by Perry, Mark
In this, at least, Franklin Roosevelt proved to be more clear-eyed than either Harry Hopkins or George Marshall. The United States was still many months away from fielding an army sufficiently trained and equipped to take on Hitler’s legions. Moreover, the “40,000 bombers” that Roosevelt had said must be produced (in fact, American workers produced tens of thousands more) were, in May 1942, only just beginning to come off the assembly lines. So whether or not his erstwhile ally signed on to anything the Americans proposed was of little importance, at least not yet. What was important was to tell the Russians that the Americans and the British were committed to a second front, no matter when it came, and to keep shipping the Red Army the tanks, trucks, aircraft, and rifles it desperately needed to stay in the fight. Then too, what Roosevelt needed most of all was not an agreement with Churchill, but rather a singular triumph that would lift morale and give hope that the Anglo-American journey to victory had finally begun.
Although 1942 was a bad year for Roosevelt, it was even worse for MacArthur. Morose over his escape from Corregidor, stunned by the lack of resources that greeted him in Australia, and frustrated by his long-distance exchanges with Marshall and Roosevelt, MacArthur remained a Melbourne recluse. After his exchange with Roosevelt, MacArthur cabled Hap Arnold that the Japanese could take New Guinea “at will.” Pessimism seeped from his cables. MacArthur’s spirits were buoyed by news of General Jimmy Doolittle’s surprise aerial attack on Tokyo in April. Carried out by thirteen B-25s launched from the USS Hornet (it had been his idea, MacArthur harrumphed to his aides), the strike lifted morale and provided evidence that Japan was vulnerable. But whatever lift MacArthur received from the Doolittle raid was short-lived. At the end of April, even before Wainwright’s surrender on Corregidor, Army Air Force Brigadier General Harold George (who had headed up Lewis Brereton’s “pursuit command” in the Philippines and preceded him to Australia) died in a freak accident at Batchelor Field, near Darwin, when a P-40 veered off course and killed him. MacArthur’s period of mourning was unusually long; he had admired George and the two were close friends. MacArthur needed good news, and desperately. It came, finally, during the first week of May.
On May 4, the Japanese Imperial Navy entered the Coral Sea looking for U.S. aircraft carriers. The Japanese task force, led by ascetic Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue (with two aircraft carriers—Shokaku and Zuikaku), shielded an invasion force of eleven troop transports carrying four thousand soldiers of the South Seas Detachment bound for Port Moresby. In Hawaii, Chester Nimitz was warned of the Japanese offensive by cable intercepts and dispatched Admiral Frank “Jack” Fletcher and two aircraft carriers, Yorktown and Lexington, to intercept them. Alerted to the Japanese move by Nimitz, MacArthur directed his skeletal Allied Air Force to scout north of New Guinea for Japanese naval movements, then sent three cruisers to reinforce Fletcher. Beginning on May 7, Fletcher and Inoue exchanged the first blows of the two-day battle, the first in history where two navies fought each other solely with aircraft. The first day’s encounter was indecisive, though American planes found and sank the light carrier Shoho and the Japanese sank two American tankers. But on the second day, Fletcher was able to find and damage Shokaku. He paid a heavy price: Lexington, hit by two torpedoes and three bombs, was set afire and sunk. Fletcher, with Yorktown also damaged, broke off contact and limped south. The Battle of the Coral Sea is considered a draw by most naval historians, but it was viewed as a setback by the Japanese. Japan’s planned conquest of Port Moresby was postponed, and the South Seas Detachment was ordered back to Rabaul.
There was better news to come. Stymied by Fletcher in the Southwest Pacific, Isoroku Yamamoto, Japan’s premier naval commander, decided to finish the job begun by Admiral Chuichi Nagumo at Pearl Harbor by luring U.S. aircraft carriers into a much-anticipated “decisive battle.” He dispatched Nagumo and four carriers (Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu, and Soryu) and a supporting naval group to the Central Pacific to capture Midway and to destroy the American fleet. But the movement didn’t result in the victory the Japanese hoped for. Warned again of the threat by his code breakers, Nimitz sortied three aircraft carriers from Pearl Harbor (Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown, the latter hastily repaired after its drubbing in the Coral Sea) to meet the Japanese. On June 4, some 1,100 miles northwest of Hawaii, Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu were hit by dive-bomber squadrons from Enterprise and Yorktown. The Japanese carriers were set ablaze and sunk. The carrier Hiryu responded with two dive-bomber attacks on Yorktown, which, listing and set burning, was sent to the bottom by a Japanese submarine. A final American attack, ordered by U.S. task force commander Raymond Spruance, targeted Hiryu, which was so badly damaged that it was scuttled by its crew. The battle ended with the surviving Japanese ships limping west, to safety.
The Battle of Midway was a turning point. The loss of four aircraft carriers, along with the heavy cruiser Mikuma (and over three thousand of its sailors), was a devastating blow to Japan. When its wounded returned home, they were sequestered from the public. In senior navy circles, discussion of the defeat was forbidden.
The Midway victory provided the Americans with a respite from the cascading defeats they had suffered since December 7. Although he had lost Yorktown, Nimitz had bought time until new ships, and most especially new carriers, were produced by U.S. shipyards. And the navy had found a new hero: Raymond Spruance emerged from this battle as one of the navy’s most celebrated fighters. For Franklin Roosevelt, the Midway victory provided not only a reason to celebrate, but also a unique opportunity to press Churchill to implement plans for Sledgehammer, the early invasion of France. As luck would have it, Louis Mountbatten, one of Britain’s most celebrated naval officers (and a member of the royal family), was then in Washington to discuss the topic—he had been sent by Churchill to assess just how serious the president was in opening a second front. For Churchill, Mountbatten was the perfect emissary; a handsome and romantic figure, articulate and brainy, he was viewed as a friend of America. More importantly, like Churchill, Mountbatten was not persuaded that Sledgehammer was a good idea. An invasion of Europe in 1942, he believed, was simply not feasible. In his first meeting with Roosevelt, Mountbatten argued that the Allies were not prepared for an invasion. His message reflected what Stimson and Marshall most feared, and what Stimson had predicted—that Churchill would not only find a way to climb down from his earlier support for an invasion, but also propose an alternative that would pick away at Hitler’s “Festung Europe.” Stimson and Marshall also worried that Roosevelt, seduced by Mountbatten during a private White House dinner (to which they were not invited), would concede Churchill’s point, but without a compensating promise that would pressure Germany.
But both men underestimated Roosevelt. Armed with the news of the Midway victory, the president was more than prepared to take on Churchill. During a dinner with Mountbatten on June 9 (as what remained of the Japanese fleet was limping west from Midway), Roosevelt reminded him of the agreement he had reached with Churchill the last time the prime minister had visited Washington. Churchill had pledged, Roosevelt reminded Mountbatten, that the Allies would do something to help the Russians in 1942. That meant opening a second front in Europe. Roosevelt was matter-of-fact, leaning back in his wheelchair, his cigarette holder gripped firmly in his teeth, smiling. Mountbatten eyed him, then shrugged; to be effective, an offensive had to succeed, he argued, and an invasion of France in 1942 would not. Roosevelt was forceful. If what Mountbatten said was correct, then the president saw no reason to continue shipping American troops to England. Roosevelt then played MacArthur’s Pacific-first card. There is, he said, “a general desire to take the offensive [against Japan], from Australia, using existing U.S. Marine forces and combat shipping.” He and Marshall, Roosevelt added, “were anxious to have two British aircraft carriers with their destroyer screen” join the offensive. Mountbatten masked his concern, smiled, and promised that he would pass Roosevelt’s message on to Churchill—that either the British would agree to take
on the Germans in Europe or the United States would take on the Japanese in the Pacific. Roosevelt smiled. Nodded.
Back in Melbourne, MacArthur was unaware of these maneuvers, but he would have been pleased by Roosevelt’s views. The second front for which he had tenaciously fought over the previous months was finally acknowledged, if only as a means to lever the British into confronting the Germans in France. As it turned out, and after a fortnight of debate, the Roosevelt-Mountbatten exchange resulted in a compromise: The British agreed to fight the Germans in 1942, as Roosevelt insisted, but the Americans gave up the idea of an invasion of Europe. In place of Sledgehammer and over George Marshall’s strenuous objections, the Americans and British adopted Operation Torch, an American invasion of North Africa to help the British Eighth Army defeat Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps. The adoption of Torch was the first time that Roosevelt interfered in a strictly military decision, and the first time he overruled Marshall, but the president had found Mountbatten’s argument persuasive. The U.S. Army was not yet ready to take on the Germans, at least not in France. Fighting Rommel, with better odds, would give the army the seasoning it required. The invasion of North Africa was set for November.
But long before that, or so MacArthur calculated, the 32nd and 41st American divisions would be engaged in a slugging match against the Japanese in New Guinea. On May 15, MacArthur had ordered the 14th Australian Infantry Brigade Group to take possession of Port Moresby, and then, on May 9, he ordered the construction of a new airfield on New Guinea’s southeast coast. On July 2, he ordered the 7th Australian Brigade to capture Fort Milne, on the island’s clawlike eastern coast. The only other thing he needed now was to find an air commander to replace General George Brett, the commander of the Allied Air Forces in Australia, and Brett’s trailing kite of subordinates. MacArthur pummeled Hap Arnold at the War Department for a replacement, but to little immediate effect. Finally, in early July, Arnold provided a list of officers who could take Brett’s place. One name caught MacArthur’s eye, and he cabled Arnold that he would be pleased if George Kenney, whom he had met on the Western Front during the Great War, could be assigned to his command. Within days Arnold agreed.
Major General George Kenney—voluble, self-confident, and outspoken—was summoned to Washington from his command in San Francisco in mid-July for a meeting with George Marshall and Hap Arnold. Kenney was being sent to Australia, Marshall said, to head up the Allied Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific. The command situation in MacArthur’s theater was bad, Marshall added; it was characterized by personality differences among its senior commanders. Kenney jumped at the assignment, telling Marshall and Arnold that he would dismiss the “deadwood” in Australia, since “no one could get anything done with the collection of generals” around Brett. The comment irritated Marshall and Arnold (who appeared “a bit peeved,” as Kenney later wrote), but they said they would approve his command changes as long as MacArthur did.
After his meeting with Marshall and Arnold, Kenney flew back to the West Coast and then on to Australia, arriving on July 18. The first officer he met was Brett, who complained about MacArthur’s chief of staff, Richard Sutherland. The chief was arrogant, ignorant, and “a bully,” Brett said. If Sutherland wasn’t able to end every sentence with the words “by order of General MacArthur,” Brett added, “he’d be a nobody.” Less than twenty-four hours later, and after meeting with Sutherland, Kenney agreed. Sutherland was too full of himself to be of much use, the major general decided. Kenney met with MacArthur on July 29. “I listened to a lecture,” Kenney later wrote, “for approximately an hour on the shortcomings of the Air Force in general and the Allied Air Force in the Southwest Pacific in particular.” He carefully picked a spot to interrupt, then jumped in. As MacArthur stood by in surprise (for he was rarely interrupted), Kenney told him that he knew how to run air operations and if MacArthur felt that Kenney couldn’t be a loyal officer, then MacArthur wouldn’t need to relieve him, he would relieve himself. The speech was greeted by MacArthur with a steely silence and then, slowly, a smile. “He grinned and put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I think we’re going to get along all right,’” Kenney recalled.
But the tussle with Sutherland had yet to begin. Kenney’s first directive to MacArthur was returned to him with red marks detailing takeoff times and lists of air crews. This was Sutherland’s work, and Kenney (who didn’t think he needed advice on how to run an air force) stalked into Sutherland’s office and took out a piece of paper. He drew a small dot on its upper corner and pointed to it: This is what you know about air operations, he told Sutherland, “and the rest of the paper is what I know.” Sutherland wasn’t impressed. “You have your orders,” he said. Kenney had been waiting for this moment and suggested they take their disagreement “into the next room,” where it could be settled by MacArthur. “I want to find out who runs this air force,” Kenney said. Sutherland was silent, then suddenly retreated. Kenney could run his air operations any way he saw fit, Sutherland said.
In fact, while Kenney could run his air operations in the way he saw fit, he had already received a detailed briefing of what was expected from him from MacArthur who, in turn, had just received his own guidance from Washington. From the end of June and into early July, MacArthur learned, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)—Chairman Admiral William Leahy (officially the chief of staff to the commander in chief), Marshall, King, and Arnold—had engaged in a contentious debate over Pacific strategy, with Marshall and King the chief antagonists. At issue was whether they should approve MacArthur’s recommendation that he attack Tulagi, at the south end of the Solomon Islands, which would serve as the jumping-off point for a quick campaign against Rabaul.
The Joint Chiefs liked the plan, but King wanted the navy to take the lead. The Pacific was the navy’s war, not MacArthur’s, he said, and Admiral Robert Ghormley, Nimitz’s commander in the South Pacific, should have the job. King implied that he might take his concerns to Roosevelt. With King on the warpath, Marshall warned MacArthur not to be insistent. A blow-up with King, he implied, could scuttle the army’s entire effort against the Japanese. The Southwest Pacific commander got the message. “I comprehend fully the extreme delicacy of your position,” he told Marshall, “and the complex difficulties you face there.” In fact, King was pushing the president to adopt “an integrated general plan of operations” for the Pacific that would give the navy the resources to fight the Japanese without army help. “Give me the naval forces, air units, and amphibious troops,” King told Roosevelt, “we can drive northwest from the New Hebrides into the Solomons and the Bismarck Archipelago.”
As Marshall suspected, this midsummer debate had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with service competition. At issue was whether the Joint Chiefs should approve a plan to attack Rabaul through New Guinea and New Britain (with MacArthur in command) or whether to attack Rabaul through the Solomons (with Ghormley in command). If the Joint Chiefs chose the New Guinea route, then MacArthur (and the army) would receive the largest share of men and matériel, but if they chose a route through the Solomons, then Ghormley (and the navy) would get the resources. As the debate gathered steam, MacArthur cabled Marshall his advice. You have to be careful, MacArthur told Marshall, for what the navy really wanted was “general command control of all operations in the Pacific theater.” The navy had always wanted to take the lead role in the nation’s defense, he added, with the army serving as its supply organization. MacArthur wasn’t alone in this view. In Washington, Dwight Eisenhower watched King’s maneuvers with increasing anger. “One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King,” he confided to his diary. “The navy wants to take all the islands in the Pacific, have them held by army troops, to become bases for army pursuit and bombers. Then the navy will have a safe place to sail its vessels.”
By late June, Marshall had shaped a compromise. He proposed that instead of choosing between New Guinea and the Solomons, the United States should fight in bo
th, with MacArthur and Ghormley (and the army and the navy) sharing responsibilities for conquering Rabaul. King studied the proposal and endorsed it because he understood the elegance of Marshall’s reasoning: The Joint Chiefs would use the army-navy competition in the Pacific to fuel a series of punches and counterpunches to keep the Japanese off balance, requiring Japan to meet attacks from two directions. Then too, as King appreciated, the compromise would give Nimitz the time he needed to plan offensives in the Central Pacific, where the major fight against the Japanese would be carried out. In time, King believed, Nimitz’s advance through the Central Pacific would dwarf anything that happened in the Solomons—or in New Guinea. Those two offensives would become sidelights. The JCS issued its directive to MacArthur and Ghormley on July 2, detailing three “tasks.” In Task One, U.S. Marines would occupy the Santa Cruz Islands and Tulagi; in Task Two, northeastern New Guinea would be captured (along with the rest of the Solomon Islands); and in Task Three, Rabaul and its approaches would be seized. The tasks dictated that MacArthur’s air force, now Kenney’s air force, would be required to support Ghormley’s operations in the Solomons before shifting back to support MacArthur’s operations in New Guinea.
To oversee these operations, MacArthur moved his headquarters from Melbourne to Brisbane (where he took up residence in Lennon’s Hotel). He directed the 32nd and 41st Divisions to begin jungle training in preparation for their deployment to New Guinea and ordered Kenney to get his fighters and bombers into the air over the southern Solomons. By August 5, Kenney had reorganized his command and sent Brett’s trailing kite string of forty colonels and lieutenant colonels back to the United States. He established good relations with Thomas Blamey’s Aussie flyers and formally established the Fifth Air Force. Brigadier General Ennis Whitehead became Kenney’s deputy and overseer of the Fifth’s advanced echelon at Port Moresby. As Kenney described it, Whitehead’s job was to “own the air over New Guinea.”
