Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  The next day he described its beauties to MacArthur: the solid concrete-block construction, the four large bedrooms, the huge swimming pool with a massage room and steam bath in the basement. MacArthur silently listened; then the next morning missed his usual breakfast with Kenney.

  When he came back that afternoon, he was smiling sheepishly.

  “George, I did a kind of dirty trick on you. I stole your house.”

  “I know,” Kenney told the astonished MacArthur. He had guessed immediately why the SWPA commander had missed breakfast, and he had called the Bachrach agent to see if there was another house available if he didn’t want Casa Blanca. The agent said there was, a house belonging to Mrs. Bachrach’s sister, who had told the original contractor, “I want an even better house than my sister’s.”

  —

  Kenney took it at once, and relayed the story to the new occupant of Casa Blanca, who was somewhat relieved he hadn’t thrown his air force commander out in the street.

  “So where is it?” MacArthur wanted to know.

  “No, I’m not going to tell you,” Kenney said firmly. “I made one mistake, and I’m not going to repeat it.”3

  Casa Blanca suited the MacArthur family very well. When Jean and Arthur arrived on March 6 after sailing into war-smashed Manila Harbor, MacArthur was finally able to relax into the domestic routine that suited him best. Above all, he had Jean with him, who had become the advisor-cum-confidante that his mother had always been, and with whom he could speak frankly about his worries and the war, the constant clashes with Washington, and his concerns about the future.

  Once after a long evening of far-ranging conversation with Egeberg, MacArthur had gotten up and said, “Good talk, it was bit like talking with Jean.” His doctor took it as the highest compliment, and realized how important the partnership between the pair was.4

  Now in Manila she took on another important duty for her husband, visiting army hospitals. MacArthur had confessed to Egeberg that he never could; it was far too painful for him and, “a handshake or a pat on the shoulder seems a paltry gesture” for what he had asked them to sacrifice. But “why don’t you take Jean to visit the hospitals? The men would rather see her anyway.”

  And so Egeberg did, as she toured one hospital after another over the next months, meeting and greeting doctors and nurses and then going bed to bed, saying, “I am Jean MacArthur and I am so sorry you are in the hospital. Are they taking good care of you?” With many patients she would linger for several minutes, talking and asking where in the country they came from. It wasn’t unusual for her to visit and talk with a hundred or more of the wounded, before going on to the next facility.

  Eventually and inevitably, she insisted on going up closer and closer to the front lines. Egeberg consented, and took her to a small field hospital northeast of Manila that had been under enemy mortar fire the night before. She visited tent after tent, often talking to soldiers who had been hit in the field less than an hour before; when Egeberg and she left, he remembered, her eyes were glistening with excitement as well as deep emotion. Like her husband, she would have been happy to go up to the front itself.

  When MacArthur heard what had happened, he was furious.

  “You cannot, you mustn’t expose her like that” to possible enemy fire, he bellowed, slamming his fist on his desk. “You know what Jean means and how I need her…Don’t do that again!”

  A chastened Egeberg didn’t. But it made him more aware than ever of the powerful bond between Jean and the SWPA supreme commander, “Sir Boss.” It was the only time Egeberg ever got a dressing-down from MacArthur. He later reflected that, considering she was the wife of the boss, he probably deserved it.5

  —

  Meanwhile on April 12, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt died, after twelve years in office and six months of battling cancer. His death plunged the nation, and the nation’s armed forces, into mourning. Most of the teenagers or twenty-year-olds serving in MacArthur’s command, or in the central Pacific or in Europe, couldn’t remember a U.S. president other than FDR. MacArthur’s own reaction was muted; for more than a decade the pair had been rivals, almost enemies. Their professional partnership since MacArthur’s tenure as army chief of staff had been deeply strained; any friendship had been far more a matter of necessity than choice. But six days before he died, Roosevelt had made his last important decision as commander in chief. He handed over to MacArthur command of all ground forces in the Pacific.

  That decision resulted from an uneasy compromise among the Joint Chiefs in Washington. There still could be no agreement on a single unified command that would satisfy all parties; indeed, there were now more independent commands than ever, including the newly formed Twentieth Air Force with its B-29 superbombers under the personal supervision of General Arnold, which had launched its air offensive over Japan with the spectacular firebombing of Tokyo on March 6, killing more than 85,000 people.6

  Yet as the two great area commands came closer and closer to converging, it was apparent that some new overall arrangement was necessary. So as Nimitz took command of all naval forces, including Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet, MacArthur now assumed command of all army ground forces except those in Hawaii, including the American troops in Okinawa.

  But where would they be going and what would they do? King still held out for a blockade and aerial bombardment plan, without an invasion. MacArthur pointed out, not unreasonably, that strategic bombing alone hadn’t defeated Germany, so why assume it would work with Japan?7

  In the end, it was Nimitz again who broke the deadlock. He opted for the invasion-of-Japan idea and, facing opposition from his own inner circle, King was forced to acquiesce. On May 25 Nimitz flew out to Manila to discuss the plan with MacArthur, while MacArthur’s staff threw themselves with enthusiasm into revising the details of OLYMPIC and CORONET, the two parts of the overall defeat of Japan, code-named DOWNFALL.

  OLYMPIC, or the assault on Kyushu, would now begin sometime in the autumn of 1945; CORONET’s landings on Honshu would take place in March 1946. Walter Krueger and his Sixth Army would carry the brunt of OLYMPIC, which would beef up to eleven army and three marine divisions—almost 650,000 ground troops.

  Three corps of three divisions each would land at three different objectives in southern Kyushu while General Charles Hall’s XI Corps would stage a diversionary strike at Shikoku.8 Only when the southern portion of Kyushu was secure would preparations for the Honshu invasion begin, using airfields and staging areas on Kyushu for the final decisive push.

  Even then, just the southern portion of the island would be occupied, but MacArthur and his staff understood only too well that the fighting for Kyushu would be indescribably bloody. No one could be sure that the fanatical Japanese wouldn’t fight literally to the last man, woman, and child. Using casualties on Okinawa as his benchmark, Admiral Leahy estimated that the OLYMPIC invasion force would take 35 percent casualties. With 760,000 Americans involved in the attack, that meant more than a quarter million killed or wounded.

  It would take a supreme optimist to enter into an invasion plan like this lightly, and MacArthur was no supreme optimist. It was not surprising, then, that he was determined to take one more decisive step toward cutting off Japan’s war-making resources, by seizing its last remaining source of oil and gasoline: the Dutch East Indies via Tarakan in eastern Borneo.

  —

  To planners back in Washington—not to mention historians—MacArthur’s decision to launch a major offensive in Borneo in May seemed inexplicable, an unnecessary diversion of soldiers and resources away from the principal goal, namely, the conquest of Japan.9

  But to MacArthur it made good strategic as well as political sense. The soldiers involved would not be Americans but Australians; indeed, employing the Australian I Corps in Borneo under American leadership would prevent Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Southeast Asian Command from using them to recapture Burma and Malaya, as part of returning the British Empire to Asia.

 
; Here MacArthur and Admiral King were in rare agreement. Once the British were allowed back in the Southwest Pacific, they felt, it would be tough getting them out again. The future of Asia involved pushing the British and the other old European colonial empires out and planting the American flag in their place—as a prelude to granting independence to the indigenous peoples there.10

  For once, however, the Australian high command dug in its heels at doing MacArthur’s bidding. He and General Blamey had a huge fight—not so much over the wisdom of launching an offensive in Borneo and the Dutch Indies, but over whether SWPA GHQ was free to take command of Australian troops without Blamey’s consultation or approval. “I think the time has come,” Blamey angrily wrote to Prime Minister Curtin, “when the matter should be faced quite squarely, if the Australian Government and the Australian Higher Command are not to become ciphers in the control of the Australian military forces”—since that control was now being ceded to MacArthur and the Americans.

  MacArthur’s reply on March 5 was tart and unambiguous. Since the Lae operation, he wrote, ground forces had been organized under task force commanders responsible to him. There was no possible way Australian troops in Borneo could be under the command of an Australian officer already burdened with command of troops in New Guinea and Australia, namely Blamey. “Any other course of action would unquestionably jeopardize the success of the [Borneo] operation and impose a risk that could not be accepted.”11

  Blamey replied that MacArthur’s memory was faulty, at the very least. He had always been in charge of any and all Australian forces in the field; the First Army was operating according to that standard even as they were writing back and forth. He reminded MacArthur he had said there would be no move from New Guinea until the last Japanese resistance on the island had been crushed. If MacArthur was determined to clear the enemy from the Philippines in order to protect his rear, Blamey and the Australians should be allowed to do the same in New Guinea.12

  It took a meeting between MacArthur and Blamey on March 14, and a personal intervention by the desperately ill Curtin, to end the crisis in command. Curtin insisted that the operation in Borneo go forward; Australian newspapers were not unhappy that their troops were once again active in the final assault against Japan, no matter how remote from the center of action.13 Yet, in historian Gavin Long’s words, “Resistance to the Borneo operation, which had been disapproved by Marshall in February, adopted by the Joint Chiefs in March, objected to by the British chiefs in April and May, continued even after the opening of the first phase when an Australian brigade group was landed on Tarakan on 1 May.”14

  MacArthur was there, of course, to watch the Australians in action. As for the kerfuffle with Blamey, he could not have cared less. Now at last he could smell final victory, and it didn’t matter whom he offended in pursuing it. He had already set off a political land mine in late April when he learned that Manuel Roxas, a Philippine politician and a close friend of his as well as of the late President Quezon, was being held at Sixth Army headquarters in Pampanga, and ordered Roxas released.

  There was one problem. Roxas had been a member of the Japanese puppet government since late 1944, and the news of his release sent shock waves through the Filipino press and sparked a controversy that rocked the new government of President Osmeña as well as the American occupation.

  The fact that Roxas was a MacArthur pal as well as an Osmeña antagonist, and as former Treasury secretary was the one legal witness to the $500,000 transaction between MacArthur and Quezon on Corregidor, has fueled speculation among historians and anti-MacArthur partisans ever since.15

  Those who speculate that the release was some form of payback or even a way of buying Roxas’s silence don’t know the facts (far from the Quezon deal’s being a guilty secret, all of MacArthur’s superiors in Washington had approved it) and don’t know MacArthur. He was completely dismissive of the controversy that Roxas’s release had set off, especially on the political left.

  “I have spoken with a number of people who [were in Manila] during the occupation,” he told Doc Egeberg, “and I spoke with him [i.e., Roxas] several times. I have decided that the work he did with, or under, the Japanese was of a positive help to the Philippines and the Filipino people, and I urged the Philippine government not to look on him as a collaborator.” It was also true that Roxas had been active in the Japanese opposition, and even in touch with the resistance, when the puppet regime in Manila begged him to help them reach out to their domestic foes.

  “The Philippines need him as a leader, and you mark they will soon use him,” MacArthur barked at Egeberg, poking him in the chest with a forefinger.

  “The people love him, and I have confidence in him as a man.”* And that was enough, as far as MacArthur was concerned.

  He and Egeberg were having this conversation as they sailed in the USS Boise on their way to Borneo. Despite the ill will with Blamey, MacArthur was determined to watch the Australian troops, whom he still thought of as his troops, in action. On June 9 they were off the coast of Brunei Bay, Borneo, as the usual massive naval bombardment went off and then Australians of the First Division poured ashore.16

  There was not much action to see, so the next day MacArthur insisted on going ashore again, this time in the marshlands below Brunei Bay. There he, Kenney, and Whitney had to wade through calf-deep mud until a jeep picked them up and ran them and the rest of the landing party closer to the action. They drove as far as the town of Brunei, where the Australians were busy rousting out Japanese resistance. Someone pointed out a pair of dead Japanese nearby, snipers who had been hunted down and killed. MacArthur walked over to look at the bodies; one of the photographers with him snapped a picture. Another standing next to him was just then hit in the shoulder by another sniper’s bullet.17

  Kenney and the others now insisted it was time to go. But MacArthur said no; he wanted to keep going. Finally a flustered Australian colonel came up and said in no uncertain terms that MacArthur, five stars or not, had to leave. He couldn’t assume responsibility for the life of SWPA’s commander in chief. MacArthur reluctantly agreed to go, and they returned to the Boise for MacArthur and his staff’s favorite treat after a brush with death, a chocolate ice-cream sundae.

  At one point his doctor had to ask MacArthur if he wasn’t taking one too many chances with his own life, with these frontline visits. He shook his head.

  “Don’t forget I had a lot of combat experience in World War One,” he said, “certainly more than any of our present general officers—and as you live through such experiences you learn things. You learn to see things that are dangerous or that are reassuring, and you get a sense of timing.”

  Besides, he added, “it does help morale, you know, when they see a major or colonel or general with them. Something happens to the men.”18

  Running risks is the price of leadership, he was saying. By doing so a general can make things happen—if his timing is right, it might even turn a war around.

  —

  As MacArthur’s staff continued the final planning for DOWNFALL, poring over maps and charts of Kyushu and Honshu and calculating how many thousands of tons of supplies and ammunition the mammoth operation would take, and how many hundreds of planes and bombers, planners in Washington were looking over a pile of recent ULTRA decrypts and getting very worried.

  Everyone, including MacArthur’s headquarters, had understood that with the fall of the Philippines and Okinawa, Japan would now shift all its remaining troops and resources to the defense of the home islands, especially Kyushu, the inevitable choice for a MacArthur-led amphibious landing. Likewise, every American decision maker knew not only that every Japanese soldier would fight to the death but virtually every civilian too—more than 200,000 had died in the taking of Okinawa.

  But no one until May realized how many soldiers and planes Japan was actually cramming onto the island in preparation for the final battle, even as Kenney’s aircrews were bombing and shooting up every Japanes
e vessel they could find crossing between Kyushu and Honshu, while the B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force were firebombing one Japanese city after another into smoldering ruins, starting with the capital, Tokyo.

  What the ULTRA decrypts revealed to both the Joint Chiefs and MacArthur’s G-2, General Willoughby, was a deeply alarming picture of between eight and eleven infantry divisions committed to the defense of the island. In addition, there were more than 1,000 planes available as kamikazes to hammer an invading fleet, with at least 1,200 more from the Japanese navy—and tens of thousands of pilots being trained for the final suicide ride that would end by crashing into the deck or the bridge of an American ship.

  All through May and June the numbers kept growing. Willoughby concluded that Japanese mobile infantry strength alone had increased from 80,000 to 200,000 troops between April and July. “This threatening development,” he finally had to report, “may grow to a point where we attack on a ratio of one (1) to one (1) which is not the recipe for victory.” In other words, the Americans landing on Kyushu as part of OLYMPIC could find themselves outnumbered the moment they hit the beach—with many more Japanese waiting for them once they fought their way inland.19

  On June 18, 1945, a very worried new president, Harry Truman, and the Joint Chiefs met to discuss the situation. Marshall asked MacArthur’s GHQ to provide an estimate of American casualties in the first ninety days of OLYMPIC. The reply that came back—105,050 battle and 12,600 non-battle casualties—left Truman gasping. Marshall wrote back to MacArthur that those numbers were too high to contemplate an invasion of Kyushu.

  MacArthur quickly replied to reassure Marshall and the president that those numbers were “purely academic and routine,” and he had every expectation that successful landings would be far less costly. Besides, weren’t the Russians about to enter the war in Manchuria? That would divide and distract the Japanese, and take away any hope of any further reinforcements for Kyushu. “I most earnestly recommend no change to OLYMPIC.”20