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

by Perry, Mark

  Two waves followed the first onto the island, quickly overcoming indifferent Japanese resistance. By midmorning, the American onshore commander reported that Momote Airfield was in his hands. As B-25s and P-38s from Kenney’s air force made their appearance, Kinkaid’s destroyers continued to fire on Japanese holdouts. By noon, the entire American force was ashore. Later that afternoon, MacArthur and Kinkaid visited the beachhead. MacArthur tramped through the mud, talked with the men of the 1st Cavalry Division, and awarded a Distinguished Service Cross to the first soldier who had made it ashore. The commander then went forward to inspect the front lines. An officer touched his arm. “Excuse me, sir, but we killed a Jap sniper in there just a few minutes ago.” MacArthur kept walking. “Fine. That’s the best thing to do with them,” he said. Two Japanese corpses lay along the trail ahead, and MacArthur stopped for a moment. “That’s the way I like to see them,” he said. Wheeling around, MacArthur walked back down the trail and then onto the airstrip. Colonel Roger Egeberg, his physician, accompanied him. “Walking along with MacArthur, I could hear gunfire a few hundred yards off the beach,” Egeberg remembered. “I thought about my children at home. Maybe if I ‘accidentally’ dropped something, I could stoop over, but I wondered if I ever would be able to stand up.” After two hours, and covered in mud, MacArthur returned to the Phoenix, elated.

  Surprised that the Americans had come ashore on the island’s southern beaches, the Japanese reformed their battalions and swept forward. The attack came at dark, in a series of separate assaults. The 1st Cav was vulnerable, having been able to dig only shallow trenches in the coral rock. Nor could it bring its artillery forward—the beachhead was too small. The Japanese attack that first night was a near thing, fought off by massed naval gunfire and broken apart by barbed wire that Kenney had airdropped onto the beaches. Hundreds of corpses were stacked in front of the American position, but the force held. One week later, another brigade of the 1st Cav landed on the island’s north side and pressed south, clearing the jungle in front of them.

  MacArthur’s gamble had been successful, but not everyone was impressed. Krueger remained uncomfortable with MacArthur’s Los Negros decision: If the Japanese had deployed their troops on the southern beaches, the landing brigade would have been destroyed. Barbey’s deputy, Rear Admiral William Fechteler, shook his head at MacArthur’s decision. “Actually we’re damn lucky we didn’t get run off the island,” he said. “Looking backward, I have wondered if MacArthur ever questioned his own judgment in this matter.”

  Despite the success at Los Negros, MacArthur’s relationship with the navy continued to fester. In the aftermath of the Los Negros operation, he and Halsey engaged in an acrimonious exchange over who would control Seeadler Harbor, the anchorage on Manus, the largest of the Admiralty Islands. Nimitz started the spat by insisting that Seeadler fell under Halsey’s control and recommended that the boundary of Halsey’s theater be moved to include it. MacArthur struck back, telling Marshall that Nimitz’s claim was an “insult” to his leadership. Marshall sided with MacArthur, but suggested that MacArthur leave Manus open for Nimitz’s use. With Marshall’s support in hand, MacArthur invited Halsey to Brisbane for an early March showdown and, within minutes of his arrival, let loose a torrent of accusations. “Before even a word of greeting was spoken,” Halsey remembered, “I saw that MacArthur was fighting to keep his temper.” MacArthur’s rage was unfeigned: He blamed Halsey, Nimitz, King, “and the whole Navy” for hatching a “vicious conspiracy to pare away” his authority. When MacArthur added that he had ordered the harbor at Manus closed to his ships, Halsey ripped into him. “If you stick to this order of yours,” Halsey said ominously, “you’ll be hampering the war effort.” Halsey’s comment stunned MacArthur’s staff. “I imagine they never expected to hear anyone address him in those terms this side of the Judgment Throne,” Halsey reflected. Finally, after an unpleasant dinner, MacArthur relented. “You win, Bill,” he announced, and agreed to open Manus to Halsey’s ships. Halsey was gracious, but the debate had only begun.

  In fact, the real issue was control of the Pacific War. For, while the cork had been put in the bottle of Rabaul, the JCS had yet to determine whether the Philippines should be invaded and had consistently postponed a decision on whether to appoint an overall commander in the Pacific. On March 2, in the midst of the MacArthur-Halsey fight over Manus, the JCS had invited MacArthur and Nimitz and their commanders to Washington to decide these questions. Five days later, they heard the first in a series of presentations from Nimitz on why the Central Pacific should be the axis of advance on Japan. The Nimitz plan was well argued and even provided a fig leaf for MacArthur: If he could capture Mindanao, Nimitz said, then Kenney’s fliers could protect the navy’s western flank in the Central Pacific. Richard Sutherland responded by outlining Reno IV—an offensive further up New Guinea’s northern coast, culminating in an invasion of Mindanao in November. The conquest of Luzon—in January 1945—would follow, he said.

  The JCS were under pressure to accept the Nimitz plan, primarily because of King’s and Marshall’s unspoken agreement that the Pacific War would be waged by the navy. King’s view had weight: His navy was the strongest in the world and so should be used. Then too, as King pointed out, conquering the Philippines was of little use if the Japanese navy survived. But ironically and much to King’s chagrin, the weak link in his anti-MacArthur front was the self-effacing Chester Nimitz, who saw the logic in MacArthur’s argument for a return to the Philippines, where thousands of Americans were starving in Japanese prison camps. The archipelago was even more of an obsession now, with information beginning to seep into public consciousness about the Bataan Death March. “I am going to hang Homma,” MacArthur had told his staff. He would storm ashore in Luzon, destroy the Japanese, free his Bataan soldiers, clap Homma in handcuffs, and be reunited with “Skinny” Wainwright. In many ways Nimitz agreed, for while the admiral was proud of the navy, he believed that the defeat of Japan meant the defeat of their soldiers—as well as their sailors.

  King sensed Nimitz’s wavering and warned him about it, issuing what he hoped was a decisive argument against a MacArthur-only offensive. “This idea of rolling up the Japanese along the New Guinea coast, throughout Halmahera [in present-day Indonesia] and Mindanao,” he wrote to Nimitz, “and up through the Philippines to Luzon, as our major strategic concept, to the exclusion of clearing our Central Pacific line of communications to the Philippines, is to me absurd.” King was not alone in his views. Hap Arnold supported the Nimitz offensive because it would provide island bases for his bombers, which would turn Japan’s cities to ashes. For Arnold, the key to Nimitz’s campaign was the capture of Saipan in the Mariana Islands—an action that would provide a base for his B-29s, which were just then beginning to flow from U.S. assembly lines. The most advanced bomber ever built up to that time, the B-29 reached altitudes of forty thousand feet and cruised along at 350 miles per hour. More crucially, a single B-29 carried ten thousand pounds of bombs. The Japanese had nothing to match it. The battle of Tarawa, followed by the nearly effortless landings at Kwajalein (on February 1) and on lightly defended Eniwetok (on February 18), edged Nimitz closer to the Japanese homeland—and Arnold’s B-29s to Japan’s cities.

  The JCS went into closed session on March 12 to decide the contest. Within twenty-four hours—an amazingly short time considering the issues at hand—the Joint Chiefs endorsed Nimitz’s planned campaign while dismissing King’s argument that MacArthur’s forces be folded into Nimitz’s as a part of a single offensive. The decision directed that Halsey’s command be extinguished (with the Solomons conquered, there was nothing for it to do), with his ground forces used to strengthen MacArthur’s march toward the western tip of New Guinea. Halsey was ordered to Hawaii, where he would help lead Nimitz’s drive into the southern Mariana Islands, after which Nimitz would seize islands in the Carolines and then move on Peleliu. On its face, the JCS directive read like yet another compromise. It institutional
ized the dual-drive offensives that MacArthur and Halsey had used so successfully in reducing Rabaul, while remaining silent on appointing an overall Pacific commander. Notably, however, the JCS’s directive followed the principle of earlier resource-dictated decisions, with this caveat: Where previous decisions were driven by a lack of resources, the March 1944 decision reflected a surplus of them. Nimitz could now deploy upward of eighteen fleet carriers and thousands of fighter aircraft, while MacArthur was reinforced by enough divisions to overwhelm the Imperial Japanese Army in western New Guinea. MacArthur welcomed the reinforcements, but he remained suspicious. Not only did Nimitz inherit Halsey, but Nimitz’s resources outstripped anything promised for MacArthur. Moreover, it sounded to MacArthur as if the Joint Chiefs hoped that while Nimitz was taking on the Japanese fleet, MacArthur would be wading ashore not on Luzon, but on Mindanao, which was not quite the triumphant “return” that MacArthur had planned.

  In Washington, Nimitz was drawing far different conclusions. While less suspicious of MacArthur than King, Nimitz decided that while the navy had gotten much of what it wanted, it hadn’t gotten it all. The JCS directive left open the possibility that MacArthur’s forces would be brought further north for an invasion of Luzon. The key phrase was contained in “Section e,” where the JCS directed the “occupation” of Mindanao “preparatory to a further advance to Formosa, either directly or via Luzon.” Nimitz was also required to provide MacArthur with air cover during MacArthur’s planned Reno IV fight for Hollandia, a major Japanese rallying point further west on New Guinea’s northern coast. This meant that Nimitz would be putting his biggest carriers in danger of attack from the masses of Japanese land-based fighters.

  Nimitz was uneasy: It was one thing to find MacArthur’s arguments for a line of advance to the Philippines compelling, and another thing entirely for the JCS to direct that Nimitz help the commander—thus sapping the power of the admiral’s own offensive. What’s more, as Nimitz noted, the directive ordered that he and MacArthur meet to hammer out the details of their operations—a directive confirmed by a cable that was on Nimitz’s desk when he returned from Washington. “I have long had it in my mind to extend to you the hospitality of this area,” MacArthur wrote. “The close coordination of our respective commands would be greatly furthered I am sure by our personal conference. I would be delighted therefore if when you are able you would come to Brisbane as my guest. I can assure you of a warm welcome.”

  Two weeks after receipt of the JCS’s March 25 directive, Nimitz and Admiral Forrest Sherman landed in Brisbane. The two arrived by seaplane, with Nimitz expecting that MacArthur would send an aide to greet them. But when Nimitz landed, there was MacArthur on the dock, with his staff drawn up behind him. Nimitz was surprised, but pleased, and even more so when MacArthur greeted him with a handshake followed by a hearty shoulder grip. That night MacArthur hosted a banquet for his visitors, and the next day, they met for their first formal discussion, with Nimitz briefing MacArthur and his commanders on his Central Pacific plans. The next morning, MacArthur outlined his differences with the navy. Nimitz’s offensive was useful, he said, but only because it supported him. The main axis of advance to Japan, he argued, would have to be through the Philippines. He outlined his plans for the final conquest of New Guinea, then argued for a leap into Mindanao, followed by an invasion of Luzon. When he finished, the room was uncomfortably silent. Nimitz nodded as a smile crept across his face and he began to tell a story:

  The situation reminds me of the story of two frantically worried men who were pacing the corridor of their hotel. One finally turned to the other, and said, “What are you worried about?” The answer was immediate, “I am a doctor and I have a patient in my room with a wooden leg and I have that leg apart and can’t get it back together again.” The other responded, “Great guns, I wish that was all that I have to worry about. I have a good-looking gal in my room with both legs apart and I can’t remember the room number.”

  MacArthur disapproved of this kind of story—if one of his staff had told it, the commander would have been enraged. But when Nimitz finished, MacArthur broke into an appreciative laugh. With the tension eased, Nimitz responded informally to MacArthur’s presentation, pointing out that like the doctor of his story, their commands were like “two legs apart,” and that their offensives would keep the Japanese guessing. MacArthur nodded his appreciation. But when, at the end of Nimitz’s briefing, Nimitz mentioned that the JCS expected the two of them to draw up alternate plans “for moving faster and along shorter routes towards the Luzon-Formosa-China triangle,” Nimitz was given a taste of MacArthur’s Philippines obsession. The mere mention of the word Formosa spurred MacArthur into an “oration of some length on the impossibility of bypassing the Philippines” and “his sacred obligations there.” Even so, the meeting ended amicably enough, with Nimitz, like Halsey, wondering what all the fuss was about. “His cordiality and courtesy to me and my party throughout my visit was complete and genuine,” he recalled, “and left nothing to be desired.” But the deadlock in the Pacific remained, and Nimitz began to take more seriously King’s warning that the conquest of the Philippines would be more costly than a “more direct route” to Japan. Nevertheless, and in keeping with the JCS directive, Nimitz and MacArthur had agreed to support each other’s offensives.

  MacArthur’s plan was to leapfrog into western New Guinea, with multiple landings near Hollandia. Japanese air assets in the area were meager, but airfields on Peleliu in the Palau Island chain could hamper his operations, so (as he confirmed to Nimitz in Brisbane) he required air support from carriers of Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58. Nimitz agreed, though with the caveat that if the Japanese fleet sortied to meet Mitscher in the waters of the western Pacific, their defeat would be his first priority. Barring that, however, Nimitz agreed to designate aircraft from the carriers Hornet, Belleau Wood, Cowpens, and Bataan to hit Wakde, Sawar, and Sarmi. Nimitz also confirmed that his aircraft would continue to pound Rabaul as well as points in the Admiralties. MacArthur, for his part, assured Nimitz that Kenney and Whitehead’s pilots would strike Japanese emplacements in the Caroline Islands, knocking out airfields that could interfere with Nimitz’s offensive. This was an elegant push-pull strategy: When MacArthur moved west and the Japanese inevitably moved to stop him, they would be forced to turn back east to face Nimitz in their rear.

  The MacArthur-Nimitz meeting, then, was a mix of disagreement and grudging cooperation, which is just what George Marshall had envisioned at the war’s beginning, when he endorsed the two-pronged MacArthur-Halsey offensive in the Southwest Pacific. The plan for 1944 and 1945 was much the same. MacArthur would conduct an arc of landings through western New Guinea, while Nimitz leapfrogged west and north, through the Marianas. Somewhere, it was thought, MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s forces would meet in yet another classic double envelopment. But the question remained: The two forces would meet, but where? Would it be in the Philippines, with MacArthur’s soldiers coming ashore to liberate the American wards from General Yamashita? Or would it be at Formosa, with Nimitz’s aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, and Marines coming ashore, with the Philippines isolated and in their rear? The race was on.

  On March 23, MacArthur issued Field Order Number 12, naming Robert Eichelberger as commander of the Hollandia Task Force, which was composed of the 24th and 41st Infantry Divisions, and assigning the 163rd Regimental Combat Team to seize Aitape. Eichelberger celebrated. He was back in the fight, gleefully writing to “Miss Em” about the “green eyed” Walter Krueger, as, this time, he led the troops. The return of Eichelberger made sense. The rising tide of newly trained American soldiers meant that MacArthur actually outnumbered the enemy with close to 750,000 soldiers in the Southwest Pacific. He could now deploy six U.S. infantry divisions, three regimental combat teams, and three brigades, while Kenney could put more than two hundred bombers into a single strike. Then too, Eisenhower was lobbying Marshall for Eichelberger’s transfer to Europe,
where he would be a senior commander during D-Day. The pressure from Eisenhower meant that MacArthur had to find a role for the exiled Eichelberger, and Hollandia was it.

  MacArthur dubbed the seizure of Hollandia “Operation Reckless,” and it was. While MacArthur’s head of intelligence favored the move, operations chief Stephen Chamberlin opposed it: Hollandia lay six hundred miles up the New Guinea coast from Saidor, with fifty-five thousand soldiers of Japan’s Eighteenth Army close by. Another fifty-five thousand soldiers of the Second Army were stationed at Wakde, Sarmi, and Manokwari and on Biak Island. Hollandia could easily become a Rabaul in reverse, with American and Australian troops trapped and bypassed by the surging Japanese, Chamberlin argued. As at Los Negros, MacArthur’s staff was badly divided over his decision, but this time, the dissent got ugly. Intelligence chief Charles Willoughby went behind Chamberlin’s back in pushing for the move, surreptitiously using cryptologist Bonner Fellers—one of the best American intelligence analysts—as his channel. Fellers, who had served with MacArthur before the war (and had an acrimonious relationship with Eisenhower), was an influential voice with MacArthur and plied him with Willoughby’s optimistic assessments. When Chamberlin, jealous of Fellers’s prerogatives (and a constant critic of Willoughby’s right-wing beliefs), found out, he fired Fellers and demoted him.