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

by Perry, Mark

  But Eichelberger’s offensives were not without their detractors. The JCS expressed doubts that the operations were necessary, and although they approved them, they only did so after the fact and well after Eichelberger’s troops were already ashore in the Visayans. “It is still somewhat of a mystery how and whence MacArthur derived his authority to use United States Forces to liberate one Philippine island after another,” the official U.S. Navy history of these campaigns notes. “He had no specific directive for anything subsequent to Luzon. He seems to have felt that, as Allied Theater Commander in the Southwest Pacific, he had a right to employ the forces at his command as he thought best for the common cause.”

  MacArthur’s staff defended their chief. The Japanese had slaughtered a hundred Filipinos on Palawan back in December, and there was reason to believe that the closer MacArthur came to Japan, the more vicious the Japanese would become. Then too, planning for the invasion of the central and southern Philippines had been under way since November 1944, and the plans for it had been submitted to Washington. Finally, in his last days, Roosevelt had followed MacArthur’s post-Manila operations closely and raised no objections. “There is no record of a challenge or an accusation of arbitrary usurpation of power,” a MacArthur staff aide notes. “Somewhere there had been some slippage in gears.”

  But submitting a plan is not the same as having it approved, and while Eichelberger’s offensives brought no official protest from Washington, the JCS thought that MacArthur was overstepping his bounds. He was now waging a private war without the oversight that Marshall provided for Eisenhower in Europe, and this war took advantage of what had been true throughout the conflict: MacArthur conducted his operations with few men and arms and with little oversight. Worse still, with the Philippines liberated, MacArthur’s dismissive attitude toward the JCS—and the slow leaking of his private views on Roosevelt and the “anti-MacArthur clique in Washington”—began to cast a pall over his Philippine triumph. Or perhaps it was that with Roosevelt passing from the scene, MacArthur considered himself untouchable and so allowed his sense of destiny to overrule his common sense. He was MacArthur the great general, the American Genghis Khan.

  Another possibility—and one certainly as likely—was that MacArthur thought he was following in his father Arthur’s footsteps. Like Arthur, Douglas resented Washington’s “interference” in his command and viewed the Philippines as a MacArthur family protectorate. This was made eminently clear when Philippine senator Manuel Roxas, who escaped Manila before being captured by the Japanese in Mindanao, was invited by MacArthur to his headquarters after the fight for the city. Roxas had ties to the Japanese puppet regime, but MacArthur seemed more than willing to overlook this, particularly as Roxas was a friend and an opponent of Quezón successor Sergio Osmeña, whom MacArthur disliked. MacArthur defended his own hand in the rehabilitation of Roxas by saying that Roxas had secretly provided MacArthur’s headquarters “with vital intelligence of the enemy” as a part of the clandestine Manila Intelligence Group.

  This claim was hardly a palliative to Osmeña, however, who was convinced that Roxas was given a clean bill of health because MacArthur wanted Roxas to run against Osmeña for the presidency. The Philippine president confronted MacArthur about Roxas, pointing out that others in the Japanese puppet administration had been arrested, including four of Roxas’s close friends. Osmeña also challenged MacArthur’s claim that Roxas had aided the Philippine resistance during the Japanese occupation, pointing out that no Filipino guerrilla leader ever remembered actually meeting with him. MacArthur airily dismissed Osmeña’s protest. “I have known General Roxas for twenty years,” the general said, “and I know personally that he is no threat to our military security.” Inevitably, Osmeña was forced to accept MacArthur’s explanation, but he knew what it meant: that Roxas would win election as president in 1946, when Osmeña’s term was up.

  In fact, Osmeña quietly agreed with MacArthur’s policies on dealing with collaborators and with the views expressed by Manuel Quezón, who, before his death, had argued that members of the Japanese puppet regime in Manila should be forgiven. They’d had no choice but to obey the Japanese authorities because if they didn’t, they would have been shot, Quezón said. Osmeña came to the same conclusion. “The motives which caused the retention of the office and the conduct while in office rather than the sole fact of its opposition, ought to be the criterion upon which such persons are judged,” he argued. By this reasoning, MacArthur’s treatment of Roxas was perfectly acceptable. Or, as MacArthur put it, there would be no allegation of treason made against anyone simply because the person “accepted duties under the Japanese-established government.” What MacArthur said made sense, but it’s impossible to ignore the fact that, after the war, those who led anti-Japanese guerrilla movements were ignored, with few of them assuming postwar leadership roles. MacArthur was partly responsible for this exclusion. So was Courtney Whitney, the right-wing former lawyer and official MacArthur flatterer. As head of MacArthur’s Philippine civil affairs teams, Whitney made sure that any leader with a leftist tinge was sidelined and disenfranchised—the list included nearly all the country’s resistance leaders.

  MacArthur’s critics would later point to the Roxas case as evidence that MacArthur was playing favorites. Osmeña, they asserted, spoke for the poor and disaffected, while Roxas was pals with rich landowners. In fact, Osmeña was as much of a Manila blueblood as those who had collaborated with the Japanese. Moreover, Osmeña had little support among the Philippine people, which wasn’t true for Roxas, despite his shady past. In fact, it seems more likely that MacArthur’s support for Roxas had as much to do with the general’s disdain for Harold Ickes as it did with his disapproval of the placid and uncertain Osmeña. Ickes, still serving as secretary of the interior, not only was still sharpening his blades against MacArthur, but had also advised Osmeña that the Philippines should declare its independence only after a much longer period as an American ward. Osmeña didn’t agree with Ickes, but this hardly mattered to MacArthur, who viewed with suspicion anyone who took the interior secretary seriously. As for the status of the Philippines, MacArthur was intent that the commonwealth move toward independence as soon as possible—and Ickes be damned. If the Philippines were to be competently rebuilt, MacArthur believed, then Roxas was the man to do it. “Osmena, whatever his qualities,” a MacArthur staff assistant later noted, “was beloved in Washington only for his passivity, not for his ability to rebuild the postwar Philippines.” Except for Ickes, not only was there no official protest of MacArthur’s actions issued by Washington, but former Philippine high commissioner Paul McNutt (hardly a MacArthur partisan) endorsed MacArthur’s views, saying that what the Philippines needed now was stability, which Osmeña could not supply.

  There are many reasons to question MacArthur’s views on Philippine collaboration, but the post-occupation history of the archipelago follows a distinctly different trajectory than that followed by most German-occupied European countries—or China, where collaborators were treated harshly. This was not the case in the Philippines, where many of the richest and most powerful families survived the occupation by cooperating with their occupiers. Eventually, about five thousand Filipinos were identified as collaborators and brought to trial by special courts, but only 156 of those trials resulted in a conviction. Not surprisingly, Ickes took note of the MacArthur policy and intervened against him, writing to Osmeña that if the Philippines did not “diligently and firmly” prosecute collaborators, the United States would withhold postwar reconstruction aid. As MacArthur anticipated, the always ham-handed Ickes had blundered: After news of his threat appeared in the Philippine press, Osmeña was viewed as being a tool of “the imperialist Americans,” while Roxas was seen as “a patriotic nationalist.”

  The imbroglio over Roxas was only one of several crises that MacArthur faced in the wake of his Luzon triumph. In February, MacArthur had told Marshall that he wanted the Australian I Corps to liberate Borneo (
Operation Oboe) in order to free its oil resources for use during the invasion of Japan. Although Marshall hesitated to give his approval, MacArthur met with Australian General Sir Thomas Blamey in Manila in March to perfect his invasion plans. But Blamey dragged his feet: Since August 1944, he had been harshly criticized by the Australian parliament for launching a series of overland offensives against Japanese stay-behind forces bypassed by MacArthur—in Bougainville, New Britain, and New Guinea. Blamey’s operations did not sit well with the majority of the Australian people, or with Australian conservatives, who described his offensives as an unnecessary waste of lives. Blamey defended himself, but poorly. Australian soldiers, he said, were demoralized by sitting and not fighting, Australia could gain battlefield honors by liberating its own territories, and the country needed to show the United States that it was a good ally. Blamey’s claims brought derisive hoots from his detractors, who pointed out that there was nothing so demoralizing as being killed and that the Bougainville campaign was, as a number of Australia’s soldiers later wrote, “a politicians’ war and served no other purpose than to keep men in the fight.” Furthermore, the Australian public was fed up with the ceaseless MacArthur communiqués extolling the Americans while rarely mentioning the Australians.

  The Operation Oboe controversy reached all the way to Manila, where MacArthur defended Blamey, praised Australian soldiers, and criticized Blamey’s detractors. But while MacArthur’s inattention to the Australians had been tolerated by Prime Minister Curtin and Blamey throughout the war, that was less true now. In April 1945, Australian opposition leader Archibald Cameron spurred his government to question MacArthur’s use of the term “mopping up,” which is how MacArthur characterized what Australia’s Diggers were doing. The criticism, set out in a scathing letter written to MacArthur by Acting Prime Minister Joseph Benedict “Ben” Chifley (John Curtin was ill and would not survive the war), quoted extensively from MacArthur’s communiqués, none of which mentioned the Australians. In what sense, Chifley asked, did MacArthur use the term “mopping up” in his communiqués of June 7, August 13, and February 16? MacArthur responded with a high-handed lecture. “For your personal information,” he wrote to Chifley, “the military significance of the term ‘mopping up’ implies the completion of the destruction or dispersal of all organized resistance in the immediate area of combat. The communiqués to which reference is made are perfectly clear and completely accurate.” He then concluded, angrily, by admitting that while he was “out of touch with what is going on along these lines in Australia,” he suggested that Australia’s government “take adequate steps to see that truth and justice are presented, in so far as past campaigns are concerned.”

  Blamey was not only reluctant to go forward with Oboe, but also upset to learn that during the operation, he would be reporting to Eichelberger and not to MacArthur. Although the Australians had cooperated with MacArthur’s command arrangements in 1942, tolerating the creation of a separate Alamo Force that contained no Aussie Diggers, that was then. Back then, Australia’s leaders viewed MacArthur as the nation’s savior and had received assurances that Australian soldiers would share the limelight with the Americans. Then too, although Allied armies in both the Pacific and Europe had engaged in operations that seemed nonessential, the invasion of Borneo seemed especially unnecessary: Its huge oil resources were not essential to Japan’s defeat, and Brunei, where the landings would take place, was actually a British protectorate. The Australians were more than willing to fight the Japanese when it came to protecting Australia, but it was another thing to fight them to liberate a British colony. Blamey dug in his heels. “The insinuation of American control and the elimination of Australian control has been gradual,” Blamey wrote to his government, “but I think the time has come when the matter should be faced quite squarely, if the Australian Government and the Australian High Command are not to become ciphers in the control of the Australian Military Forces.”

  Realizing that persuasion alone wouldn’t convince Blamey of his point of view, MacArthur offered a compromise: Blamey, he said, could have full command of Australia’s soldiers and report up the chain of command to him, not Eichelberger. This satisfied Blamey, but it had little impact on George Marshall, who withheld his support for Oboe, eventually agreeing to it only belatedly. Ironically, Marshall seems to have been brought around by King, who had been working through all of April and May 1945 to undermine a similar argument by Britain. The British argued that they needed a role in the fight against Japan and so should command all British Commonwealth (primarily Indian, Australian, and New Zealand) forces in the Pacific. King supported Oboe not simply because it would recognize Australia’s role in the Pacific, but also because the operation would drive a wedge between the Australians and the British. And this is precisely what happened. When Ben Chifley became prime minister after Curtin’s death in July 1945, he informed Churchill that Australia wanted the same policy-making role in any commonwealth force that it had enjoyed with the Americans. As Chifley noted, the role would “guarantee her an effective voice in the peace settlement.” This assertion was patent nonsense: The Australians had never had a policy-making role at MacArthur’s headquarters, and Chifley knew it. In other words, while Chifley might have been angered when MacArthur ignored Australia’s wartime sacrifices, he much preferred this to having Australia’s Diggers serve under a British commander.

  Although King later denied that he wanted to cut the British out of the Pacific War, at key points in mid-1945 he criticized their naval capabilities by pointing out that they had no refueling capacity, were short of transports, and would have to be resupplied by the Americans. If the British wanted someone to fight for their colonies, he believed, they could do it themselves. MacArthur agreed: It was the Americans who had been carrying the weight of the war against Japan and had done so since the British Far East fleet was bombed out of existence in December 1941. Now, just when the Japanese were on the verge of defeat, the British wanted in on the action—just as they had insisted that one of their senior officers be appointed as a deputy commander to Eisenhower.

  Inevitably, King was forced to shift his position, but only after it was decided that keeping the British out of the Pacific fight would raise too many questions with the American public and after Churchill warned that sidelining British forces would sow mistrust between the Allies. A final argument came from John Winant, the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, who was intent on shooting down anti-British sentiment among the Joint Chiefs. America should welcome the deployment of the British navy to the Pacific, he argued, because to do otherwise would “create in the United States a hatred for Great Britain that will make for schisms in the postwar years that will defeat everything that men have died for in this war.” Finally, after wavering between King’s views and his own political instincts, Marshall agreed with Winant: The American commander did not want to have to explain why only Americans would have the “privilege” of dying in Japan. Furthermore, British (and commonwealth) participation in the Japan invasion, no matter how modest, could also lessen the manpower pressures placed on the JCS. This meant that the Australians would have to be kept in the fight. So Marshall signed off on Oboe while pointedly withholding his approval of MacArthur’s suggestion that it be followed with an invasion of the Netherlands East Indies. After all, the Dutch had had little to offer in the way of support for the invasion of Japan, which wasn’t true for the British.

  In retrospect, Marshall’s foot-dragging on approving Oboe was part of his attempt to put his personal stamp on the last months of the war and (as he had done with Eisenhower) impose discipline on American military planning. Doing so now, after Roosevelt’s death, was more important than ever. With Eisenhower, Marshall had insisted—ordered—that the celebrated general make do with what he had. But with MacArthur, the demands were different: The Southwest Pacific commander was to bring his staff under control and finally get rid of Richard Sutherland, who had wheedled himself back into MacA
rthur’s confidence after months of being denied access to his office. During the second week of April 1945, Marshall detailed his views on Sutherland in a carefully drafted memo. In the memo, he expressed his disapproval of the views that MacArthur had given to reporter and MacArthur biographer Frazier Hunt. The importance of army-navy cooperation in the coming invasion of Japan was crucial, Marshall wrote, and he added that the primary obstacle to that cooperation was Sutherland. Sutherland’s attitude, Marshall noted, “in almost every case seems to have been that he knew it all and nobody else knew much of anything,” and the chief directed that Sutherland be barred from future interservice conferences. Although Marshall eventually decided against sending this memo, his views signaled his increasing conviction that in the months ahead, MacArthur’s independence would have to be curtailed. In this, Marshall had the support of a new president, Harry Truman.

  In fact, Truman despised MacArthur. “He’s worse than the Cabots and the Lodges—they at least talked to one another before they told God what to do,” Truman had confided to his diary soon after becoming president. “Mac tells God right off. It is a very great pity that we have stuffed shirts like that in key positions. I don’t see why in Hell Roosevelt didn’t order Wainwright home [from Corregidor] and let MacArthur be the martyr. . . . We’d have a real fighting man if we had Wainwright and not a play actor and bunko man such as we have now.” As it turns out, Truman regularly used the term “bunko man” to describe those he didn’t like (nearly all of them were Republicans), and he later included Dwight Eisenhower in the group when the general ran for the presidency in 1952. MacArthur reciprocated Truman’s views, though he kept his private: Truman, he felt, was not up to the job.