The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur

by Perry, Mark

  Brereton’s less-than-stellar record does not excuse MacArthur. Although there is no historical account of MacArthur’s words to Marshall during the fateful December 8 telephone call, that MacArthur gave a blunt recitation of the facts (that the Far Eastern Air Force no longer existed) seems certain. In retrospect, the tragedy is not that MacArthur didn’t send his fighters and bombers north, to Formosa, to bomb Japanese airfields, where the U.S. forces would have almost certainly been destroyed. The tragedy is that he didn’t send them south to Mindanao—out of harm’s way. MacArthur had, in fact, anticipated the danger of a bombing attack from Formosa, writing to Marshall on November 29 that he wanted to move the bombers away from Manila and had ordered Brereton to do so. That did not happen. On the other hand, while MacArthur, Sutherland, and Brereton all followed proper procedure on the morning of the eighth (an attack was proposed, but deferred until a photo reconnaissance could be made), MacArthur was dilatory, Sutherland panicky, and Brereton irresponsible. In the end, what was important was that the Japanese victory at Clark Field was fatal to any future U.S. attempt to defend the Philippines. After December 8, MacArthur’s forces were doomed.

  Amid the could-haves and should-haves of December 8, the actions of MacArthur, Sutherland, and Brereton stand out in stark contrast with the competence for which the American military became known over the next years. It is not simply that the Americans were caught on the ground; it is that their highest-ranking and most experienced officers were mentally unprepared for war. MacArthur and his staff were stunned by the sheer violence of the attack and struggled to respond to it. The Japanese did not have dozens of bombers, but had hundreds; their soldiers and pilots were not green and untrained, but were experienced and hardened; their intelligence service did not need to conduct a reconnaissance of the Philippines, for this had already been done. Over the previous two decades, since the end of World War One, what military officers refer to as a battle’s “tempo” had shrunk: Soldiers who had once faced each other across a battlefield’s no-man’s-land, where attacks were planned meticulously and lasted for hours, now faced each other across vast distances, where targets lay beyond the horizon and where combat firefights were short, bloody, and brutal. World War One was a vicious and deadly grind, but what faced MacArthur now was of an entirely different order and would demand a competence and coordination never seen in any previous conflict. Then too, the ferocity of the attack was so stunning that a number of Brereton’s pilots were convinced that the Zeros and Bettys that plunged from the skies over Clark, Nichols, Iba, Del Carmen, and Nielson Airfields were actually flown by Germans—because everyone knew that Asians were incapable of handling complex machinery.

  For his part, MacArthur defended Brereton’s reputation and so became a party to the cover-up of Brereton’s misdemeanor—a common practice of that era. MacArthur realized that as the commander in the Philippines, he was the officer responsible for the December 8 debacle, and not Brereton, no matter what the air chief’s condition. In his memoirs, MacArthur clearly defended Brereton:

  A number of statements have been made criticizing General Brereton, the implication being that through neglect or faulty judgment he failed to take proper security measures, resulting in the destruction of part of his air force on the ground. While it is true that his tactical handling of his command, including all necessaries of its protection against air attack of his planes on the ground, was entirely in his own hands, such statements do an injustice to this officer. His fighters were in the air to protect Clark Field, but were outmaneuvered and failed to intercept the enemy. Our air force in the Philippines contained many antiquated models, and were hardly more than a token force with insufficient equipment, incomplete fields, and inadequate maintenance. The force was in the process of integration, radar defenses were not yet operative, and the personnel was raw and inexperienced. They were hopelessly outnumbered and never had a chance of winning.

  In Washington, Marshall puzzled over MacArthur’s failure, but waved away the critics and ignored calls for an investigation. Was he protecting MacArthur? Or, as a postwar interview suggests, was he defending another officer’s reputation? In an interview after the war, Marshall pointedly alluded to the problems MacArthur faced on the morning of December 8. The Japanese were a problem for MacArthur, Marshall said, but so was Lewis Brereton. “It was a very trying thing for him because he had nothing he just had nothing,” Marshall said of MacArthur. “And another thing was that I found out during the course of affairs that the initial air men that we sent in were not up to standard at all.” For historians who have studied military efficiency reports of that era, “not up to standard” is well-known army code. The haunting, but unstated, truth of December 8 is that Sutherland had good reason to stop Brereton at MacArthur’s door: Brereton was in no condition to see the commander. Having plowed himself into bed after a night of revelries, Brereton was awakened five minutes later with reports of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He dressed and drove to MacArthur’s headquarters, where the air chief presented himself for duty. Sutherland, who had been at the same party, sized him up, denied him access to MacArthur, and saved the man’s career. “It had been a good party,” one of MacArthur’s aides laconically remembered.

  Nine hours before the first Japanese bombers struck America’s airfields in the Philippines, a large portion of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Striking just after dawn, the Japanese sank or beached the battleships Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia, California, and Nevada and put the Maryland, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania out of action. The Japanese attacked in two waves using 353 aircraft and also struck Hickam, Wheeler, and Bellows Airfields. American casualties were nearly catastrophic, with 2,403 sailors, soldiers, and airmen dead.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor was authored by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the son of a samurai, graduate of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, and one of the most admired officers in the Japanese military. Yamamoto had served on a cruiser during the Russo-Japanese War and was identified as one of the most brilliant of a rising class of young officers educated at the Imperial Naval Staff College. Yamamoto learned English as a graduate student at Harvard University, then hitchhiked across America to learn about the country. What he saw then convinced him that once aroused, the United States would fight to the death. His views were reinforced by his service as Japan’s naval attaché in Washington, where he was exposed to the impenetrable world of American democracy.

  Yamamoto was one of the great military thinkers of history, and his Pearl Harbor plan reflected his genius. Naval task forces with carrier-based aircraft, he believed, could have a decisive impact on naval battles and could fight without being seen. It was a revolutionary idea that transformed naval warfare. His plan for December 7, authored only after his argument that Japan shouldn’t fight America was overruled, was one of the most breathtaking in military history. Envisioned as an attack on the military assets of the United States, Holland, and Great Britain, the plan would erase nearly one hundred years of Western colonial power in Asia. Yamamoto’s plan was predicated on the tenuous proposition that when faced with the morale-busting loss of its Pacific fleet, the American people (the soft, spoiled, and affluent American people) wouldn’t have the stomach for a protracted and bloody conflict. They would decide not to fight and would concede East Asia to the Japanese. In light of later events—and although it was obvious to many from the outset—this calculation stands as one of the colossal blunders of modern history. It would cost Yamamoto his life, and Japanese mothers and wives millions of dead sons and husbands.

  On the day that the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, six advance Japanese naval task forces sailed from Formosa and Peleliu Island (east of the Philippines) to establish forward air bases for the follow-on invasion of Luzon. The Japanese secured Batan Island, north of Luzon, at dawn on December 8; two days later, a small task force seized Camiguin Island and established a seaplane base. The seizure of Batan and Camiguin provided the Japanese with two
forward outposts for what would follow—the landing of two detachments to secure airbases in the Philippines, at Vigan (on Luzon’s far northwest coast) and Aparri (in Luzon’s far northeast).

  Japan landed modest detachments at Vigan and Aparri on the morning of December 10, but the landings did not go as smoothly as the Japanese had hoped. While both towns and their nearby airfields were eventually captured, the convoys carrying the landing parties rode through heavy seas that forced the detachments to divert to calmer beaches. The landings at Aparri were difficult, with the high surf forcing the Tanaka Detachment ashore twenty miles to the east, at Gonzaga. When told the Japanese had captured Gonzaga, MacArthur ordered Brereton’s remaining aircraft aloft, with two B-17s flying north to oppose the landings. This modest air force provided MacArthur with his first victory, as one of the B-17s successfully bombed a Japanese troop transport. The pilot of the B-17, Captain Colin P. Kelly Jr., was killed on the return trip when his aircraft was shot down by Zeros. He received the Distinguished Service Cross.

  The Japanese attacking force anchored off Vigan also faced rough seas. It diverted its landing party south, to Pandan, where the Kanno Detachment, some two thousand soldiers, was met by bombing runs by five U.S. B-17s, which also damaged two transports. The Japanese, who assumed that their December 8 attacks on Clark and other U.S. airfields had wiped out the American air fleet, dispatched another wave of bombers and fighters to mop up Brereton’s force. From December 10 onward, the Japanese controlled the air over Luzon.

  The North Luzon commander, Jonathan Wainwright—a West Point graduate and one of the few army officers close enough to MacArthur to call him “Douglas”—viewed the Vigan and Aparri landings as diversions and sent modest columns to harass the invaders. In the meantime, he kept the bulk of his forces in central Luzon, hoping to defeat the Japanese during their landings on the beaches of Lingayen Gulf. MacArthur’s forward deployment of Wainwright’s units was a roll of the dice and a poor one, as it soon became apparent. Wainwright’s forces had little chance against the Japanese, who landed on the eastern shore of Lingayen on December 22, then followed that up with a second landing at Legaspi, in southern Luzon. A separate set of landings took place at Mindanao, where Japanese troops captured airfields to support their push into Borneo. MacArthur might have dispatched some of Thomas Hart’s ships to oppose the Japanese landings, but the Japanese bombing of Manila’s Cavite Navy Yard on December 10 had destroyed the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, despite the heroic defense mounted by Brereton’s remaining fighters. The Japanese did not make the same mistake they had made at Pearl Harbor, where support facilities had been left untouched. This time, they bombed warehouses, machine shops, and repair facilities. Hart, whose behavior on December 7 had poisoned his relationship with MacArthur, watched the attack from his headquarters in Manila, sickened by what he saw. Billows of smoke rose over Cavite, which burned for days. The dock was covered in blood.

  These were trip-hammer blows. As the Japanese followed up their early December victories, nearly all of the Southwest Pacific was in their hands (or about to be), with Japanese troops coming ashore in Malaya and Thailand. On December 10, as the first Japanese troops were fighting at Vigan and Aparri, the Japanese sank the HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales off Singapore, eliminating the British fleet in the Pacific. (“In all the war, I never received a more direct shock,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill later wrote.) By the third week of December, the Philippine lifeline to the United States through the Central Pacific (along which, MacArthur hoped, U.S. forces would mount a counteroffensive to relieve him) had ceased to exist: American outposts on Guam and Wake Islands were bombed (Guam fell on December 8, Wake on December 23), and Tarawa and Makin, in the Gilbert Islands, were stormed. Standing on the veranda of his penthouse, MacArthur could cast his eyes onto the street below and see Filipinos rushing about—packing their meager belongings in the belief that their beloved capital would soon fall into the hands of the invader, or crowding Manila’s banks to withdraw their life savings. MacArthur was hemmed in. He now commanded an area that had shrunk to just three hundred miles in every direction. Everywhere else, at every point of the compass, the flag of the Rising Sun was triumphant.

  In Washington, the string of defeats of early December brought the grim realization that it would take years to turn the tide. On the morning of December 14, MacArthur’s former chief of staff, Dwight Eisenhower, reported for duty at the War Department, summoned there by Marshall to serve in the War Plans Division. Eisenhower considered the assignment a dead end, as it meant serving once again on someone else’s staff. But Eisenhower’s former boss, General Walter Krueger, had recommended him and told Eisenhower that his assignment in Washington was important. After being shown where he would work by his old friend, Leonard Gerow, Eisenhower met with Marshall, who was standing at his desk when Eisenhower entered. Marshall quickly reviewed the series of American defeats in the Far East, finishing with MacArthur’s isolation in the Philippines.

  “We have got to do our best in the Pacific and we’ve got to win this whole war,” Marshall said. “Now, how are we going to do it?”

  Eisenhower stared back at Marshall. “Give me a few hours,” he responded.

  Later that afternoon, Eisenhower presented his plan on several sheets of yellow legal paper. It was three hundred words long. Headed “Assistance to the Far East,” Eisenhower’s program was unadorned. “Build up Australia, a base of operations from which supplies and personnel (air and ground types) can be moved into the Philippines. Speed is essential.” Next: “Influence Russia to enter the war.” Then: “Initially, utilize the bombs and ammunition now in Australia to be carried on carriers and fast merchant vessels with planes. Establish fast merchant ship supply service from U.S. to Australia for maintenance. Ferry from Australia to Philippines.”

  Facing Marshall, Eisenhower added his own conclusions: “General, it will be a long time before major reinforcements can go to the Philippines, longer than any garrison can hold out without direct assistance, if the enemy commits major forces to their reduction, but we must do everything for them that is humanly possible. The people of China, of the Philippines, of the Dutch East Indies will be watching us. They may excuse failure but they will not excuse abandonment. Their trust and friendship are important to us.”

  Marshall remained silent, so Eisenhower plunged ahead: “Our base must be Australia, and we must start at once to expand it and to secure our communications to it. In this last we dare not fail. We must take great risks and spend any amount of money required.”

  Finally, Marshall nodded. “I agree with you,” he said. “Do your best to save them.”

  MacArthur, had he been present, would have been pleased with his former assistant’s plan—but also disappointed. He would have been proud that Eisenhower believed, as he did, that America must fulfill its pledge to defend the Philippines, but he would have been shocked by Eisenhower’s conviction that the Philippine garrison was doomed, and that the defeat of Japan must begin from Australia. Whether pacing the floor in his headquarters in Manila or on his penthouse veranda, MacArthur imagined that somewhere over the eastern horizon, the U.S. Navy was sailing to his relief and that it was only a matter of time before it arrived.

  Surrounded by his staff and the ever-vigilant Wainwright, MacArthur vowed to fight on. He peppered the high command in Washington with daily, and sometimes hourly, coded radiograms. “If the Western Pacific is to be saved it will have to be saved here and now,” one read, to be followed by another: “The Philippine theater of operations is the locus of victory or defeat.” MacArthur appeared confident and defiant. “My message is one of serenity and confidence,” he said.

  As the forces of Japan bore down on him, MacArthur called together his senior commanders and laid out his plan for the defense of Luzon, marking on a map in his office the successive lines they would defend. His plan, he told them, was to buy time, fending off the Japanese while building up the defenses of Bataan and Corregidor
, the island that served as the “cork” in the bottle of Manila Bay. Struggling to understand the pace of this new war, he gave exact instructions and precise orders. He seemed to hearken back to his days as a brigadier general, when he had led his beloved Rainbow Division fearlessly “over the top” at Côte de Chatillon. In one noted anecdote, he stands in his khakis, feet apart and hands on hips, outside his headquarters at No. 1 Calle Victoria, staring at Japanese fighters speckling the sky over Manila. He counts them with his eyes. “Fifty-five,” he says. Nearby, a gaggle of officers eye the fighters, casting furtive glances back at the headquarters, hoping they can sprint inside before the Japanese strike. One of them urges MacArthur to take cover, but MacArthur ignores the plea. Over his left shoulder, the remains of Cavite smolder in the December sun, while to the east the line of B-17 wrecks continues to send clouds of black smoke into the air over Clark Field. “Give me a cigarette, Eddie,” he says.

  CHAPTER 5

  Lingayen Gulf

  It was savage and bloody, but it won time.

  —Douglas MacArthur

  The picture of Douglas MacArthur, in mid-December 1941, calmly counting Japanese fighters veiled the worry he must have felt. American power in the Pacific had been shattered, with all of America’s military outposts, excepting those in the Philippines, overrun. There was little doubt that the islands that MacArthur loved were next on Japan’s list. George Marshall, in Washington, knew this too, even as he struggled to provide his Philippine commander with the aircraft and supplies he needed, but that Marshall did not have.

  Given the lack of the dozens of army divisions, air squadrons, and battle fleets needed to oppose the Japanese, Marshall viewed his immediate post–December 7 task as maintaining the morale of the Americans and Filipinos facing the Japanese—to “buck up” MacArthur, even as his air force lay smoldering on Philippine airfields. “The resolute and effective fighting of you and your men air and ground has made a tremendous impression on the American people and confirms our confidence in your leadership,” Marshall cabled MacArthur three days after the December 8 debacle. “We are making every effort to reach you with air replacements and reinforcements as well as other troops and supplies.” This was brazen fibbing of the most obvious sort, for MacArthur’s command had fired nary a shot in anger, and most senior American officers not only didn’t believe the Philippines could be saved, but believed to do so would be a waste of time.