over he sat at the table rereading portions of it as pool photographers snapped pictures for news services. From a batch of negatives dipped and dried in a local darkroom, the Associated Press editor in Los Angeles hurriedly picked out one of FDR with his mouth open, obviously reading his speech from a sheaf of papers spread on his desk.
As every politician knows, the millisecond a photo is snapped can make the difference between a glorious legacy and utter humiliation. Unfortunately for Roosevelt, the photo the AP editor selected became the first disaster in a campaign not three hours old. The camera’s timing and angle revealed a gaunt FDR, his head bowed over his text. His mouth hung open, and glassy eyes stared blankly over a narrow face and oversize suit and a dark, outsize shadow hovered over his shoulder. The photo was a silent testament to a candidate whose running mate was probably the Grim Reaper.
The photographer—who had advised against the photo’s publication—was promptly kicked out of the presidential retinue, but the damage was done. Anti-Roosevelt papers reprinted the photograph and Republican flyers showed side- by-side comparison photos with the full-faced, vibrant Franklin Roosevelt of 1940. Governor Dewey gleefully accepted the windfall and told audiences that a vote for Roosevelt was a vote for Harry Truman.22
The “death’s door” photo of July 20 was an ironic setback on a day bearing sweet fruits of America’s war leadership. In Tokyo that day, General Tojo’s government collapsed, in large part due to the loss of Saipan to King’s leathernecks. On the other side of Eurasia, a cabal of German officers tried to assassinate Hitler with a bomb—a reflection, in part, of the success of Marshall’s army in France. Roosevelt’s job as candidate would be to ensure that voters associated him with victory abroad, not the squabbles at home.
•
When Baltimore sailed into Pearl Harbor on July 26, Roosevelt was in better form. His cheeks had regained some of their color, his blue eyes sparkled in the tropical sun. The grin returned to his face. He beamed as he scanned Hawaii’s great harbor, bustling with hundreds of ships, their rails lined with row upon row of white-suited officers and sailors. In open disdain for security protocol, the presidential flag snapped from Baltimore’s main, and for a brief, shining moment, Franklin Roosevelt looked like a lion in autumn, not winter.
Before they reached the pier, a motor launch pulled alongside the cruiser and sent aboard Admiral Nimitz with a delegation of white-uniformed flag officers. Baltimore proceeded majestically to Pearl’s seawall, where the splash of the anchor as it hit the water announced the end of the voyage.23
As the crowd of vice admirals, rear admirals, generals, and commodores milled about Baltimore’s deck, Roosevelt looked over the group and realized one face was missing. “Where’s Douglas?” he asked.
Nimitz had no answer. The party stood there in embarrassed silence.
• • •
Marshall had ordered MacArthur, whose code name for this occasion was MR. CATCH, to fly to Honolulu so as to arrive on July 26. Marshall told MacArthur to let as few people as possible know of his trip, and gave him no official instructions as to why he was going, other than “general strategical discussion.” But Marshall did tell him he would see “Leahy etc.,” and figured he probably knew who the “etc.” in Leahy’s party would be.
Marshall couldn’t dictate security measures to the Secret Service or the Navy, but he could make certain there would be no leak from the Army’s end. “I assume that there will be no publicity regarding the President’s visit until after his return to the mainland and therefore there should be no reference to General MacArthur’s presence in Hawaii,” Marshall instructed Hawaii’s senior Army commander, General Richardson. “The restrictions regarding the President are not my affair, but I wish you to see that no reference is permitted regarding General MacArthur’s presence in Hawaii except in strict accordance with the President’s instructions.”24
Forty minutes after Baltimore’s gangplank was lowered to the pier, the air was split by the shriek of a police siren. A motorcycle escort appeared, leading what Sam Rosenman remembered as “the longest open car I have ever seen. In front was a chauffeur in khaki, and in the back one lone figure.” That figure wore a crushed general’s hat and a brown leather jacket.
Mr. Catch had arrived.25
MacArthur’s car drove to the gangplank, to the wild applause of the crowd. He bounded up the ramp—stopping halfway to acknowledge another round of applause—then strode onto the cruiser’s deck. He saluted the commander-in-chief before shaking Roosevelt’s outstretched hand.
“Hello, Douglas,” said Roosevelt. “What are you doing with that leather jacket on? It’s darn hot today.”
“Well, I’ve just landed from Australia,” MacArthur said with a smile. “It’s pretty cold up there.”26
• • •
He had not just landed from Australia, for Bataan had arrived an hour earlier; MacArthur had stopped at Richardson’s home to shave and freshen up. But the jacket made a great prop, and FDR appreciated good political theater. On Baltimore’s sun-bathed deck, he sat between MacArthur and Nimitz for the obligatory photo session as Leahy, wearing his “King Gray” uniform, worked his way to the center of the group portrait.
The photo work done, the party set off for their quarters. They gathered the next morning for a day inspecting shipyards, airfields, hospitals, and training camps scattered across the island.
When Roosevelt decided to take Nimitz and MacArthur on his inspection, his advance men scoured Oahu for an appropriate car. The islanders had been squeezed by war rationing, so the garrison had only two choices to offer the president: a slightly cramped hardtop Packard, owned by the city’s fire chief, or a larger, classier touring car owned by the proprietor of one of Honolulu’s well-known brothels.
Sensibly concluding that the president of the United States could not be filmed wheeling about town in a car owned by a whorehouse madam, Richardson borrowed the fire chief’s car, and Admiral Nimitz squeezed into the backseat with Roosevelt and MacArthur. Leahy rode shotgun as newsreels turned and cameras snapped.27
Flying from Australia to Hawaii, MacArthur had complained bitterly that he had been caught at a disadvantage—summoned from Brisbane on short notice to make a presentation with few notes and no staff support. But it would be Nimitz who labored under the greater disadvantage of keeping pace with two outsize personalities. During the ride, Nimitz recalled, the conversation was dominated by “Franklin” and “Douglas,” as the two men called each other. MacArthur later reminisced that at one point he asked Roosevelt whether Dewey had a chance come November.
“I’ve been too busy to think about politics,” Roosevelt replied.
MacArthur stared at him for a split second, then burst into laughter. FDR burst out laughing, too.28
• • •
As Waikiki’s rhythmic waves lapped the shifting sands, Roosevelt brought Leahy and his two commanders over to his borrowed beach house for a private dinner. After a dessert of ice cream served in pineapples, the men retired to the living room. Roosevelt opened the discussion by asking, “Where do we go from here?”
The foursome batted around general considerations for three hours, but reached no definite consensus. Finishing late, they agreed to meet after breakfast for a more formal discussion.29
The next morning Roosevelt, Leahy, MacArthur, and Nimitz resumed their talk. Standing before a giant map of the Pacific theater mounted near one of the living room’s large walls, for two and a half hours Nimitz and MacArthur took turns presenting their views.
Articulating Admiral King’s position more than his own, Nimitz explained that Formosa was a prime location from which to cut off Japan’s oil supplies by sea. Air forces based there could also strike Japanese armies in China and hit the Empire’s home islands. Luzon was less vital, for if Leyte were in Allied hand
s, the Allies would have an adequate anchorage in the Philippines to springboard to Formosa.
Then came MacArthur’s turn. Grasping the pointer in his right hand, his left casually shoved into his pants pocket, he made his military points in confident detail before hitting themes closer to Roosevelt’s heart. Using every kilowatt of his charisma, MacArthur explained the military problem in political terms. America bore a moral obligation to liberate Filipinos and Americans abandoned at Corregidor and Bataan, he said. Those dependents were suffering untold hardships in Japanese concentration camps while the nations of Asia waited for their protector to liberate them. The Filipinos—indeed, much of Asia—might forgive America for abandoning them to overwhelming force in 1942, but they would never forgive America for bypassing them in 1945.30
To Leahy’s surprise, MacArthur and Nimitz made their points professionally and respectfully. Nimitz even conceded that further developments might make Luzon an important objective. “I never heard two men expound their views more clearly, without deviating from the main issues, than did Nimitz and MacArthur,” Roosevelt’s naval aide recalled. Leahy agreed. “After so much loose talk in Washington, where the mere mention of the name MacArthur seemed to generate more heat than light,” he wrote, “it was both pleasant and very informative to have these two men who had been pictured as antagonists calmly presenting their differing views to the Commander-in-Chief.”31
MacArthur’s political warnings were not entirely convincing, and after eleven years in power, Roosevelt knew the American voter far better than MacArthur did. But it was an election year, and FDR’s sensitivities were acute. He could not chance a misstep now, especially when the warning came directly from the darling of Republican conservatives.
As with his endorsement of Harry Truman, Jimmy Byrnes, and Henry Wallace, FDR was coy about his decision on Formosa versus Luzon. But MacArthur came away with the impression that Roosevelt had committed himself to liberating the Philippines before moving against Japan. So, too, did reporters who gathered around the grassy terrace of the beach house the next day. FDR told them MacArthur would go back to the Philippines—though he cautioned that how or when he would go back “cannot be told now.”32
•
Before the meeting in Honolulu, Admiral King had complained about Nimitz to his friend Charlotte Pihl: “I cannot make his back stiff. He’ll give in, he won’t even open his mouth.” But the president had asked to see Nimitz, not King, so King’s Pacific chief would have to carry the ball, even if Nimitz was not the orator MacArthur was. “Nimitz was a good sound man but he wasn’t even in the same class to be pitted with MacArthur that way and, of course, Mr. Roosevelt was a ‘past master,’” King conceded. But he nonetheless blamed his Pacific commander for the damage to his Formosa strategy. “He let me down,” he said.33
“Of course,” Admiral King later admitted, “MacArthur was appealing to political motives, to which ‘F.D.R.’ was always ready to listen.”34
• • •
On further review of America’s options in the Pacific, George Marshall grew lukewarm on King’s Formosa plan. He did not dispute the advantages of taking the island; a glance at the map told him Formosa was a larger and better base than Luzon. But a glance at the map would not tell him how many dead and wounded Americans it would take to capture the island.
Throughout August, Marshall pondered the cost of an island defended by 145,000 fanatical soldiers. His Operations Division estimated Formosa would cost nearly 90,000 casualties, a number that Marshall noted “approximates our total U.S. ground force casualties in France during the first two and a half months of the present campaign.”35
On September 1, the Joint Chiefs agreed to begin landings in December on the island of Leyte, the thoracic segment of the Philippines chain. They had not yet decided whether to leap from Leyte to Formosa, or take the short hop to Luzon. Admiral Halsey, General Richardson, and many of Nimitz’s planners favored Luzon, and as the Combined Chiefs prepared for their upcoming conference with the British in Quebec, the pendulum seemed to be swinging MacArthur’s way.36
FORTY-SIX
TRAMPLING OUT THE VINTAGE
“WHEN ARE WE GOING TO MEET AND WHERE?”
The war’s most impatient man, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, was itching to decide political and economic matters, and he pestered Roosevelt for another summit with “Uncle Joe.” Five weeks after D-Day, he wrote FDR, “That we must meet soon is certain. It would be better that U.J. came too. I am entirely in your hands. I would brave the reporters at Washington or the mosquitoes of Alaska!”1
As it turned out, Churchill didn’t have to swat at buzzing reporters or give jostling mosquitoes a quote. After a few rounds of correspondence, the two men agreed to meet on September 12 at their old QUADRANT haunt, the Citadel in Quebec. As before, the Combined Chiefs would caucus at Château Frontenac.
The OCTAGON conference, as Churchill dubbed it, signaled a shift in the high command’s focus. The big decisions had been made, and grand strategy had been set. Gone, too, was the desperation of earlier meetings. Russia was safe, England was safe, the second front was open, and the springboards to Japan were being graded and paved. Even the Citadel’s antiaircraft batteries, which had watched over the leaders the year before, had been packed up and sent to places where they could fire at something with a swastika or a red meatball.2
The final campaign for Japan brought the only open blows of the military conference. At the first plenary meeting, Churchill delivered a typically grand soliloquy on British intentions to contribute to the war against Japan after Germany’s defeat. As his perorations reached their climax, he offered Roosevelt the use of the Royal Navy in the Pacific. As Roosevelt’s advisers sat around the conference table, poker-faced as always—and caught completely off guard by the proposal—Roosevelt graciously accepted.
Admiral “A.B.C.” Cunningham later quipped that the meeting minutes for this point should have read, “Admiral King was carried out.” King loathed the idea of giving the Royal Navy a place in the Pacific order of battle. In his mind, the British had broken their promises in Burma and tried to hobble his Pacific offensive when the chips were down. In 1941 he told a confidant that he considered his Admiralty counterparts “inefficient, blundering and stupid.” On a more practical level, His Majesty’s Ships were notoriously “short-legged” on logistics; his seaman’s eye could picture U.S. tenders being sent hither and yon to refuel their British cousins.3
Arnold wrote in his diary that at the next Combined Chiefs meeting, “Everything normal until British participation in Pacific came up. Then Hell broke loose.” When A.B.C. asked where the British fleet was to be used, King said the “practicability of employing these forces would be a matter for discussion from time to time.”4
Leahy corrected King. “He did not feel that the question for discussion was the practicability of employment,” the minutes reflect, “but rather the matter of where they should be employed.” A.B.C. added that the prime minister had offered Roosevelt the Royal Navy for the main effort against Japan the day before.
King, the proverbial bull who carried his china shop with him, said the British could put forth their proposals if they cared to. Cunningham snapped back that the proposal was to use Britain’s fleet against Japan.5
The discussion turned into a row. King denied recalling any mention of the Central Pacific the day before. Brooke, more peevish than usual, rejoined that the plenary meeting plainly decided the basic question: The Royal Navy would join the “main effort” against Japan. Piling on, the abrasive Cunningham reminded King that FDR and Churchill had agreed to include British forces. King said he did not remember that, leading an exasperated Brooke to interject that “the offer was no sooner made than accepted by the President.”
Leahy, trying to defuse the quarrel, shut King down. He said the British offer was acceptable, though no one could say for certain where British ships would be dep
loyed. If King didn’t like it, he could take his objections up with the president himself.6
“We had great trouble with King, who lost his temper entirely and was opposed by the whole of his own committee!” Brooke wrote in his diary. “King made an ass of himself,” Cunningham told his. According to Cunningham, when King turned on Marshall over MacArthur’s plans for the Pacific, he “was finally called to order by Admiral Leahy, the President’s Chief of Staff, with the remark: ‘I don’t think we should wash our linen in public.’”7
King lost this round, but he knew there would be more rounds before the final bell. He would order his intelligence chief to withhold from the British liaison anything about future U.S. operations, and he provided no logistical help for Britain’s ships. The Brits might worm their way into MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific, but he could probably keep them in the dark until it was too late to interfere with his Central Pacific plans.8
• • •
King forestalled British meddling in the Central Pacific, but stopping MacArthur wouldn’t be so easy. His Formosa strategy took an unexpected blow during the Quebec conference when Halsey’s Third Fleet launched carrier raids against Mindanao and Leyte and encountered no resistance worthy of the name. The enemy’s oil supplies there were gone, there was “no shipping left to sink,” and “the enemy’s non-aggressive attitude was unbelievable and fantastic.” One of Halsey’s downed pilots had been rescued by Filipinos who told him there were no Japanese left on Leyte, he reported. “The area is wide open,” Halsey assured King.*9
With Leyte allegedly free for the asking, Halsey recommended canceling operations against Mindanao, Yap, and the Palau Islands and going straight to Leyte Gulf. That would free up an amphibious force that MacArthur could use against Leyte. Nimitz radioed King that he would cancel Yap, but wished to proceed against Peleliu and its Palau Island neighbors.10