CHAPTER TWO
MacARTHUR
General Douglas MacArthur was one of the Second World War’s most flamboyant and controversial figures. He was a military commander who had a keen idea of the value of keeping the public informed, and a past-master at image projecting. He made sure that the photographers were there to take his picture at key moments, such as his return to the Philippines in 1944.
MacArthur graduated top of the class of 1903 at West Point Military Academy and served in the Philippines, Panama and Mexico, before being posted to World War One in 1917, twice being wounded and much decorated. He was promoted to major general in 1925 and became Army Chief of Staff by 1930. In this post, he clashed bitterly with political leaders over cuts in US defence budgets.
MacArthur was constantly in conflict with President Roosevelt since he had taken office in 1933; the politics and personalities of the two men were in total contrast. MacArthur was a thoroughgoing conservative whom some Republicans on the home front regarded as a candidate for the presidency after he retired from the army to take a military post in the Philippines. MacArthur was also in conflict with the new Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and the Army establishment on a number of issues, including the 'Germany first' policy against which MacArthur repeatedly protested. Nevertheless, the Army was glad to have a strong and popular figure like MacArthur to uphold its role in the Pacific and oppose the ambitions of the Navy.
He had been recalled to duty when, in December 1941 Japan attacked the Philippines. MacArthur commanded both the embryonic Filipino Army and US Army Forces. The Japanese quickly overwhelmed the defenders and soon held the three air bases in northern Luzon and on 22nd December gained control of Manila.
A further series of Japanese assaults forced the US defensive lines back and MacArthur ordered a general retreat to the Bataan peninsula. On 22nd February, 1942, MacArthur was ordered to leave Bataan and proceed to Australia. General Jonathan Wainright remained behind with 11 000 troops and managed to hold out until the beginning of May.
When MacArthur arrived in Australia on 17th March, he found his new command short of manpower, poorly equipped and quite deficient in air power. He also found Australian morale shattered due to the Allied debacle in Asia, particularly by the fall of Singapore, which had been regarded by Australians as the keystone of their security; hence his first task was to infuse the Australians with an offensive spirit and confidence.
MacArthur transformed Australia's morale. He told parliament in Canberra a week after his arrival; “We shall win or we shall die, and to this end, I pledge you the full resources of my country. My faith in our ultimate victory is invincible, and I bring to you tonight the unbreakable spirit of our just cause. The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines for the purpose of organizing the Allied offensive against Japan, a primary object of which is the recovery of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return”. By the time he had finished speaking, the audience were on their feet cheering.
American reinforcements arrived, and together with Australian troops were sent into the areas of undefended Australia. On Anzac Day (25th April), MacArthur issued orders that wherever the Japanese landed, they were to be resisted and thrown back into the sea.
The Japanese High Command, meanwhile, had indeed been considering an invasion of Australia. The navy, in particular, was keen, but the army protested. To them, the war in China was all-important, and the generals refused to provide enough men to invade Australia. On 4th March, the High Command reached a compromise: they would capture Port Moresby and push south-east in order to cut Australia's shipping routes across the Pacific to the USA. Then they might consider an invasion of Australia itself. On 31st March, they began their drive but, without knowing it, the Japanese had almost reached the limit of their spectacular expansion. The tide of war was about to turn. Attempts to capture Port Moresby would lead to their first major defeats - in the Coral Sea, then on New Guinea's Kokoda Trail.
At the beginning of American participation in the war, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that the Pacific area, including Australia, should be under American command, with the Middle East and India remaining under British control. Europe and the Atlantic would come under joint Anglo-American direction. The command in the Pacific was further divided between MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Command and the Central Pacific Command of Admiral Chester Nimitz. Each was in control of the land, sea and air forces in his zone except that Nimitz retained control of the amphibious operations.
For almost 40 years the American Navy had expected war with Japan and, now that war had finally come, was determined that the Navy was to have the pre-eminent role in the Pacific. Nimitz and the Naval Chiefs of Staff headed by Admiral Ernest King did not want any naval forces under Army command and hence advocated a purely naval campaign, advancing from their big base at Hawaii. The army commander in the Southwest Pacific was to stay on the defensive. MacArthur, however, was too strong a personality for him to accept this role. Having been driven out of the Philippines by force of arms, MacArthur was most firm that the only way for the United States to regain control was by the same means, otherwise she would never be able to reassert her pre-war authority in the Pacific.
MacArthur believed that the Western Allies, having been beaten so decisively and disastrously by the Japanese, must prove their superiority again. He felt it would be folly not to take this into consideration when planning the Pacific strategy. For MacArthur the only road to Tokyo lay through the Philippines.
Thus Nimitz and MacArthur were to compete against each other to see which of them could be more effective. Roosevelt approved the divided command in the hope of using the natural rivalry between the Army and Navy to produce faster results. MacArthur thought it was incredible that the Navy could allow inter-service rivalry to determine the course of the war and later wrote; “Of all the faulty decisions of the war, perhaps the most inexpressible one was the failure to unify the command in the Pacific”. Through the insistence of Admiral King, however, the commands of Nimitz and MacArthur remained separate throughout the war.
MacArthur soon developed a highly efficient team which played a major role in his coming success. An invaluable asset for MacArthur was the discovery of Commander Long of the Australian armed forces. He was the organiser of the superb intelligence network of coast-watchers whose information made the difference in many operations. So, within three months of his arrival, MacArthur was able to start on the road back to the Philippines.
MacArthur began the campaign to clear Papua and New Guinea by increasing the garrison of Port Moresby which ultimately attained the strength of 55 000 American and Australian troops. The Japanese advance over the Owen Stanley Range was subsequently halted by the Australian forces, who then began to push the enemy back, but a lengthy contest ensued. The Japanese High Command then decided to down-grade the Papuan campaign and throw all their resources into the struggle for Guadalcanal after the Allies landed there on 7th August. Over the next eight months there were ten major land battles and seven major naval engagements in this area. At the turn of the year General MacArthur, in denying the enemy access to Port Moresby in New Guinea, had now assumed the initiative which he was to keep until the end of hostilities
The reconquest of New Guinea, which was completed in mid-January, cost MacArthur dear and, in view of his losses and the enemy's tenacity, he decided his methods had to be more efficient. As he wrote in his memoirs: "It was the practical application of this system of warfare, to avoid the frontal attack with its terrible loss of life; to by-pass Japanese strongpoints and neutralise them by cutting their lines of supply; to thus isolate their armies and starve them on the battlefield; to as Willie Keeler used to say, 'hit 'em where they ain't', that from this time guided my movements and operations.
Briefly, MacArthur was applying the "indirect approach" method recommended in the months leading up to World War II by the British military writer Basil Liddell Hart and practised also by Vice-Admiral Halsey in his advance from Guadalcanal to Bougainville and in the following autumn by Admiral Nimitz in the Central Pacific Area. When staff members presented their glum forecasts to MacArthur at meetings, stating that strong points could not be taken with our limited resources. MacArthur would reply; “let's just say that we won't take them. In fact, gentlemen, I don't want them, you incapacitate them.
The results of this method were strikingly described after the end of the war by Colonel Matsuichi Ino, formerly Chief of Intelligence of the Japanese 8th Army: "This was the type of strategy we hated most. The Americans, with minimum losses, attacked and seized a relatively weak area, constructed airfields and then proceeded to cut the supply lines to troops in surrounding areas. Without engaging in large scale operations, our strongpoints were gradually starved out. The Japanese Army preferred direct assault, but the Americans flowed into our weaker points and submerged us, just as water seeks the weakest entry to sink a ship”.
This could not be better expressed; nevertheless, MacArthur's method demanded perfect collaboration of the land, sea, and airborne forces under his command and he handled them like some great orchestral conductor. He was also aided by the appointment in October 1942 of Admiral Halsey as commander of the naval forces in the Southwest Pacific. Like MacArthur, Halsey had a well-deserved reputation for leadership, confidence and aggressiveness. MacArthur now turned his attention to the rest of New Guinea and his main objective of Rabaul, the key Japanese military and air base in the Solomon Islands.
According to the decisions taken at Casablanca, by Churchill and Roosevelt, Nimitz's objective was Hong Kong via the Marshall and Caroline Islands and Formosa. Here he was to join MacArthur; who would have come from the Philippines, reinforced in the vicinity of the Celebes Sea by the British Pacific Fleet. In Hong Kong the Anglo-American forces were to enter into contact with those of Chiang Kai-shek, whose objective was Canton.
However, a few weeks later the American Joint Chiefs-of-Staff defined as follows the missions to be carried out by MacArthur and Halsey. Their Pacific forces to cooperate in a drive on Rabaul, then to press on westward along the north coast of New Guinea. Halsey was reduced to the men and materiel allotted to him by the C.in-C. Pacific. This excluded aircraft-carriers, as the new generation of aircraft-carriers only reached Pearl Harbour at the beginning of September. Nimitz, firmly supported by Admiral King did not intend to engage Enterprise and Saratoga, which were meanwhile filling the gap, in the narrow waters of the region.
In the meantime, whilst at Port Moresby General MacArthur was setting in motion the plan which was to put a pincer round Rabaul and allow him to eliminate this menace to his operations. The Japanese high command had decided to reinforce the Bismarck Sea region. On 28th February a convoy left Rabaul on board eight merchant ships escorted by eight destroyers. But Major General Kenney unleashed on the convoy all he could collect together of his 5th Air Force. The American bombers attacked the enemy at mast-height, using delayed-action bombs so as to allow the planes to get clear before the explosions. On 3rd March the fighting came to an end in the Bismarck Sea with the destruction of the eight troop transports and five destroyers.
The battle of the Bismarck Sea had lasted for three days, with Kenney's bombers moving in upon the convoy whenever there was even a momentary break in the clouds. “We have achieved a victory of such completeness as to assume the proportions of a major disaster to the enemy. Our decisive success cannot fail to have most important results on the enemy's strategic and tactical plans. His campaign, for the time being at least, is completely dislocated”.
Rightly alarmed by this catastrophe, Admiral Yamamoto left the fleet at Truk in the Carolines and went in person to Rabaul. He was followed to New Britain by some 300 fighters and bombers from the six aircraft-carriers under his command. Thus strengthened, the Japanese 11th Air Fleet, on which the defence of the sector depended, went over to the attack towards Guadalcanal on 8th April. But since the Japanese airmen as usual greatly exaggerated their successes, and as we now have the list of losses drawn up by the Americans, it might be useful to see what reports were submitted to Admiral Yamamoto who, of course, could only accept them at their face value. Yet it must have been difficult to lead an army or a fleet to victory when, in addition to the usual uncertainties of war, you had boastful accounts claiming 28 ships and 150 planes. The real losses were 5 and 25 respectively.
But this was not all, for during this battle the Japanese lost 40 aircraft and brought down only 25 of their enemy's. The results were therefore eight to five against them. Had they known the true figures, Imperial GHQ might have been brought to the conclusion that the tactical and technical superiority of the famous Zero was now a thing of the past. How could they have known this if they were continually being told that for every four Japanese planes shot down the enemy lost fifteen?
With the victories in Papua and Guadalcanal, the offensive in the Southwest Pacific had definitely passed to the Allies. MacArthur was now arguing with his superiors in Washington, and not increasing his popularity in the process, that the best route to Japan lay along the 'New Guinea-Mindanao Axis'. Nimitz and the Navy argued cogently that a route through the Gilbert, Marshall, Caroline and Mariana Islands was not only shorter but necessary to protect the New Guinea-Mindanao Axis from air attacks staged from these islands. Thus the Nimitz-MacArthur race continued, although MacArthur now had greater resources as increased supplies and equipment flowed to his command At the Quadrant Conference at Quebec in August 1943, MacArthur and Halsey were directed to bypass Rabaul. This was surely a wise decision as Rabaul contained one hundred thousand defenders under a tough and resourceful general with ample supplies. An assault on Rabaul would have delayed the Allied advance by many months. With the fall of Bougainville to the south, Rabaul was now sealed off and left to 'die on the vine'.
Supported by Halsey's Seventh Fleet, MacArthur's forces pushed rapidly forward in a series of amphibious operations. There were still mopping-up operations and many by-passed Japanese troops to be watched, but now MacArthur could look across the Celebes Sea towards Mindanao.
In the Pacific the year 1943 was marked, as far as Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur were concerned, by a series of limited offensives which, whilst gradually wearing down the Japanese forces, were to give the Americans and their Australian allies the necessary bases for the decisive offensive of 1944.The objective of this latter offensive was the complete and final destruction of the Japanese military machine. No more than with the Germans, the Allies were not prepared to accept, anything less than Japan's total and unconditional surrender.
Any change of opinion over these radical aims would have aroused the opposition of the American public. The war against Japan was deeply felt by the American people and, in Churchill's entourage, during the conferences which took him across the Atlantic, it was often noticed that the reconquest of some obscure island in the far corner of the Pacific raised as much enthusiasm in New York and Washington as did a whole battle won in Africa or Italy. The White House and the Pentagon had to take these feelings into account.
Along with the concern shown by Roosevelt and Hopkins for the U.S.S.R., a concern which caused them to urge the opening of a second front, there was also the fact that the Americans did not look favourably on their hero MacArthur being kept short of men and materiel whilst in Europe U.S. forces stood idle on the wrong side of the Channel. In the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff Committee, that was the sentiment of the rugged Admiral Ernest J. King: instead of giving complete and immediate support to the principle of ‘Germany first’, the centre of gravity of American power should be shifted over to the Pacific. To forestall this reversal of strategy the President and General Marshall were therefore constrained to set in motion Operation ‘Round-up’, which was to become ‘Overlord’.
In the first two years of the war, Washington had allotted more troops and combat ships to the war with Japan than to the war with Germany, and almost as many planes. The real cause of MacArthur's annoyance was a trend he foresaw in the making. With the invasion of Europe now in the planning stage, an increasing percentage of the United States' men and materiel was being earmarked for the European and Mediterranean theatres. Even worse, from the general's standpoint, was the fact that of the most recent allocations for the Pacific theatre, a smaller share was going to support his advance toward the Philippines from the southwest Pacific than to Admiral Nimitz' advance across the central Pacific.
General MacArthur's mood at the start of 1944 was less than happy. Over the past 16 months, Australian and American troops of his southwest Pacific command had driven the Japanese out of Papua and New Guinea and regained a firm Allied foothold on neighbouring New Britain. But in all they had advanced only about 280 miles closer to MacArthur's cherished goal. By the end of 1943, he was later to recall, "I was still about 1 600 miles from the Philippines and 2 100 miles from Manila”.
The general made no bones about his dissatisfaction, and unlike other commanders he did not feel he had to limit himself to military channels. An added outlet of expression was available to him in exchanges of letters with his fervent admirers back home.
In linking the Nimitz and MacArthur operations as a ‘dual drive’, planners in Washington had inadvertently touched off a competitive spirit that made the normal inter-service rivalries seem pale: Part of the problem lay in the sharply divergent ways in which people reacted to MacArthur's lordly personality. With few exceptions, his staff thought he could do no wrong. They treated him with a deference that bordered on idolatry, and they shared his belief that his projected return to the Philippines was in the nature of a sacred mission. Among Navy officers, on the other hand, MacArthur was viewed as a pompous windbag and an incurable ham, always playing to the galleries. They hooted when, in late 1943, he took note of press rumours that his part in the War was to be reduced by issuing a statement asserting that "however subordinate may be my role, I hope to play it manfully”. They felt certain that MacArthur's massive ego would never allow him to yield his claim to supreme charge of the war against Japan-or to give the Navy proper credit for its vital contribution to that effort.
Dislike of the general reached to the top of the Navy's hierarchy. The hard-bitten Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest J. King, voiced such hostility to MacArthur in the privacy of Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings in Washington that he eventually drove presiding General George C. Marshall to an uncharacteristic act. The usually mild-mannered Marshall smashed his fist down on the table, declared "I will not have any meetings carried on with this hatred," and cut King off in mid-tirade.
Apart from their personal rancour, Navy officers found fault with the thinking at MacArthur's headquarters. They felt that his operations planners were locked into an ‘Army mentality’ unsuited to dealing with an arena of war that was mostly an expanse of ocean. Captain Raymond D. Tarbuck, who served as naval liaison with MacArthur, later remembered his surprise at "how little the Army officers at GHQ knew about water”. The Navy concept of a body of water as a pathway was foreign to them; they treated "even the smallest stream as an obstacle”. Even their maps, Tarbuck claimed, stopped at the water's edge. Coral reefs and other hazards that seagoing men had to take into account did not figure in their calculations. Predictably, the Navy took a dim view of MacArthur's repeated attempts to enlist some of its prized carriers to support his operations.
MacArthur's opinion of Navy thinking was no more flattering. Frontal assaults on heavily defended islands, the strategy chosen by the Navy's planners for the drive across the central Pacific, struck him as an utter waste of men and time. The American losses at Tarawa provoked a blistering MacArthur memorandum to Washington. Directed over the heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, the MacArthur memo denounced the Navy's frontal attacks as "tragic and unnecessary massacres of American lives," and clearly implied that the cause of the tragedy was "the Navy's pride of position and ignorance”.
There was, in fact, no difference between this strategy and the strategy of leapfrogging and starving out the enemy that Admiral Halsey had introduced and successfully employed in his drive up the Solomons in the closing months of 1943. Halsey was one of the rare Navy men for whom MacArthur had any kind words-he called him "a battle commander of the highest order”.
The term Macarthur preferred for bypassing enemy strongholds was throwing "loops of envelopment" around them. But whatever the semantic shadings, the strategy was to work as successfully for MacArthur as it had worked for Halsey. During the first eight months of 1944, his forces were to advance 1 100 miles to come within 300 miles of the Philippines.
In the War's early months the shock of the fall of the Philippines the Dutch East Indies, Burma and Malaya had temporally diverted Allied attention from Japan's quieter moves into the southwest Pacific. Besides taking Rabaul on New Britain, much of the Solomons chain and a stretch of the east coast of New Guinea, the Japanese had occupied a number of sites along New Guinea's north coast, as well as a number of islands in and around the Bismarck Archipelago. Seizing these places from Australian or British or Dutch control had proved easy enough, and promised the Japanese two vital advantages. In addition to bringing them closer to cutting Australia's lifeline, it gave them a valuable edge in case the fortunes of war shifted. A far-flung perimeter of outposts to guard against Allied attack on the Philippines and the home islands.
By the start of 1944, the perimeter had sizable dents in it. The Solomons were in American hands due to Admiral Halsey's success, along with MacArthur's landings on New Britain. All these developments enhanced the prospects of MacArthur's drive on the Philippines. But ultimately its success hinged on his disposing of key Japanese outposts along his projected route. ln line with MacArthur's philosophy of waging war at the least possible cost in lives, he intended to bypass as many of the enemy’s bases as he could, seizing every opportunity that arose as his operations proceeded.
On the ways to get to Tokyo and the means to be employed there was, to put it mildly, lively discussion between Admirals King and Nimitz on the one side and General MacArthur on the other. This is not surprising, as each of these leaders was a man of strong character and not given to compromise solutions of which his conscience would not approve.
It fell to General Marshall to pronounce judgment on their arguments and, in the last resort, to impose a solution. We shall see under what circumstances he did this, but let us say at once that it was done with both authority and a sense of opportunity.
The strategy question was still unresolved at this point. The Naval Chief of Staff, Admiral Ernest King, led the Navy school of thought which wanted to by-pass the Philippines, invade Formosa and set up a base on the Chinese mainland for the final assault on Japan. MacArthur's position was based on the liberation of the Philippines and the use of Luzon as a base for the final assault on Japan. Luzon could be sealed off by Allied air and sea power far more successfully than Formosa, which Japan could easily reinforce from the Chinese mainland. He also insisted that the United States had a compelling moral duty to liberate the Philippines which had been nourishing the Filipino resistance movement, and where the troops he had left in 1942 were still imprisoned. At a conference at Pearl Harbour in July, MacArthur converted Nimitz and Roosevelt to his 'Leyte then Luzon' strategy which was then formalised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. MacArthur and Nimitz were to continue their advances and converge on Leyte in December. The fast carrier forces of Halsey, spearheaded by the new Essex class carriers, demonstrated graphically at Saipan Japan's great weakness in air power, so the date of the Leyte assault was moved forward two months to 20th October 1944.
The prior action at Saipan had brought about a massive air battle in which the Japanese lost 300 irreplaceable planes and pilots, the 'great Marianas turkey shoot' as American pilots called it. On 12th-15th October Allied Task Force 38 knocked out a further 500 planes based on Formosa, leaving Japan denuded of her naval air force. A powerful fleet was detached from the Central Pacific Command to assist Halsey in protecting MacArthur's 700 transports and auxiliaries carrying one hundred and seventy four thousand troops. These forces landed on schedule the morning of 20th October in the Gulf of Leyte in the central Philippines.
The Japanese High Command regarded the Leyte operation as a major crisis. If the enemy succeeded in occupying the Philippines, the supply lines of Japan would be fatally obstructed. The High Command, therefore, decided that the issue of the war hung on its ability to defend the Philippines, so it gathered its Navy to turn the American threat into a Japanese victory with one decisive blow. However, now that Japan's naval air force had been virtually eliminated, the attack would have to rely on the battleship fleet led by the awesome Yamato whose 18-inch guns made it the most powerful battleship afloat. The Japanese were also well supplied with cruisers and destroyers, but these would go into battle alongside the capital ships without air cover and with no way of striking at the enemy other than with gunfire and torpedoes. The Japanese Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Toyoda, devised a complex plan to use a decoy force to draw off MacArthur's protective fleet of battleships and carriers under Halsey, after which two strong fleets would move in and attack the American forces while they were unprotected and in the highly vulnerable process of disembarkation. Toyoda counted on his forces making unimpeded contact with the enemy, free from air attack, and destroying the American transports and troops by sheer gun power. Thus Toyoda laid his plans for what was to become the largest sea battle in history, a battle which if successful would have had the impact of a second Pearl Harbour and kept Japan in the war for at least another year.
On 23rd October the battle opened on a successful note for Toyoda as Halsey withdrew his entire force to chase the decoy force, a fact for which he was subsequently heavily criticised. Spearheaded by five battleships, the larger Japanese attack force was intercepted by a weak force of American escort carriers and a few destroyers. These delayed the Japanese for hours with a heroic fight while reinforcements were mustered. The Japanese commander withdrew as he was coming under heavy air attack and was uncertain of the strength of his opposition. The decoy force escaped completely. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was the final action of the war for the Japanese Navy, which was so heavily battered that it was reduced to an auxiliary role. The great naval lesson of Leyte Gulf once more proved that battleships without air cover are helpless in a modern sea battle; Toyoda's plan was defeated mainly by Japan's lack of planes and to a lesser extent by bad intelligence and a lack of co-ordination among his commanders. The largest naval engagement in history, resulted in a decisive victory for the Americans. The Japanese Navy lost four carriers, three battleships and ten cruisers.
But, had the Japanese decided to press home their attack after Halsey had left MacArthur dangerously exposed, this surely would have resulted in the stunning disaster for the Allies as envisaged by Admiral Toyoda. In the event, however, the assault on Leyte was successful. Standing on the beach, MacArthur made the broadcast to the people of the Philippines for which he had been waiting two and a half years: “People of the Philippines, I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil, soil consecrated by the blood of our two peoples”. The broadcast made a tremendous impact on the Philippines, and there on the beach MacArthur scribbled a note to Roosevelt urging him to grant immediate independence to the islands.
Although Japan had suffered a shattering defeat at Leyte Gulf, there were still sixty thousand Japanese troops on Leyte under the tough and determined command of General Yamashita (the tiger of Malaya). Ever since their defeats in Papua and Guadalcanal, the Japanese had followed a policy of making the Americans pay as high a price as possible and Yamashita continued to do so on Leyte. MacArthur was forced to commit a quarter of a million troops to its capture. Progress was slow as American troops, largely conscripts, tended to bog down in the jungle and relied on artillery fire power to clear the way. When the battle for Leyte was over the Japanese had lost an estimated forty eight thousand killed, as against three thousand five hundred for the Allies.
The strategy debate had continued right up to the assault on Leyte. MacArthur wanted to land on Luzon as soon as possible while Nimitz was still arguing for Formosa. Admiral King was all for by-passing Luzon in favour of Japan itself. Most of the others had come around to MacArthur's point of view, except for the ad